It’s no secret that mental health is one of the topics closest to my heart.
It has been since I was twelve years old, setting up a mental-health themed Instagram account with the general vibe of ‘you are not alone’. Several people around me at the time were going through mental health struggles, and although I knew it wouldn’t necessarily help them specifically, I hoped it would help other people in the same boat.
The Instagram account didn’t last, but my interest in mental health did. Fast-forward four years, and I was studying Psychology at A-Level and writing a book featuring Dissociative Identity Disorder.
You can sort of guess how I came to study Psychology at A-Level. It was there as an option, and there was no way I was going to study Maths. But the book with Dissociative Identity Disorder? That’s a whole different ball game. And that led to a book with gender dysphoria, and then a book about reconnecting with mental health.
But how did all those come to be? And why those topics, specifically?
Let’s start at the very beginning. Lockdown, 2020.
I know that for a lot of people, the first COVID lockdown in Spring 2020 marked a downwards spiral in their mental state. The isolation and the fear was like a huge grey cloud looming over the horizon. But for me, strangely enough, my mental state improved. It had been utterly abysmal over that last winter, but with lockdown, everything just… stopped. All the stressors that had been making me miserable? Gone. I wasn’t spinning so many plates – I could just pause, reconvene with myself, and re-build.
With that came a restart in my love of writing. It had all but deserted me over the last year or so – every creative molecule in my brain was focused on my English Language coursework, or on finishing The Silent Chapter, my first book. But I had been reading a lot that winter, particularly the book All Of Me by Kim Noble. It’s a non-fiction autobiography of artist Kim, and her experiences growing up with Dissociative Identity Disorder in the 1960s and 70s. I’d learned about Kim a couple of years before, and her story had intrigued me. But there were very few other books out there about Dissociative Identity Disorder, and certainly none that featured Sapphic people, with whom I was starting to identify. So, to me, the next natural step was to write one.
That book eventually became The Summer We’ve Had, and I published it three years later when I was nineteen. I repurposed some characters from an old WIP that I had scrapped, and thus Cass and Felicia were born. Felicia has five alters: Heather, Daniella, Coral, Kylie and Autumn. The book explores the intricacy of their little system, and how the five of them adapt themselves to let in Cass, their next-door-neighbour and eventual girlfriend. Cass herself is struggling with her mental health – after finding her mother dead by suicide two years previously, depression and nightmares have shrunk her world down to the size of an anchovy. Cass and the Felicia system – powered by dominant alter Heather – help each other, and eventually Cass and Heather fall in love. An unconventional relationship, perhaps, but it works. I wanted to show that having mental health conditions, or struggling with mental health, is not a death knell for someone’s love life. That you can be loved alongside mental health conditions. I think that The Summer We’ve Had does that well.
I mentioned before that my interest in mental health was piqued by the people around me going through the same thing, and the same can be said of my interest in gender dysphoria, and the non-cisgender identities of the LGBTQ+ umbrella. I’ve had friends come out as trans or non-binary, or be questioning their gender, over the last few years. And the hostility that non-cisgender people faced, and continue to face, boiled my blood.
That anger, I fuelled into Love You However. In that book, 52-year-old Jean almost loses their marriage when their formerly dormant gender dysphoria rears its head and builds walls between them and wife Petra. This goes hand-in-hand with self-harm, which they had struggled with several years ago, and which in turn attempts to rear its head again when Jean’s life becomes stressful. I wanted to show that gender dysphoria and self-harm and mental health struggles are not simply ‘a young person’s fad’. Anybody can be affected by them, at any age, and you can’t always tell just by looking at them. Your friendly local shop cashier, for example. Or the conductor of the village choir. (Both of which Jean is.) My aim was to de-mystify the subject of gender, in particular non-binary people. And then, once again, I wanted to show that a change in gender does not mean an immediate end to a relationship or marriage. Petra and Jean have a happy ending, just like Cass and Felicia.
One person who certainly needed the subject of mental health de-mystifying for them was Victoria Berry, the protagonist of my most recent book, A Different Kind Of Pride. For a headteacher, she knows surprisingly little about the subject, largely since her own mental state has been frozen in a state of ‘nothingness’ for more than twenty years. It isn’t until Anastasia walks into her life, caring for her after a car crash and a spinal surgery that robs her of everything, that she brings her own mental health back under the microscope. And even that isn’t through choice – all the trauma of the accident crashes down upon her one afternoon, and it is this that marks a turning point in her friendship with Anastasia. Particularly one conversation, a few days later, where Anastasia niftily turns a few pictures of ancient broken pottery in a museum into a metaphor. I think it’s one of the most important paragraphs I’ve ever written.
“Oh.” Anastasia felt her cheeks colour, and fixed her gaze on the screen. “Well. Call me ridiculous, but I thought of it as the most wonderful metaphor. If you smashed a plate at home now, you’d bin it, right? But these smashed up bits of pottery are on display. In pride of place, simply for being themselves, because they symbolise an ancient time that has long since passed. Nobody cares that they’re broken: it’s the fact that they exist that matters. And the same goes for humans. When you have someone who loves and cares for you, they don’t care how broken you are. They love you and celebrate you all the same because of what you mean to them. I was pretty broken at the time, post-breakdown and break-up, and it was a bit of an epiphany. That’s why I took the photos, to remind myself.” She sighed. “I’d forgotten up until then.”
And that sums up, in a nutshell, what I want everyone to take away from my books. Mental health struggles do not take away from your self-worth, and they do not make you unlovable.
Read that, and then read it again.
If you're struggling with your mental health, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Other people have been exactly where you are, and they have come out the other side. That doesn't make it any less painful, but please do not lose faith. Your person, or people, are out there. Cass found them. Felicia found them. So did Jean and Petra. Even ice-queen Victoria, who thought she'd never manage to take down her walls enough to let someone into her heart. Read my words and have hope.
Need I say more?
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