The end of May is not generally a good time for me. My late husband’s birthday and our wedding anniversary fall within 8 days of each other, so emotional memories flow abundantly. Last year I was in a psych ward for those dates, and although my friend came and ‘celebrated’ hubby’s birthday with me, and we released a balloon, I was essentially too unwell and too medicated to really feel the impact. This year however, feelings were exceptionally raw. Having realised in the last 12 months the extent of the effect on my mental health of my husband’s controlling and bullying behaviour during our marriage, has left me with such varied emotions. Firstly I still love him. We were together 20 years, and 6 years into our marriage, when I could have left, I acknowledged that although it was a far from perfect relationship, I still wanted to be with him. And after this point, when I made clear that some things needed to change, mostly it was better. I was prepared to compromise a lot because essentially he was not a bad person, he was just as insecure as I was, and had had a controlling, bullying father as a role model. Hence I also feel some sympathy, pity even for him, despite how he treated me at times. However in contrast to that, I at times feel intense anger towards him for mistreating and disrespecting the one person who stuck by him through his terminal illness, fought his corner against know-it-all junior doctors and was there at his bedside in ITU the night he took his final breath.

So I was very low, what would have been the day before our silver wedding anniversary. I am exceptionally poor at asking others for help, but on this rare occasion, even I could sense the danger of being at home alone as distressed as I was. I called a dear friend who dropped everything to come and help me pack a few things and take me back to hers. She looked after me when I couldn’t look after myself. I really wasn’t well. I begged her to shave my head for me, which she duly did, despite not understanding my urgent insistence. She fed me and listened to me and held my hand and supplied endless cups of tea.

After a couple of days of being intensively looked after, I was craving my own space and independence again. The first night back home, I struggled and once more needed to ask for help. I can not stress how hard that is, or how much of a failure or a burden I feel doing it. But a friend stayed with me until I was calmer and so exhausted I was ready to fall asleep. I had a couple more really difficult days, but since then (2 weeks ago) I have gradually been feeling better.

For the first week I barely acknowledged to anyone that I seemed to be doing ok. Both my nurse and my therapist were on leave. I really wanted to be able to survive that week without putting in calls to CMHT or Out of Hours. I felt so determined not to fall apart in their absence, but I still had a niggling doubt; was I ok, or was I going slightly high? I had been rapid cycling for so many months it seemed like I had completely forgotten what normal felt like. Every time I had thought I was doing ok recently it turned out I was just midway on an upward journey into hypomania. So when my nurse returned this week I called him up, still very cautious that although I mostly felt ‘just ok’, every now and then something would alarm me that perhaps I was ‘going a bit batshit’.

He came out to visit me towards the end of the week, and I was still feeling ok. Kind of normal (for me anyway!) The ‘batshit’ moments had lessened too. As we talked I shared some of the ways I had been trying to track my moods and act accordingly to prevent extremes. I explained how I had been jotting down observations about myself, what works for me, what doesn’t and what affects my mood. I added that this felt a bit self-obsessed, but I have become aware that unless I find patterns of what helps I am not going to be able to make positive changes to enable me to look after myself. I noticed the huge grin on his face as he told me how good it was to hear me talking positively about putting my own self care first, and how long it had taken me to get to this point. I found myself grinning too. 

I told him how feeling positive and optimistic like this makes me feel nervous. He asked if I felt guilty for enjoying myself. I said not guilty, no, just anxious that something would go wrong or my mood would just randomly crash, because I don’t really expect my life to go well. Then I laughed at how ridiculous that sounded.

So, I’m definitely not counting my chickens before they hatch, but I noticed when told at my choir today that I look better, my auto-response was, “I feel better”. And I do.