Here's a message I sent to a friend recently outlining how I'd been feeling since losing my job last year, trying to start a home business but still experiencing a lot of anxiety and depression.

After our brief chat earlier I felt the need to share some of my recent ruminations & experiences.

I said 'I am allowing myself to have a breakdown' - I'm giving myself the space to be broken for the first time ever. I'm okay right now -I started a new antidepressant (another one) about a week ago after having 2-3 periods of the worst depression I've experienced probably since I was around 15, and that's saying something. The few months prior have been incredibly painful and scary, dealing with my life situation and having to face losing my job, and being alone a lot, being a parasite in someone else's home, and wondering why I find everything so incredibly difficult. At times I felt I was making progress, but realisations would be punctuated with horrible fear and depression. The new medication has made me feel very ill for a week but I am starting to feel much better, and I think the agony of catharsis was necessary before I took the antidepressant to make this sort of progress, which I hope will prove to be more permanent than anything previously.

Anyway, I 'realised' a few months ago that I have spent my entire adult life trying to convince other people that I am ill and need help, when really the only person who needed to realise that was me. It's been helpful to me over the last few days to regard the last 12+ years as one big breakdown. I've always wondered - what exactly is a breakdown? Have I had one? What constitutes one? I did some googling and the answer is it's not a real term, but it usually involves large amounts of depression and anxiety building up until you can't cope anymore. Well! That describes my entire life! And a breakdown is, I guess, about other people noticing that you can't cope, and reaching a crisis where you either let out a massive cry for help or just visibly break somehow (it's always seemed that you're not allowed to say you can't take it anymore, you have to break in some visible way). I've had depressive breakdown after breakdown, but always got out of the job/house/situation just before I could lose anything, until now, or managed to carry on somehow. I am horrifically high functioning - it's weird. I don't know why I am still here, how I have carried on like this, how I have tolerated life.

Last week I was crying my eyes out, I'd been taking my new medication for a few days, I was really sad about something, I was in terrible pain, and I thought, 'I don't deserve to feel this way.' And then i stopped and thought - I haven't had that particular thought since I was maybe 11. I've never thought 'I don't deserve to be miserable'. It felt like a big thing - the result of many months of pain and thinking and working on self compassion. I still felt awful, but it was a different flavour of awful.

Obviously at some point, I thought that being sad and being in pain was such a constant that I must deserve it, and completely internalised that idea. I've been thinking a lot about my life, and trying to make sense of a lot of painful memories, a lot of shame - but regarding it as one big breakdown really vindicates me; I can have compassion for myself, I was in pain, I was broken and never took the time to fix myself.

Since then, I've noticed my obsession with 'deserving' things, that to 'deserve' to have anything, I have to work, that there is some objective judgement that can be made of your soul that means you 'deserve' to be healthy and happy and calm. And I've decided that deserving is utterly irrelevant - I am an organism, and my purpose is to fight for my own survival - to take what I can get from life, because nobody else can do that for me. Only I can say when I've had enough, when I can't take it anymore, when i need a break. I can carry on forever struggling up mountains with two broken legs (which is what I've been doing!) waiting for someone to say - that's enough now, it's okay. But if I do that - all that is going to happen is that I will die young, because I'm not fighting for my own wellbeing. I thought I could never rest because I need to move forwards, I don't deserve to rest, to take anything free from the anyone or to rely on anyone, to take advantage of anyone or anything. But that's how healthy people survive, they take anything free they can get and they rest whenever they can and they do the least work possible - it's efficiency, it's sane. Most people do it on a smaller and more approved scale - they manage to get through their whole life working and functioning every day, but they take their solace from life in other little ways, in the way they think - I don't know how, so I have to break and rebuild myself, to learn how to give myself a break.

I've recently been active on a mental health social networking site, and it's lovely - but I notice in everybody what I have found in myself: we all think we need to be rescued from this life, because we can't judge for ourselves what we need, what we deserve, whether we are suffering enough, whether we are trying enough, whether we deserve to be saved.

I think I am learning to be more compassionate towards myself. It's hard to explain it here - and sadly I don't think it's something that you can put into words and share with others and have it fix them (not that that's what I'm trying to do here at all, I just wanted to share my thoughts), everyone has to make their own journey - this is all only stuff people have been telling me and that I've 'known' forever, and never really believed.

My task for now is to learn to do nothing, to be lazy, to not be in pain, and then I can learn to be moderate and to live life like a normal person, and then maybe I can think about being a functioning member of society again. For now I am just trying to be aware of how broken I am and how much I've struggled, and how much I am just going to keep struggling id something doesn't change. I'm going to take as much as I can from the world to aid my rest and recovery, to become figuratively fat and strong and grow some skin to give me an actual chance in life, a chance to actually live and compete in this world - as an organism in a finite universe, competing with other organisms, and there's no god to judge who most deserves that crust of bread you're fighting for. So you better be well rested and well fed.