For ages I just got on with life. I didn’t hate it, exactly, but felt more and more miserable in every area of it — work, relationships, just being in my own head — without ever quite stopping to ask why. You get used to a low hum of misery if it builds slowly enough. Eventually the depression and anxiety got bad enough that I couldn’t just carry on getting on with it, and I sought therapy.
I didn’t turn up thinking “I need to find out who I am.” I just wanted the heaviness to stop. Bleak about the future, if I’m honest — going through the motions of a life I couldn’t quite locate myself inside of. But what actually happened was slower and odder than sorting out a mood. It was taking off a mask I hadn’t fully clocked I was wearing.
For most of my life I’d been wearing a suit that didn’t fit. Not a literal one — a version of me cobbled together from other people’s expectations, old assumptions, roles I’d played for so long I’d forgotten I was performing them. It fit well enough to get by. Nobody could really tell from the outside. But I could feel it, that low-level exhaustion of holding a shape that wasn’t mine.
A lot of the work was simply learning who I wasn’t. Not some big reveal of a hidden true self — more like sorting through a pile of beliefs about myself and realising half of them belonged to someone else entirely. Things I’d inherited, or built as armour, or just never thought to question. Bit by bit, taking those off, there was more room to actually be there.
None of it would’ve been possible without feeling like I wasn’t being judged. Not in a vague, soft way — I mean specifically, sitting across from someone who didn’t flinch, didn’t correct, didn’t quietly measure me against some standard. That safety was the whole mechanism, really. I couldn’t look at myself honestly in a room that felt unsafe. I needed to feel unthreatened before I could feel free.
And I do feel freer. Freer to say things without editing them first. Freer to actually want what I want. Freer, oddly, to be imperfect, because the mask was always about hiding imperfection, and once it came off, imperfection stopped feeling like a crisis.
I’m not “fixed,” far from it. Still have rough days, old patterns that creep back in, moments I reach for the ill-fitting suit out of sheer habit because it’s familiar. But I’m not fumbling about in the dark anymore. I’ve got insight now, and proper skills — how to catch myself, ask better questions, sit with discomfort instead of avoiding it. Progress, not perfection, and that doesn’t feel like a booby prize anymore.
My therapist said something once that’s stuck with me: “sometimes you need another brain to help figure things out.” She was right. There’s only so far you can see using your own head alone — some knots don’t come undone by the hands that tied them.
I don’t know if I’m done with any of this. Not sure “done” is even the point. But I’m lighter than I was, and a good deal further from that bleakness than I thought I’d get. And I know now what it’s like to wear something that actually fits.
You can read more about the therapies on offer at Leicester Psychology Clinic here.