In my ‘about me’ blog I wrote about being diagnosed with a number of conditions that I believe help me to relate to a lot of other people. The past I have had also plays a part of this too.

When I was 11 years old, in New Zealand, where I am from, I was diagnosed with glandular fever. This resulted in me missing a lot of school, and at one point becoming covered head to toe with a severe rash that landed me in isolation in hospital for a week while the doctors figured out what it was. They did figure it out, but it had a name so long and confusing that I honestly couldn’t tell you what it was.

Jump forward to the age of 19 and I had been living in Melbourne Australia for a year, most of which had been spent continuously having to see my doctor as I was always in pain. I couldn’t think straight and nothing ever felt ‘right’. After a year of numerous tests and medications, my general practitioner (GP) at the time decided to call the Alfred Hospital (a big well known hospital here in Melbourne) and advised that she was sending me to them and that I was to be taken straight in through emergency and not to have to wait. I ended up staying in hospital for two weeks while they ran every single test I can think of. Too many to list.

I will never forget what the head of the rheumatology department said to me when she sat at the end of my bed to give me my diagnosis. Mind you, I knew no one in Melbourne at this time really, so I was all alone going through this without any support. Back to what she said. The doctor told me I have fibromyalgia and that “even holding a pen will cause you pain”. She wasn’t wrong. Fibro, as those of us who have it, call it, is wide spread pain throughout your entire body. It effects everyone differently, but the gist of it is, I live in chronic pain, combined with chronic fatigue and brain fog which are all part and parcel of this condition. How and why people get this differ, but many of my doctors believe that I contracted it when I had glandular fever and just had mild symptoms so had no idea until I was diagnosed at 19. By the age of 20 -21 I was using crutches and walking sticks to get around, because the level of pain I lived in was so excruciating.

Long before being diagnosed with fibro and chronic fatigue, I knew that I was different. And also depressed. I think the first time I fully acknowledged to myself that I was actually depressed was when I was 15 years old. I was at high school and just remember the distinct feeling and thought telling me life wasn’t supposed to feel this way. Even I find it odd that it took until age 15, since I first tried to kill myself at the age of 10 by hanging myself off my swing set at my childhood home. No one knew this. Luckily, not that it felt it at the time, I was too young to fully understand what I was doing so tied the rope too close to the swing, so when I stopped being able to breathe, natural instinct was to fight for life and I managed to reach the swing and get myself down. I never told anyone this until I was much much older.

I started self harming when I was approximately 11 years old. Cutting myself in places I knew other’s where not likely to see. Feeling like I had no other escape from the pain I felt in my heart and soul, yet ashamed that I was doing it since “people only cut for attention”. This is what so many people said about cutters. But in reality if you have never been in a particular situation, you can never truly understand what it feels like. The attention whose for are suffering, want, is usually just to know someone out there cares about them. Even just a little.

When I was 18 years old and had just moved back to New Zealand from Australia the first time, I was living above the bar and restaurant I worked at, since my boyfriend who I originally went to Australia with had ended our relationship, and my mum was in another one of her moods so wouldn’t let me come home. One night I just couldn’t stop crying. Crying so hard because it felt like nothing ever got better and instead everything tended to usually get worse. Well that’s how bad I felt. So I smashed a photo frame and started cutting myself with the glass. I passed out after a while. When I came to in the morning there were cuts everywhere on both of my arms and a lot of blood throughout my bed and on the floor. I knew I needed something to cover the cuts but didn’t want to see or speak to anyone. I went to the chemist next door to the restaurant and tried to figure out what I needed. It wasn’t long before I was crying again in the store and a kind woman who worked there came over to help me. One look at my arms and I was told to go immediately to my doctor. I was scared because I had a family doctor that my whole family saw, but since I was over 18, thankfully he could not tell my mum.

