In the first weekend of August, I was lying on my floor after I’d slid down off my chair, shaking and covered in tears feeling like no matter how hard I screamed it wouldn’t be loud enough to change anything. It’s like gasping for air as you’re struggling to stay above water that’s continuously pushing you back under.
This wasn’t the first time that day. It certainly wasn’t that week or that month. This had been continuous, increasingly getting worse and more frequent as time passed.
That afternoon, I slowly crawled towards my bed, thinking I couldn’t stay where I was. But moving those two meters left me so exhausted that I was completely overtaken by that same horrible feeling. It feels like being immobilised as if all strength has left your muscles while you’re forced to endure the pain. Kind of like what Katie Bell looked like in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
I managed to get onto my bed. And still over and over and eventually without a break, the violent hail and the ruthless downpour of a waterfall kept hitting me. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I needed it to stop. And as I opened the drawer of my bedside table, I found peace in the thought of ending it. With the pills already in my hand, I thought: maybe I should call Dad and ask him if this is really a good idea.
It felt like so many lights had gone out that one new light couldn’t make a difference in the darkness anymore.
Dad told me to get a plane ticket home straight away, the earliest one I could get, which was one and a half day later. The breakdowns didn’t stop during the one and a half day, but I told myself that I should at least hold on until I got to the Netherlands.
In the Netherlands, I found a stable home. Two stable people and dinner made for me each night. They were the first new light. But this one light couldn’t stop the thoughts, the feelings and the endless amount of time in a day. In my worst moments, I still felt like I wanted to jump out of a window. Something had to change.
When I was still in Scotland, I had tried to force myself to edit videos. When that stopped working, I started making a game. In the meantime, I had been unable to write fiction for months and tennis never had the same effect as playing football.
I thought of something new. I thought of writing some sort of diary that I could base off things that had already been written. Namely, in online conversations that I’d had with people, which only needed to be reframed/retold to become a non-fictional ‘story’. This felt do-able without being mindless. And so I started forcing myself to write these things as soon as my mind started turning black.
As a result, I wrote around 40.000 words between the 7th and 26th of August. That’s how I kept myself going. And as it started to work in those early days, it gave me hope and a sense of stability coming from within. I was doing this and making this change. This meant that I could survive and keep on living.
I returned to Scotland in September, feeling like I was in a better place and with the prospect that football would start back up immediately. Football would be my safety net. It’s my only definite working coping mechanism.
Then I got injured one and a half week after starting football again. And I didn’t and don’t have the two stable people like I did in the Netherlands. I am (supposed to be) my stability. And I am cooking and eating healthy. I’m keeping a clean house, going to my classes and writing a set amount of fiction every day. I am my stability, but the legs I’m walking on are wobbly.
It has only been three to four weeks since I got injured and I’m struggling. I’m struggling so much.
It’s a scary thought, isn’t it? I’m scared. When will I start feeling like I want to take an overdose of pills again? All the other thoughts have already been here.
And what do I do until my injury recovers? The writing trick in August has outlived its time. How am I going to keep on surviving if nothing is stable? What is my future going to look like?
I’m left wondering where I am going to find the stones to rebuild the walls of my house.
