Beneath The Bottle

Tag: mental-health

  • Finding My Spark Again

    Finding My Spark Again

    I was told I’d lost my spark.

    The words sat there between us, heavy and undeniable. And the truth is, they were right. I have lost my spark.

    Not in the obvious way, perhaps. I am not outwardly miserable. I am not the person people would necessarily point to and say she is falling apart. I can still smile. I can still laugh. I can still hold a conversation and make myself appear intact. But inside me, there is turmoil running through every vein. A constant unrest. A heaviness that rarely loosens its grip.

    I keep most of it in.

    It spills out here instead, into my writing, because this is the safest place I know to be honest. I can pour my worst fears onto a page, lay my pain down in words, and for a little while it leaves me. Or at least becomes quiet enough for me to breathe.

    If you met me, you would see that I do have a personality. Even writing that feels uncomfortable because I have no real ego to cushion me. Speaking well of myself feels awkward, almost embarrassing. But it is still true. I can laugh. I can care. I can sit with someone for hours if they need comfort. I can help an elderly lady reach the top shelf in a shop, balancing on my tiptoes as if I am far taller than I really am. I can help a flustered woman at a petrol station open the petrol cap when she has borrowed her husband’s car and cannot work it out. I can carry the weight of eight children’s needs, emotions, chaos and endless mess, and still somehow keep everything moving.

    If I see someone struggling, I stop.

    If someone needs kindness, I give it.

    I can play video games to a decent standard for a 45 year old mam. I can snipe on Call of Duty. I can edit montages on Premiere Pro. I am down to earth. I can crack a joke. I can make my kids cringe at my humour, and although they would never willingly admit it, my jokes are funny. I enjoy a bit of harmless sarcasm. My empathy floods me more than it should sometimes, but I would still rather be too soft than too hard.

    But trust is gone.

    Some things happen in life that strip trust from you so completely that it never grows back the same. Since last year, I have known that something in me has changed for good. I do not trust. I do not believe I ever fully will again. So I stay alone, in my own company, where disappointment cannot walk through the door wearing a familiar face.

    There was a time, about eighteen months ago, when I would go out walking and take photographs of everything beautiful. Flowers. Bees. The river. The sun. The moon. The trees. The clouds stretching themselves across the sky as though they had all the time in the world. I noticed things then. I felt pulled towards them.

    Then I stopped.

    And maybe that is what losing your spark looks like. Not becoming someone else entirely, but slowly ceasing to reach for the things that once lit you up. Quietly drifting away from what made you feel something. Letting life harden around you until wonder no longer feels natural.

    But today I took photographs of the clouds.

    And they mesmerised me.

    That has to mean something.

    Maybe I did not lose my spark at all. Maybe it was only dulled. Worn down by years of pain, by things that should never have happened, by the sort of hurt that changes the way you move through the world. And then, just as I was already carrying enough, I was retraumatised by someone I had believed I could trust.

    That kind of pain does not just bruise you.

    It alters you.

    But sparks fade. They do not disappear.

    I need to believe that now. I need to believe that there is still something in me worth finding again. I need to start looking for beauty in small things. I need to let myself enjoy gaming not as a distraction alone, but as something that genuinely brings me joy. I need to make the TikToks again. Edit the videos. Learn new things. Build something from the skills I do have. Not for clicks. Not for likes. But for the feeling. For the small flicker of pride. For the sense of purpose. For the reminder that I am still here.

    Gaming brings me joy. It always has. My competitive side wants to improve, to sharpen, to keep going. Editing gives me something to focus on, something to shape, something I can make mine. Creation matters. It reminds you that even when life has taken so much, it has not taken everything.

    I do not naturally believe I am talented. I can say I am a good mam, but even that I downplay because it feels easier to minimise myself than to stand fully in anything good. But I have written a book and self published it. I have another one in progress, this time fiction. That must count for something. It has to.

    What I need now is belief.

    Motivation.

    Desire.

    A reason to keep reaching.

