My life without me
When I was growing up, my parents told me that I could do anything that I put my mind to. By the age of four, I had mapped out my life. I would be a pediatric oncologist, a professional harpist, and the first ever princess of America. I was small but I had big dreams.
By the age of twelve, I was on my way to achieving two out of three of these things. And I’d made a fair go at the third (I wrote a letter to George Bush Sr- he politely declined my offer to be the first princess). I had won national music competitions and was performing around the country regularly. I was doing well in school and was being fast-tracked to bypass Standard Grades to sit my Highers early.
I am not sure at what point my brain started to convert the possibility of being able to do anything into a compulsion to do everything. But, by the age of twelve, I found myself in a situation where I felt like I was drowning. My parents had recently separated, I’d won a music competition that I’d dreamed of winning since I was six years old which came with a lot of pressure and attention that I hadn’t expected, and I was in my first year of high school. I just needed a little time to breathe.
In an attempt to press ‘pause’ on my world for a while, I stopped eating. And suddenly, everything stopped. There was silence. Within days, I stopped worrying about school. I stopped thinking about music. I stopped caring about anything. It was just quiet.
Days turned into weeks and though my concept of time here is hazy, eventually I ended up in hospital. First, a medical ward, and once I was stable, an adolescent unit. Which I remember little of except being incredibly anxious the entire time and at one point, trying to leave only to have an aggressive nurse push me up against a wall, telling me that he would have me sectioned. I was twelve. At this point, the only “section” I knew of was a caesarean section which my mum had had when my brother was born. I was horrified. And very confused.
What follows was several years of being shunted from one hospital to another. All different shades of confusing and terrifying. I learned the language of “sections” and “orders.” I was first taken to the Sheriff Court when I was 14 when I was sectioned for 6 months and listened as the GP I had known since I was two stood up and swore on the Bible that I was too much a danger to myself to go home. I spent three months on an adult psychiatric ward when I was 14 because there were no facilities for young people nearby, before being sent 300 miles away to England. When that hospital sent me back, the doctor said I couldn’t go home because I was too high a risk to myself but there was nothing further that mental health services could do for me so he referred my case to social services to look at.
Social services looked at my file and decided the only place they could keep me safe was a secure unit and so I spent the longest eight months of my life under the care of the state. There’s a lot I could (and will) say about these eight months someday. Not today.
I did eventually escape, albeit to another hospital 500 miles away, and spent another couple of years there before being released, right before my 18th birthday.
But this isn’t about my life story or about the lack of adequate provisions for young people with mental health problems. Nor is it about the oxymoronically-named care system.
It’s about a life, interrupted, and what happens when other people step in and start taking over the narrative. Because my life, up until the age of twelve, had been about my hopes and my dreams and my aspirations. And then suddenly, I was inside of institutions and other people were telling my story. It wasn’t about me or what I thought or what I cared about or who I was or what I wanted or what I needed; it was about what I did and how they perceived me through their lens. It was about reactions and responses to a child who was unable to articulate clearly, but it was never about listening to me. It was about putting in place what was needed on the most basic level (sometimes) — walls, legal orders, food — but never thinking about the other needs that a child has; for connection, for compassion, for protection, for belonging.
The other thing, for me, is that I am now 34. I spent a lot of my 20s in hospital too. Most of my life is documented in medical records and case files. Very little of what’s there has come from me. Very little tells my story. None of it says who I am. These are “my notes”. People — professionals — have walked into my life and made life-altering decisions about what should happen to me and where I should live and who should be my legal guardian and who is responsible for my care and safety without ever sitting down and getting to know me. But they feel able to do so, based on what is in these files. What’s in my notes paints a picture of an adult, with a long history of severe and complex mental health problems. Anybody who meets me now would likely be very surprised at that. Not only because I don’t speak about my past, but because that isn’t who I am. Words convey an image. Twisted and distorted, pointed at the truth, but not the truth itself. I haven’t changed. I am still as much like the 4 year old who wrote to George Bush to ask if she could be a princess as the 15 year old who would hide slices of toast up her sleeves. My story is mine to tell, not for a doctor that met me in A and E for 15 minutes and decided that I needed to spend 72 hours being detained in a psychiatric ward.
Being observed 24/7 is a very unnatural way to live and I’ve found that perfectly normal human responses to such an artificial situation are labelled as “abnormal” or “disordered” behaviors. Our brains are not wired for institutions. And institutions are not wired for individuals. We have fight-or-flight responses. When we place somebody in some type of “home” or “unit” which triggers those responses and then observe and label what they do, we are pathologizing their responses because we’ve already decided that they are unwell and this effectively confirms it. If someone has decided you are “crazy”, it is very hard to prove them wrong. Being quiet is “isolating yourself”, chatting too much or too fast is a sign of mania, sitting upright is a sign of anxiety, being too relaxed is a sign of despondency: Are you depressed? Thinking about hurting yourself? Can you keep yourself safe tonight?
There’s something painfully dis-empowering about your story being told for you, about no longer being the narrator of your own life. As if it isn’t even about you anymore. As if your opinions and your beliefs don’t matter. When you speak up and are repeatedly told that you don’t know what’s best for yourself, or that you are incapable of making decisions for yourself, and that those decisions need to be made for you. Eventually you stop speaking up. Eventually you stop asking for what you want, or what you need, because you have been repeatedly told that you don’t know what you need. Eventually you stop trusting your own opinions entirely. Eventually you almost fade away. You stop seeing yourself as a whole person. I felt like I belonged to other people. My life certainly felt like it belonged to other people.
How do you come back from that? How do you find your own voice? How do you learn to trust yourself again? How do you learn to live without needing the permission to do so? How do you write yourself back into your own life where you should have been before your voice was written over?
It’s impossible for me to go back and change things. But it’s not impossible to go back and tell the story the way I want it to be told.
I want to reclaim my voice.
