This post contains discussion of mental health, trauma, dissociation, suicidal thoughts, and childhood experiences of distress and identity struggle.

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with my mental health. I didn’t always have the words for it, I just knew there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

I’m not sure exactly when it all started, but from what I can remember, the first time I thought about death, I was seven years old. I didn’t even fully understand what “death” was, I just knew that it felt… quieter than everything else in my head. Less painful. Less intense. Less confusing.

Around that time, I started to question my gender. Again, I didn’t have the words for it; I didn’t even know that being transgender was a thing. It wasn’t something anyone around me talked about. I just knew something about me didn’t add up. I would wish away the body parts I had, wishing for new ones in their place. Boy ones. I would lie in bed, fearing the future: what might happen to my body, what it might look like for me. At the back of my mind, all I could think was “why couldn’t I have been born a boy?”

Looking back, I think that was when everything really started to unravel.

It is probably important to mention here that I was born with Cerebral Palsy. This means that I am a full-time wheelchair user and have been my whole life. Because of this, I was introduced to feeling “different” very early on – feeling inferior, unwanted, out of place… rejected.

Those feelings are a lot for anyone to process, especially at the age of seven. But add confusion about your gender into the mix and having no safe person to go to about it, and it becomes something else entirely.

At that age, I had already experienced being excluded, being rejected, being treated as less than, and I didn’t need another “problem”. Another reason for people to judge me. To exclude me. To shame me. To reject me. So I shoved it down, as far as it could go.

I ended up internalising the beliefs I was surrounded by: that I was the problem. That I wasn’t worthy. That I was shameful. Evil, even. Not right in the head.

After all, if you hear something enough times, you start to believe it.

I tried so hard to mould myself into the version of me that the world seemed to want. The girl they all said I was. The girl they all expected me to be.

I was a ball of anger. A ticking time bomb ready to explode at any moment. I would lash out. Those around me didn’t understand; they saw my anger as me just being spoiled. Kicking off because I “didn’t get what I wanted”.

And I couldn’t tell them any different.

Besides, they already saw me as evil, shameful, embarrassing, selfish, horrible, messed up, an attention seeker, a liar. They couldn’t see how much pain I was in, they couldn’t see how desperate I was to fit in. To be seen. To be understood. To be heard. To be accepted.

And what was the point in explaining? It would only reinforce those beliefs they had. So, I let them believe what they wanted to believe.

I don’t remember much about my childhood from here. Just muddled fragments, here and there. I realise now that I spent most of my life dissociated: the beliefs that I had internalised, the bullying I endured, the rejection, the identity confusion… the isolation (to list a few things), had been too much for my brain to bear and so it protected me in the only way it knew how.

I have always had this longing to be understood. Not just by others, but by myself, too. I guess, that is when my journey of “self-discovery” began. I sought help. Or at least what I thought was help because, in my experience, it did the opposite. It left me right back where I started: invalidated, unheard, and misunderstood.

So, I started to research my experience extensively; the emotional dysregulation, the dissociation, the paranoia, the intrusive thoughts, the anxiety, the hallucinations, the low-self-worth, the social difficulties … the list goes on, but you get the gist, right?

I just want to reiterate what I said earlier about not remembering much. There are huge chunks of my life that I don’t recall, and even now, I struggle with memory. So, this blog post is a very watered-down summary of my life and experiences, in a somewhat jumbled and fragmented form.

And I think that is important to say here, because it explains a lot of how I have tried to make sense of my life. When your memories are fragmented like that, you don’t really have a clear narrative to hold onto. Just feelings, patterns, and moments that don’t always connect in a way that makes sense.

Think of it as seeing clips of a film on TikTok but never being able to watch the whole thing.

So I started trying to connect them myself.

I started to find words for what I was experiencing. I never self-diagnosed, that wasn’t the purpose of my research. The purpose was to find understanding, to make sense of myself, and to reassure myself that other people experienced similar things.

I wasn’t a psychiatrist. I didn’t have the power to diagnose, nor did I have enough knowledge to do so. But I knew in my gut there was something more to what I was experiencing.

I went to the GP, who referred me to therapy. Therapy was helpful but it didn’t hold all the answers. At the time, the focus of the therapy was on depression and anxiety, as that was my diagnosis then. My therapist was very candid in saying she believed there was something more to my experience, but she was unable to carry out assessments or diagnose anything further.

She then got me in touch with my Community Mental Health Team and, I guess, I have a lot to thank her for. If she hadn’t listened to me and taken me seriously, I wouldn’t have received the appropriate help and diagnoses that I needed.

It has been a long process to get to where I am now: lots of diagnoses, lots of medication, lots of therapy. The first label of many was emotionally unstable personality disorder (better known as borderline personality disorder).

This piece of the picture brought a wave of emotions: anxiety, fear, confusion, and shame. But that was eventually followed by relief, understanding, and, over time, acceptance. And it didn’t arrive on its own; it became the first piece of a much larger picture.

Once I had that language, things didn’t suddenly start to make sense overnight, but they started to shift. The way I understood myself, my reactions, my emotions… it all began to feel like it might have an explanation beyond just being “wrong” or “too much”.

And from there, more pieces started to emerge.

Over time, there were more diagnoses, more therapies, and more attempts to map out what was happening in my mind.

More recently, this year, I was diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. While this diagnosis does resonate with my experience, and makes a hell of a lot of sense, I found this one particularly hard to accept.

It seemed a little… dramatic. Obviously, I know now that trauma can be many things, and even experiences that might not look “serious” from the outside can still have a deep impact, especially in childhood. But at the time, I struggled to believe I had been through anything “bad enough” to warrant such a diagnosis. And I’d be lying if I said I don’t still sometimes have those thoughts.

But slowly, through trauma therapy and alongside my university studies, I am beginning to understand that trauma is not defined by events themselves, but rather the impact of the events.

I am not proud of everything I did while I was hurting, or the people I hurt along the way. That is something I carry with me, and I don’t think the weight of that guilt ever fully disappears. I am still very much a work in progress.

I also want to say that I’m not sharing this to paint myself as a victim, or to excuse the things that I have done. I’m sharing it because I’m trying to understand how I became the person I am today. How all of these experiences shaped me, for better or worse.

A lot of my passion for mental health, and my desire to help others, comes from this. From trying to make sense of it all. From learning, slowly, how to take responsibility for my actions, to learn from my mistakes, and to become a better version of myself.

My experiences of mental health have shaped my direction in life. It is what has led me to study psychology, and what drives my long-term goal of becoming a clinical psychologist with a focus on complex trauma.

I want to help people. I know what it feels like to be disbelieved, unheard, misjudged, and not taken seriously. I know how isolating and lonely that experience can be.

And if I can be to others even a fraction of what I never had myself, then I truly believe all this pain – however messy, however difficult – was worth something.