So it happened in the early hours of Tuesday morning, as I suspected it would. After contributing on Monday evening to a discussion of mental health on Twitter (#Gdnbluemonday) and revealing that I have had issues of my own, I woke up with the feeling of dread I have come to associate with being honest about this difficult topic. What was I thinking? I mean REALLY? Announcing on Twitter that I’d experienced anxiety, depression and OCD?

GOD, ANNABEL, YOU REALLY ARE AN ABSOLUTE LOON I screamed into my pillow as I writhed with shame. You are supposed to be a rational adult, Goddammit! A no-nonsense high-achiever! Constantly happy and high-functioning with a brain that runs smooth as a BMW engine, not sad sometimes, and struggling, with a mind that stutters and stalls like a second-hand Skoda.

What if people don’t believe you? I cried into the night. What if people DO? I wasn’t sure what was worse – being thought of as jumping on the mental health bandwagon, or being taken seriously.

I’ve almost written this blog several times over the past eighteen months, but have never quite had the guts. It’s the fear of appearing self indulgent and disingenuous on the one hand; the terror of being really seen, warts and all, on the other. But to hell with it. It seems like the right time to say this stuff. I can’t join in a Twitter debate about the importance of being open about mental health while being ashamed of discussing my own struggles in a blog. So here goes.

As a young person, I remember a sense of ennui that I used to call the ‘Sunday feeling.’ I didn’t have the terminology to understand what it really was. All I knew was that, at various points, life would seem vacant, colourless and devoid of meaning, as if it were stretching endlessly into the horizon, monotonous as the desert. Life felt dull and boring and tedious and flat and empty and quiet as a Sunday – but on every day of the week. Fresh new Mondays should not feel like Sundays. Fridays should be the polar opposite! But there it was. I had a Sunday feeling when the rest of the world seemed giddy about the weekend. It didn’t happen all the time. In fact, it didn’t happen most of the time, but the ennui still occurred, every now and again, and it made life difficult.

As did the anxiety. It is vital not to embellish the facts, but it is important not to hide from them either. It is true that I functioned really well as a teenager and have overwhelmingly happy memories of that time, but I also suffered from disturbing, intrusive thoughts throughout my adolescence. These thoughts made me feel guilty, so I’d try to unthink them, tying myself in mental knots. DO NOT THINK ABOUT KICKING THAT PUPPY I would tell myself as I walked down the street, with the inevitable consequence that I could think of nothing but kicking the adorable ball of fluff tied up outside a shop entrance. Or a kitten on the wall. Or a small, innocent child who just so happened to passing me on the pavement. My wild eyes pounced on anyone and anything – the more vulnerable the better. A kind old lady with snow-white hair and twinkly blue eyes? Perfect! In my mind, I would beat her to a pulp. I didn’t really want to. I was simply scared that I wanted to, frightened that thinking it or seeing it in my head made me a monster. So, I policed my thoughts for hours on end, trying to counter ‘bad thoughts’ with good ones, having terrible spikes of anxiety whenever something popped into my mind that was ‘sinful’ – which, of course, was all the time. A sure-fire way of making someone think about a blue elephant is to tell them not to think about a blue elephant.

I coped, though looking back I can see that my response was far from healthy and I became reliant on compulsive behaviours to ease the pain. Now, after years of reading and research, I know that this was a form of OCD, but I didn’t realise it at the time. It was just a weird thing that happened, a nameless feeling, an unknowable, unconquerable enemy. It would have been so helpful to have the vocabulary to define my experience, to be able to put into words that which felt unspeakable, to demystify the sensation by giving it a label that could be looked up in a book.

I am wary of painting an overly bleak picture of my childhood when it truth it was lovely and I was lucky to have supportive, wonderful parents and friends. The anxiety never impaired my ability to go to school or have a social life, so I did what most of us do – I hid my struggle. I squashed it, pushed it down and forgot about it for large chunks of time. Whenever it did rear its ugly head, I told myself that if I got enough A*s or achieved grade-eight violin or got into Oxford or became a size six or ran for an hour on the treadmill or met the new ever-moving target that I constantly set to prove I was GOOD ENOUGH then somehow I would feel better.

I didn’t. Or, at least, I didn’t in any way that really mattered. Victories were shallow and short-lived, a mini-high that felt good for a few days or weeks but left me craving more success. And then I did something brilliant, something so out-of-this-world fantastic that my self-esteem should have been bolstered for life: I got my first novel published (My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece). Let me put this in context. This was my dream, my Olympic gold medal, my Oscar, my lottery win – all rolled into one. This was It, the thing I had been striving for my whole life, the validation I had sought for so long, the absolute pinnacle of achievement… and so I stood at the top of my Everest expecting to feel wonderful and I felt… nothing.

