I needed a break from ‘me’
I SAT in the office of Mr Daniels, a consultant psychiatrist. He saw something in me I didn’t yet see. His belief was if I had a rest for months I would make new choices after it.
He asked me if I would consider hospitalisation for rest and recuperation. “Just a week or two. Gather yourself.”
I said I couldn’t because I didn’t want to face my sadness. I just wanted him to help me. I was 22 years old. Mr Daniels talked about going into the mountains of his native country to live alone for months. You can’t go into the mountains in a city. So hospital would be the ‘mountain’ for me.
You can’t take two months off without losing your job, I said.
“What if you need more than a couple of months off later? What if you can’t work at all?” he asked. “You need to be a hermit for a while.”
Mr Daniels prescribed a rest from humanity for me and I didn’t take it. It was a mistake. Not taking the time then put me at risk over the next ten years. On three occasions, I came too close to enacting the death wish I lived with more or less constantly.
I never knew why I felt this. Now, I do. A quarter of a century later, I do. I fought myself all the way. I fought my shyness with talk, with a proficiency that gave me a broadcasting career but my anxiety has not changed. I just understand my anxiety and cope with it in situations. I fought my sensitivity because I had been advised I couldn’t cope in the real world with it, then I realised the real world is different for every person. There are seven billion real worlds.
I fought my desire not to be in the middle of things by putting myself into a media job. I realised you can be in media and never leave home or your comfort zone. But before the realisations, I fought myself. And twice I was exhausted enough to come close to taking my own life.
How did I recover? I began not to see the worst in myself. I used to feel ill when people complimented me, now I feel uncomfortable but I try to accept it. I was brought up in the ‘don’t get above yourself’ generation and it nearly put me six feet under. Friendship. The beautiful and sustaining concern of good, real friends came and ended the long years in the dark room.
New friends are coming who didn’t know me in the despairing time. They think I’ve always been free and they’re right. But, up until recently, I would have said they were wrong.
It’s 2012 and I am not on the thin ice. I am not just coping, which I’ve always done. I am in a day of my own. My life is now not about what I deprive myself of, but what I give to myself.
On a summer morning in 1990, I sat with Mr Daniels and he asked me not to leave the hospital. He advised me not to get into my taxi, which was taking me to an airport to pick up my parents and my grandmother for a weekend in my west London flat overlooking a park, with my beautiful fiancé and my amazing life and career. I was wearing an Aran cardigan and I remember the collar was soaked with tears I couldn’t control. Even in the taxi, which took me away from the consulting room, and before this on the train that brought me to the hospital, I couldn’t stop. To be so public in my deprivation was shaming but also releasing. I didn’t have energy for putting on the brave face. It was an iron mask. I’d worn and shown it as me for years. I’d turned up for ten-hour days in offices and commuted home to sit by a window and cry. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it felt I had cried more than I had lived.
But it changed.
Mr Daniels tried to persuade me resting is an action. He told me I needed to climb out of my past and see what my reality was doing to me. I did not want ambition or pursuit. I wanted peace and reflection. Even then, I was craving it and it was driving me crazy, because my life couldn’t supply my spirit’s demand.
“You are in the wrong life,” he said as he took my hand. “You are not supposed to be pushing. You are someone who pulls people up. You do not push people down. But you’re pushing yourself down in this way,” he demonstrated as he pressed my hand flat on the table. “You need time and help to rise up to the shape you are supposed to be. You are trying to be the shape of someone else. So you are suffering.”
He was right. A lot of psychotherapy contributed to that realisation, as well as his first prompting. I talked my way out of suicide. In the early days, I was trying to be an example. I was the oldest grandchild on both sides of a family. The first to go onto third-level. The first to do this and that. It took a lot to hand back the pedestal and allow my own inclinations to come to the fore. My inclinations were quieter than the life I was leading. How did I find it out? By listening first to Mr Daniels and then talking to others like him.
For seven years, I talked most weeks to one woman called Catherine. That was the single most important commitment to take the graveside away. I talked to others, but she was the one I talked to most.
A prescription for Prozac was part of the process. The doctor said to me: “You need a holiday from yourself.” I took it for four days and felt myself change. But a quiet voice said to me: “You don’t want to be different, you don’t need a holiday from yourself. You need to accept yourself as you are.”
I put the rest of it in the bin.
The top of a career ladder wasn’t right for me. I just wanted to give into my softness and not have to compartmentalise my sensitivity. Now I have integrated my passion with my reason, my sensitivity with my chosen way. It doesn’t feel an arrogance today to say I love words and can put them together well and I love people and can put them together well. But back then, in the 1980s, the last decade of silent trumpets, I was not allowed to honour instinct, only my upbringing and my spectacular Catholic guilt.
My greatest gift from life, apart from my sons, is I got to experience the need to die and I learned from that how precious life is and how no one survives without stories. Some pass them off, some neutralise them, but if you truly live your story you will know a time when you wished it would end and in the wish find a new beginning.
Life has shifted for me. I’m not afraid to be open with people or to assist them. If you need help and I know you, I will give it. Equally, I will give it to myself.
I stopped doing things for approval. If you find it hard to receive compliments, then why work to earn them?
But it’s Mr Daniel’s wisdom that was the prompt for my journey in and out of therapy rooms. He understood so much. He understood imagination and how it is more real to some people than reality. So he was the right first person to speak with, to show my dark secrets. He was the first to suggest there are many realities and I was in the wrong one. I was a person trying to live in the real world when I am meant for one of my own creation.
I was trying, by sitting exams and by getting jobs, to make myself belong. This almost killed me. I tell my creative writing and creative expression students, and strangers who listen to me talk on the subject of mental health, that for years I was trying to pitch my tent on the good advice I was given. To put in the ground pegs, hammer them in, stay level as advised and keep out the rain as advised. One day, the rain looked better for being in than being squashed with a sense of airlessness under canvas. My tent never looked right compared to others. So I took out all the pegs, one by one, and let the fabric float upwards. That’s when I found out I had a hot air balloon on my hands and let my head back into the clouds where it belonged.
I came home to a quieter self inclined to do what it was suited to. Children, a move to the country, a loving special needs teacher for a husband, good friends, all of these things came out of depression and where it took me. Home. I came home in my own time.
* Read more about Suzanne’s journey through depression, and where it led her, in her book Heart Lines, €12.99, published by Londubh Books, in bookshops and available online now from the publisher’s and other websites.
