Keeping Your Head Up When No One's Watching

A deep dive into the never ending emotional rollercoaster through the lens of my life: The highs, the lows, the lonely bits and carrying on in the face of adversity.

At 24, I’m well aware I’ve barely scratched the surface of my life yet. If adulthood begins at 18, then I’m only a 6 year old adult. With social media clips of the Oasis reunion tour fresh on my mind, and as a big fan of the band, one lyric I relate so deeply to comes from the song Half The World Away: “My body feels young but my mind is very old”. That lyric couldn’t sum up how I feel at this stage of my life any better.

A Young Mind At War

I have been battling my mind as far back as being a kid in primary school. A lack of self confidence and inner belief has been a plague on my life ever since I can remember.

Naturally as I got older, things escalated and took a darker turn. What began as not having confidence I could get better grades at school, or be as good as the other boys at football, eventually became a battle against mental health problems as I got into my teenage years.

The first point I took a step back, reflected and realised things were getting quite bad was towards the end of my time at secondary school. Around 15/16 or so, there was quite a serious incident (which I won’t go into), which had a huge impact on me. Off the back of this incident, I had a period of perhaps a couple of months where I experienced suicidal thoughts for the first time.

At that point as a teenager, looking back now, I genuinely don’t think I was comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t know what self love was, I was my own worst enemy and truly my biggest critic in a much bigger way than I am now as an adult.

Being around people was vital. I could not bear spending time alone. Perhaps in a way, what happened to me only amplified this deep unhappiness that was already within and led to the thoughts of: “What’s the point ?”, “I can’t face this”, and “I don’t wanna be here anymore” entering my mind.

The “Coping Mechanism”

This period of my life also coincided with starting to dabble in certain vices. As I’ve come to realise through age and experience, the only thing this achieved was deepening the hole, delaying dealing with complex emotions, and causing my problems to grow.

Anyone out there who is struggling or has been through some hard times, when it comes to “vices”, the one thing I’d say is all things that seem harmless can take over your life, you come to rely on them, particularly if a big part of why you use said thing is blocking out emotions and your problems.

Just remember, using a substance or alcohol to block things out makes your demons stronger. Delaying dealing with certain emotions or thoughts, means when they do come back they return with vengeance and create a level of noise off the decibel scale that is impossible to ignore.

Starting Over

Sixth form marked the next chapter of my education and my life, and unfortunately, it also marked another dark turn.

In Year 12, most of the friends I made were in the year above, there were a couple in my year but not many. When I got to the end of Year 12 and those friends left, it hit me like a tonne of bricks. I felt alone, like I had no one, and like socially, I had to start all over again.

Making friends growing up was something I hadn’t really ever struggled with. I had always found it easy talking to people and mixing with different groups, however this was the first period in my life where this felt more complex and I really struggled. People had already established their friendship groups, and trying to find where I fitted in felt like trying to intrude on a party I hadn’t been invited to.

This was a ticking time bomb in my mind and from an emotional perspective. Eventually things got too much, I was in a terrible head space and those suicidal thoughts began to creep back in for a second time. I remember seeing a friend after sixth form one day, us coming out of his family home on to the landing, looking over to the ground below and thinking how easy it would be to just jump.

Finding the Strength to Speak

Despite all of this, I did take action and did not keep the burden to myself. In the end, I informed a member of staff, arranging a conversation in her office, where I ended up close to tears. She was a great support. I also had a handful of conversations with a friend during that period which really helped too.

I must add, both periods I have gone into to this point, I did eventually open up to family members and have the difficult conversations that needed to be had, particularly with my Mum. Ultimately, there was a light at the end of the tunnel and I navigated my way through yet another incredibly dark chapter in my life. I did also meet some great people in sixth form and although parts of it were difficult socially, I was able to form some great connections.

Those two periods of suicidal thoughts taught me what it truly meant to be depressed, having the weight of the world on your shoulders and feeling like you are trapped. It’s only now, being older and after plenty of reflection, that I fully understand that. That period in sixth form was the first time I came face to face with anxiety: a new feeling and emotion, a constant level of worry and fear that bounces from one matter to the next, never feeling at peace and constantly on edge.

Beyond Mental Health: The Physical Struggles

My journey has had more to it than the battle against mental health. There are other factors and experiences that have not only made my mental health struggles more complicated but have also affected my life on a wider level too. There’s been a 10 year ongoing battle with IBS and severe stomach problems, losing close relatives and my experiences with grief, and, late last year, being hit with the news that I had testicular cancer. All of these things have added additional layers to what I’ve been carrying, and have shaped how I’ve had to navigate through life.

People would not have the faintest idea what it is like to deal with years of physical pain and the impact it can have on your mind or your life more generally. Years and years of experiencing all manners of stomach pain, spending half your life in the bathroom, losing considerable amounts of weight during bad flare ups, and then having to smile through all of that to friends like everything is fine.

