That November night, I was proved very very wrong.

Despite many years of my body sending me increasingly urgent signals, it took my mind reaching breaking point for me to realise that something had to change. Or rather, that I had to actively change something.

I had always been self-aware in the sense of knowing that constantly volleying between feeling fine and feeling distinctly not fine was not how I wanted to live my life, but I had subconsciously resigned myself to feeling that way forever. I was self-aware enough to spot my destructive behaviours, but I didn’t love myself enough to put in the deep work to open up a new way of being. I was not yet ready to take responsibility for my own healing process. But sometimes, we’re not ready until we have to be. And at that point, it was clear I had to be.

“It took a dissociative episode with police intervention for me to realise I wasn’t just ‘stressed’”