I Found Peace in a Hopeless Place

This is going to be difficult to write. Last weekend I came frighteningly close to the edge. I’m not going to dress that up, and I’m not going to turn it into one of those sanitised mental-health stories where I was feeling a bit sad, reached out to somebody, had a cup of tea and realised everything was going to be OK. It wasn’t like that. It was fucking awful.

But something happened during those few days that I wasn’t expecting. Something that came out of one of the darkest periods of my life and has, bizarrely, left me feeling more positive about my future. I found something I’ve been trying to find for years.

I found peace. I now I know what it feels like. How ‘normal’ people feel.

Friday

Friday was bad. My mental health has been struggling for some time, although I’d thought I was beginning to improve. Therapy was helping. Medication was helping. I was beginning to understand myself better. I could recognise some of the patterns in my anxiety rather than simply being consumed by them. Things weren’t exactly good, but there was movement.

Then things started going backwards again. Work was hanging over me, and my eventual return had become another enormous source of anxiety rather than something positive. There was uncertainty everywhere, and uncertainty is absolute rocket fuel for my particular brand of anxiety. My mind doesn’t respond to uncertainty with, “We’ll see what happens.” It responds by identifying the most catastrophic possible outcome, assuming that is definitely what is going to happen, and then making me experience all the fear associated with it in advance. Very helpful.

By Friday I was tired of fighting it. Not tired as in needing an early night. Properly, deeply exhausted. Exhausted from being frightened. Exhausted from monitoring everything. Exhausted from trying to anticipate what people wanted from me. Exhausted from wondering what an email meant, what a phone call might bring, whether somebody was disappointed in me, whether I’d done something wrong or what terrible thing might happen next.

I’ve described my life recently as feeling like a war zone. My nervous system has been jumping from one perceived threat to another without ever getting the chance to reset. One thing gets resolved and almost immediately something else takes its place. There is always something coming over the horizon.

I wanted it to stop, it had to stop!

Saturday

Saturday was worse. Much worse. The dark thoughts that have accompanied my depression stopped being background noise and I started listening to them. Eventually, I reached a point where I made a decision: I was going to end my life.

I’m not going into the details of what I’d planned because they aren’t important to this story. What matters is what happened inside my head once the decision felt made. Almost immediately, things that had seemed overwhelmingly important suddenly weren’t. Work couldn’t frighten me anymore. There was no return to work to worry about, no difficult conversation, no uncertainty about my future, no email whose wording needed analysing seventeen different ways, and no worrying about whether somebody was disappointed in me. There was no tomorrow to catastrophise about.

And with that came something completely unexpected.

Calm.

That was the point when I noticed it. I wasn’t numb, distracted or suddenly happy. I was calm. Actually, genuinely, profoundly calm. The constant noise in my head had stopped.

For years my brain has been scanning the horizon looking for the next threat. Even when one problem is resolved, another immediately takes its place. Work, money, health, relationships, something I said yesterday, something that might happen tomorrow, something I should be doing, something somebody might expect from me. Suddenly none of it mattered. The internal committee had adjourned and even the anxiety gremlins had apparently fucked off for the weekend.

I remember recognising the feeling because it was so unfamiliar. Fuck me. Is this what peace feels like?

That’s a horrible thing to write given the circumstances in which I discovered it, but it’s true. For the first time in longer than I can remember, I wasn’t frightened. Initially, that calm seemed to reinforce the decision I’d made. I had found a way to make everything stop. I could finally rest.

I started writing a note. It became enormous. Once I started, decades of stuff came pouring out: school, being told I was on my own, grooming, rape, illness, losing my partner, friendships, loneliness, sexuality, work, shame, anger and fear. I wrote about all the rules I’ve accumulated about how I am supposed to behave. Be useful. Be good. Don’t inconvenience anybody. Don’t ask for too much. Don’t want too much. Don’t disappoint people. Cope. Look after everybody else. Keep going.

Underneath almost everything was one rule I’d apparently been carrying since childhood: you’re on your own.

But while I was writing all of the note, something else was happening. I’d noticed the calm. Once I’d noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing it. It was so different from the way I normally experience the world that it became fascinating.

Why was I so fucking calm?