The impact this has on your mental health, words can’t even express it. Thinking to yourself you cannot put up with this pain anymore, the pain subsiding and being anxious about whether it will return, people passing comments about your appearance after losing weight during a flare up, brushing those comments off, knowing that if you bother explaining, most people just would not get it. Above all else though, you spend a lot of time asking: why me?

Then there are the by-products of something like this. It can make you feel less confident about getting out and about and doing things. You worry: what if when I’m out I feel unwell and am constantly back and forth to the bathroom? So, you go into making a decision about doing something socially with the knowledge of what affects your stomach in your back pocket. One of the central factors for worsening my stomach pain has always been poor sleep. As a teen and now in my twenties, people want to have fun and be out till all hours. In my position you can end up feeling like certain social activities could be a tall order, so you turn more things down, have less of a social life, and at times spend an unhealthy amount of time alone as a result.

When Loss Hits Home

Grief is something so complex that whenever you’re unfortunate enough to encounter it, it really messes with your head.

My first experience of grief and losing someone within my immediate family came during COVID, a time that was difficult enough for us all as it was. Three days after my 19th birthday, my Grandad passed away. It was strange, when my mum broke the news, no immediate emotion came out of me. That being said, I fully grasped the weight of what she had just shared with me.

I spent several weeks beating myself up in my mind, almost torturing myself mentally. When grief hits, in my experience, what I have been immediately struck by is regret, the things I should have done but didn’t. In the weeks after my Grandad died, all I could think of was not expressing my love enough, and regretting how especially in my teenage years, I prioritised spending time with friends and doing things socially over spending precious time with someone who had a huge impact on my life and was just an amazing man.

The weeks of beating myself up passed. Just a few days after his funeral, the emotion finally hit me. One day I flicked through the images from the funeral programme and listened to the song he’d chosen for the ceremony, and I must’ve cried for an hour and a half.

With time, I stopped beating myself up, even down to things like feeling as though I wasn’t thinking about him enough, or wondering why I wasn’t sad more often. As the months and years have passed, I began to think of him more often, memories with him and time spent together during my childhood. I also began to realise beating yourself up for being a teenager and wanting to socialise just isn’t healthy, especially when that’s such a normal part of that stage of life.

Another Wave Of Grief

Unfortunately, last summer brought another painful encounter of grief and the loss of a loved one. This time though, it was one of the biggest losses I’m ever going to experience. Eleven months ago, my Dad passed away at the age of 74.

Losing my Grandad was a big deal and it tore me in two, but losing a parent at 23, while I’m still just a young man trying to find his path in life, is incredibly tough and complex. Growing up there were difficult feelings I had about mine and my Dad’s relationship, the fact he didn’t live with us, and the fact we became closer as I got older.

These were things I spent a considerable amount of time processing on my own, using counselling and personal reflection to help me resolve my emotions and achieve greater mental clarity. I achieved this, any frustrations or emotions I had about these factors or other things, I managed to work through and found myself in a much healthier head space.

It’s strange though, because although almost a year has passed, I sometimes don’t feel like it’s hit me that I’ve lost my Dad. Because there’s been so much going on in my life since that moment, I don’t feel as though I’ve had that moment where I’ve stopped and really taken in the fact he is no longer here.

Although I learnt a lot from the grieving process when my Grandad passed away, a lot of the things that were difficult for me about his death have crept back in regarding my Dad’s. My head is often overflowing with regrets, things I should’ve said, things I should’ve done differently, and how I should’ve set aside more time to spend with him. It’s incredibly complicated, it’s a can of worms I don’t think I’ve even begun to properly delve into yet.

The C Bomb

Shortly after the loss of my Dad, my 2024 took a turn I could have never imagined, being told I had cancer.

Maybe a month to six weeks after my Dad died, I had found a lump on my testicle. As someone with quite bad health anxiety, naturally this sent my brain straight to the worst case scenario. The lump was initially waved off by a GP who told me it did not feel worrying. A scan followed at a different GP practice, perhaps a week or two after my initial scan I was essentially told over the phone, based on the scan we think the lump could be cancerous.

Further conversations/investigations continued. Eventually, I had a further scan at the hospital and sat down with a specialist. This was where the discussions escalated from it could be cancer, to we think it is cancer and you need to have an operation as soon as possible. What I was hearing didn’t feel real. Considering I have suffered with mental health problems for many years and have always been a huge over thinker, strangely, because the process moved so quickly, I actually didn’t have time to overthink what was happening.

Essentially I just lived in that moment. I knew I was in the best possible hands I could be. I did not catastrophize and let my mind take me to places like, what if this is worse than the initial assessment and I need chemo etc. Spending many years living in a constant state of anxiety and low mood, it almost felt odd remaining as calm as I did over something so big. The operation took place in late November, about a fortnight or so later I got the answers, the full picture and knew where things lay.

