January: New Year, New Me (Except the New Me is Twice as Mentally Ill as Before)

[Trigger warning for discussions of disassociation]

January is a weird month for us all, but this month has really hammered home just how fragile we all are.

I ended 2021 on a relative high, happy with what I’d achieved in the year, and looking forward to a change in approach for the year ahead. For the first two weeks, I put my head down and got to work, steamrollering through a hefty to-do list and enjoying it thoroughly. I was in the zone, focussed and energised. Despite the challenges and the growing sickness of fascism in our society, I was coping, keeping my eyes on what I could change, and where my energy was best spent. I was making time for relaxation and friends. I, naively, thought that I’d found the balance, finally, between work and rest.

Because of Omicron I didn’t go out until halfway through January. I didn’t want to risk getting the new variant, as the last one was bad enough. I made plans to spend some time with Krista, for a change of scenery if nothing else, and had a great time with her playing Magic into the early hours of the morning. 

I needed to pop into Cardiff on the way back to run a few errands. As I was getting off the train I felt a little anxious because masks were less common than they’d been before Christmas, but mostly was looking forward to popping into my usual haunts. A perfectly routine and innocent conversation in one of these places triggered one of the deeper traumas and fears that I carry, and my mind and body responded by plunging me into the worst disassociative episode that I’ve ever experienced.

I didn’t feel much at the time – it’s all quite fuzzy to think about it even now, but I remember a vague idea of confusion, and severe exhaustion like I’d never felt. Even thinking about it, and how vulnerable I was that day, makes me feel sick to my stomach. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t understand what people around me were saying, I could barely walk, and I couldn’t process anything I was seeing outside the muscle memory of the journey home. Thank God that I was in a place that was familiar and not somewhere I didn’t know very well. I was able to send a garbled message to my partner to come and meet me at the train station, and luckily made it home safe with her help. The moment I reached the bedroom I passed out, and it took seven hours for my speech to return and my body to stop trembling.

After the confidence and satisfaction of the weeks before, the whole episode has left me terrified. It happened so quickly, out of nowhere – at least it seemed that way. I’ve been struggling immensely with bouncing back, because if I can go from feeling so good to being so thoroughly gone, will I ever be truly safe again? How will I navigate my independence, how will I do anything outside my home? Or are the days of going out alone over? It’s a horrible thought. 

I am lucky to have a very good long-term therapist, and we’ve been working on little steps to build my confidence back. One of these was to go out with Teddy. Privately, I was hanging my hopes on feeling normal, so I could write off the episode as a fluke. But even with Teddy there, upon the slightest, most seemingly benign trigger, I disassociated again, albeit less intensely. It hammered home that this was not a fluke – this was a part of my cacophony of mental illnesses that I now had to adapt to. It is so unlike the other symptoms, however, because it strips my very consciousness from me in those moments. I can’t think. I can’t even think enough to panic. I am not quite sure how to adapt to this.

My friends and family have been wonderful. Teddy, especially, has been as dependable, rational, and grounding as always. She doesn’t seem much phased by it, as she rarely is phased by anything, which has helped. Despite her preference to stay home, she’s offered to take me places so I feel safe. My friends, too, have been patient and understanding, asking if there’s anything I need. 

That’s the thing that is frustrating me, though: my needs are met. I have a stable, happy home, and a chosen family. I have food to eat and plenty to keep me occupied. I don’t need anything, really. But that’s the nature of trauma. Once you are free of that which inflicted it, it rises to the front and wreaks its havoc. What a monster it is. 

There’s a cycle that I’ve been in for a very long time, and I think perhaps this episode finally broke it. I would get into a rhythm of working very hard, feeling confident and capable in my abilities, and then I would have some kind of mental health setback that shocked me into wanting to re-evaluate my commitments and responsibilities. And then I would slowly get back into working, taking relief in the distraction that it brought from my troubles, amping up too quickly… And round and round we go. 

This time, I have not allowed myself to slide straight back to work. Well, more accurately, my family and friends have made sure that I do not. It feels bloody horrible, especially with the rabid hatred being hurled at the trans community from Welsh transphobic activists in the last couple of weeks. I hate not being busy, and I hate sitting by helplessly as things spiral out of control. A few times, I’ve desperately tried to clutch anything that could bring me something “productive” to do, and then had to let it go. It must be very confusing for those around me, and those I work with. 

I have no idea where I am meant to go from here, or how to learn to live with a lack of independence and limited distractions from the troubles thundering around my body. One of my goals at the end of 2021 was to truly become okay with being a disabled person this year – I just didn’t expect to be forced to do so quite so violently. 

We are, all of us, more fragile than we realise. And I suppose, if any of us learn anything from that fact, it should be to revel in joy when you feel it, and to hold it tightly so that when it pulls away from you, it does not entirely slip from your fingers.