    Because the truth is, I have never really had anyone in life who believed in me in the way people should be believed in. I have had to become my own cheerleader, my own comfort, my own support system. And that is hard when your faith in yourself has been chipped away over years and years.

    But maybe this is where it starts again.

    Not with a miracle.

    Not with some grand transformation.

    Just with a photograph of the clouds.

    Just with a small return to wonder.

    Just with the quiet decision to believe that something in me is still glowing beneath it all.

    Maybe I have not lost my spark.

    Maybe I am only learning how to find it again.

  • I Want To Know But Not At The Cost Of Knowing

    I Want To Know But Not At The Cost Of Knowing

    Friday was a strange day. At short notice, I got an appointment for the long Covid clinic, something I had almost forgotten about. My GP referred me last year.

    I have suffered from the effects of an Omicron Covid infection since December 2022. The infection itself was not bad. Two days and I was over it. But the after effects wreaked havoc on my body. I can only presume it attacked my central nervous system, damaging key regulators such as the vagus nerve.

    But advocating for yourself does not mean you are going to be believed or understood. I always knew it would be a battle if I ever found the courage to face the brutality of the crippling after effects I have been left with.

    My body is not the same. I do not even know where to begin in trying to explain how severe the symptoms are. And yet I know trying to get a doctor to listen might be even harder. Especially when self advocacy is alien to me.

    Initially, for eight months, I was bedbound. I experienced horrific POTS type symptoms, a racing heart when I stood up with no relief, air hunger, adrenaline dumps. I lay on my bed twitching, unable to talk, unable to regulate my breathing, feeling like I was dying, my body reacting to some unseen trigger. The psychological effect of that was horrific. But the symptoms were real. The feelings were real. There was nothing psychological about lying there with no escape from the hell of severe panic triggered by nothing, several times a day, for hours at a time.

    My body forgot how to breathe. I was winded just by sitting up. It was as though my body would no longer let air in the way it used to. And there was so much more. The desperate need to swallow constantly. A numbness in the back of my throat. The feeling that my tongue was too big for my mouth and not knowing where to put it. The sensation that my throat was closing. The constant unconscious, forced need to tighten throat muscles just so the feeling of dying between each breath would subside. Feelings that lasted all day. Not being able to breathe through my nose with any satisfaction. Everything feels different now. My body is not working how it should.

    And then came this appointment, where I had to advocate for myself. I had to tell this doctor that I was not uneducated, that regardless of my complicated mental health difficulties and my alcohol addiction, I am still insightful, accountable and capable of understanding my own health and the things preventing me from feeling normal.

    On Friday I sat with that doctor and he spoke, but he also let me speak, for one hour and twenty minutes. He gave me the time and the space to explain things. To be open and honest about how Covid had damaged my body, and how there were clearly psychological issues at play too.

    We laughed, and I became teary at times. I try to joke about my broken body, about being scared of my own shadow. I mock myself to show humility rather than accept that perhaps things have never been good, and that being gentler with myself might help. But I cannot do it. I cannot accept that I deserve kindness. I cannot accept that I deserve love. I cannot accept that I deserve self love. If I dared to love myself, I think I would break even more, because how do you show yourself tenderness when you have never believed you deserve it?

    I went through my history. My childhood, my poor mental health, and my current health in relation to long Covid. He joked that his job was to catastrophise, and I already believed the catastrophe before it had even happened. He knew his words would cut through me like a screeching child in a silent room.

    He wanted a full panel of bloods, looking further than the basics. He wanted inflammation markers, coagulation tests, hepatitis B, hepatitis C. He reeled them off one by one. Then he wanted a chest X ray and an ECG.

    I am certain he knew what my reaction would be after the long conversation we had just had. I told him I would find it impossible. Which sounds so crazy. In my head I knew there was no chance I would be able to go through with those tests. I want to know, but not at the cost of knowing. Where does that even come from?

    The truth is, I do want to know if I am ‘dying’. But I also feel it is better for me not to know. The doctor felt it would be more harmful to me to have the tests done than not to do them. Instead, he is referring me onto a psychological long Covid pathway, where I will work with a therapist in the hope of slowly reaching a place where I can tolerate the tests I currently cannot bear.

