MENTAL health awareness week has come and gone again, with little fanfare. Hashtags, articles, twibbons. As someone with more experience than I’d like steering the good ship unstable, I use this calendar point as my annual reminder to reflect on how things have changed for me between adolescence and now.

This, the sixteenth MHAW, centred on the idea of relationships in supporting good health. Most of the advice focused on the health of external relationships, and how they can impact and lessen a mental-health crisis. Relationships with others are a valuable tool if you have them, but what about the two most intrinsic relationships to anyone living with it – the relationship to the self and the very idea of mental illness? When you are trapped in your own head, these two are your first line of defence, or your worst enemy. I’ve spent this week thinking about that, and how my ideas of both have increased my ability to cope on my worst days.

Some days - the best days - are nondescript. Seven hours' sleep. A shower. Black coffee. One tablespoon of set honey swirled into porridge. I frown at the day’s headlines. I pack four identical lunches. I tie laces, fasten buttons and brush hair. I dole out gentle reminders about unmade beds, unopened curtains and unclean teeth. We leave the house together, on foot or on bike, and sharing jokes and squeezing hands on our five-minute journey to school. I plant kisses on noses, cheeks, foreheads and say my goodbyes. 

This is normal.

Some days are not neatly bordered by sleep. Some days ten togs of puffed quilting press down with the weight of a thousand unmade decisions. Before the simple act of stepping out of bed, I have to become Samson. In the face of the truth, I must summon every ounce of latent strength for the task ahead: unpeeling myself from the sheets would be to emerge into a day that has no shape.

The worst days are when I forget how to navigate my way through the simple necessities of everyday life. Days when the air is thick and difficult. Breathing feels clumsy and uncertain. Too quick. Too slow. If I make it into the shower, I will lose my sense of time. I will stand in the stream, transfixed by apathy, paralysed by the choice between creamy coconut or invigorating grapefruit. Pinned between the loofah and the sponge.

When I get round to it, the coffee is bitter and alien in my mouth – everything from the taste to the temperature. The congealed oats are offensive, with or without honey. I don’t eat. I forget to put butter on the sandwiches and what cupboard the Tupperware hides in. We leave the house under the shadow of a cloud. I hold hands clinically – functionally present, emotionally absent.

On some days, the pointillism is convincing. I can gaze at my life and see that all things are as they should be. On other days, the illusion fails, erupting into a maddening, unruly collection of dots. None of them exact, or as they should be. My energy goes into counting and examining the parts that make up my existence, cataloguing their failure to add up to anything meaningful. There are smudges on the window. Weeds peeping through the paving stones. The sofa cushions are in the wrong order. I become consumed by detail. Cataloguing my failings, from the miniature to the massive, stops me from just being able to complete a morning routine without feeling on the verge of implosion. Brushing hair, fastening buttons and cleaning teeth all seem like an impossible, insurmountable agenda for one short morning.

But this is normal too.

I grew up in a house where mental illness kept watch, but was never openly acknowledged. To the world outside, we would not grow up bridled by that stigma – even though the nameless stranger accompanied us throughout, engulfing us each in turn. In the intervening years, between teendom and now, I have become aware of my tides. The rhythms that dictate my days, weeks, months and even years. I have made my peace with my unquiet mind, and in doing that, have reconciled that the tumultuous days are not limbo, they are basecamp. The highs and lows depart from here. This is my normal and that’s okay.

I tried leaning into the labels, and lost sight of myself. I tried to deny them, and missed how to help myself. I tried thinking of myself as ill, as that’s what others told me, but learned the weight of that negativity. Illness. It’s something that happens to people, lots of people. Something to pity, something that requires flowers, grapes and other people’s delicacy.

There have been many labels, and there will be more. Labels that change with time, doctor or how I feel about myself. Knowing that these are just words prescribed by a person, to the bits of me they can piece together, gives me some relief. I cannot be defined by them because they cannot, and will not, know all of me. They are human approximations sounded out for something much bigger than one person. They are an aspect. A view point. A prism that only describes a part of me at a particular time. They will never describe the stuff that matters in the core of me; how it feels to hold my children, or how music sounds to me, or how a first mouthful of chocolate tastes.

Sometimes my mind will become so distracted, I will forget what my hands are for. Using them takes effort – mallowy limbs that disobey their purpose. Moving around feels like punching in a dream. Walking feels like running through water. Sometimes my mind will feel like quicksand, unsteady, shifting, parting in places it’s not supposed to. It will not carry the weight of the world today. But tomorrow it might hold fast, and everything will continue to work – breathing, thinking, being – choreographed and effortless, as if they always have been.

Mental Health Awareness Week asked us to consider our relationships, but addressed only the external. The relationship I have to myself, to my particular combination of irregularities, has been the most healing of all of the interventions I’ve tried. There is no Lemsip for the mind. No plaster that joins a broken person back together. Sometimes the best I can do is look myself square in the eye and say, “I am a wreck. But it’s okay. Everyone is.”

The more I’ve been honest with myself about it, and the more others have felt able to break the moratorium on discussing mental health, the easier it gets to cope. I’ve realised that all people are icebergs – we see only a fraction, and oftentimes what lies beneath the water is a mess. Recognising that this is my normal, and many other people’s normal, has been a game-changer.

I take delight in knowing that I am still going. I can be a walking shambles. I can be a beaten-up Volkswagen chuffing along a dirt track, parts rusted and imperfect but still recognisable as a car. I can be dented, clattering and straining to make it through each day, but when others look at me, they still see a person. When I look at me, I still see a person.

Knowing that there is no finite point that I will reach, where everything will be fixed and remain in perfect condition, is a comfort. My job is navigate, with each turn of the earth, and to pass on those skills to my own children. But my body, this head, these four limbs, are just a vessel really. The recognisable ship that carries the mercurial self forwards.

This will pass. I will pass. Sometimes trying to see the good in life will be like peering through a milk-film. There will be days that feel like sandpaper. Moments that feel like vinegar on fissured skin. But this is not the only state of being. Colours will seem brighter again. Knowing that, and reminding myself of it regularly, has been my best tool in my mental first aid kit.