“Waking up every morning and knowing there is something wrong, that there has always been something wrong with you is painful. One gets up anyway and experiences the melancholy highs and lows of life like any other teenager. Then you feel it creeping up on you like a shark. There you are immersed in a world of sleepless nights and twilight days.
“In one doctor’s appointment I was an ‘anxious and nervous person’, the next appointment I was ‘depressed’, all the while I knew it wasn’t just that. I knew it wasn’t normal to sing all day, even when teachers asked you an answer, or feel the urge to stick a knife in the toaster because some idiot gave you the evil eye. I never received the cognitive therapy I was promised. I then spent a week not sleeping, full of manic joy and euphoria which ended in me nearly drowning in the Creggan reservoir.
“That night after taking two aspirin for a headache I hallucinated thinking the wallpaper was alive, a memory from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. My mother thought I was on drugs, my family thought I was insane. All the while I knew it wasn’t my fault. Now two-and-a-half years later I still haven’t received the help I need. I’m waiting for my second mental health assessment which is reassuring.
“Through all this I’ve maintained my GCSE’s and stayed in school. If all goes to plan I’ll be jetting off to London to study Journalism and Creative Writing. Sometimes I feel a bit like Sylvia Plath, thankfully psychiatric medicine has moved on from institutions and electric shock therapy, my Bell Jar isn’t half as big as hers was.
“Plus I know no one in their right mind would perform a lobotomy on me, it would be an awful waste, and the world would be a left a lot duller without me.
“There’s always hope at the end of that long tunnel.”
