I want to know what pop songs trigger you because there are lots that I can’t listen to.

I was anxious a lot at 6 years old. This was also the age that I discovered the many songs that would disturb me deeply. They still do.

I can’t tell you why, but they made me feel destabilised, terrified and weirdly ashamed. And they are still played all the time.

You know I’d tell you if I could consciously attach them to a trauma, but there isn’t any I can consciously recall. I can’t remember not being deeply disturbed by these songs.

My mum also doesn’t like pop music from the 80s – when she was a teenager – but we both talk a lot about how this music has never left the radio. Never not a sync choice for TV and film. It’s like they were born in her childhood and never left.

When these songs come on now, the physical response is not as dramatic, but it’s still there. They are still haunting me.

My Death Playlist

Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

The Jackson Five – ABC

Michael Jackson – Beat It

It’s Raining Men – The Weather Girls

Britney Spears – Toxic

There are more, but these are the worst.

Imagine you have been dealing with a low mood – mild depression for about two months. It sits with you all day and, though you can quite easily ignore it, it’s definitely something you’re noticing more and more.

Things feel like more effort and sometimes you wake up in the night panicking about what all this is for. It doesn’t happen very much: maybe once a week. Things definitely aren’t getting better and so you call the GP to organise an appointment, because you know something isn’t right. They give you one for six weeks’ time.

But one Sunday after baking cinnamon buns and still feeling awful, you decide to take a depression test on the internet. It tells you that you have moderate depression and are at risk of it getting worse. You must go to A&E immediately.

So you go to A&E and they ask you questions. You tell them things have been sort of fine but getting worse, definitely. You haven’t had thoughts of suicide. They tell you it was only a matter of weeks before those kind of symptoms would appear. You just caught it in time and have done the right thing.

They admit you for the night and in the morning a mental health nurse comes over and asks how you’re doing with having been diagnosed with depression. She gives you a leaflet about depression and a document with all the numbers to call if you’re in crisis. She tells you that you can call at any time and that the team are there to support you.

This is basically what happened to me, in March 2023 when I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. Things really weren’t that bad. I went to hospital because the internet said I should, and just because of a high blood sugar number, I was admitted for four days and given a mountain of support. Support, at the time, it felt like I didn’t need.

People kept asking about the mental load of the diagnosis and how I felt about it. I was mentally just over the biggest hurdle of my life and two months post-ERP (exposure) therapy for my OCD. The biggest battle was finally coming to an end but now the support came. I was angry.

No one ever asked me about how I was feeling about the ‘weight’ of my OCD diagnosis. Mostly because I’ve never been formally diagnosed because no one understood or believed me. ‘Just’ anxiety or stress was often what doctors would explain it away as.

Of course, the idea of being admitted to hospital for depression when symptoms are mild is comical, but I think about it like that because I was sat there in my hospital bed completely bemused about what all the fuss was about. Of course, high blood sugar is life threatening and they were right to treat me as they did, but the seismic chasm between the NHS’s support and resources for diabetes care vs mental health care was viciously illuminated to me at that moment.

No one seemed to take my experience with mental distress seriously – certainly in no way did it come close to diabetes care. I didn’t feel reassured that I’d ‘done the right thing’ by going to the GP, but often more bemused and terrified about what the ensuing waiting time for treatment might do to my already destroyed mental health.

For months after my diabetes diagnosis I was in complete denial about it all. The extent to which it all felt ‘so fine’ in comparison to my mental illness meant I didn’t really give myself the opportunity to feel or grieve. Type 1 diabetes is lifelong and not reversible. It’s always with you and impacts every small decision.

Still, I didn’t have to think about it every waking hour of the day. Nor was I seeing the world through a veil, always a few moments from breaking down. Because of insulin I could live my life normally. Insulin was my lifesaver. But, because of mental health medication stigma, it took me five years of intense suffering to consider an antidepressant.

I struggle more with the mental toll of my diabetes now. Especially when it all goes wrong at inconvenient times – like in the dead of night in William Walton’s house on Ischia where the only option for treating a low was tablespoonfuls of La Mortella honey.

I struggle with numbers and my weight and the whole moral quandary of HBA1c and ‘time in range’. I cancel a lot of my appointments because I can’t face it all. Diabetes is a lot easier to ignore and deny than mental illness.

Imagine if even part of my fantasy depression diagnosis story could be the truth – that people took mild symptoms extremely seriously and sought treatment before crisis had occurred. But basically no one does that, because ‘other people have it much worse’.

I preface a lot of my thoughts with ‘I don’t mean this in a depressed way’. Because I like talking about death. That often utterly imperceivable line between life and death. Or how meaningless, and therefore meaningful, everything is. That we are so small in the great context of the universe and how comforting I find that. Sometimes that line, or gap, between life and death feels so strong and other times it barely seems to exist.

When I was at my most unwell with depression, I was scared of death – and all my thoughts about death. I started thinking about death when I was about seven years old and developed obsessions about it. Who might die and how I could control it. It was a cloak of fear that would follow me everywhere for a long time. Even though I was more dead than alive.

