FOUR YEARS AT A TIME
I have a cycle. And it’s not menstrual (that ended 20 years ago). It turns out that every four years, something major happens in my life that changes me. Forever.
In 2012 my sister died
It was a highly traumatic experience. She was just 40 years old when she died from alcohol related liver failure. She was a beautiful, sweet, loving, funny, exotic girl, plagued with mental health issues from a young age. Like me, she had grown up with childhood emotional neglect. What other traumas she faced I cannot know for sure but her life was sad and tragic.
When she became critically unwell I flew up and spent the last weeks and months of her life with her. Setting up services and spending long overdue time catching up. She had a dreadful doctor who treated her with no compassion at all but eventually I found nurses who were absolutely wonderful and referred me to a different palliative care doctor. He spoke with her so gently and explained that if she was treated palliatively she would die. It is what she wanted and her life expectancy was already very poor. So she was treated palliatively and about six weeks later she passed away.
It was very distressing.
I arrived at a filthy house that she’d been unable to maintain for years. I did my best to sterilise and clean it but it was mostly beyond repair. She could barely walk. Her tiny frame had an enormously swollen belly. She was fluorescent yellow. And from that point she just deteriorated. Eventually I arranged for a hospital bed to be brought in and she spent her last weeks in the bed hooked up to a morphine drip. I had to try and get alcohol into her to stop her having seizures from alcohol withdrawal. We recorded videos to send to my father and grandmother. My father at the time was having major heart bypass surgery. I had to tell him his youngest daughter was dying. He would never see her again. I had to tell my grandmother. I had to tell everyone. It was all very stressful.
Eventually she slipped into a coma and passed away leaving her 24 year old son behind. Her body was donated to science and after a year her ashes were returned to me and we scattered them at a beautiful lookout where she can hopefully find the peace that she never found in all her living days.
I was forever changed by her death. My dislike of phone calls predated her. But it escalated in 2012. I barely answer the phone these days. It is synonymous with bad news.
In 2016 I had my first inpatient stay
My five-year breakdown began in 2015 when I started to self-harm. By the end of the year I’d been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and major depression. By 2016 I was highly suicidal and was admitted into hospital. I have never been the same since. I changed from being a strong, quiet, resilient, emotionally-contained person, to being fragile and vulnerable and overflowing with an excess of emotion that couldn’t be restrained.
It is a humbling experience to suddenly be cast into the world of first-hand mental health. It was the beginning of understanding how demonised psychological issues are compared to physical issues.
I lost my ability to function meaningfully
By the end of 2016 I knew I could no longer work as a musician and teacher. I left the work I had done since I was 14 years old. It is not easy to leave a 36 year old career. There is a huge loss of identity. It is the year when all my identities disappeared and I didn’t know who I was. Something I still struggle with. I became the girl with the eating disorder.
It is also the year I was put on pristiq – which turned out to be a disaster for me, mental health wise. Initially it seemed to help but it never felt completely right to me. Over the four years I was on it, I became increasingly agitated and wanted to go off it again and again. I had no psychiatrist at this point in time – there were none available. So I was struggling on my own. I’d go off it then back on then back off. And on. And so it went. Until things just got worse and worse. I was forever changed by that first psychiatric hospital stay. I became a new person and it wasn’t always good.
In 2020 I had a suicide attempt
It was a defining moment in my life. By this time my mental health had struggled for five years and there was a lot of compassion fatigue around me. 2020 is also the year that covid crashed into our worlds and my problems were just one of many complex things everyone in my world was dealing with. I became extremely alone and isolated. I spent nine weeks in hospital trying to recover.
By the time I took the overdose I was so incredibly unwell. I can’t even explain it. The pristiq was interacting very badly with me. The only thing I can liken it all to was the time I had sepsis after my hysterectomy – in 2004 (another of the four-year cycles). I was so incredibly physically ill and weak and drained, I could barely move. It was awful.
At the time I took the overdose, and the weeks and months that followed, I felt exactly the same. My body was struggling to function. My brain was certainly not functioning well. I felt systemically unwell. It took nine weeks in the hospital to get me well enough to go home and just sit in my chair soaking up the sun with a cat on my lap. It took many more months to start to feel vaguely well – both physically and mentally. I said to the nurse in the hospital that I would never be the same again and she said yes, that is true.
And I have never been the same since
I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder and put onto a regime of medications that have just seen me go from strength to strength, but I am not the same person anymore. I was humbled to the ground when I hit that unbelievably low rock bottom. It also became the year when a lot of my relationships changed. Not necessarily better or worse, but simply different. I was viewed differently now that I had a string of diagnoses attached to me. I had crossed a line that the vast majority of people cannot understand. And I became estranged from someone I still love an incredible amount. I will never be the same person again.
In 2024 my two relationships ended
My marriage of 32 years ended. We remain good friends and we are cautiously optimistic that we can remain separated under one roof for the long term but the intimacy of marriage has faded. Ending my marriage was a very emotional and difficult time and adjusting to being a single woman after the vast majority of my life was spent with a very good man is not easy. But we will adjust.
My girlfriend left me at the same time and because it was a new and fresh relationship that was at the height of the new and exciting period, it has been a grief-stricken process. The ease with which she walked away after knowing each other six years sent me into physical shock and I developed a tremor at the same time. That sense of abandonment and rejection from someone I love so very much will change me forever.
I love rarely but fiercely
To lose my only ever two loves in rapid succession is heartbreaking. My heart feels literally broken – like a piece was ripped away and is now in someone else’s hands. I know heartbreak comes to everyone one way or the other, but I am changed by this. Forever. I feel myself isolating more and more. My ability to trust is torn to shreds. I feel unbelievably alone and abandoned. Not to sound melodramatic, but a lot of it feels like a permanent change. I mean I know life will get easier and more cheerful again but I am not the same person I was two months ago. Yet again, I have been changed.
I do not look forward to 2028
I absolutely do not know what the future holds. Futures are notoriously difficult to predict. I couldn’t have predicted any of the things that have happened to me. But even predating 2012 I can see all sorts of major changes happening every four years – not all of them bad – but each time, I am changed as a person. I have been humbled so many times now. Unlike my younger self, I live my life in a really open, vulnerable manner. My heart is always on my sleeve but I am not sure it has done me any favours. It has been broken so many times now.