Sunday

Sunday went lower still. That’s important because I don’t want to retrospectively turn this into a neat story where I woke up on Sunday morning, sunlight streamed through the curtains and I suddenly realised that life was beautiful. Bollocks. I was still in an extremely dangerous place.

But now there was another thought in there with me. I wanted to understand the calm.

None of the things that had been tormenting me had actually been resolved. Work hadn’t magically sorted itself out. My past hadn’t changed. My depression hadn’t disappeared. Nobody had reached into my head and repaired decades of accumulated damage. The only thing that had changed was that I’d decided I wasn’t going to have to deal with any of it anymore, and apparently that was enough for my brain finally to stop fighting.

At first I’d connected the peace directly with dying. Decision made, problems finished, anxiety stops. Simple. Except as Sunday continued, that explanation started to bother me. I started talking to people. I reached out, which is something I find incredibly difficult when I’m struggling. People answered. They listened. They didn’t run away and they didn’t throw meaningless platitudes at me. They were just there.

I also started thinking about what I was actually experiencing. What did I want from this? Was it really death that I wanted, or was death simply the only way my desperately exhausted brain could imagine getting what I actually needed?

That was when something began to shift.

I didn’t want everything that makes me me to disappear. I wanted the fear to disappear. I wanted the constant vigilance to disappear. I wanted the guilt to disappear. I wanted the endless fucking analysis to disappear. I wanted to stop treating every uncertainty as an approaching catastrophe. I wanted the voice constantly telling me that something terrible was about to happen to finally shut up.

I didn’t want to die. I wanted the noise to stop.

And the noise had stopped.

That’s when the calm that had initially seemed to reinforce my decision started doing precisely the opposite. I realised that whatever complicated combination of brain chemistry, nervous-system responses and anxiety gremlins creates the experience we call peace, my body had just demonstrated that it could do it.

That sounds almost ridiculously simple when I write it down, but it was enormous. For years people have talked to me about finding calm, relaxing, feeling safe and being present. I’ve understood all those words intellectually because I’m bloody brilliant at understanding things intellectually. Analyse it, categorise it, explain it, put it in a box and carry on.

But this was different. I’d felt it. I’d fucking felt it.

And as Sunday went on, the calm became the catalyst for not ending my life. I wanted to know whether I could get there another way. Could I feel this sitting somewhere beautiful? Could I find some of it around people I love? Could therapy help me get there? Could I learn to stop treating every uncertainty as a threat? Could I change parts of my life that keep my nervous system permanently mobilised for war? Could I learn that I don’t have to control everything?

I didn’t know the answers. I still don’t. But suddenly there were questions I wanted to be around to answer.

The peace I’d initially associated with an ending had become something aspirational. I had been imagining peace as something that existed somewhere else, somewhere beyond all this. But my body was producing it while I was still alive. It wasn’t waiting for me somewhere else. It was happening inside me.

It belonged to the living me.

By Sunday afternoon, the whole weekend had started turning itself inside out. I had gone looking for an ending because I desperately wanted peace. Instead, I found peace, and the peace gave me a reason not to end.

Monday

Then Monday arrived and, rather inconsiderately, brought the real world back with it.

That included work. I had a meeting hanging over me that I’d been dreading. Before the weekend, the uncertainty around that meeting was exactly the sort of thing that could consume me. My brain had already written the script. It was going to be terrible. They were going to tell me they didn’t want me anymore. Everything was going to collapse.

I was still anxious. That’s important. I hadn’t undergone some miraculous transformation over the weekend and emerged as Zen Me, serenely floating several inches above the carpet. I took my medication and used the tools available to me. My therapist knew I had just started playing the new Lego Batman game and described these as my Batman utility belt, which I rather like.

But something was different. I had perspective that I hadn’t possessed before. I’d just spent a weekend fighting for my fucking life. Even if that meeting went as badly as my anxiety predicted, did I really want to give it the power to destroy me?

For perhaps the first time, work didn’t feel bigger than me.

Work still matters. My career matters. Returning to work matters. I want whatever comes next to be healthy and sustainable. But no job, no manager, no meeting and no fucking email is worth my life.

And as it happened, within about thirty seconds of the meeting starting it became clear that the catastrophe my brain had spent so much energy preparing for wasn’t happening.

Funny that!!!

Tuesday

Then came therapy, and trying to explain all of this aloud helped me understand just how much had happened.

