My life is a roller-coaster

I felt as though I didn’t fit, and I was prone to swings of mood from early adolescence, but I thought that everybody felt that way. True, there were some intense moments, which could probably be classed as manic with the benefit of hindsight – like when I declared to my classmates that I was Elvis Presley reincarnated – but nothing to really set off any alarm bells.

But in February 1997, something changed. I was almost sixteen, a few months away from sitting my GCSEs. My mock results had been good, and I had plans for my future. The depression that hit me, though, well and truly knocked the wind out of my sails, mainly because it came totally out of nowhere. I remember standing in the yard at school, convinced my friends were talking about me behind my back, conspiring against me, spying on me. I beat the hell out of a nearby brick wall, filled with such utter desolation; I hardly knew what to do with myself. I cried all the way through double Design and Technology, inconsolable. Not that anyone really tried to console me anyway. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I didn’t want anyone to know. For me, there was a great shame attached to falling apart in public. There still is. So I tried my damnedest from then on to keep it all hidden. I learnt to be proficient at “pretending to be me”. For the most part, I pulled it off.

It didn’t occur to me to ask for help. And even if it had, I probably wouldn’t have done. The stigma of mental illness was very strong. I’d grown up with a secret fear of being like my sister, who was sectioned once when I was very little. All I could remember was the way she’d stormed and raved around the house, and the way my parents cried when she ran away. To even think that I could be the same as her was terrifying.

By the time I started my study-leave in May, I felt better. It was as if a shutter had been lifted, revealing the world and all its magnificence again. I felt bright and happy. The world was my oyster. I could do anything, be anything. I felt invincible. I was positively fizzling. That old cliché, from one extreme to another, that’s what it seemed like. But I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t see any harm in being happy, and I didn’t see that this was more than happy. I couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed at things that weren’t even funny. I was filled with such optimism that I breezed through the whole exam period without a care. My thoughts were like rockets, blazing through my mind. I had so many brilliant ideas, I couldn’t follow them all. I found hidden meanings in everything (delusions of reference). Songs were about me. Things on the TV were about me. All in good ways. I could feel all the cosmic connections around me. I’d never felt so alive. I developed an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and borrowed books from the library in droves. It didn’t matter how much I tried to cram information into my head, though - I couldn’t concentrate for more than a couple of minutes at a time. But I was happy. So, so happy. I thought those dark months at the beginning of the year were just a blip, and everything was going to be wonderful and exciting.

Oh, but if only it was that simple. It wasn’t. I finally realised that I was an unwilling passenger on a roller-coaster that had no brakes and no intention of stopping, when I went to pick up my exam results. I should have been pleased with the A*, 2 As, 4Bs and 2Ds. It was better than my mocks, and I should have been over the moon. Instead, the roller-coaster dropped me from a great height without warning, so sharp and so sudden, I literally didn’t know what had hit me. I kept staring at my exam results, at the very things that should have made me happy, cursing them for making me feel so woefully unhappy.  Unhappy to the point of suicide. I couldn’t see a future anymore. All I could see was dark, crippling misery. There didn’t seem any point to life anymore. One evening, I sat on the steps outside the community centre whilst my friend was line dancing inside, and I stared at the swings in the playground and saw myself hanging, lifeless from the top bar. I walked over to the swings, caressed the smooth wood of the supports. I was shaking and crying. There was a huge part of me that wanted to be dead, but when it came to it, my courage failed me. I sat on the swing instead, until it was time to go home. For safety’s sake, I didn’t go back.

Somehow, I made it through two years of A Levels. It was a weird two years. I started off in the sixth form of my secondary school with several friends, but left with none. I frightened them all away with my erratic moods. Who could blame them for keeping their distance? For several weeks I might be over-the-top with wild, reckless enthusiasm - like the time I suggested we dress up to raise money for Children in Need, arrived at school dressed as Elvis Presley, replete with sideburns and pink trousers, and proceeded to perform a very off-key, embarrassing version of Blue Suede Shoes in front of most of the lower school. They cringed for me, because I thought I was fantastic. But usually, the enthusiasm for life was fairly short-lived, and my mood would darken again, rendering me monosyllabic and uncommunicative. I couldn’t bear the company of others; I would take myself off to the nearby woods during break times and free lessons, sit in a tree, and think about all the many ways I could end my life. I worked Saturdays in a bookshop, and discovered that even at my lowest ebb, I felt okay amongst books. Daft as it sounds, I actually thought of them as my friends. In my more enthusiastic spells, I dreamt up my future career in bookselling, running my own chain of bookshops… though later that plan would come back to haunt me in a quite devastating way.