Worse than that, actually. I felt really, truly awful. I know how this sounds, and I am cringing as I type. If ever there was a high-class problem, this is it, right? Poor you, you are definitely NOT thinking. How hard it must have been to feel numb at your unexpected success.

I mention it only because it is an important part of the story. Obviously, getting a book published was a real thrill and I was proud and immensely grateful for the opportunity, but did it miraculously ‘fix’ my life, or my self esteem as I expected it to? No, it did not, and this made me feel guilty. And then I felt guilty about feeling guilty, which made me anxious. And then I felt anxious about feeling anxious. Why aren’t you enjoying this more? I’d ask myself, over and again. What’s wrong with you? The question would whir endlessly around my brain as I rattled round an empty house. I’d quit my job in teaching to become a full time writer, but rather than revel in my newfound freedom, I was lost in it. It was too big, too vast, and I was used to structure. I quickly became depressed – and for the first time it was a black, all-consuming depression – which made writing my second novel, Ketchup Clouds, almost impossible. It was going badly to say the least. I was massively behind schedule and that made me even more anxious. So I redoubled my efforts, getting nowhere. Exhausted, I carried on flogging myself, determined to meet this new target, but for the first time in my life I just… couldn’t.

To say I suffered some sort of breakdown is not, I sincerely hope, an exaggeration. It’s strange to think of it now, but I’d wake up after a fitful night’s sleep with gut-wrenching stomach ache then spend the day crying. And then inevitably I’d get angry with myself, shout at my reflection, and even slap myself in an attempt to snap out of my ‘weak’ frame of mind. It went on for months. I eventually made an appointment to see a doctor, receiving anti-depressants that I threw in the bin, ashamed of my inability to cope without medication. Determined not to be a failure, I went to war with my depression and anxiety, trying to battle my own thoughts, reading pop-psychology books, intoxicated by their sugary promises that they could make me happy.

I was convinced of two things, that my brain was the enemy and my fragile state of mind was something to hide at all costs. It wasn’t easy, but I did it, smiling in interviews when asked how my life had changed since getting a book published even though I was on the verge of tears; pretending to people that I was fine… Okay…. Doing very well, thank you very much. For me, the worst part of mental illness was not the anxiety or depression but the loneliness that came with living a lie. At parties, meetings, family occasions, even in the supermarket, everybody else seemed to be over there, while I was stuck over here, floating in a bubble, or behind some sort of glass. There was more than a disparity between the Annabel I presented to the outside world and the person I felt inside; there was a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap.

Only my husband was aware of how I really felt, and he was completely and utterly brilliant, endlessly patient and compassionate as he tried to help me out of the black hole. For months, he’d tell me the same thing, which was to stop fighting the way I felt. To me that was counter-intuitive. Of course I had to go to war with myself! I had to beat this thing! Get rid of it! And if I couldn’t do that then by God I was going to squash it down and pretend it didn’t exist!

Don’t, he said, over and again. Just accept it for what it is.

Slowly – and I mean really, really slowly – I started to trust what he was saying. And I started to read. Not anything that dangerously and irresponsibly promised to make me happy; instead, I read about self-compassion and mindfulness that prompted me to start meditating; I learned about leaning into my discomfort, and sitting with my pain, and the acceptance paradox (if you accept an unpleasant emotion, you stop fighting it, so you’re more at ease with it, so it’s less painful and therefore more likely to pass quickly). I taught myself cognitive behaviour techniques, learning how to challenge my negative mindset without attempting to replace it with empty positivity. It involved filling in a lot of tables, laboriously finding evidence to destroy my ANTS (automatic negative thoughts). I dropped the word ‘should’ from my vocabulary so there was no longer a standard I had to meet in order to feel good enough. Slowly – and I mean really, really, REALLY slowly – it started to work. My thought patterns changed. My mood lifted. I began to accept myself for who I am, warts and all.

Now, unbelievably, I am able to write this blog. Eighteen months ago it would have been unthinkable. The thought of exposing myself in this way still makes me a little shaky and nauseous, but nowadays I can breathe through it and click ‘publish’, knowing that I no longer have to present a perfect facade to the outside world. I am proud of my imperfections. I see them for what they are – an inevitable part of being human powered by an engine as complicated as the brain. No one has a smooth-running BMW up there. We all have something that stalls and stutters every now and again.

It took a long time for me to get to this point of acceptance and understanding, and the process was painful and difficult, almost unbearable at times. It doesn’t have to be like this. It shouldn’t be like this. It’s imperative we talk about mental illness, and about mental wellness, too. Let’s do it in person, on Twitter, in our newspapers and in our schools so that the message gets out: we are all flawed. And we all struggle. And it’s okay. It really is. We don’t have to be perfect.