Now, in order to survive, my depression lives in a sanguine place where death and life seem paradoxically similar. Or at least my relationship to them feels similar. I’m a very happy depressive. Someone who floats among the cytoplasm of life with a real knowledge of the possibility for my brain or body to turn on me.

Yes it pisses me off. That I might die. More so that people around me will die. Being a happy depressive means choosing to grieve this a little bit all the time. And to talk about it with people I love when they might not want to.

At the moment, a lot of my creative projects feel like they’re in their twilight era and so there’s a contentment setting in. It was often my ambitiousness that fuelled my fear of death, at least in wellness. And now I’m not feeling so ambitious, but waiting to see what emerges.

Maybe I don’t know anymore. Anxiety is something about controlling my relationship to death and pain. Depression is something about being pissed off about death and pain. Now life is sort of all of it.

The other day, I asked AI to show me a picture of myself in old age. I loved her more than I ever expected to. I also made it make me a child and the person I saw seemed to be a possible future child. She was beautiful and I wanted to look after her. Maybe I really do want a child.

But can I really talk about my relationship to death or growing older without mentioning suicidal ideation? That was part of my experience for a long time. Wanting to sleep forever, wanting pain to end, wanting not to exist. Never planning for it, but wanting it as a strange, beguiling fantasy.

The new feelings of peace towards my own death are nothing like that ideation. The calm around it I am starting to invite isn’t a deadening experience, but one that is life giving. It also seems to be rooted in prayer and in accepting the big emotions – all those huge emotions I seem to experience without having any control over them.

Acceptance for me has all been about allowing myself to be annoyed about dying for a time. Accepting my inability to accept. I love it, I love that I am now allowed to be in a mood about dying sometimes. I get very upset about everything ending and about my health being bad.

I feel it all and then that permission gives way to peace eventually. Because my feelings about death are safe and allowed to stay.

Is this a single person’s scourge? It’s not a very big patch and doesn’t really hurt that much. Every time I go on holiday alone I’m confronted by the patch again – the light soreness beneath my t shirt as I remember. A careless sea swim and there it goes, my bi-annual whipping.

This holiday has been hard. Again. I am a glutton for going away alone and realising how vulnerable I feel when I don’t have work to ground me or friends to distract me. No one to have fun with, but still I go away.

Around twice a year I now go somewhere alone – not always sunny but always alone. What happens unavoidably is a descent into panic on day 2 as my brain tries to relax and switch off but can’t. I feel traumatised, back in anxiety disorder mode and panicking about losing control.

I can’t read any of the books I’ve brought because they’re too emotional and I can’t watch tv because it’s also too much. I end up watercolour painting, writing poems and swimming if my intrusive thoughts aren’t too bad.

The days ebb and flow. The mornings are great! I enjoy my solitary breakfast with a view and loads of coffees. Then swimming!

Lunchtime is when things go downhill and also when the patch on my back makes itself visible. I feel oddly surrounded by couples, offended by the world’s straightness and generally depressed. I fight the depression with more swimming but feel worse and so, defeated, I go to sleep. I feel better, then worse as I walk to dinner.

‘Are you alone?’ I have felt annoyed by waiters asking this, which means I’m probably in denial about how I feel being alone. I think I love it, but I’d rather it wasn’t pointed out because I feel lame eating my prawns, staring into space.

I take some pudding from dinner in my bag to eat as the sun sets on my balcony. I have a double espresso – the biggest risk I take these days – and feel happy again.

I’ve cried a lot this holiday. I haven’t cried since I broke up with my last situationship over the phone in October. Something is shifting.

Every time I make space to be alone without work, this happens. The reminder that I’m actually really quite vulnerable and emotional and feel a lot of things very deeply. I’ve made a life for myself where emotion comes second to productivity. My singleness allows for so much creative, productive time but resting and holidaying whilst single and alone is so difficult.

There must be a method of applying suncream to your back without a man, but all the women in this resort have a man to do it for them. It’s not like I’ve been wishing for someone to join me, to make this easier to numb the emotion.

Just I’d love to know when I might be able to accept the immense inner experiences that I seem to be continually given. When will a holiday not also be a deep reckoning? Or is it how everyone feels?

I never expected to write opera reviews when I started editing Opera Now. I wanted to be a cultural journalist, but without that elephant in the room: writing reviews.

For a long time I thought it was because I didn’t have an opinion. Unsure what it could mean to write about someone’s work. Also, as a performer in my life as a cellist, criticism was hard for me. I struggled with performance classes and reading a panel’s thoughts on my playing after an exam.

When people gave me advice or criticism, I felt it in my body, but forced out a ‘sincere’ gratitude for their words and advice. I still do that sometimes – even asking others for their opinion on my work whilst slightly wincing at the response.

So I knew what my words could do to other artists and wanted to protect them from my version of the truth. About four months into my job, my colleague Claire Jackson was talking to me about my career and said some words that started me off on the journey: ‘you can’t really be a music journalist without writing reviews.’

I think she meant that the work wouldn’t be there if I ever went freelance. That reviewing was a large part of every culture writer’s work that I knew. And I was terrified of it. I wanted to make and keep friends – I wanted to support people in the industry and didn’t see a place where I could do that and tap into an opinion that might threaten that.