    And this is where my humiliation cuts deep. From the youngest of ages, my parents manipulated a narrative they wanted me to believe and accept. My mam wanted me to know that there was something wrong with me. From as early as I can remember, she would tell me there was something wrong with me. Then she built on it. As a young child I began to get severe headaches, and this was accompanied by severe sickness. She told the doctor she believed I was allergic to chocolate. I believed her. Until after I ran away and decided to test the theory. It took every ounce of resolve to stand in a doorway after eating a Kit Kat, at the age of 18, taking the smallest bites, waiting to see if I would throw up, waiting for my stomach to turn.

    It did not. I was not sick.

    She told me I had a spot on my head and neck and that it meant I had a brain tumour. There was no joking. No playful teasing. She meant every word. I would stand in front of her mirror. She would analyse my body and with each spot she found the escalation of her diagnosis would mount. It became the norm. She would tell me incessantly, yet she would not take me to the doctor.

    But why was I so sick as a child? The answer may never be proven, and it would be dangerous to say fully what I believe. But I was sick for a reason, and my mam was the only person who had access to what I ingested.

    My dad reemphasised the fear around health. I would hear things like if you are nipped you will get cancer and die. If you go outside without me, you will die. My mam would tell me not to eat apple pips because I would get appendicitis and die. If I took medicine I would die. I was suffocated by the words. I was suffocated by fear that lodged itself into every part of my life.

    Eating became immensely hard. My parents diatribe of constant fear. They would make me chew and over chew, they threatened that I’d choke if I didn’t eat so precariously. Each mouthful was painful. I would feel overwhelmingly nauseous, and every attempt to swallow took careful timing and accuracy just to avoid the dread. My mam would cook food and force it upon me that carried further choking hazards. It was as if she readied me for battle. Fish with bones was a favourite. I was sucked into a vacuum of fear, daily, constantly. There was never any sense that I could be fixed. In my world, you were either fine or you died.

    I do not believe that I was or am fixable.

    I cannot face those tests because if there is something wrong, in my head, then to me it means I am dead. And if there is something wrong, it also means my mam was right. It means there was something wrong with me all along. How do I ever recover from knowing she was right after all the heinous things she has done?

    So the shame of carrying what my parents brainwashed into me lies beneath everything I do. The fear never fades. Their words never fade. I am a prisoner to the persistent, constant voices of my parents, the ones you trust because you have to trust them as a child, because at that time they are all you have.

    I know some people will read this and think I am no longer with my parents, so why does it still have such power over me. But that is the point. Trauma like this does not stay politely in the past. It changes the architecture of your mind. It settles into your body, your instincts, your reactions, your beliefs. My parents did not just frighten me. They taught me to distrust my body, to fear illness, to expect catastrophe and to believe I was never safe. I may have left them, but the system they built inside me did not leave with them.

    And whilst there is rational within me. The overbearing, all consuming fact remains that they formed my entire sense of self and only by rebuilding that can my thought process fully be eradicated and rebuilt.

    And maybe that is the cruelest part of all, that even now, their fear still speaks through my body louder than my own voice ever learned to.

  • Surviving March

    Surviving March

    Content warning: This post contains references to childhood abuse and trauma.

    The thing I wish most in the world is that people could understand how it feels.

    Not to judge. Not to dismiss. Not to offer easy solutions. Just to listen and understand.

    I wish my words and emotions could show people how hard it really is just to breathe sometimes.

    I wish I was not seen as inferior because of my “issues”. Above all I wish I did not feel like this at all. Because if I did not, there would be no need to explain why functioning in this world can be so difficult.

    It should not be about people needing to understand. It should be about me being able to cope and cope well.

    But we should also live in a world that recognises that not everyone is okay and that looking down on people or casting judgement is as unhelpful as it is cruel.

    The older I get, the harder my mental health becomes to manage.

    Perhaps youth has advantages. When you are young there is a resilience that keeps your head above water. There is energy that fades as age slowly creeps in. There are fewer expectations and responsibilities pressing down from every direction.