We talked about the strange absence of my usual anxiety gremlins during that period of calm. I’ve spent years regarding those little bastards as the enemy. They’re the ones shouting that something is dangerous, analysing emails, predicting catastrophes and occasionally informing me that EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE before I’ve even had a piss.

I know they’re not actually trying to hurt me. I know they’ve been trying, very badly, to protect me.

My nervous system has learnt some horrible lessons over the years. It learnt that people can hurt me, that pressure and expectation can be dangerous, that being trapped is dangerous, that people can disappear and that sometimes nobody comes to help. So it watches. Constantly.

Maybe during the weekend even those parts of me realised that screaming louder wasn’t helping anymore. Maybe they stood down. I’m not quite ready to hug the little fuckers, but perhaps I can hate them a little less.

We also talked about what the peace actually felt like. It wasn’t happiness or excitement. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t some enormous euphoric high. It was ease. Contentment. Being able to exist in the moment without constantly trying to control the next one.

No bloody noise.

And that connects to something else I’ve been struggling with in therapy recently: wanting. I can tell you what I should do. I can tell you what other people might need. I can tell you what would be sensible, responsible, useful or practical. Ask me what I actually want from life and things become considerably more difficult.

Now I have an answer, or the start of one at least. I want peace.

I don’t mean permanent happiness because life doesn’t work like that. I want moments of ease. I want to sit somewhere and simply exist without scanning the horizon for incoming artillery. I want connection and laughter. I want to be stupid. I want to sing ridiculous songs about my folks’ dog being a poo bum. I want to be around people I love without wondering whether I’ve earned the right to be there. I want to occasionally wake up and wonder what I’d like to do rather than immediately compiling a list of what I ought to do.

I want some fucking peace.

And for once I’m not going to apologise for wanting it.

I’m Keeping It

’m not cured. The last few days haven’t magically erased depression, anxiety or trauma, and I don’t want to pretend they have. There are things in my past I still need to process and things in my present that I probably need to change. The gremlins will shout again. There will be bad days and there may be very bad days. But I have something I didn’t have last week: a reference point.

I’ve spent years trying to reach somewhere without really knowing what the destination feels like. People tell you to “relax”, “try not to worry” or “find some calm”. Yes, thank you. Marvellous. Why didn’t I think of that? But now I’ve actually felt it. I’ve been there. I don’t know the route back yet, and I suspect there isn’t one simple route. Maybe it’s therapy, medication, friendship, nature, changing parts of my life, relinquishing some control, learning that I don’t have to be useful every waking second, or some messy combination of all of them. I don’t know yet, but I know the place exists.

There’s a line near the beginning of the note I wrote over the weekend: “This isn’t a goodbye. It’s an exercise in letting go.” Reading those words now is strange, because perhaps that is exactly what the weekend became, just not in the way I intended when I wrote them. Perhaps I can let go of some of the fear and some of the rules. Perhaps I can put down responsibilities that were never really mine to carry. Perhaps I can learn that feeling frightened doesn’t necessarily mean I’m in danger, and that being useful isn’t the price of admission to my own fucking life.

Most importantly, perhaps I can start letting go of that oldest rule: you’re on your own. Because when things got really bad, I reached out. People answered. They listened. They stayed. They didn’t run away, and they didn’t need me to make everything comfortable for them first. I wasn’t on my own, even though almost every part of me was telling me that I was.

In therapy we ended up talking about a boat that has spent a very long time being battered around at sea. I don’t think I’m safely back in harbour. The sea hasn’t magically become calm, the boat isn’t completely repaired and there will undoubtedly be more storms. But for the first time in a very long time I feel close to the harbour wall, and there’s a line between the boat and the land. It may slacken, it may pull tight, and sometimes I may drift further away again, but the connection is there.

That’s probably what I’m taking from this horrible, extraordinary weekend. Somewhere underneath all the noise, fear, anger, grief and exhaustion is something I wasn’t even sure existed anymore. I had thought peace was something I could only find by leaving everything behind. Instead, the very fact that I felt it while I was still here showed me that it was already part of me. My mind and body are capable of it. I don’t yet know how to find my way back there, but now I know there is somewhere to find my way back to.

I found peace in a hopeless place.

It turns out I didn’t have to stay there to keep it.