Valentine’s Day is coming up so I thought I’d write a little love letter to my mental illness. Here goes:

Hey, baby.

No, don’t get up. Stay there, let me unravel myself for you. Mm. Yeah. I’m here to romance you, honey-sweet-chocolate-sweet-bottom. Make a list of all the groovy and shagtacular things you’ve done for me. All that sexy, sexy anxiety. Mmm. Those nights when we barely slept (if you know what I mean). Oh sugar, I’m gonna lay myself down on a sheepskin rug and let you know how much I love you.

Remember when I got into my first relationship and you helped me convince myself I was ugly and worthless and lucky to be tolerated at all? Because I do, baby. Thank you for whispering that he was constantly cheating on me in that caramel voice of yours. And when his ex-girlfriend started harassing me via social media platforms, you held me really tight and told me it was okay, I deserved it.

Oh and love, do you remember when he carefully explained that he was ‘settling’ for me and could do much better? You stopped me from punching him in his stupid face. If I upset him, he’d leave me and no-one would want me! God, women are so sensitive! You reminded me I was overreacting. Thanks, babycakes.

Maybe this comes off as a little passive aggressive. Maybe I should root out my depression and anxiety and have a chat over coffee about ‘what went wrong’. Maybe I brought all of this on myself and the mental illness, in the end, loved me so much it ended up hurting me. Maybe I’m just a bitter, crazy old hag.

What that relationship reveals to me now is less about the unfortunate soul I spent 18 months with (soz bby) and more about where my head was at back then. I wasn’t okay, but I didn’t know it. I figured that was my ‘normal’ and all relationships featured a heavy level of paranoia and pain. Looking back through the lens of a clearer and less depressed mind, I can see far more clearly than I could have when I was seventeen. In a way it feels quite futile, because I can’t protect that young woman any more than I can protect the eleven-year-old Rhiannon, who had her heart broken by Nick from 6SB.

Love, my friends, is really hard. It requires patience, optimism and endless, endless forgiveness – and that’s only what I’ve worked out from watching romcoms and reading Twilight. If great poets could spend their lives pondering it, I’m hardly going to fit it into 800 words and send you all on your way to romancing the living bejeezus out of your RAG Blind Date.

Trying to love yourself is hard enough, let alone someone who knows what you really look like in profile and might someday hear you snore. But all that stuff about how ‘you can’t love someone else until you love yourself’ is bullshit, of course, because both are a journey (if you’ll excuse me temporarily turning into a wise old man from a kung fu movie).

You learn how to cope with your own tics, your own changes and inconsistencies, while learning to love the people around you for theirs. I’m in the process of trying to work out how to treat myself like an acquaintance, a best friend, and then, after some hard graft, a life-long companion. But I’m also in love with a non-Rhiannon, which is nice, partly because it stops me from thinking about myself all the time, partly because he’s pretty darn wonderful.

There’s so much that can go wrong when you love someone who’s a little… well … ‘anxious’. You can’t kiss the pain away. There’s no way to romanticise the ugly bits – the self-loathing, the anti-social behaviour, the frustration on both sides. A lover on a TV drama might come to their beau’s bedside, having ‘saved them’ from an overdose. The beau might then skip out of the hospital, magically freed from their debilitating depression by the ‘power of love’. A knight in shining armour will have the same luck restoring your vigour for life as a girl you meet in a coffee shop will have in curing your cold. Unless they’re both medical professionals, it’s probably too good to be true.

But oh, being in love with the right person is pretty bloody spectacular. If you get the chance to do it and you want to do it, do. I won’t completely drag its name through the dirt because you’re not ‘ready’ if your mind doesn’t work perfectly yet. A loop of depression can make you think that you don’t ‘deserve’ to have nice things. I want you to know that you absolutely do. Just make sure they deserve you.