Three years ago, I was running on four hours of sleep, saying yes to everything, and genuinely believed that the tightness in my chest every Sunday evening was just me being dramatic. I had a job I’d worked hard for, a flat I was proud of, and a group chat full of people I loved. From the outside, I was thriving. From the inside, I was drowning so quietly that I had convinced myself the water wasn’t even there.

I want to tell you this story because I’ve read a lot of mental health essays that skip the messy parts — the relapses, the months where therapy felt useless, the way you can be medicated and still wake up some mornings and feel absolutely nothing. This isn’t that kind of essay. This is the version I wish someone had handed me in 2023, when I finally admitted something was wrong.

“I didn’t look like someone who needed help. That was, I now understand, precisely the problem.”

— Amara Diallo

What I know now — what took three years, two therapists, one medication change, several spectacular setbacks, and a slow accumulation of very ordinary mornings to learn — is that healing does not move in one direction. It spirals. It doubles back. It gives you a run of good weeks and then drops you somewhere you thought you’d already left. And if you don’t know that going in, those drops feel like failure. They’re not. They’re just the shape of the thing.

Year One: The Unravelling I Didn’t Name

The first year wasn’t a breakdown. It never is, for most of us. It was more like a slow leak — small enough that you keep meaning to deal with it, large enough that everything around it starts to feel damp.

I was irritable in ways I couldn’t explain. I’d cancel plans at the last minute and feel relieved, then ashamed of the relief. I stopped reading, which sounds small but was actually significant — I am a person who has read every night since I was seven years old. Some nights I’d open a book, read the same paragraph four times, retain nothing, and put it down. I told myself I was tired from work. I told myself everybody felt like this.

What I was experiencing — I know this now — was a textbook presentation of high-functioning anxiety sitting alongside low-grade depression, a combination that is extraordinarily common and remarkably easy to miss precisely because you are still functioning. You’re still showing up. You’re still performing. The machinery is running. You just can’t feel the warmth from it anymore.

The most dangerous kind of unwell is the kind that still looks capable from the outside.

I didn’t seek help in year one. I want to be honest about that. I thought about it — I’d open my Notes app and type things like “find a therapist” and then close it again. The barrier wasn’t money (though it is, for many women, and that matters). The barrier was the belief, installed in me by years of being the person who holds things together, that needing help was a referendum on my strength. I come from a family where we dealt with things. We did not discuss them in a room with a stranger for £80 an hour.

The Appointment I Kept Rescheduling

I finally booked a therapy appointment in January 2024, after a disagreement with a friend over something so minor that I genuinely cannot remember what it was. I cried in my car for forty minutes and then sat there, very still, and thought: this is not a proportionate response. Something is wrong.

My first therapist was lovely and not the right fit for me. I want to say this clearly because I think a lot of women go to one therapist, feel nothing, and conclude that therapy doesn’t work. It is a relationship. Chemistry matters. My first therapist used an approach that felt too abstract for where I was — I needed more structure, more tools, something to actually do with my hands. We parted kindly after eight sessions.

My second therapist uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with elements of ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — and within three sessions I understood, at a cellular level, why the first year had gone the way it had. CBT gave me a framework for recognising the thought patterns I’d been running on autopilot. ACT gave me something more radical: permission to feel bad without treating the feeling as evidence that I was bad.

“You don’t have to fix every feeling. Some of them just need a witness.”

— Amara’s therapist, paraphrased

Year Two: The Setback I Thought Was Failure

Year two is the one I don’t see written about often enough. The honeymoon period of therapy — that first flush of insight, when the frameworks are new and every session feels like a revelation — ends. And then you’re left doing the actual work, which is slower and less dramatic and involves applying the same tools to the same patterns over and over again, mostly in the unremarkable circumstances of an ordinary life.

