Chapter 1: Everything is Fine

Dissonant is the best word I can use to describe how I felt throughout my life, even as a child. I always played the good girl who smiled and got along with everyone, who was smart and strong and confident. She was acceptable. Not too popular, not too pretty, but pleasant and good-looking enough to mostly get her own way in life. But something felt off, like occasionally I would get a glimpse behind the curtain and see someone lurking in the wings, awkward, shy and dark. No, I couldn't look at her, she wasn't allowed to be there.

“Chop, chop” my Mum would say to hurry us along. “No, you won't miss me, you will have a great time!" As I held back the tears, I would hear "It’s all fine, everything is fine.” And this became my mantra. My inner voice was chipper and busy, in spite of not chiming with what was going on on the inside.

I remember standing in the playground at primary school one day, watching all the other kids play. I felt like I was in a dream, that none of it was real. I thought surely I was invisible. It seemed to me that they were all part of the world but I wasn't. I was somehow separate.

Stomach aches were part of normal life for me. Struggling to get to sleep was also normal. Then at high school I started to get headaches and taking paracetamol became a normal part of life too.

At university I realised that I was depressed and signed up for free counselling sessions. The therapist asked me to draw myself how others saw me and I drew a big smiling face with blonde hair and blue eyes. Then she asked me to draw myself how I felt and I drew a grey stick figure floating out in space, all alone.

Around that time I had repeated visits to the doctor for various ailments, including recurring thrush, digestive complaints and mineral deficiencies. Each time I was sent away with some tablets or even, in the case of the digestive complaints, told not to come back because there was nothing to be done.

The cracks were already starting to show and it only got worse when I was living in London as a young professional. I had landed myself an office job as an environmental consultant, mostly thanks to my father’s work connections. I thought I had grown up. Succeeded. And boy oh boy was I disillusioned with success. I spent a few years excelling in my work, socialising (and boozing) daily, doing an excessive amount of sports, failing to sleep or relax, and generally burning myself out. I knew this, but I wasn’t willing to stop until it was the only remaining alternative.

Being ‘on the go’ to me meant success: being happy, healthy, busy. Stopping meant failure: being sad, tired and lonely. I had built myself a double life in which I was forced to burn out in order to avoid failure and pain. It felt like the real me deep down inside was wrong, a broken mess incapable of coping with life. So the fake me strode out in front, making herself larger than life, grabbing life by the horns and taking every opportunity to live boldly and boastfully.

Weakness was disgusting to me and I was highly critical of myself and others. With nothing more than a glance at someone, I would condemn them in my mind. I could go down the street, labelling people in my head as I went, an overweight person could be fat and lazy, someone wearing lots of make-up was self-obsessed, a shy person was a waste of space and someone in a dull job lacked ambition and purpose. My self-talk wasn't much better, and I would go around in circles in my mind through the past and the future, picking out my mistakes and berating myself for them. Only an idiot, after all, would get home late after a long day and succumb to her chocolate cravings and then spend the night in painful misery. Only a selfish ungrateful little shit would have a perfect life and be unhappy with it.

Contact

anna@autoimmunerecoveryproject.com

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