The first review I wrote was quite strange: Barrie Kosky’s Carmelites at Glyndebourne – probably still the best show I’ve ever seen. It has been hard to tap into what a 5 star show is following that one.

I knew what was good opera when I saw Carmelites – I felt things very deeply when watching it, even as someone that finds it difficult to feel when ingesting art. And so it’s a bit of a sign when I do – sometimes it’s that simple. Criticism for me has become searching a sense of being in the presence of something very special. And it is rare!

As I started writing more and more reviews it became clear to me that something was shifting in my experience of ‘belonging’ within arts journalism. I felt my opinion was something I finally respected. In the beginning, I’d wait around for the first reviews to be released after a show to look at the star rating from another journalist, just to check that I wasn’t completely missing the mark.

Now I try to stay firmly rooted in what I determine as being ‘my truth’. The truth that my knowledge of opera is growing – I review many operas that I’m hearing for the first time and try to represent that audience member – the curious opera newbie – in my review. I’m also not an Oxbridge graduate and am aware of the limits of my intelligence. I experience shows as someone who is curious and feeling, rather than intellectual and interrogative.

And I am a woman. That is not so rare in the world of opera criticism anymore, and my friends: Flora Willson, Alexandra Coghlan, Rebecca Franks, Jessica Duchen, Claire Jackson and Fiona Maddocks have done incredible work to make me feel at home in what had been such a male-dominated space.

Mostly, I am ok with writing about others, sometimes negatively, because I see that opinion is flawed. Sometimes I may get the wrong end of the stick and other times I pay attention to the wrong things. I definitely don’t understand deeply enough the process of getting a show on stage and feel upset that sometimes all this time and money that creatives put in results in little old me giving 3*’s so easily.

Writing criticism has forced me to confront my inner people-pleasing. It has forced me to sit in awkwardness when meeting an artist I’ve written about in a less-than-positive way. It has uncovered a confidence, largely born of knowing that what I write doesn’t need to be taken so seriously. But it does means considering the impact of my words on someone and find ways around expressing my truth in as kind a way as possible.

My only job is to tell the truth and there’s something extremely liberating in that. To come from your own emotional experience and try and communicate that. But mostly, I’m still writing criticism because there is good opera out there, sometimes in the most unlikely places, and it’s exciting to keep searching for it.

The notebook pile is being moved between different chairs and areas of floor in my bedroom. I don’t like having them out of sight. It occurs to me that this reflection cycle I’ve unintentionally begun might not be healthy. How good can it be to look back on the past?

But the truth is that much of the day is in the very present reality of feeling normal person things like stress, tiredness, attraction, sadness and dissatisfaction. As well as the positive emotions. But I don’t think about my past until it reaches 10pm and I arrive in my room to pick up the notebooks and place them in a heap on my bed.

Some of the later notebooks are very legible and so I am afraid to look and see very clearly into my mind at the time. In 2019 I was writing in pen and my handwriting was clearer. I was dealing with an eating disorder in my 3rd year at college and that year is carved into a burgundy notebook from Flying Tiger which says ‘Affaires du jour’ on the front.

2019 is a hard one because I was maybe the happiest I’d been in a while, with an eating disorder seeing me with a newfound functioning. I was scheduling every inch of my day and out and about, buzzing with motivation.

I lack and fill the time
Then I shock into remembering
Slam the laptop and remember
'I am better than my escapes'

What is left is me on a bed
Writing to recover
Recovering what is unread
Being lonely suggests I think my being lacks

Which it doesn't

Disorder is complicated because it’s so comfortable. Loneliness is complicated because it’s often coming from a place of self-protection. Knowing you need the breath you gain from being alone.

Part of my disorder was running and through running I saw so much. Everywhere I went I now explored at double the speed and so many of my poems centre around the natural world at this time.

These things
I can't even think of a better word
They are here
How amazing

Functioning but functioning because of something so insidious as an eating disorder! I was confused about that. I knew there were still so many dark emotions beneath the surface that the disorder was keeping at bay.

Sitting on this rock as so often I do to find
Forgiveness and make promises for a gentler life
My purpose, you are killing this side of me
Therefore you have died

The north coast of Scotland was the backdrop for a lot of my poetic life in 2019. I did write some poems in Hyde Park, but mostly they would only come out when I visited my parents in Scotland.

I was always looking for metaphor in the landscape – or my brain was creating metaphor for comfort. Surely I’m like these rocks because I am among them? Surely I am like the seasons and things will get beautiful again because how could they not?

The curvatures of this
Landscape are like the desire
Some days to be so much
Others to be less and some
To be not much at all

I like the idea that we choose how ‘much’ we need to be on a given day and I think I live life deciding what gear of Hattie to set life to on a given day.

Poems and journal entries often live alongside each other when I write. At the moment my journal and poetry diary are one and the same and in 2019 they were too. ‘I’m scared of who I might be really,’ I wrote in early 2020, ‘but I need to take myself in all parts. I’m worthy in all forms, all pains, all illnesses’.

Yesterday I went to my diabetic eye screening for the first time in two years. And the week before I went for my diabetes review at my surgery. Both I had cancelled multiple times over many years almost certainly due to a sense of not feeling worthy with this illness. Wanting to be who I was without it. ‘I need to take myself in all parts.’

