How my mental breakdown changed my life

& resources that have been, and still are, fundamental to my recovery

During my 20s I relentlessly chased change. New clothes, new haircuts, new routines, new diets, new exercise regimes, new personality types. All promised to me as a way to make myself feel pretty, smart, productive, healthy, fit, and popular. It wasn’t until I hit rock bottom that I realised I’d been chasing a fiction.

I remember the firsts. The first time I tried hot yoga and thought ‘yes, this is it, I’m a hot yoga girl’. The first time I ate a vegan recipe and thought; ‘yes, this is it, I’m a vegan’. The firsts were what I chased; the pleasure of the promise that this time it would expel the deep-seated discomfort in my belly for good. For a while, I would be satisfied. But it never lasted. Not once.

If anything, a constant cycle of desperate change exacerbated the empty feeling I felt deep inside. I switched it up so many times that I couldn’t find my centre, my anchor, my selfhood.

One day, shortly after my thirtieth birthday, this changed. I became very unwell quite suddenly. I had been struggling with my mental health and (unknowingly) burnout, but I didn’t comprehend how bad it had become. Looking back, I was a bit like a balloon that was being slowly but continuously pumped full of air. I could stretch and flex for a while, but there came a point where the only option was to burst.

It was only when my world exploded into a thousand little pieces that I could see I had been searching for answers in the wrong places. I wish I could have understood this without the need for a breakdown, but I guess this is what life is about; learning.

In falling apart, I no longer had the energy to pursue the dopamine-rush of change. I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t see people, I couldn’t process new information. With nowhere to run, I was forced to sit with myself and the pit in my stomach.

The reality I faced was cold and harsh. My light had gone out, and there was no warmth or pleasure anywhere to be found. Suppressed feelings bubbled to the surface one-by-one. ‘Healing’ is sold to us as this beautiful process of self-discovery. But, for me, in the early days at least, healing my relationship with myself (which is an ongoing journey) has been ugly and painful. No wonder I didn’t have the courage to face it before.

Over time, I realised that the motivation behind my pursuit of change all those years had been the root of my problem. I was motivated by my deep and unknown dissatisfaction with myself, a feeling so great that it drove me to distraction in things and ideas around me. Those things and ideas were just plasters that eventually peeled off to reveal my dissatisfaction time and time again.

I don’t like to say I’m grateful for my breakdown, because honestly I would rather have learned these lessons without it. But I will never regret the lesson itself; that my answers are within me and no shiny new thing being sold to me can replace the feeling of looking inward, doing the hard work, and watching my answers unfold.

The very nature of this realisation is that no-one else and nothing else has the magic key to the answers we each are searching for. But I wish to share a few resources with you that, I now see, were fundamental to my journey.

I attended a lot of therapy and counselling, and still do. A nuance for me in finding a therapist was making sure they had a neurodiversity affirming practice, and that they were ideally neurodivergent themselves, since I am autistic. I am so happy to see that therapy is more widely spoken about and utilised these days, and I hope that it becomes a more accessible resource to everybody.

I spent time reading about and learning about how to re-regulate my nervous system. And then I implemented my learnings consistently in a way that suited me. For me, this helped me slowly shift out of chronic fight or flight mode and allowed me to more easily process my life and access periods of rest.

I made a whole video on how to rest because I was so astounded that I’d never heard of the different types of rest before. Learning about the body’s need for rest, and addressing my conditioned beliefs around rest and productivity with my therapist helped me to tune into my body’s needs.

My creativity bloomed during this time, and it was important to me to be able to explore myself without judgment. I spent time journaling, drawing, painting, walking in nature, writing, and making videos. It didn’t need to mean anything, or be used for anything, it was simply a way of building my muscle of self-expression again.

I looked critically at what information I was consuming, whether through the news, TV shows, films, books or music. I unsubscribed from all of the media channels that I felt pulled me away from myself, or triggered my fight or flight response, and became more intentional about what, how and when I was consuming information. I wanted to be able to hear my own thoughts, ponder my own beliefs, and reconnect with my own truths, without being bombarded by everyone else’s all the time.

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This list is not exhaustive, but translates a flavour of what has emerged so far from my journey inward. It has taken me a year to compile, and I’m still making discoveries most weeks. Through this list I have started to cultivate a peace in myself that has allowed me to come back to life a bit. For me this has looked like accepting I am enough, loving and turning towards myself even when I’m stuck in darkness, expressing myself when I feel called to share, and retreating into myself when I want to remind myself of these lessons.

It’s not that I don’t find inspiration outside of myself anymore, it’s just that I no longer need it to feel okay. I’m no longer scared to trust that I have the answers. In reconnecting with my selfhood, I’ve built myself an emotional home. That’s something I didn’t have before, and it’s not something a new dress, car, or even house could have given me.

I am under no illusion that life’s lessons in selfhood will continue to emerge for me. I, and my life, will never stop changing. But my tentative hope is that change in my life will continue to be organic, aligned, sustainable, and most of all, born of my self.

Sending so much love your way,

Charlie

P.s. I made a video to accompany my reading of this piece. You can watch it here if you like: