As my 18th birthday approaches I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve been through to get to this point in my life. For many years now I have neither planned nor wanted to be alive for this long into my life and now that I am able to proudly say I have most of the control over my own mental state, I have decided it’s time to share something that few people know about me in the hope that it makes a difference.

It’s really hard to put a date on when I started suffering from depression, body dysmorphic disorder and suicidal thoughts. And that is, perhaps, the scariest thing about mental illnesses. It all goes on inside your brain and you sometimes don’t even know or recognise the feelings. This is so scary because it means that often, you don’t have the ability to recognise when you need help easily and it’s often virtually impossible for those around you to detect. Not a day goes by where I don’t feel blessed beyond words that people around me noticed enough to say or do something and I developed the strength to talk and help myself before it was too late, because for far too many people this isn’t the case. There is no vaccine against mental illness, it’s not a curable thing.

By the age of 14, in year 10, I had been self harming for a long time, around a year. I never wore short sleeves, I never took any pictures of myself or with people and I could barely bring myself to look in a mirror. I always had a sense I knew that what I was doing was unhealthy but to me it seemed like it was something I had to do to be able to get out of bed in a morning. It seemed like the only option that could make me feel better. During a dance rehearsal, I rolled up my sleeve because I was hot for no more than 10 seconds before realising what I was exposing. During those 10 seconds someone had seen my arm. The next day I was called into my headteachers office where both my parents were sitting. And from then on my life completely changed in a way that I never once expected.

The act of even admitting to what I was doing and feeling lifted a weight that until then was so permanent I forgot I even had it. I started the counselling process and various other options were explored including medication. I never shared my experience with anyone. I started to feel healthier and so I told my parents I was better. I had GCSEs coming up by this point and I threw myself into them and found myself distracted in other ways for a long time.

I still don’t know what triggered me to start self harming again but I did and it felt worse than before. It felt like a much deeper feeling and I felt lower but I still didn’t tell the people closest to me, even though I’d experienced first hand the positive impact of doing so. I would wake up in the middle of the night pretty much every night and go into the bathroom, sometimes cry, and wish I hadn’t been given life and I would want nothing more than for it to end. No one around me knew how bad my mental state was getting because I had become so good at pretending and acting a certain way. I started looking up methods of suicide and I actually planned how I was going to die. I wrote letters to the people closest to me in preparation. When I attempted to end my life I got a sensation that I’ve never spoken about to anyone and can’t quite put into words. I’m going to try though. I had this image of my family sat around a table at Christmas without me. Nothing in this world means more to me than my parents and my sister. And when I imagined the impact my Suicide would have on them it was enough for me to stop and for me to say ‘enough is enough, I’m not okay’. I told my mum exactly that. I think I said ‘mum I’m not okay and I haven’t been for a really long time’ With the help and support of those who mean the most to me, I restarted the counselling process and knew that this time I needed to see it through until the end. Certain relationships around me completely changed because I realised I needed to focus on myself and getting me better. It has been a really long journey and one with many challenges.

Fast forward to now and I have never in my whole life felt so genuinely happy. People who have known me for a while will have been able to see my attitude to myself changing. Every day I accept myself a little bit more and my confidence grows and that is something I am so proud of because for so long I wouldn’t even go to the front of a classroom to get paper for fear of people looking at me. I wouldn’t go to pool parties or post or even take any pictures of myself. For so long I not only felt not happy but I actually felt incapable of being happy. I felt numb to any positive emotion, things that used to bring me enjoyment and happiness I couldn’t even be bothered to think about. However, I can now look at my life and see what I’ve been blessed with. Which is so much. I still struggle a lot with the opinion I have of myself and will do for the rest of my life, I still have some really bad days where things get a bit too much and I will probably always have those too but I now know that my life is worth something and I can now recognise when my thoughts are becoming dangerous and when I need to talk to someone about it.

I have chosen to fundraise for the charity, Papyrus UK which helped me personally with their Suicide hotline service many times, which I don’t mind saying seemed to often be the line between life and death. They also bring the lasting effect that I have experienced to many other people and help to raise awareness for something that nowadays is such a prominent issue. The money raised will go towards suicide prevention training and campaigns to raise awareness. In April, on my birthday, I will be doing a Skydive, which is absolutely terrifying and challenges about a million genuine fears of mine like heights and flying and falling, but I thought that it was quite fitting seeing as I’m celebrating overcoming something that for so long I couldn’t see the end of.

I want to end by saying that thoughts and experiences like mine are not exclusive to one type of person. There’s not a checklist of things you need to have experienced or things that you have or don’t have to be effected by a mental disorder. I genuinely have the most blessed life and have done from the moment I was born and my mind still wasn’t okay. You probably know so many people who suffer that you haven’t even realised have anything wrong. Sometimes there will be tell tail signs if someone feels suicidal or depressed but sometimes there aren’t. If you are not able to donate, I completely understand but please take a new awareness towards this topic with you. Papyrus have a really useful website which you get a lot of information from whether you are suffering or are worried about someone so I highly recommend giving it a read.

Organisations like Papyrus haven’t just helped to changed my life, they’ve saved it and many others like me. Please donate whatever you are able to.