Throughout my life I’ve been diagnosed with 3 separate mental health conditions; a wonderful concoction of Major Depressive Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder and later, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I’ve had panic attacks, dissociative episodes, periods of sleeping 18 hours a day, agoraphobia and even a full blown nervous breakdown. Let’s just say, it’s been a party in my brain for most of my life.

The more severe symptoms started when I was in my late teens, with my diagnosis for MDD coming at the age of 20. However, I have memories (and thousands of diary entries) dating back to my early teens and even my childhood of things not being quite right.

I remember having a full blown anxiety attack age 7 because Christine the dinner lady was going to make me eat my orange at lunch the next day and the texture freaked me out, so I stayed up crying in my parents bed hoping I wouldn’t have to go to school. I would cry when my parents got a new car because I hated change and don’t even talk to me about having to get rid of my favourite, orange hand-me-down T-shirt that was stained, with half the gems missing and didn’t fit anymore.

The disgust for certain textures and an inability to deal rationally with change then mapped onto my teen years, alongside a whole new set of “peculiarities”. The rules of socialising made very little sense to me. I always took people at their word and often didn’t understand jokes, which I tried to play off as a cute, innocent thing. I was taken advantage of by my close friends on more than one occasion and would tolerate terrible treatment until one day, I would snap and cut off all contact. Friends I still have from high school can probably testify to this.

Flirting was BEYOND me (still is, ask my boyfriend). I did not have a clue about dating and the first time a boy tried to kiss me age 14, I ran away. It didn’t matter that we were “dating” and I totally had a crush on him. In my later, proper relationships, I didn’t understand how things worked. Feelings were incredibly overwhelming to me and I was so focused on how things were “supposed” to be, I couldn’t just let things be. Also hugging was not natural to me and not something I enjoyed much.

Into college things started to collapse around me. I was devastated about leaving high school, a place I knew so well and was very comfortable in. During our leaver assembly I broke down crying singing “I will remember you” with my friends in front of almost 200 classmates and teachers. Oh, the embarrassment. Did I mention I don’t so well with change? So when college came around, with all the noise, the new people, different schedule, unfamiliar teachers, coming out as bisexual… I started to crack.

At this point I still wasn’t completely adept at expressing my feelings. The tears from my childhood meltdowns had dried up and some of my friends mentioned that they’d never seen me cry. The “happy emo” one called me. This mask had helped me to fit into a world I didn’t understand, a world of hormones and bitchy-ness and where people didn’t always say what they meant. I was innocent, happy, silly me, friends with everyone – except if you came for my friends then I would bite your fucking head off.

The funny thing is I didn’t realise it was a “mask”. I could sense that others weren’t struggling in the same ways I was, but I didn’t realise I was pretending so hard to fit in. I would write lengthy diary entries about how I just didn’t get how I was supposed to behave around my peers and how I hoped I was doing it right. Sometimes I would be told a secret and I couldn’t sleep because I was so anxious about whether I should tell someone else or whether that was wrong or a thousand other possible scenarios.

There are so many other reflections on my childhood and teen years that I now have since my diagnosis of autism and ADHD. The racing thoughts, the social difficulties, the inability to rest (I was in two clubs every night of the week, then hanging out with friends and church all weekend without fail). I couldn’t stop despite my very real struggle with social anxiety and I couldn’t sleep because of the constant fuel I was feeding this anxiety.

I look back on my younger self with awe, because I have no idea how I coped so long with everything that was going on in my brain and body, not to mention in the world around me. Despite the constant overwhelm I kept going until I was 22, and even then it took something catastrophic to really throw me off the wagon. Hindsight is 20/20 but my new diagnoses shed so much light on my troubled past. They also make me question whether my mental health diagnoses were actually symptoms of my unregulated neurodivergence all along.