    Maybe with age that energy simply disappears. Maybe the strength it once took to suppress everything has finally exhausted itself.

    Or maybe being a mam to eight children and being the face of positivity, encouragement and strength has taken a toll on the parts of me that can no longer hide.

    Because for me, as long as my children have love, affection, warmth and hope, then I have done at least one thing right in this world.

    But the truth is I am struggling more now than ever.

    Breathing itself can feel difficult.

    It is anxiety that never stops. Twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week.

    A constant panic that never dulls or fades.

    Every breath can feel like it might be my last. Doctors might call it somatic OCD, but labels do not capture the reality of living with a constant sense of doom sitting in your chest and stomach. The physical symptoms often overpower any ability to simply push through.

    I am actually an easy going person by nature. Laid back. Accepting. I rarely complain about the everyday things people often become frustrated by.

    But trauma lives in places most people never see.

    The ping of a microwave can send panic through me.

    Standing near a cooker fills me with fear. Not because of the pain of burns, but because of the memories. As a child my mam would burn hidden parts of my body.

    Closed rooms frighten me, even in my own home.

    Baths terrify me because as a child my mam would hold my head under water until the very last moment. Until the fight drained out of me and only then would she release me and I would gasp desperately for air.

    Even drinking a simple glass of water is difficult. As soon as the cup reaches my lips my body panics for breath.

    I keep trying. I never give up trying. But my body feels stuck in trauma mode.

    All the understanding in the world cannot always break the chains of physical memory.

    And then there is the weather.

    The sky.

    The smell in the air.

    The subtle shift of seasons.

    Things most people barely notice can send waves of panic through me because they are tied to memories my body never forgot.

    And then there is March.

    March is a cruel month for me.

    One that traps me inside memories created by something horrific my mother did.

    My medical records even show it. Every year my mental health spirals during this time. I did not even realise the pattern myself until years later and saw it written clearly in my notes.

    I had always believed I was simply falling into random depressions. But with age, therapy and understanding comes painful realisation of how trauma stores itself inside the body.

    I hate saying what happened out loud. I have only managed to speak about it twice in therapy.

    But this blog is the only safe space I really have.

    And as March begins I can already feel the shift inside me. The fear building. My best friend worrying about how I will survive the next four weeks.

    Today I am lying in bed writing this while my children are at school or work. After the school run I had no strength left to remain up.

    The sky outside is the same sky from that memory.

    And I cannot bear to look at it.

    March 1996.

    I was fifteen.

    Naive. Not street wise. A child who already knew far more about pain than any child ever should.

    In our kitchen my mam kept a calendar. Each month she circled the day my period began. My initial sat inside the circle like some kind of trophy she had claimed.

    It filled me with shame just looking at it.

    But I never questioned it. Questioning her was dangerous.

    That March there was no circle.

    She was angry.

    After school she ordered me into her bedroom. Her room had a bay window and a full length mirror. The sky filled the glass. Soft clouds drifted across pale afternoon light.

    Even now that mirror and that sky remain fixed in my mind like a stain that cannot be removed.

    She told me to take my clothes off.

    This was not unusual. She often forced me to stand naked in front of the mirror while she mocked my body and humiliated me.

    But that afternoon something changed.

    Standing behind me she suddenly violated my body in a way that sent sharp pain through me. Tears filled my eyes but I could not scream. I could not cry. I had already learned those rules.

    You never question her.

    You never cry.

    You never talk back.

    By the time it ended I could barely stand.

    When I told her I was bleeding heavily she dismissed it as simply being late for my period.

    But something had changed in me forever.

    From that moment my fear of bleeding was born.

    It is not a trigger you can escape. Periods. Childbirth. Miscarriages. Medical procedures. Even conversations around women’s health can send waves of panic through my body.

    So every March my body remembers.

    Even when my mind tries to bury it.

    The pain in my abdomen returns.

    The anxiety doubles.

    Flashbacks arrive without warning.

    And the sky becomes a doorway back to that room.

