Living With It, Then Living Beyond It

I wasn't planning on writing something this personal on a training company's blog. But it's September, it's Suicide Prevention Month, and I've spent enough years now on the other side of this to know that the reason it stays such a big problem is that people don't talk about it until they're forced to. So I'm going to talk about it while I don't have to, in the hope it reaches someone who needs it.

In 2014, at 36, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Complications followed. For a long time — including for me — that felt like the obvious explanation for everything that came after: the mental health struggles, the chronic pain, the sense that my head just wasn't a safe place to be some days. It made sense. It was recent, it was traumatic, and it was the thing everyone, myself included, could point to.

Hiding it didn't help anyone

I hid it for a long time. I want to be honest about that part, because I think it's the part people relate to most and talk about least: hiding it didn't help anyone. Not me, not the people who loved me and could tell something was wrong but didn't know what. It just meant I was carrying it alone, which is the worst way to carry anything.

When I finally did open up, I hit a different wall. I tried. CBT. Talking therapy. Group therapy. Mindfulness. Different medications, which helped for a while and then stopped, and had to be changed, and helped for a while again. Every single one of them gave me something — I don't want to undersell any of it — but nothing lasted longer than a few weeks before I was back where I started. And that brings its own particular kind of despair: I opened up, I did the thing you're supposed to do, and it still didn't work. So why bother?

If you're in that place right now — you've tried the thing, and the thing didn't stick, and you're wondering what's left — I need you to hear this: there was something left. There might be for you too.

What actually changed everything

For me, it was EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I won't pretend I understood how it worked before I tried it, and I'm not going to pretend I fully understand the mechanism now. What I can tell you is what it did. It let me look at the actual root of what was happening in my head, rather than the version everyone — including me — had assumed for years. And the root wasn't the diabetes diagnosis. It wasn't the complications. All that time, all that other therapy, had been aimed at the wrong target, through no one's fault — it was simply the most obvious, most recent, most visible thing to aim at.

Once I could see the real cause, something shifted that hadn't shifted with anything else. I could finally look forward. Make plans. Enjoy a moment while I was actually in it, instead of just getting through it.

I want to be precise about what it did and didn't do, because I think overselling it would be its own kind of dishonesty. It didn't touch the chronic pain. It didn't touch the diabetes — that's still exactly as volatile as it ever was, still moved around by temperature and time of day and day of the week and things I still haven't figured out the pattern for. What it changed was my relationship with what's going on in my own head. It let me manage that, instead of being managed by it. And from that place, I could actually see what I had — including a family whose support never once wavered through any of this — and what I still had to look forward to.

What's different now

Since finishing EMDR, I've changed my whole working life. I left a job for the sake of a job, and started my own company doing something I actually love — training and supporting other people. I don't think that's a coincidence. It turns out life was never really about how much you earn. It's about what the work gives back to you. I couldn't have told you that five years ago.

So if you're reading this and you're struggling: please don't give up at the first hurdle. I know exactly how hard that is to hear when you're in it — I've been there, more than once. But persevere. Think about the people who love you, and how insurmountably their lives would change if you weren't in them. And think about yourself, too, because you deserve to hear it directly: you deserve happiness. You deserve contentment. You deserve to see what your future actually holds — not the version your head is telling you right now, the real one.

I've only listed a few of the things that are out there — CBT, talking therapy, group work, mindfulness, medication, EMDR. That's not the full list, and it's not going to be the same list for you as it was for me. That's exactly why mental health is still the problem it is: there's no single fix that works for everyone, and it can take trying several before you find yours. Don't take one thing not working as proof that nothing will.

Don't be ashamed. Don't try to hide it, the way I did for too long. If you need to, it can be as simple as this:

“I don't feel great. Can someone please help me. Listen to me.”

That's it. That's the whole sentence you need.