Mental health honesty

This week I was offered a mental health check by my GP and for the first time in over a decade I accepted. Much is said about the dire straights of the NHS, but my current GP seems to be a guardian angel on my shoulder. My personal relationship with NHS mental health services runs the gamut of working the system to get what I need re my gender and sitting in a room with helpful but not knowledgeable psychiatrists trying to unpack much of the trauma I had been through. I have an open door policy with others and myself, an honesty box if someone asks I have no issue talking about my mental health. Yet, when it comes to some things it is really hard to unpack and process without turning in on myself.

Being trans is treated as a psych issue, yet personally my gender has never been the cause of my mental health issues. I am on the side of saying that trans folk should simply be allowed to get on with things without the medical profession getting involved because gender identity is not inherently a pathology. Yet, there are a whole bundle of things under the surface with me that always get compartmentalised by me when things get rough. Therapy does work for most people, but due to some significant trust issues I find it much easier to have a dialogue with myself than with others.

Part of my reason for being public about it is that I want to remove the stigma of talking about mental health. Physical health is easier to digest, easier to empathise with, yet the vast majority of us will have some form of mental health issues in our lifetimes. Not being able to be frank and honest about it leaves many of us to deal with these issues alone or with a close few who may not be equipped to handle it all.

Much of my own issues comes from a sense of abandonment, partly due to my transition and partly due to how things have worked out over the last four years. Loosing my hair knocked my confidence, as did my ex-partner breaking up with me. Being trans had nothing to do with this, yet being a trans woman in a world that in not linguistically equipped to deal with trans complexities is awkward and takes delicate navigating. A reason I write is to work through many of the issues buzzing around my mind in the hope that in my working out I can at least help others.

Middle age womanhood is a privilege I accept with abandon, the fact that my body still allows me to play sport, still allows me to act as if I am 30 is nice. But, this body of mine also has the bad habit of neuro-chemically screwing me over, sending me into a vicious dive into the depths of weird and nihilistic depressive episodes. Thankfully I come out of them quickly, but depression is one of those inner mindsets that is really hard to explain to others, especially when I am generally a cheerful and outgoing person. I have cut out drinking, tried to turn my diet around, and exercise at least three times a week. Every little helps, but sometimes the abyss beckons and I free dive all the way in.

For a long time I hated being single, always in a relationship or searching for a relationship. Having been single for nearly a year I can honestly say I am enjoying being a single woman, yet occasionally I miss the shape of my last relationship. The ease of discussion, the quiet moments, the give and take friendship. I do not miss my ex, but I do miss the ease with which we could talk freely. She was always suggesting I speak to a therapist, and maybe she was right, but at the time I was resistant and reluctant to share.

My single biggest reason for not divulging certain aspects about myself, such as my birth name and surname, is due to an incident at the last church I belonged to in 2007. It was an evangelical church of the old school variety, the sort where sin was sin and the sinner needed absolute contrition to receive communion. It was an odd choice for me, as my faith at the time was less hide bound. Over the course of a few months the pastor and elders sought to unpick my gender and uncover my hidden past, all the while denying my basic identity. Yes, I should have known better, but at the time I was looking for faith to salve my fracturing psyche. In the end I shared my birth name with a visiting pastor in confidence who gleefully broke his word and shared it with my church’s congregation. It fundamentally broke something inside of me when I found out, made me resent everything about the church and its leadership. I walked out never to return, and about six months later my faith simply evaporated.

Losing my faith removed a bedrock from me, an ability to simply talk with God, to prey and let go of all the pain that I felt in a given moment. Non-believers may never understand what it is like to let go of something so fundamental and elemental. I was born into the church, grew up with its precepts, and for the first 24 years of my lived as Christian life as I could. Letting go of that was both easy and incredibly wrenching. If there is no God there to listen, then who would hear my deepest fears, my darkest thoughts? As an atheist I replaced prayer with deep personal conversations with myself, doing the self-reflection to come to terms with whatever happened to me. Yet, there was still this profound sense of emptiness that took years to fully fill.

I have never once regretted my gender transition or disavowing God and all religions. Not once I have thought that either was a mistake or that my life would be different if neither had happened. Both have made things harder in some respects, yet mental health wise both have shaped the woman I am today. I am candid about both, and as open as I am able without overloading about my mental health because I have nothing to hide or to be ashamed about. There is no shame in admitting mental health issues, there is no burden I feel from being able to be frank about these things.

The word is definitely not me shaped, yet there is a place for me in the world. A place for all of us in this world. It would be an emptier place if the abyss swallowed me, swallows anything. There is only one of each of us, and there is only one life to live. In those darkest moments I shut down the part of me that wants to make another attempt at ending it, knowing that life is worth living. It is not easy, had not been easy, yet in the self-honesty that I have with myself I know that my mental health is a part of me that I need to be honest about and deal with. There is no one way of handling mental trauma, and I am sure there are better ways for me that I may find down the road, but for now the first step is acknowledging that I need more support than I have and asking for it. The first step is the hardest, and the path may have no end, but the journey is worth taking .