I Broke my Brain and Stitched it Back Together with Pages from a Book
The most awful feeling in the world is watching people around you live, while you remain utterly afraid of life. You see no adventure, no excitement in new people, just lions and tigers and bears. Buildings that are too high, voices that are too loud, and people that are too sharp asking you why you are no longer wearing your rose-coloured glasses for life. I was living my life as a self-condemned coward; fearful of my own thoughts. But it was through education that I learnt to critically analyse and logically use my brain, before it starts running wild.
I was eighteen years old when I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, and paranoid tendencies. Towards the end of my first term at university, I had a mental breakdown, where I was convinced I was being watched outside my flat. Obsessive thoughts of being taken away from my friends and family, meant that I completely dissolved into a ritual of self-checking compulsions. These were all designed to soothe away the anxiety. After I ran home to my mother in the middle of the night, my days turned into lying in bed, to afraid to turn over. As for the past eight hours, I had been working on containing a collection of obsessive thoughts, that any minute now the doorbell to my mother’s home would ring, and I would be swept away by some men wearing white lab coats.
I had stopped eating, stopped sleeping, and had become stagnant. I was living off adrenaline.
By the third week marker, my mother had clocked that this went beyond my normal anxious routine. I had stopped eating, stopped sleeping, and had become stagnant. I was living off adrenaline. I needed medical help, and fast. I know that mental health and GPs can be like shaking a magic eight ball. Sometimes they can give you the answer you have been looking for, and other times you come away thinking that they looked right through you. As if this whole time your skin was made of cling film. I can say I was very fortunate with both my doctor and the medication I was given. It felt like someone had thrown me a pair of pliers, in the shape of some white and green tablets, meant to cut away at the chain and ball attached to my ankle. The medication took a while to work, and only really kicked in around six weeks after my nineteenth birthday. My mother had made me a lovely chocolate birthday cake in the morning, and I then spent the majority of the day convincing myself she had only made it for me because I was going to be sent away, rather than it genuinely being my birthday.
At this point, I was slightly too busy finding the hidden meaning behind my mother’s cake, then actually remembering university and higher education existed. Yet, it was education and my degree, along with medical intervention, that was a huge part of what saved my life. Once my medication had begun to work, I began to become more relaxed. Relaxed enough, that the first thing I did was pick up a book. My days were still pretty much filled with anxiety attacks and fighting paranoia, but something odd would happen at night. At around 10pm till 1am, it felt like I came back into my body and was completely logical and calm once again. This was when I decided to access my university page and see what work I was able to catch up on. Instead of feeling any kind of stress or worry about all the work I needed to do, I felt excited. A very foreign feeling.
My night-time routine went on like this for a couple of weeks, with me just reading all the texts on my modules. I felt like something out of an indie French film: wake up, take your antidepressants, fight your paranoia, read a novel, analyse it’s meaning, repeat. Eventually, I started emailing my professors explaining the situation, and then mitigation. All from my bed I might add. The response I got back from my professors was some of the most thoughtful and practical emails to my situation. I was unable to attend university, and for a while considered dropping out, but through the university’s procedures I was able to keep learning; only just from 2 hours away and from bed.
Learning can be difficult, and even traumatic for some people. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my anxiety dropped quicker and faster, than with medication, when I was working. I felt present again, once I picked up a book and started using my overactive brain to search for further complexity in the text. Learning got me out of bed for the first time in months. I would sit in my living room and watch my lecture on Foucault. Then I would take my first bath, while annotating Jane Eyre. I soon found that any time a thought of paranoia or the urge to self-check came on, it was quickly replaced with a counteraction of ‘I haven’t got the time. I need to email people.’ Whatever first step I was taking in my recovery; literature was there with me.
I left university in November 2018 and returned for my first seminar on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound Mid-March 2019. The poem felt very fitting, as it’s essentially about a man being chained down and longing for release. It felt euphoric to sit in a classroom and contribute ideas. I started attending university once a week, until May. I drove two hours from my mother’s house and back again. Learning became so important to my wellbeing, and the schedule I used to help maintain my health. I was incredibly fearful of falling back into that pit of anxiety. Yet, it was through academia that I rebuilt my voice and learnt to value my own mind again.