    The pain of accepting that my own mother, the person who was meant to nurture and protect me, could inflict such horrific sexual and physical abuse sits on my chest like a life sentence. I have never once hurt my children. I have never even thought about raising a hand to them. Sometimes that makes the question even harder to carry. How can a mother look at her child and feel hatred instead of love? How can the one person who should celebrate your existence become the person who tries to break it?

    Right now it is 2.35pm and the school run is approaching.

    Soon I will have to open the door and step outside.

    I will look up at that same sky that holds so many secrets.

    I will collect my children from school.

    I will hold their hands.

    I will listen to their stories about ordinary things.

    Inside my chest the storm will still be there.

    But every year I do the same thing.

    I breathe.

    I step forward.

    I survive March.

    Again.

    And again.

    And again.

    Spring arrives for everyone else.

    For me, March is the month my body remembers.

  • When The Day Was Too Heavy

    When The Day Was Too Heavy

    Trigger Warning: This post contains honest reflections on alcoholism, relapse, and difficult emotions. Please take care while reading, and only continue if you feel safe to do so.

    This is a desperate blog. A one where I’ve tried everything else and the futility finally overcame me.

    My plan today was simple: get to a meeting, A.A. Then on to therapy. The therapy was cancelled because my therapist was ill. The friend who’d come with me had to take the bus because the metro was cancelled. I had to walk through town, which sparked my anxiety. Once anxiety rears its head, it’s so hard to crush. It’s the little things that tip you over on days like this.

    I spilled tea down my white jumper. Did it bother anyone else? No; of course not. Was it the end of my world? Yes, of course it felt like that.

    The women’s A.A. group was calm and welcoming. My foot tapped the whole time, my body’s tiny attempt to suppress the fear. One woman even asked three others if they had spare tissues; she’d been watching me and thought I might burst into tears at any moment.

    A.A. is different from anything I’ve known. After a share, when someone tells their story, everyone goes up to hug and thank them. It felt alien. Not because people weren’t kind, but because I didn’t come from a place where kindness, togetherness, and mutual respect were taught. I sat there frozen, knowing I looked isolated and ungrateful for the courage it must have taken to share a story of alcoholism in a room full of people. In my head my expression read as disrespect; in my heart there was warmth and gratitude, but I couldn’t bring myself to show it. I was stuck. Not because of her, but because of me. I was so scared to move, to be seen, to be noticed. I wanted to be invisible. I’m not sure A.A. has a practice for not being seen. As I stood to say thanks, my only thought was: she’ll think, who the fuck is this person? And that thought is a recurring habit.

    The day folded in on itself and I found myself doing two A.A. meetings. Was it enough? No. Honestly, I could’ve gone to several more and still not felt like it was enough. My sobriety has been on and off since July 1st, 44 days. It hurts that I made it to 44 days before I crumbled. I was that person who thought, “I’ll just have one.” One never stayed one. So many more followed. Since August it’s been sporadic, leaning back into dependence rather than occasional flirtations.

    We all have a realisation moment. Last week, before school runs, I drank seven pints. Armed with chewing gum and mints, I hid the trail of deceit and lies. My kids believed I was sober. I hid a bottle of gin under my desk, bought a pretty pumpkin glass with a lid and straw, two bottles of lemonade, and drank the full bottle of gin over the evening pretending it was lemonade. Nobody knew, nobody guessed. My tolerance and need to hide it mattered more to me than anything visible.

    As I drained the last dregs, the sudden urge to be sick crept up. The next day I woke with severe anxiety and shaking hands and I knew I couldn’t go back to how it once was, repeating the cycle, building an unforgivable tolerance. That was my lightbulb moment. I had to really try. I needed something to make me stick to sobriety, something I’d never found before, something that would challenge me beyond all I’d known.

    After the gin, deep down I knew. Google showed me a local A.A. meeting and whatever fear I had, I knew this was my last chance to try something different.