In 2020 my ED turned into OCD again, triggered by the pandemic. And it was awful. And I let it be awful, at last. With an arms-length-ness that freed me on one level. It’s exhausting to try and accept when you just can’t. Accepting my inability to accept. It’s now a way of life.

I listen for the pain
As I expected, she sounds
Bright and honest this
Mystery she wraps around –
I fear and hold tighter

Not to mind is to release
But I know its true
Impossibility in this moment
I see it – it's ok that I feel
Impossible for a time 

I’ve been reading the Psalms alongside my old diaries. When I was 20, it felt like the Psalms were the most readily-available form of empathy. And I still feel that way. The whole experience of feeling ‘forsaken’ can quite accurately describe the brain I was inhabiting in my illness. The psalms often talk about being forsaken.

Truly, I am on the verge of falling, 
and my pain is always with me.

Psalm 38 feels like it brings together my past and present. It laments about shitty people, transience of friendship, deep pain and why we keep repeating the same patterns. ‘O Lord, do not forsake me; be not far from me, O my God.’ If Psalm 38 was a meme and the ‘me’ trend was a trend back in 2017, I would for real skim that psalm and say: ‘omg, me’.

Purple sari journal was written in around 2017/2018. So much of my writing has faded on the pages. I would write in pencil on the handmade paper because my grandma told me that if you write in pencil it would never disappear. That was one of many lies she told me.

If I liked a poem I’d written, I’d write it out again in gold pen. Something within me must’ve known. In purple sari journal, there’s a phrase I’ve written three different times:

Knowing that in those moments I forget about it
I am blissfully happy

I remember this meaning a lot to me and has always felt desperately sad too. It noted a moment of acceptance that maybe the best happiness I could experience would be in the moments of forgetting, because they happened so rarely.

The moments of feeling in flow felt rare, and I knew flow meant change and change meant hope and hope meant maybe happiness could return for real. But in those small moments in 2017, blissful happiness looked like forgetting. And I clung onto those moments I was able to forget.

I have these thoughts
In the dark about every other person
Who's doing better than me

These were not thoughts of comparison in career or esteem, but of deep jealousy of everyone else’s apparent happiness. I felt torn between two states: one of feeling that everyone must be just as depressed and anxious as I was, and also feeling that I was surely the only person suffering.

I saw functioning and joy as the ultimate success and I had failed at both. Purple sari journal sees me squeezing out the shame I was feeling for experiencing the world so deeply and painfully. Everyone was doing better than me and that was terrifyingly stressful. I couldn’t be this ill, it didn’t go with my aesthetic.

And now I can’t decide whether to share ultimate emo or pastiche poem. Purple sari has a lot of both, and the very first in the whole book feels like I could have written it at many points in my life:

You got a headache from crying so hard 
But you sort of liked it because
It was a feeling and it meant you weren't all numb

By the side of the Cathedral

Where the misty sunlight sits

As if to grow no more

There’s a grief in waiting too long

Patient for change, angry in its stagnancy

I linger to watch as

The Cathedral opens its door

The coffee grows bitter

Angry in its own steam

I wait for the bravery to hit

Like a carcinogen or rainstorm

They wanted help. They wanted reassurance, to know that things got better and how to go about exposure therapy. It felt like encountering myself from five years ago. People with OCD communicate with such a kind, generous panic. They will share with a fellow sufferer things that feel utterly unbearable to share with anyone in their normal life.

People often message me about the video and blog, looking for support. Sometimes I ignore them, because the pain of engaging is too great. Sometimes I feel like I want to meet them at that dark, messy place and counsel. Give them words of understanding and ideas for where to go next. Because what’s for sure is that no one without OCD could really come near to understanding it.

I am also looking at the moment through my pile of journals and poetry books from the past eight years that have been piling up in my wardrobe. Opening them is like looking straight back at the pain of OCD – watching my terrified mind as it desperately tries to reassure itself and get through one long day at a time.

I was always writing about the experience of obsessing and compulsive actions. I was fascinated by the cycle and wrote numerous poems about what it felt like. I was terrified by the ensuing dissociation and what felt like losing touch with reality. I would write things I didn’t yet feel, because the alternative was too depressing.

‘Sound is like a living emotion.’ I wrote this in early summer 2020, in the midst of my worst sound obsessions – where my mind was hyper-alert to sounds, interpreting them as danger and fearful that they were hallucinations.

‘I will never know for sure what the future holds for me,’ I wrote on 28 July 2020, ‘But I am hopeful that I will find help and healing and my life will move at the pace it needs to move if I let go a small amount.’

‘I know it will work out in time,’ I wrote on 5 August 2020. And almost all diary entries from this era would start with great swathes of violent thought waves with terrible emotional consequences, but always ending with hope. Because I had absolutely nothing else.

My poems from this time largely don’t make sense. Not in an e e cummings way either. I’m sure I was responding to some internal landscape that I can’t begin to remember now, but maybe that’s for the best.

Reminders appear crass
Corrupting this unidentified soreness
Selfless pain aches of
Destruction – we imagined
Pleasure quite different from this

Sometimes I’d lie in bed when the most intense thoughts had softened slightly and I’d write the jumbled, but musical, word maze in my head. Words would cascade into my hand and I would feel something a bit like freedom.

