*deep breath*

It's New Years, the one before last, and I've just told someone that I'm desperately unhappy and I have been for almost a year, and they've patted me on the head and told me not to be silly.

I've opened my eyes wide, stunned. I've been trying for a year to say those words, and I don't know where they went, but they weren't heard.

*****

It's sometime in 2005, I'm at a party and I've just told this guy that I hate myself.

I didn't mean to, in my defence, we were talking about things in general and, following some deep and searching questions, I was trying to articulate exactly why I was unhappy. He asked me. Him. He started it.

Eventually I blurted it out, after month upon month of thinking it and never quite finding the right words to say it, I told him, and it hung in the air in a little cloud of angst like a dragonfly.

He gives me a Look. "That's just... you just want me to go 'oh no, Fi, that's terrible, how awful'..." So dismissive. He has no idea. I want to scream at him.

"It IS terrible, you arsehole, it IS awful, it IS awful that I feel this way!"

I didn't say anything. I seethed though, and I never forgot it.

*****

It's September 2005 and I've just told the doctor that I've been unhappy for almost two years and I've been thinking about staging some kind of elaborate suicide attempt in order to get someone to listen to me.

He tells me to get out more, enjoy life.

I stare at him in much the same way that dogs who have just been kicked stare at their owners. I'm pathetic now, and I've run out of places to hide from things I don't want to think about.

*****

It's my first term at university and I'm no longer unhappy. I still cry at night a lot and I wouldn't exactly say that I'm happy, but I'm not unhappy and I'm so relieved that I start to believe that perhaps it's all over.

It's like I left all my issues in Yateley. I wonder if they'll still be there when I go back.

*****

I go back and they're still there. They bite me in the ass like a rottweiler and this time they draw blood. I stand in the kitchen and scream silently into my hands while my nan sits and breathes smoke out of her nebuliser. I finally understand what complete and utter despair means, and I worry that everytime I see rock bottom it seems to have gotten lower.

I learn the first lesson in depending on God and, stupidly, think that this means I'm capable of carrying on.

*****

This new year will be a new one in every way. This year I will be healed, I promise myself in January that this will be the last year in which I let the Bad Place take over my life. I'm so empowered by my new year's resolutions that I don't even bother to go to the doctor about the recurring nausea and sleeplessness.

*****

February means tough decisions. Hard decisions, but I think they'll be the right decisions. Life in complete dependence on God is difficult, I decide, but so, so worth it.

I become aware that the Bad Place hits me harder at sometimes than others. I start to differentiate it as a separate entity to me. It pays no attention to what's going on in my life, just comes, goes and affects me as and when it will.

Nausea comes and stays with me for a whole three days without making me sick. I can't get to sleep at night for feeling sick. I can't get out of bed in the morning. I don't want to. Throughout all of this, I feel closer to God than I have in a long time.

*****

February draws to a close and Kit Ward dies in hospital following a brain haemorrhage. His sister, Sidonie, is one of my favourite people in this entire universe and I'm furious that there is nothing I can do to save her and her family from this.

I have a lot of conversations about death, life, heaven, hell, God, his plan, our flaws, and what it all really means, after all the bullshit fades, why does none of this make sense?

I realise that my course means nothing to me. I know instinctively that Royal Holloway is the place where I am supposed to be right now but my BA Drama and Theatre matters less and less with each person I know who hears of Kit's death and grieves for him.

I realise that I don't care about theatre anymore, when people are dying. The rights and wrongs of it are beyond me, but that's the way I feel.

Suddenly, I look back at the last few months and realise that I haven't really been living my life at all. I walk back from the pub on Monday night and think, why doesn't this matter to me? Why is it that I'm with friends who I adore, drinking drinks that I like, conversation that makes me laugh, experiences that I should enjoy, and I can feel nothing?

Why do beautiful things make me sad? Why do good times make me anxious? Because I know that I'm not really experiencing any of them. I'm watching myself go through them and feeling nothing at all for myself. I'm sad because I know I've had a good time at uni but I only know it, I haven't felt it at all.

*****

In the nurse's office, I confess, I'm the first one to mention the word 'depression'. She asks me what's wrong and for the first time, it's not enough to tell her that I'm sad and hope that she comes to a conclusion that might help me. I've realised in the past week how fucking fragile life is and I point blank refuse to continue the half-life that I've been living for about two years now.

I tell her I think I'm depressed. I tell her why I think it, how long I've felt this way for and the way that it's affecting my life and generally making me despair, and she agrees that yeah, it sounds like I'm suffering from depression.

How dramatic, how terribly presumptious of me, to have spent two years in a dark pit, reading every possible resource, going to every talk, absorbing every account and analysing every last symptom before daring to suggest that perhaps, there's something wrong with me.

Eventually, a girl has to take responsibility for herself and say, yeah, I reckon there's something wrong with me and I want help for it. I want someone to give me some advice on how I can start doing life again, on how to get up in the morning, on how to cry less.

I want life back.

*****

Please, please, please. Don't tell me I did the wrong thing. I've spent many many months debating whether or not to get help and now I've made the decision I don't want to go back on it. Third time lucky. If you think I'm a hypo, or a drama queen, or should just get over it, I don't want to know. I'm sorry. Bottom line is, I've started to scare myself. This is the only way I can see of being happy again.

Doesn't everyone have the right to try and be happy?