I remember being told that I was extremely lucky to be alive as I had cut so deep that I had only missed the major artery by 1mm. A 10th of a centimetre kept me alive. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I obviously needed stitches which I keep hidden with bandages and long sleeves, so no one knew what I was going through. The doctor sent me to the local mental health hospital to see someone given what I had done, but all I remember is that they wanted to talk about the lack of relationship I had with my father, due to my parents divorcing when I was 3 years old, and at the time I was not even sightly interested, nor did I think that had anything to do with anything, so I basically fled, never went back to that hospital, and not long after this incident returned to Australia, where I have been ever since.

I believe I was approximately 20 or 21 years old when I first went to see a doctor to talk about how I was feeling. How sad I always felt and how I spent so much of my time thinking about death. To me, death wasn’t scary, it was eternal peace at the end of a shitty existence on earth. Unfortunately I was still cutting at this age. I had moved with with someone and his son and basically had ‘a ready made family’. I knew from the start we did not belong together, as did he, which he voiced, yet I convinced him and myself otherwise, since I was so broken by this point, I just needed to at least pretend like someone loved me. Even though I had never been able to feel it at all in my life.

So there I was, in a relationship with a person who was completely different to me in every single way, and who openly criticised how I dressed, spoke, and even danced, because I was too ‘out there’ for him or his culture, given he was Indian. So, obviously we did what is so common in our society, and instead of ending the relationship 6 months after it begun, I bought a house for us to all move into instead. It had always been my goal to buy my first house by 21 so I thought this would help me. It did not. Like I said, I was so severely unhappy and honestly believed that this was my only chance at happiness, even though all in all, the relationship made me even more unhappy then I was before it started.

So we moved into our new home and I started being treated for depression. I started seeing a psychologist that was located in the same clinic as my new GP at the time, and also started taking antidepressants. It didn’t take long for me to know I did not like the psychologist I was seeing. I always left her appointments feeling far worse than I did when arriving. I guess it took me a while to realise that sometimes you have to meet a few before finding the right fit.

Unfortunately the antidepressants did not help all that much and I was still cutting, thinking about death non stop and constantly having issues with everyone I was close to. It did not take long before I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Not only was I told I had this but the doctor’s words were “you have every single symptom, so far off the scale that you are far too ill to go onto a public waiting list for treatment so you need to get health insurance immediately so you can be seen to at a private mental health hospital”. How I felt in that moment was extreme relief and unbelievable horror at the exact same time. I knew I had always been different. The fact that I was bullied as a child relentlessly and had to change schools so often, told me that, but now here I was, with a doctor telling me I have a personality disorder. Like my entire personality is defective in some way. I will never forget the words I said when I got home and told my partner, “it’s offical, I am crazy” before laughing my head off and then crying my eyes out.

I started dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) at the Albert Road Clinic in Melbourne not long after being diagnosed. While seeing one of the top psychiatrist’s at this clinic and in Melbourne itself, I was also diagnosed with bipolar, (which one, type 1 or 2, depends on which of my doctors you speak to), anxiety, dissociation, psoriasis, anxiety, depression and anorexia. This last one I do not and have never agreed with even though I guess it is fair to say I do have some body dysmorphia happening every now and then.

In the years that have pasted since then I have also been diagnosed with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), interstitial cystitis (which deserves an entire blog to itself), scoliosis, which is so bad that I am literally tilted. It is very noticeable when I wear skin tight dresses. Thankfully the chiropractor I see does say it can get better, it’s just going to take a really long time, as I am now 35 and was only told what I’m dealing with regarding this, two years ago.

So on any given day I am dealing with a hell of a lot. It has taken years of work, self-improvement and going through some real dark shit to get me to where I am. But this is who I am. I am me. I am not my illnesses, I am just a person who happens to have a lot on her plate when it comes to dealing with stuff. Yet this is what I believe helps me to help others. Because I am so open and frank about every single thing in my life, that I find, sometimes by just sharing with someone some small snippet of what I have been through, it helps others to feel comfortable to open up and talk about what they need help with too.