I also played a lot of hymns on my electric keyboard. I didn’t pray much because I found it too distressing, but I guess I could pray through playing hymns. In another OCD episode in 2018, I had written so many prayers. I wrote basically nothing else.

Lord,
Help me to embrace my vulnerability and emotional pain.
Help me to learn through this pilgrimage and drop any harsh demands I may have of myself.
Help me to love the weak parts of me and lead me to peace and joy when in distress.
Help me to fill my place in the world with a whole heart and a loving presence.
Amen.

When I was in the convent from the latter half of 2020-2021 I was so aware of how fragile my existence had become within OCD’s wrath that much of my writing was about seeing the seasons without an illness cloud. It was my first spring on antidepressants and, in some ways, felt like the first spring of my life.

One poem ended with ‘I am singing more than I used to.’ Others were obsessed with mortality, death and the experience of living:

Sat in the living world, 
Listen to the horrible pang of trying to
Believe to accept to move and all the while
What's left doesn't sing anymore

I could see the inevitability of suffering, rather than being blinded by it. That made me seriously fascinated and I felt really creative. Like I had just emerged from death, given another chance of life but still with such fresh memories of the pain.

‘I am blessed to know you, to sit and cry and say I was glad to live through it. Glad I chose to stay and not to die.’

I don’t know why I want to write all this. I guess it’s because I don’t write poems about OCD or suffering in the same way anymore. I write a lot about love and friendship and difficult relationships.

But this part of my story was very big and long and the healing has been extraordinary. It’s not comfortable to look back but it is helping me to remember my worth, my faith and some of the wisdom that I am grateful that I chose to document in words.

I can’t remember why I came across the litany for humility late last year but I can’t stop thinking about it now. I’m permanently changed. The paradoxes are seared in my brain. I’m sometimes confused, sometimes at peace and often a bit angry at those words make so much sense but hurt to internalise.

O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being honoured, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being praised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being approved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being despised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being calumniated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being ridiculed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being suspected, Deliver me, Jesus.

That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be chosen and I set aside, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and I go unnoticed, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be preferred to me in everything, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

I am in need of these words because parts of my life and ego are out of hand. I follow lines of enquiry purely because they might elevate me in the minds of others. Sometimes I go to events because of who might be there. Sometimes I take on new facets of a personality to impress others. Sometimes my hobbies are created because of an aesthetic.

A lot of the time a lot of these things are true. Stripped down without the desire to impress others and elevate myself in the industry or the world, I wonder who I really am and what would be left of me if I took all this insecurity away.

If I was to live truthfully as my authentic self, and prefer this even if it means being lesser in the eyes of the world, would I find greater peace and happiness?

‘I want to be happy and content on my own – that’s all I want.’ This is something I’m thinking a lot at the moment and telling people. That there’s part of me that knows that no other person or situation can really fill the hole that continues to perforate my existence.

So maybe desiring the opposite to earthly love, attention and honour is the only way I can go now. The other option has left me feeling lonely and hollow. Even when I gain the attention, what next? This is addiction, this is a never-ending cycle of placing my value in the eyes of others. It has left me lonely.

But the part of the litany that troubles me is the part that speaks about ‘desiring’ misfortune on yourself. Perhaps in order to ‘empty yourself’ as Christ did. Or is this an example of a mistranslation from the prayer’s original Spanish? In order to tolerate the wording, I interpret it more as ‘if it be your will, grant me the grace to desire it.’

Desiring to be trampled on doesn’t feel very 21st century, but I also feel that I may be being too literal. I wish the litany was more about acceptance than desire. I accept that these difficult things may happen: that others will be chosen, praised and preferred, but why am I asking for it? How can I ask for humility and still be empowered?

Could it be that we ask to desire these things so that they don’t hurt so much when they inevitably do come? Suffering often forces us to rely on the strength of a higher power rather than our own abilities. It’s a lot of pressure to rely on all we have built in the eyes of the world.

Could it also be acting from a place of embracing the risks of misfortune? If we desire it, what risks could we take as individuals and how much more nuanced and interesting could our experiences be? Keeping yourself small comes at a risk. I don’t know if I’m ready to take that risk yet but I can’t stop thinking about it.

‘You can go up now.’ Darryl’s words mean that this is really happening and it’s maybe 40 seconds before I see Kirsty again. I take the lift to the fourth floor and there she is waiting, smiling at me. We walk to her office which remains completely unchanged, except for a few predictable additions to the bookshelf. Mel Robbins’ Let Them Theory, the latest Gabor Mate.

I hang up my coat and as I turn around, Kirsty’s familiar smile punctures my anxiety. It always feels like she’s genuinely pleased to see me. I’m terrified and embarrassed to see her.

‘I think it was… April 2024 that I saw you last?’ Yes, and the same old shit is still going on, Kirst. ‘I’m embarrassed,’ I confess. I don’t want to bore her with the full story of the confused romantic connections I’ve made – the crumbs – of the past 18 months, but I do. I make it quite quick. We started at 11 and by 11:15 my story is complete.

