More Than a Diagnosis

Early on, it takes over everything. It is the first thing you think about when you wake up, the thing every conversation somehow comes back to, and the answer to how you are even when you say you are fine. For a while that is unavoidable, and I would not tell anybody to fight it, because you are learning to live a completely different way and that takes everything you have got.

But there is a point, and it creeps up on you rather than arriving, where you notice you have gone a whole afternoon without thinking about it once. You were doing something else. You were just being yourself, the way you used to without ever noticing you were doing it. The first time I clocked that, it felt like getting something back that I had not registered was gone.

It does not mean it has stopped mattering. The care still happens, the routine is still the routine, and the bad weeks still come round. What changes is the amount of room it occupies in your head when nothing is actually going wrong, which it turns out is most of the time.

The condition is a fact about me. It is not the whole of me, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that those are different things. I am still the same person who is happiest near water, who will talk your ear off about music for far longer than you want, who has a stubborn streak that has probably done me more good than harm over the years. None of that got taken off me. It was all still there, waiting, while I was busy being a patient.

If you are in the phase where it is everything, be patient with yourself. It does not stay that big forever. It shrinks down over time until it is one part of a much bigger life, and the rest of you gets the room back.