Loss without Losing Anyone

In January 2017, I learnt that in order to feel immense loss, you do not need to lose anyone. You can grow equally attached to inanimate, immaterial things just as easily as real- living people. It was announced that I was to be made redundant along with every single member of staff at the school I worked in as it was due to be shut down in the of August 2017. Initially I felt shock, anger and frustration. I had worked bloody hard, through being a parent, undergoing teacher training and losing my evenings and weekends to lesson planning and preparation. I treated my job as my baby, I loved it and nurtured it and adored it. As time went on and the bad days turned to bad weeks I slowly noticed a dramatic deterioration of my health.

It started with sporadic sleeping patterns, feeling like I could sit and write a novel at night time and then feeling weak and lethargic when I needed to be alert and proactive in the classroom. That sporadic sleeping pattern quickly evolved into prolonged insomnia. After receiving no sleep whatsoever for 3 weeks on the trot, I realised that I could not go on. My skin was grey. I started losing my hair, clumps of it at a time and I had no appetite.

I also had ongoing laryngitis, which meant that I physically couldn’t communicate verbally as my voice had quite literally disappeared.

In an act of desperation, I sought advice from a GP, immediately I was put on medication in the vein hope that I would be able to realign my sleeping patters and feel naturally better as a result, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I was put on a high dose of Mirtazapine, an antidepressant drug prescribed to treat major depressive disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and a range of anxiety disorders and the GP also signed me off work. I began taking the meds immediately. I was pleased to observe that it did indeed make me sleep. But, when I woke, I did not feel conscious. I made the decision to continue going into work, I felt that if I were on my own I would feel worse, and that was true.

It is hard, even now to put it into words and it scares me to revisit this incredibly dark stage in my life.

I felt as though, I were having an out of body experience, I couldn’t’ feel anything, physically or emotionally. I didn’t feel numb because pain was still very much accessible. In some desperate attempt to try and feel something, I remember scrambling around looking for something to self-harm with, meanwhile awaiting my next year 10 English session. I managed to dig out a staple from my pencil case, which I then proceeded to carve my arm with.

The strangest part is, I couldn’t see anything wrong with what I had done. I had never self- harmed in my life, ever, it was not something I had considered to be a coping strategy throughout my depression. I JUST WANTED TO FEEL SOMETHING.

I taught my lesson as normal (Or at least, I think it was, I honestly cannot remember)

I started to question that maybe the pills were in fact worsening my symptoms rather than improving them, but I believed that I needed to keep on with them as they were still taking effect and I just needed to soldier on.

I engaged in very negative and destructive internal conversations, where I would convince myself this behaviour was normal and I just needed to accept that this was ‘the kind of person I was’, I always had been.

In addition to my internal monologue I totally lost grasp of the conversations I had been having with my daughter (she was 4 at the time) I had actually discussed, boldly the kinds of things I had been doing and feeling in front of her. Looking back, that that must have been when I truly lost myself.

Then the ‘face-morphing’ started.

When I was little, I used be terrified of the dark and if I was over-tired I used to experience this bizarre ‘face morphing’ thing. It would be images in my mind of strange people (whom I had never seen or met before) and their faces would rapidly morph into other faces. I still don’t understand why I didn’t tell anyone about this when I was younger.

This then became constant, not just when I was trying to sleep at night. It happened at work, in the street, while I was driving my car etc.

I would see faces of real people, my students, colleagues and strangers in the street morphing. It petrified me, but I was too embarrassed and scared to mention it because I knew that I was slowly going crazy.

One afternoon, while at my partner’s flat, we were having an argument about something very menial (despite his best attempts he didn’t know quite how to help me, he couldn’t understand what was going on – and I don’t blame him.) I became completely erratic, violent and aggressive, in my daughter’s presence. She was trying to help me and I slapped her. I had never slapped my beautiful, innocent and caring little girl before and this was the turning point for me.

Believe it or not, my five year old daughter actually snapped this one, apparently I used to look like this a lot.

She ran away and cried, while I quite literally convulsed and rocked in the corner of the room, cold sweating, in the midst of a panic attack and what I believe to be a mental breakdown.

I didn’t go to work the next day.

Instead, I spent time constructing a number of suicide letters to members of my family. I was so devastated at myself, I honestly couldn’t bare the guilt, the loss of my own identity and disappointment I felt I had caused everyone. I actually believed, justified and rationalised that the world was better off without me.

In spite of this, a good friend of mine and in fact my line manager at work, who had seen my deterioration for herself at work, reached out to me. It was like she sensed that something was not quite right, even though I had profusely argued that I was fine. She ordered me to meet her at the local coffee shop (leaving school and her lessons to enable this meeting) so I felt I had no choice but to go.

When she met me, she looked horrified. She tells me, I didn’t look like me at all. I held myself differently and appeared to have lost all sense of caring. I was a mess, in every sense of the word.

She marched me down to my GP practice and demanded I saw a doctor immediately as I was in a crisis. I broke down once again.

I told them about my bizarre demonic face-morphing episodes and my out-of-character behaviours that I had been exhibiting and for the first time hearing myself actually admitting it out loud was truly mortifying. They told me to stop taking the mirtazapine immediately and placed me back onto the original medication (citalopram) then put in provision for me to return to discuss my symptoms on a weekly basis.

I began to feel better slowly but my return to a more normal thinking process, scared me at how bad I had let myself get.

I underwent a series of cognitive behavioural therapy to help me manage my destructive thinking and to prevent those thoughts turning into destructive behaviours. I was diagnosed at this point with Bipolar Disorder.

I am better than I was, there is no doubt about that, but I live in fear that I will always be susceptible to extreme declines in my mental health. It takes every ounce of my strength and tenacity to remind myself of this time so that I NEVER lose myself like that EVER again.

How beautiful is she?