    But heaviness stubbornly creeps in. Meetings filling me with a fragile hope that this self-sabotaging habit could become the past, but with that hope came the reality: facing the feelings that made me drink in the first place. By this evening there was no escape. Day slid into night and with the darkness came a pain that couldn’t be explained, pinpointed, or medicated away. A numbness that felt like my whole self was heavy and hollow. There was no energy for distractions and none of them would have taken the feeling away. How do you treat a sense of loss when there’s nobody to see you fall, when you can’t articulate how intensely sad you feel about simply existing?

    Then the tug of war begins: the voice telling me to drink; it will change how you feel, even after a few sips you can feel it change your brain, and the other voice saying stay abstinent, sit with this nameless pain. There is no winner. Drink and you re-enter the cycle: guilt, deceit, shame. Don’t drink and you are left with unwavering desolation, your body feeling heavier than before. Exhausted yet unable to sleep, menial tasks become impossible.

    An evening filled with my disabled adult daughter’s meltdowns made the desire to not exist stronger. I found myself praying to be rescued but knowing only I could do it. I didn’t drink. I chose to write instead. To try to make sense of it, or at least to be honest about how I was feeling.

    If parts of this feel familiar, you’ll know that feeling that has no name. Drowning without water. For anyone who feels the tug of war; you are not alone. Knowing others recognise the indescribable things we feel can be a comfort in uncertain times. Giving ourselves time to heal, space, and self-compassion to respect what we’re going through all play a part in the process.

    If you’re struggling right now

    You don’t have to go through this alone. If you’re in the UK, you can call Samaritans at 116 123 (free, 24/7) to talk to someone right away.

    For support with alcohol, you can reach out to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) at 0800 9177 650 or visit www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk.

    If you’re elsewhere, please look up local crisis lines or AA services in your country. And if you ever feel you’re in immediate danger, call emergency services right away.

     

  • The Courage To Begin-part 1

    I have often thought about starting a blog; somewhere to offload unforgivingly into an abyss that feels safer than the confines of a personal therapy session, where you have to make eye contact and actually accept the uncomfortable situation. But as I sit poised ready to write those nerves are still creeping vehemently across all I had hoped would be different. 

    Wondering why I now feel intense anxiety sat behind my keyboard ready to unravel a tangled story of emotion, the realisation is that it has never ever been about the situation I’ve found myself in, whether that be sat in a therapy room or now alone, in the safety of my own sitting room, on my own comfy settee. It’s to do with the deeply raw, honest, painful things that have and still consume me. I can’t promise to write articulate, perfectly grammatical blogs because I don’t have that skill but what I can promise to do is give an openly honest, hopefully relatable account of what it feels like to have gone through things that I never asked for, experiences that were undeniably wrong, and untangle the messiness of life’s events. 

    A lot of what I carry comes from childhood, those ripple effects from parents that were quite frankly, emotionally, physically and sexually abusive. Those experiences have shaped me in ways I am still now, even at the age of 45, trying to understand. Some days it feels like my past is right there like the shadow that doesn’t quite go away. It shows up in the way that I think about myself, in the heaviness that I sometimes feel and the constant ruminations of past memories. 

    The hardest part is coming to a realisation that the echoes of the past have shaped the very person that I am today. The quiet habits, the hidden words that are not spoken because of the swell of fear that sits in the pit of my stomach. Some days pass unremarkably and they are a small mercy but others I feel like I’m right back where I started. The child that is scared and unsure…but I’m not that child and writing this is my key to not being there anymore. That unlocking my story is allowed. Perhaps I’m allowed to take up space to tell my story, and untangle what has happened.

    Maybe you have felt this way too or something similar. Carrying the weight of a past you didn’t choose. The need to heal from the things that you never asked for. Wondering whether there will be a time when things will become lighter. If so then you are not alone. I believe so many of us keep these things quiet for fear of judgment or misunderstanding. When all we really want is for someone to say the words…me too! 

    I don’t have all the answers, and I’m certain I never really will. But sharing this feels like a step in a more positive direction, one that leads away from the darkness of hopelessness and towards the light of change, no matter how small that may be. If any of this resonates with you, I’d love for you to come on this journey beside me, even if it is just reading.