Bryony Gordon - No Such Thing As Normal: What My Mental Illness Has Taught Me About Mental Wellness

The End of the World

I n March 2020, it became clear to me that the world was ending. Or, at the very least, that the world as we knew it was ending. I have, in truth, been predicting the end of the world since I was about nine years old, when my mental ill health first manifested itself as an obsessive worry about nuclear war, fire and wide-scale flooding. You know all those normal worries you have as a child. As I got older and moved into adulthood, it became clear that this anxiety about the world ending was not going anywhere: if anything, it was just getting worse, and I seemed to live in a perpetual cycle of Armageddon. There was no issue too small for my mind to latch on to and feed until it became a cause of intense, apocalyptic anxiety. Texting someone and not hearing back was never just a sign that they were busy it was evidence that I had done something terrible without realising it, and had now been excommunicated. A telling-off from a boss because I had missed a deadline was never just a simple telling-off it was a sign that I was about to be sacked. A woozy feeling was never just a woozy feeling it was probably a heart attack, or a stroke, or carbon monoxide poisoning. People often talk about the world being on fire. Sometimes, I felt as if my skin was, too.

I was in a constant state of emergency, sheltering in place 24/7 from the catastrophic death scenes playing out in my head. Some people prep for crisis by stockpiling canned food or building underground bunkers. I did it by comprehensively stockpiling information on all the ways in which I was a fuck-up, and keeping that information in the underground bunker of my brain, so that I was always primed and ready for the inevitable end of my world. My world was going to end because I was secretly a serial-killing paedophile who had blanked out my crimes in horror. (I wasnt, but I had a common although rarely talked about form of OCD known as Pure O, which made me think I was.) My world was going to end because my hair wouldnt stop falling out. (I had alopecia.) My world was going to end because my boyfriend was going to leave me, and how could I survive without him? (I was in an abusive relationship.) My world was going to end because I didnt look the way I thought I was supposed to look. (I was bulimic.) My world was going to end because I couldnt stop drinking or taking drugs. (I was an alcoholic and an addict.) My world was going to end because surely my child was going to be taken away from me. (I was still an alcoholic and an addict.) My world was going to end because I couldnt bear it, because I could not get out of bed and live in it any more, because it was too painful and, although I was terrified of death, I was, by now, more terrified still of living.

Its somewhat ironic, then, that by the time the world as we know it actually began to end, I was no longer plagued by apocalyptic thoughts, and was even rather enjoying life. I barely thought about ways in which the world might end at all I was too busy enjoying its continuing spin.

In March 2020, when the new coronavirus was announced by the World Health Organization as a pandemic and the entire planet started to shut down, bit by bit, as this terrifying disease travelled towards us almost in slow motion, I was, bizarrely, in a good place. I had, in the words of my therapist, done the work (more about this later) even though, at times, I hadnt a clue that I was doing it (does wailing into the wind count as doing the work? Apparently so). I was two and a half years sober. I attended three or four twelve-step meetings a week. I saw my counsellor from rehab regularly. I had carved out an accidental life as a mental health campaigner, writing and talking about the things that made me feel bad in the hope that it might make other people feel good. And I knew that, through decades of feeling like I was losing my mind, I had, miraculously, found it. It wasnt always pretty. It was sometimes incredibly messy. But it was there , and I felt that I had studied every synapse of it through the work I had had to do to get better.