Memoir excerpt: the beginning of the way back to self
How my BFF pushing me to go the doctor changed the course of my life
“Make sure you tell them about the suicidal thoughts,” Kitty said to me.
It was January 2014, two years before I would get sober, and my life was falling apart, but I didn’t want to tell anyone. I’d said my best friend, Kitty, could come over so long as we could stay in bed and didn’t have to leave the house.
“Fine by me,” she’d said. Who doesn’t love a duvet day?
But soon after arriving she suggested I call the doctor. My thoughts were so jumbled that talking felt scary, and I kept leaving the room to cry.
My 19-year-old cousin had died recently, so suddenly and slowly I couldn’t make sense of it. The way the steroids had made him swell up. How he could no longer lift his arm to hug me.
My life looked good on the surface - my first novel had just come out - but behind the facade, I was struggling to hold myself together. Every day lately, I felt so tired I could barely lift my index finger to play another episode of New Girl. An imaginary PhD thesis looped around my head: Being Alive: is it good? And the only thing that brought me comfort was very cold Sauvignon Blanc.
“Anxiety can make your thoughts race,” Kitty told me. “It can make it hard to think straight. You need to see a doctor.”
I felt foolish, drawing unnecessary attention to myself, but I dialled the GP’s number, listened to the hold music until a receptionist was finally free, and then, sitting on the edge of the bath, admitted, very quietly, in a monotone that made even me feel a bit nervous, that I daydreamed about suicide, casually, quite often.
I got an appointment the same afternoon.
It wasn’t the first time I’d shown up at the doctor’s saying I couldn’t cope, and it wouldn’t be the last time either - more on that later - but it was the first time I’d mentioned suicide out loud.
At the time, I had no idea that what I was describing was neurodivergent burnout. No idea that the heavy, soul-crushing exhaustion I felt wasn’t just depression, but the result of years of trying - and failing - to pass as “normal.” I didn’t know I was masking. I didn’t know masking had a cost.
In his brilliant bestselling book, Unmasking Autism, Dr. Devon Price writes about the masked autistic as someone excluded from society, as in, not given the option to be themselves and love whatever/whoever they love, in the way gay people can be closeted, even from themeselves.
Masking is an experience that is put upon us, without us realising, only knowing it doesn’t feel right, that we feel somehow different, are struggling to catch or keep up.
Masked, rather than masking, he writes, with the onus on the masked autistic’s lack of choice/power/autonomy.
A person in this state doesn’t know who they are or how to begin making a life that suits them. They most likely are surrounded by the evidence of what is not sustainable and what does not work. This was me, but I didn’t know it yet.
Sitting in the GP’s office, I found myself weeping, unable to finish sentences.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I...”
“I can’t…”
It was weird to be taken seriously. To be taking myself seriously.
My voice stuttered and honked, very undignified. We called this the Dog Voice, Kitty and me. When you are so inconsolable you sound like a mongrel who has developed the ability to speak.
I was not the one who had made the Dog Voice famous - that was Kitty; she was the crier.
In my family, we didn’t cry. Deep emotions were a waste of energy, so we’d opted out.
Not that Doctor Brown would have guessed.
She passed me tissues and listened to my garbled explanation, then wrote out a prescription for Citalopram and gave me a number to call for ‘talking therapy’. I carried the pale green slip out of her office and drifted through the waiting room, wiping my eyes, towards the chemist.
I didn’t know then was that I was part of a growing but largely invisible demographic: undiagnosed neurodivergent people - especially women, especially those from marginalised backgrounds - who feel broken, but don’t know why. Who lean on alcohol or other coping strategies, not only to get drunk or high and escape, but just to keep going. To tolerate being alive without the necessary self-knowledge that makes life bearable (let alone enjoyable).
At the time, I believed I had chronic low self-esteem and maybe a bit of a victim complex. I thought I was lazy. Oversensitive. Generally bad at life. I was full of an existential dread and my thoughts were catastrophic as standard.
Not sureprising, then, that it made me dream of an off-switch.
Life is short, people said. But to me it felt soooo loooong.
Back then, I didn’t know that Autism and ADHD significantly increase a person’s risk of suicidality. Like many undiagnosed people, I believed I just needed to ‘try harder’. I didn’t know I was camouflaging without realising it. I had no idea that the effort it took to appear okay was actually seriously hurting me.
Alcohol had helped, for as long as I could remember. It let me switch off the inner monologue, stop overthinking every interaction, and access my real personality. But it held me back, too. And by then, it was beginning to dawn on me that it really might be making things an awful lot worse.
That GP appointment didn’t change my life overnight. But it marked the beginning of a new trajectory - one that would take me through therapy, into sobriety, and eventually towards a diagnosis that would change the way I understood everything. From this distance, of almost ten years, I can see that it was the beginning of a new direction in my life.
It would lead to getting sober, and discovering I am Au-dhd. To meeting the love of my life and healing my relationship with my mum. There would be grief and beauty in equal measure, because that’s the human experience.
It would be a long time until I felt okay. But writing this now, it’s been years since I felt as lost and confused and damaged as I did back then. Now I’m working to share my experience so that this connection - between a lack of self-knowledge and alcohol dependence - can become even more clearly defined.
There are so many of us, still using alcohol or other substances because we need help and support, and I hope that by speaking up and sharing our stories, we might be able to change that.
Did you get sober and discover you weren’t who you thought you were? Or does alcohol still work as a tool for you? Let me know!
📚 Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She is currently working on a book for Jessica Kingsley Publishers about the connection between undiagnosed neurodiversity and addiction + her first domestic noir.
You astound me daily with your honesty, raw humility and bravery. I´m so proud to be your Mum x
I got sober a month after beginning the 2 year long process to my autism assessment but the realisations it brought up were shocking. I didn’t find stopping drinking alcohol hard, what filled me with fear was telling other people. That was the first moment of realisation that I used alcohol to be a version of me that I thought was better, more likeable. And that what I was truly addicted to was external validation.
Thank you for sharing such an honest letter, Chelsey. 🖤