It’s a Wednesday like any other in term, except that I simply cannot get out of bed. It’s not that I am fortunate enough to not have to – after all, daily 9am lectures have been the ubiquitous arrangement since my arrival in Cambridge. Rather, it is that I physically cannot bring myself to lift the sheets off of myself and contemplate how to embody a functional human being today, let alone engage with tasks as daunting as brushing my teeth, applying make-up in a futile attempt to look presentable to the abundance of people I may run into, or – worst of all – choosing what it is that I should eat.

So I stay in bed, perusing my psyche for any morsel of evidence as to why I should persist with my extra-curricular commitments, my degree, and honestly, even with my life. The thoughts are cyclical, and paint the day with alternating desperation and tenacity: ‘I can’t go on; I’ll go on.’

“‘Is she ill?’ is the question my friends most often have to field when I pull out of an event I’d previously enthusiastically agreed to at the very last minute”

You might be questioning my morbidity: ‘is she ill?’ is the question my friends most often have to field when I pull out at the very last minute of an event I’d previously enthusiastically agreed to. I suppose the answer should be yes, albeit I have one of those maladies that teeters on the tight-rope of society’s accepted definition of illness. It is an illness that condemns its sufferers to the purgatory existing between sickness and health, where one’s ‘normal’ appearance belies an internal vortex of torment, a relentless ‘I am fat and worthless,’ ‘I must compensate for all that I eat’, ‘without my intelligence, I am nothing.’

I have a mental illness, or potentially several if we are to believe the arbitrary distinctions drawn by diagnostics. In shame, I thus often instruct those close to me to explain that I am not quite feeling myself owing to (another) cold or stomach flu, and that I am so terribly sorry to be absent, once again. 

I can’t in one article – perhaps not even in words at all – depict the torture through which my own mind ruthlessly drags me every day. Suffice it to say that my aberrant brain has made me a girl with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, and five-year plans; a girl who takes herself very, very seriously; a girl overly prepared, judgmental ad infinitum, and thriving on self-deprivation.

I'm the daughter of a feminist who said “You can be anything,” and heard, “You have to be everything.” My particular distortion has long since turned skeletons into goddesses and looks to them as if they might teach me how not to need. In sum, to survive another day is to navigate through the tempest of self-hatred, fatigue and inevitable ‘why me?’. Yet somehow, I’m still here. I attend most of my lectures, hand in my supervision work on time, and try to help others in any way I can, seeking to make their lives any little bit easier.

200 days of rain: living with SAD

This narrative of mine is not unique. While the epicentre of each experience may not be an eating disorder, it holds true that there are plenty of us burdened with a disease of the mind that we did not choose and which threatens our lives in a far more profound way than society seems to believe, who choose to go on against all of the odds. Even when we feel broken beyond recognition, we do not capitulate.

So for each of us that is still here, and for those of us who have decided to self-care in a different milieu, I say well done. Our mental illnesses rarely let us congratulate ourselves, so perhaps it will be slightly easier to believe in the words of an external party. For those feeling defeated, keep trying – even when it feels an impossibility to do so. Find a way, or forge one if you have to. For there is such great courage in the Herculean effort of surviving, even if it is not immediately visible to others.

Ultimately, we deserve to be well. We deserved fulfilled lives, accepting the ‘good enough.’ On every occasion that we refuse to be beaten, we stride closer towards this freedom