I have been seeing the word stress used more and more on social media. And rightly so, people are watching their lives and futures being destroyed, not by an illness, but by people. In the beginning back in March, I knew this would be a tough road. Not everyone has experienced high levels of stress, and most certainly won’t have experience in dealing with what is going on now. Nothing like this has ever happened, so how are we meant to have coping mechanisms already in place to help? And while under so much stress, how do you develop them?

I can only use personal experience to try and help myself through this and wonder how everyone else is actually coping. As weird as it sounds, I feel as though my early life was now training, it seemed so confusing at the time and has taken me years to come to terms with it all. But the feelings have been brought back by recent events of lockdown and what has followed.

I’ll explain as best I can. My mother was, picking my words carefully here, controlling, manipulative and selfish. She told many lies for her own gain and controlled everyone in the immediate family through what seemed like clever tactics at the time. Keeping everyone just separate enough so that we wouldn’t discuss it all and find out the truth. We moved house every couple of years and just before I was 10, she married a squaddie and we were shipped of to Germany. To put it all into context for you of what she was really like – I didn’t know she had got married for a third time. I found the wedding photos on her bedroom dresser one day and I asked what they were and who was in the picture with her. The response was “Oh, I got married last week and we are moving to Germany in 3 weeks”.

That is how my life started to be derailed and the type of person I was dealing with to bring me up. I did not know at that point that she had also walked out on us all for a few years when I was very young, my selective amnesia was in play as I understand it now. I look back and realise I had to develop coping mechanisms early for certain things. Germany was ok, I made friends and stuff and got on in school. But I feel like a part of me was left behind, almost as if everything thereafter was an out of body experience. I was present and taking part, but part of me wasn’t. I do wonder now if being hyperphantasic may have added to this strangeness in mind. And the fact that no-one else knew. They didn’t know how much I would be thinking of things, imagining them, projecting future thoughts. It made me feel very separated an awful lot, not lonely, because to be fair, I can replay so much in mind you can make people up if you want to. Not imaginary friends, but imaginary scenarios with people. This is how I prepared myself for life, because nothing else was preparing me. After a year and a half in Germany we were posted back to the UK. Two years here, then posted to Cyprus. Then back to the UK ending up in County Durham, all by the age of 14. Very different from the down south UK I was used to.

My mother also had health issues, which were also used to get what she wanted. At the time it just seemed like someone who was unlucky, was making the best of what they had. Even I thought that, she had me fooled for years too. My older siblings knew more of the truth than I did, so I was easier to ‘work’ on than they were. I was quite trusting of my family and gullible. She tried to convince me I had health ailments as I became a teenager and seemed to want to have a companion with it all (you know what they say, misery loves company!). I could feel the apron strings getting tighter and tighter. But after all the moving and weird family shit that had happened, and ending up in an completely unfamiliar place, I became unstuck mentally. Had a bit of a breakdown they said, clinically depressed and with behavioural issues.

For the first six months, I did not leave the house after developing agoraphobia on top of it all. Then I was bribed, or rather my mother came up with a compromise, she said if she got a dog, would I go out? Of course I said. (We had given up our three family dogs to go into the army life and I was gutted at the time). Took a little while, but we did get a couple of dogs, and I did make the effort to go out. I also set myself small tasks each week of going to the library so I had something to focus on. I loved to read and needed books to keep me occupied. Pocket money wasn’t enough for my reading appetite back then. I still had my anxiety pretty much everyday for years, I just got used to it and decided to go with the saying – Feel the fear and do it anyway. I couldn’t go to school so I had a state supplied home tutor for 3 hours per week as I couldn’t cope with the mainstream curriculum anymore. Before I was due to do exams I turned 16 and my tutor informed me that my compulsory education was now over and I could officially leave if I wanted to and not do exams (which to be honest were freaking me out). I was delighted and instantly dropped out, but was also devastated and believed I had ruined my whole life already. I believed the lie that if you don’t get a formal education you can’t do well in life, and that lie came from my grandparents – who funnily enough both went to university. But at the time I felt I had set myself up for failure from just 16 years old. So I started trying to get jobs and despite having depression, anxiety, full blown psoriasis from stress and migraines – I still put myself out there and tried to take part in life. I had no friends to socialise with even if i had wanted to and couldn’t just walk into shops or places without having a quiet panic attack.

After four years of trying to get myself back on track to just be able to be vaguely normal, a tragedy struck two weeks before my 18th birthday. My mother, who’s behaviour had recently become quite erratic and strange, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. So whatever I thought my life was going to be like, changed from that point. Any plans I might have had or decisions I thought I was wrestling with, were all gone. Instantly replaced by a new set of issues and a new future that was not of my choice or my making. I left home five weeks after my birthday, moved to a county where I had no family but one old family friend and tried to make a life for myself. It was stressful, there is no other word for it. That’s the short version of those events, there was a lot more to it and within it, and maybe one I will be able to write it all.

Having the rug pulled out from under you and the goalposts changed at every hurdle is stressful. Never knowing where you are or what is going to happen next, is stressful. And your health being used as a weapon of control, is stressful. All these things have been recently triggered again in my mind by the events happening around the country. They seem oddly familiar, the tricks of someone/something that is not being honest, has an ulterior motive and is entirely self-serving. And despite what they say, don’t have your best interests at heart. I can only hope that other people are finding ways to cope and are developing the mental strategies needed to understand what is happening and the long term effects that it will undoubtedly have, on us all.

(c) K Wicks