In April 2024, I had what I can only describe as a regression. I’d been doing well — genuinely well, not performing-wellness well. And then a period of sustained work pressure, a family situation I won’t detail here, and two weeks of poor sleep converged, and I found myself back in a place I thought I’d left. The chest tightness. The cancelling of plans. The book I couldn’t read.

I was devastated. I remember telling my therapist that I felt like I’d wasted a year. That all the work had come undone. She looked at me and said, very calmly: “You noticed it in two weeks this time. How long did it take you before?”

I had no answer. The first time, it had taken me almost two years to notice. The gap between something being wrong and me recognising that something was wrong had collapsed from two years to two weeks. That is the work. That is what recovery actually looks like — not the absence of hard periods, but the shortening of the time you spend in them before you reach for a ladder.

  • Recovery is not a destination. It is a set of skills you build, slowly, that change how quickly you recover from inevitable difficulties.
  • A setback in year two is not the same as a setback in year zero. You are not starting over. You are practising.
  • The instinct to hide when things get hard again is the first symptom, not the last. Name it early.
  • Being able to say “I’m struggling again” without shame is itself a form of progress — one of the most important ones.

On Medication: The Thing I Was Most Resistant To

I started a low-dose SSRI in mid-2024. I resisted it for months, for reasons that I now recognise as a combination of stigma and pride. I had ideas about what going on medication meant — that it was an admission of something permanent, that it would blunt me, that it was the nuclear option rather than a considered tool.

Every one of those ideas was wrong, or at least not right for me. The medication did not make me feel different. It made me feel more consistently like myself, which is the best way I can describe it. It did not remove the hard feelings; it turned down the volume on the background static enough that I could hear the actual signal — my own thinking, my own needs, the things I actually wanted — more clearly.

I am not saying everyone should take medication. I am saying that the decision should be made with a doctor, based on your specific circumstances, and not sabotaged by the cultural scripts that tell women — particularly Black women, who face disproportionate stigma around mental health help-seeking — that needing pharmaceutical support is weakness. It is not weakness. It is information processing.

I didn’t need to be fixed. I needed to be heard — by a professional, by people I trusted, and eventually, painstakingly, by myself.

Year Three: What Ordinary Feels Like

I am writing this in year three. I still see my therapist, now fortnightly rather than weekly. I still take my medication. I still have bad weeks. But the texture of my life has changed in ways that are quiet and cumulative and genuinely difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t been through it — a bit like trying to describe colour to someone who has only seen in greyscale.

I read every night again. That might sound small to you. It is not small to me.

I have better language for what I need, which means I can ask for it — from friends, from my partner, from my own habits. I can feel the early signs of a difficult period arriving and respond to them like someone who knows what they are, rather than someone who has never seen this weather before. I have stopped performing fine for audiences who didn’t ask for the performance in the first place.

None of this happened on a schedule. None of it happened because I worked hard enough or wanted it badly enough — those are the wrong frames entirely. It happened because I kept going back into the room, kept doing the work even when the work felt pointless, kept showing up for myself with approximately the same reliability I had always shown up for everyone else.

“Healing is accumulative, not linear. Every small act of self-attention is a deposit, even when you can’t yet see the balance.”

— Amara Diallo

What I Want You to Take From This

If you are in year one, or year zero, or somewhere you haven’t named yet: the delay between something being wrong and you doing something about it is almost never about laziness. It is almost always about a story you’ve been told about what needing help means. That story is wrong. Needing help is not a character flaw. It is a condition of being human, and ignoring it does not make you resilient — it makes you load-bearing in a way that eventually cracks.

Find a therapist, even if the first one isn’t right. Tell someone in your life what is actually happening, not the edited version. Be suspicious of the version of yourself that insists everything is fine when everything is not fine — she is not protecting you; she is just very, very tired.

And when the setback comes — and it will come, because this is not a straight line — try to remember that you are not starting over. You are just at a bend in the road you’ve actually learned to recognise. That is not nothing. In fact, it is almost everything.