When I was feeling at my lowest point or at my highest level of anxiety I told very few people how I was feeling. In fact, I don’t think I told anyone how I was really feeling, because:

a) I didn’t know how

b) I didn’t want to upset them

c) It felt too personal, like I was giving something of myself up

d) I didn’t want to belittle bigger problems by drawing attention to my own

All the above are valid reasons – and feeling shit is also valid.

It took me a long time to reach this conclusion, and it’s no wonder seeing as social media is peppered with healthy, smiling faces and people surrounded by friends, appearing to be generally succeeding in every aspect of their lives. The reality is not so.

Moreover, objectively, everything was perfectly fine. I was at Cambridge, I was in relatively good health, I wasn’t living in extreme poverty. Everything was fine on the outside, but inside I was in turmoil. 

But it’s just me.

Certainly, for myself, low self-esteem is at the crux of my mental health issues. And it’s also the thing that stopped me from trying any form of therapy (as well as scepticism) for so long.

At my lowest point, I felt like I didn’t deserve to get better. I felt disgusted with myself for feeling the way I did, for not being able to live in the moment and get the same enjoyment out of everyday things, like food, walks and drinking tea. I felt guilty for doing these things and for trying to enjoy them.

You don’t deserve to eat. You don’t deserve a walk, a voice would say inside my head.

Sometimes I’d listen to them – mostly I wouldn’t but the guilt would still be there. The only time I didn’t feel guilty was when I was working or sometimes when I was with friends. Perhaps it was the distraction, or perhaps it was the validation that came from somewhere other than myself.

"We live much of our life in the future, fantasising about what we will become, who we will be, what we will have achieved"

There is something addictive about losing yourself in another world, which in my case was the world of literature. But it wasn’t reality. The reality wasn’t the world either. During the time I was depressed I felt strangely cut off from ‘reality’, but simultaneously what I felt was more real than anything I’d previously experienced. At least that’s how I felt at the time. I think it was because I felt so trapped inside my head, inside my thoughts, that my world had been shaped entirely around these thoughts.

This left room for little else other than my thoughts, which I suppose is why I felt selfish.

The world of literature offered me a preferable alternative to ‘real life’: through it I could temporarily disengage my thoughts from my own hell. When I was walking through town, however, being part of the ‘real world’, there was nothing on which to channel my thoughts so I’d retreat into myself and feel like a selfish bitch, or not feel anything at all. Which, I think, was a lot of the problem.

I felt guilty for not being able to feel what other people felt, or what I thought they felt. In short, I felt guilty for failing at life.

There is an underlying belief given to us by society that we will feel happy when we reach certain goals in life. Whether it comes from the religious belief that we’ll ultimately reach happiness in heaven or whether it fulfils some psychological survival mechanism, it has certainly been exploited by society to keep us playing the game.

We tolerate life as it is because if I achieve this next thing, then things will be better. But things aren’t better. We avoid facing up to this fact by giving ourselves a new target, neglecting ourselves in the meantime because it will all be worth it in the end. We live much of our life in the future, fantasising about what we will become, who we will be, what we will have achieved.

Learning to love life again – Cambridge-style

The happiness that we are promised by society is always delayed and never reached. Even if we do achieve what we have set out to do, we might experience a momentary uplift but this won’t magically dissolve all our issues. We’ll still be the same people. All the things driving our problems will still be there – unless we address them.

It took me a while to realise that feeling shit is perfectly valid, and that it is also perfectly valid to want to feel better. Feeling better is not something that is rewarded to us by climbing society’s ladder: it is something that we owe to ourselves.

This is a problem for people with low self-esteem, as we feel as though we don’t owe it to ourselves. I decided I wanted to work on myself only when I’d reached breaking point. One of the most powerful things a friend ever told me was ‘just because there are bigger problems in the world, it doesn’t make yours any less important’. Once I’d set aside some time to work on my issues, instead of making me feel selfish as I expected, it made me feel more worthy.

For me, making time was as important as the therapy itself. This isn’t something that our society, which is focused on progressivity in the shallowest sense, promotes. This is a different kind of progressivity – progressivity in the lasting sense