Although she’s never judged me and Carl Rogers wouldn’t have it if she did, I do sense that she’s sad for me. I show her my meagre crumbage and it hurts. I do deserve better and we both know it. ‘I just feel like maybe I should talk to her – take back some of the power?’

I’ve hit the jackpot and we talk over why maybe I should think about talking to my latest person. I have made myself consistently small and pretended that I don’t have any needs.

I tell Kirsty that my life is too balanced. I’ve managed my stress levels to such a degree that now the people around me have a beautiful, toxic relationship to their work and it just doesn’t work for me anymore. I miss the addiction to pushing, I miss being able to tell everyone that I’m soon to enter my work hole and, no, I can’t see you.

There’s a part of me that does go into holes. Just as I will likely cancel every coffee in press week, even if I have enough time. But for some shiny, perfect people I will move heaven and earth to see them and make time for them. I have no boundaries at all because I just want so much of them, all the time. I have so much to give, I care so much but it’s not reciprocated.

‘You’ve been through so much in the past seven years,’ Kirsty reminds me. ‘From mental health and OCD to eating things and diabetes diagnosis. I wonder if part of you misses the drama, the stress?’

She’s so right. I miss it so much. It gave me things to talk about and work on. It was red-hot horror but it was something to occupy my mind. It gave me perspective outside of the dullness of everyday life.

‘It’s all I think about. Every other relationship or friendship in my life seems so dull and frustrating. I am thinking about potential romance with what feels like everybody.’

Kirsty is empathetic but it’s the brand of empathy where I sense she might not really understand. Because it’s a serious thing to admit and I’m ashamed that my beautiful friends are boring me.

As the red flags of the latest romance waft in the breeze, I am capsized into loneliness by knowing she’s not right but everything else is more wrong.

Emailing and meetings through daylight hours means that I usually have to walk at night. Leaving the house in the last few weeks, the hum of cold winter has amalgamated with Christmas lights adorning the rows of Victorian terraces. South Londoners don’t decorate by halves – sometimes neighbourhoods even collaborate on a window advent calendar and I wonder who goes about this form of organisation. Who has the time? Battle of the most tasteful tree begins in my head and I try to time how slowly I can walk past someone’s window to look in without it seeming too creepy.

The council never seems to lock Brockwell Park at night anymore. I enter with the long, dark stretch ahead of me, usually after the sun has completely set. There’s not enough battery on my phone to use the torch but that’s ok. I don’t really like being able to see anyway so often stumble on a patch of uneven ground or stray water bottle. When it’s cold, the lights of the city feel even more vibrant when I reach the top of the hill and turn around. My mind comes alive with creative ideas in this empty, wide space. Seeing the city from afar makes me feel powerful and hopeful; alive and ok.

But it’s definitely not safe. Sarah Everard actually has a memorial bench in Brockwell. It’s often covered in flowers and is a reminder when I pass that, maybe, walking at night isn’t the wisest thing to do. Sometimes I sit there, feeling very strongly that it’s worth the risk. Than however often I consider I should stick to wide, open roads and busy streets, I know I would maybe rather die than give up my night walks. It’s the only time of day that I can be out in the city without feeling overwhelmed by people.

It was a week after taking my first antidepressant that I had my first orgasm. I was 22 and recovering from my worst mental breakdown yet, of course, in 2020. With neurosis and terror flavouring my late teens and early 20s, as well as musical obsession, I started to realise that the risk of taking medication was about to unlock a lot more about life than I thought it would.

I started taking them because I wanted life to be boring. I wanted it to be numb, so that nothing triggered or affected me. People are often scared of psychiatric medication because they don’t want to be ‘changed’. I wasn’t so much changed as I was unveiled. Slowly. Very slowly and gradually peeled away to reveal a version of myself that was lying dormant.

I started to consider myself beyond barely functioning. I was awakened to my own sexuality and relationship to spirituality and faith. Sometimes I wonder if antidepressants turned me bisexual. I started to see attraction in a new way and bodies as beautiful, including my own. What I was experiencing sexually felt spiritual and extremely deep, and yet completely at odds with the version of Christianity I had neatly formed in my mind.

At this time, I also became interested in dark things. True crime and serial killers. In uncovering injustice and in classical music’s history with abuse. I began watching documentaries and reading memoirs, all around subjects that just months before would have rendered me incapacitated and brought on a panic attack.

I started to take risks that I would have never taken before: self h@rm, online dating, m*sterb*tion (yes, it felt like a risk). Sometimes for thrill and adrenaline, sometimes for exploration and to experience the new fullness of humanity being presented to me.

My sister got me Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir for Christmas this year. As I sat down to read it my mum asked to look at it. She read the first chapter and the last chapter. ‘Why did she kill herself?’ she asked me. I explained a bit about what had happened. As my mum read the foreward to the book explaining Viriginia’s abusive marriage. Her face reflected deep empathy and horror as she turned the pages: a feeling I remember in myself on reading similar things before antidepressants.

‘Do you really need to read this?’ she asked me after finishing the chapters. ‘Why are you interested in this stuff, it’s awful!’

I didn’t really know what to say, because I am interested in it and sometimes obsessively so. It must seem really strange for my mum to see her daughter go from someone entirely terrified and who had nightmares about the film The Pursuit of Happyness to someone who is interested in researching abuse and listening to its victims. Maybe I’ve taken the dark things too far – I wonder if I should guard against some of it now.