Thankfully I got incredibly lucky. I caught the cancer very early. The analysis after the surgery showed the doctors were right in their assessment, it was cancer, stage one testicular cancer with no evidence of any spread. The surgery had done what it needed to do and it was decided I needed no further treatment, simply to be monitored on an ongoing basis for the next year or two.

I learnt a lot about myself going through that. All the tough times I’ve been through, it’s easy to forget the dark places you have pulled yourself out from and how much strength lays within you. To be told such awful news at a young age, to remain calm and collected throughout, not getting swept up in the waves of anxiety and overthinking, taking each day as it comes, and a process so scary step by step truly made me understand and realise the minerals I am made of and the cloth I’m cut from.

Social Challenges & Feeling Misunderstood

One thing that’s made my journey through so many challenges incredibly hard is that feeling of being misunderstood.

I’ve always felt like at surface level I come across as a relatively happy young man, talkative and bubbly around people I know well, always down to have a laugh and chat about my interests such as football. Incredibly cheesy analogy but there’s so much more to me than that, I’m like an onion, there are plenty more layers beneath the surface.

During my teenage years I felt as though I was quite an open book and could talk about my struggles if I particularly needed to. The dialogue these days towards men is to talk about your problems if you’re in a bad place and open up to friends. But as males, a lot of us are almost hardwired to carry our issues on our shoulders and walk through life with the weight of these burdens dragging us down. As time progressed through my teenage years I became more and more aware I struggled to open up and make people aware of what I was going through.

There are certainly other elements to opening up to your mates as a guy which are incredibly hard. Some guys of a similar age to myself take that old school approach of if you have a problem/difficulty you deal with it alone and don’t burden others with the weight of what you’re going through. But in the setting of a “friendship” being around people with this mindset when you are someone like myself who has been hit with your fair share of punches from life makes parts of that connection incredibly difficult.

When you are around people who make you feel as though you don’t have the space to get things off your chest when you to, you hear this mainstream narrative that blokes should speak up, that a problem shared is a problem halved, and yet you’re left feeling like sometimes, that couldn’t be further from the truth. That experience makes you feel incredibly alone. And I’ve been there.

Misunderstood, Judged & Grateful For The Few Who Get It

Of course everyone is facing their own struggles, and no one could ever truly understand what it feels like to walk a mile in your shoes. However, when you’ve had the same conversation more times that you could count about ongoing trouble with your physical health, or perhaps going through a period of low mood and struggling to stay motivated, and people still show you they just do not get it, you are left feeling like no one on this planet truly understands you for who you are, and even more upsetting than that, it doesn’t even feel worth trying to get things off your chest no matter how much of a dark hole you are in.

The folk I refer to have left me feeling different and like I don’t fit in just because I’ve been through some ups and downs. When these people get a sniff that perhaps you are “in touch with your emotions” because the battles you’ve faced have made you sob and cry at times, they take this as a weakness. It takes courage and strength to let your emotions flow, and these people don’t seem to grasp that taking their approach of bottling things up and not letting that emotion out means it will be harder for them to regulate their emotions in the long run, and they turn themselves into a ticking time bomb where eventually the weight of all that emotion will cause them to explode.

One last observation about said people. They spend a big chunk of their time dishing out advice and preaching about how people should live their lives. More often than not, it doesn’t come from a place of care, it’s masked judgement. They aren’t trying to understand what you’re going through; they’re trying to tell you how you should be coping, and in their eyes, what you should be doing in your day to day life. What they fail to grasp is that they haven’t lived your reality or carried the weight you’ve had to carry to have even the faintest understanding of the complexities of your life. Additionally, if someone is going to make a change, more often than not it is not achieved through other people’s words, it’s achieved off your own back because you truly want it to happen.

The last couple of years I have spent a considerable amount of time alone, dealing with many issues and trying to get my life back in order. It’s been incredibly tough, and there are days where that feeling of having much less of a social life at present feels particularly depressing. I know things will improve in that regard and get back to a better place. That said, I do often feel at peace with a quieter life at the minute. My circle is an awful lot smaller than it once was but it makes me incredibly appreciative of the small number of genuine people I do have left in my life, who understand me, who take me as I am, and who give me that space to open up and be vulnerable where it is needed.

Closing Thoughts

I’m well aware this has ended up being an extremely long piece. If you have joined me on my journey and read it in its entirety, I truly can’t thank you enough.

I’d like to end with a quick message to anyone out there who’s struggling: You may not realise it, but there’s so much more strength within you than you know. You may not see it yet, but there are brighter days ahead, and I promise you, there is always light at the end of the tunnel.