Oh Chaotic Dust,
Let’s start from the beginning; not at birth or adolescence or adulthood (mental health doesn’t allow for such chronological openings) but the start as chance or fate chose it to be: Summer 2015, an unnoticed mental breakdown.
Your second year of university had ended as successfully as any academic year could. You achieved good grades, played for a university sports team, lived with your friends and, by some miracle, got the girl. Friendship turned to excitement and romance in the last weeks of Spring, and when you left for home it was infatuated.
That exterior of happiness and success is often how it goes. For some, the signs are so visible others are screaming at them to get help, to open up, to change. For others, the signs are only internal: no one else knows their pain or their need for help. That’s how it was when you were seventeen, going on eighteen, with a girl who was nothing but bad news for you, and that’s how it was at university. The breakdown of Summer 2015 exhibited no signs and that’s one of the scary things about mental health: it can be invisible and silent to all.
Prior to the breakdown, though, you went home happy and told your family about how much you were enjoying university, and they were happy too. Through that Summer you texted and called and skyped your girlfriend as those infatuated do. One more year of university, with friends and romance and a person by your side who you could talk to about anything.
Except you couldn’t tell her everything, for over Summer something strange happened. A second-hand story from an acquaintance. Laughing in a garden over drinks and food. Then the next day you woke up with a single, sickening thought in your head; a slither of a moment which would spiral so inexorably that it would go on to envelope and consume literally every waking moment of your mental life. That’s how it can be with mental health. The skies can be a brilliant blue and then suddenly it’s rain and lightning and darkness overhead, without a single whisper of thunder for a warning.
And this was only the beginning.