I have a favourite bench in Brockwell and it isn’t Sarah Everard’s. It’s one that looks down towards the Lido and, actually, my workplace. My former colleague Will said he liked it because he reckoned it had the most unobstructed view of the city. Beyond that foreground is the Shard and a sideways-facing London Eye. Blocks of the city with little red eyes staring back at me.

I sit there with a Diet Coke and someone zooms past on a Lime bike. It’s not that late, so sometimes a dog with a flashing collar comes over to explore and sniff me out. Sometimes people look a bit dodgy and I get a brief reminder of that terror feeling that I used to feel, my mind going overboard with stories about how I might be murdered.

I look at the areas of London that I and past lovers of mine have lived, which means walking around a bit (not that much). Then I feel thrilled about being alone and consider the paradox of me also being desperately sad about being single. But again, I decide it’s worth it. Being alone and happy in somewhere quiet, doing things my anxiety would have never had allowed me unmedicated.

‘They might cause sexual problems,’ my doctor tells me as she prescribes the Venlafaxine. 'Are you sexually active?’

The idea that anyone with OCD like mine could be in any way sexual makes me laugh. Early August 2020, she then asks if I’m sleeping. I say yes, because it’s the only time I have a break from my mind. I tell her I like sleeping.

‘They also have very bad withdrawal symptoms so I only tend to prescribe them when I think someone will be on them long term.’

She was right in that I’m still taking them five years later and have no intention of coming off them. I wonder what I’d have said if she knew the actual side effects I’d end up with. A fascination with bludgeoning, but otherwise they’re great and now I talk about them like I’m in love.

Every med review, every chat with someone suffering with OCD and with my family when we discuss who I was before them. ‘I can’t explain how they’re completely changed my life,’ I’ll say. ‘I don’t remember feeling this free or calm or happy – ever.’

Most of my past eating issues have stemmed from mental illness itself. The insidious meta mind fuckery of emerging from six months of foggy depression to find yourself physically and mentally half the size. Some people would tell me that it’s a plus of mental illness – getting skinny.

I was finally functioning, but with a new pressure. Maintaining skinny, or in my case, maintaining a ‘healthy’ weight. January 2019 began at my parent’s house in North Scotland. I’d decided to take on a challenge to learn all 40 studies in a book by a German cellist and composer called David Popper in 2019. 40 in 40 weeks.

I took out a gym subscription at the Imperial College gym, overlooking a leafy square in South Kensington and made the elliptical my home. Recalling exercise addiction brings a sad soundtrack with it and early 2019 included Miley Cyrus ‘Malibu’, as well as ‘No Roots’ by Alice Merton. ‘Who’ by Digga D and Ladbroke Grove by AJ Tracey.

I’d make a stressful, panicked plan in my head at 10pm each evening, drinking that hollow, bitter Options low calorie hot chocolate. ‘Ok, so,’ my brain would dictate. ‘Up at 7, run a 5k, then to the gym for rowing. Oh actually, will I feel better if I start with the cello and get some of that done first?’

I could never decide whether the angry food and exercise noise should be the first to quell upon waking or if it should be the cello. Should I start my intense scales, Popper and warm ups regime for an hour first and will that make me feel better about my work out?

There was something about the morning. About how much I could get done in the morning, what ‘to get over with’ first. I think the cello was often the louder – ‘after all, this is your entire life',’ I would tell myself. Sure, I’d be running, happy that I’d done my first bit of cello practice, but I’d always be running, planning what I’d practice later and for how long.

Sometimes the sun would be shining as I ploughed through Hyde Park, feeling my hip twinging as I forced it through more torture. Sometimes I felt very happy in this space, knowing my body to be small, my appearance to be more pleasing to everyone around me. I felt happy within this rigid structure – happy being alone and without dark intrusive thoughts consuming me.

Food noise has a facade of adrenaline. It’s not imbued with the same darkness as OCD, and so it feels much easier to deal with at first. It’s productive – it’s making a change and it sees positive reinforcement. My OCD had none of that.

In the afternoons I would often book a room at college to work on repertoire. Propping my phone up on my music stand, I filmed almost everything I played and practiced that year, usually taking 30 seconds on film to rearrange my music stand, checking how my body looked, how small my legs were and whether my outfit made me look as small as I could. Maybe some of those photos and films are still in my ‘favourites’ folder on my photos app. Maybe they’re not.

It always felt like I should move more by the evening, and so I would take these long, depressing walks through west London, often ending up on the King’s Road and working out when I should start my evening practice session. I had to start my practice sessions either on the hour or half past, meticulously calculating every section.

College felt strangely sad in the evenings. The friendly door security staff were the only bit of normality within that vast building. The evenings did mean that the large rooms with wasted space overlooking the Albert Hall were free. Sometimes the lighting was comforting and I’d lean back before starting, staring at the hall and wondering whether I’d be able to have a day off in two weeks’ time when my mum comes to stay.

‘It’s better than OCD,’ I’d tell myself as I flung myself into bed at 10pm, exhausted by the mental gymnastics of overwork and atypical anorexia*, unable to see that it was, in fact, still OCD, but in a more destructive, manipulative guise. One that felt so impossibly hard to break free from.

*Atypical anorexia: Atypical anorexia or atypical anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder where people lose weight in ways that could be dangerous. But, unlike typical anorexia, people with atypical anorexia had a higher body mass index (BMI) to start with. So, the outward signs of rapid weight loss may be less noticeable.

So I’ll be honest and say it was the fourth time in four years that the mental distress I was experiencing led me to feelings of suicide. Weeks of never-ending pain and an inability to comprehend how it will ever be possible for you to return to life as you previously knew it.

I had come to the end of my undergraduate degree in cello at the Royal College and it was clear that something needed to give. I couldn’t stomach a masters and my cellistic burn-out and mental health crises collided. I was broken.

Then my grandmother died in September 2020 and the crisis become morbidly funny as my support systems were focused on funeral arrangements and processing the complex grief of our relationships with her. I took medication out of desperation and began to feel able to consider the future and get through the funeral.

I knew I needed to get away to somewhere that I wasn’t known as a cellist or a mentally-ill person. Somewhere where I could begin to feel able to make it through the day with some semblance of routine.

‘Why do you want to come?’ a friendly nun asked me over zoom, two days before my grandma’s funeral. ‘I want time to reflect and explore my faith.’

This is the initial email I wrote to them:

Dear Community of St Clare,

My name is Hattie Butterworth. I am 22 and a recent graduate of cello from the Royal College of Music in London.

Due to the unprecedented situation with coronavirus and my previous plans to continue study abroad cancelled, I now find myself with many months without work or study. I feel drawn to use this time to help others, and specifically would love to give my time to a community such as yours. I grew up in a Christian home, my father a vicar and my mum a teacher of RE and then a gardener. Her work as a gardener led her to work for the sisters of the Poor Clare Community in Much Birch in Herefordshire, very near to where I was brought up.

I am happy to offer my help to you in any way possible in return for a room to board and lodging. I have experience in cleaning for B&B accommodation and also love cooking and gardening. It feels like the right time for me to explore my faith whilst also giving my time to help others. I understand that your guest house is currently closed due to the coronavirus, but I am wondering whether a longer term residence might be considered? I am happy to observe social distancing etc.

If you do not think it possible for me to work with you, I wonder if you might consider forwarding this email to any other UK Christian Communities you may know of who might be in need of an extra pair of hands at this time.

I really look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks and best wishes, Hattie

On arrival I had to isolate for two weeks in a wing of their 20 bedroom converted farmhouse five miles from Witney in Oxfordshire. I spent the time walking and writing my way through the mental illness that still plagued my brain. I had therapy over zoom and my therapist teased me about going to live in a convent and whether I’d become a nun yet.

It felt like I breathed the illness out of me slowly, walking the two miles each way to the pharmacy to collect my antidepressant and feeling the healing through living in community. I cooked for them most days of the week, in between attending the five offices (prayers) each day and listening, laughing and crying with the nuns.

Sister Mary became my best friend. The 84-year-old Liverpudlian organist warmed my heart with her witticisms over tea each day. We talked about nothing. We would sit in blissful silence. She never really talked about God or prayer though, and that always seemed strange to me. It’s only now, after her death and over four years later, that I realise it’s because she lived her prayer. It didn’t need constant analysis or note-taking.

No one cared much about the cello at the convent. Though I was soon asked to play the organ, taking it in turns with Sister Mary. There was another non-nun living at the convent with me. Alex was a 28-year-old masters student studying gender and sexuality in religious communities as part of her sociology degree.

I decided after a month of being inside to turn off my phone and begin writing letters. I wanted to get closer to whatever hum of existence was speaking to me in the convent walls. I had an overwhelming need to disappear for a time and focus on the eight women around me, instead of the infinite connections of the outside world. I would sleep and read. Books that stand out from the convent library include The Sexual Celibate, God of Surprises and A Guide to Christian Psychotherapy.

From January,

every morning I would feel the flickering of resentment rising in me and I staggered to the chapel. Jesus, lamb of God, have mercy on us. Mercy was there, but my interest in it was failing. I was better but missing my illness at the same time. The first time maybe that this toxic, insidious dopamine allowed itself into my brain.

I kept at restricting food and walking all the hours I wasn’t cooking. The pain of the memory of six months ago fuelled a deep desperation to be heard. That no one had really understood the distress felt like life’s greatest injustice. It wasn’t enough that I knew, and that God knew. I had been bleeding inside. My entire brain had been seized and sapped of all goodness. I didn’t function, but still I was expected to continue.

I felt better but my traumatised self wasn’t done. I couldn’t stop thinking about ways to express the pain I’d been through. It was anger, pain and trauma dying to get out somewhere.

Matthew is in a flow and telling me about the partnership he’s been putting together for our magazine. I try to secretly start eating an oat bar as he speaks in a way that looks completely natural. What I really need is a Fanta or hot chocolate but they’re downstairs.

My headphones disconnect again five minutes later. ‘2.9, glucose low’. I can feel myself getting warm and am shaking very subtly. I know I definitely need to sort this low blood sugar out but I still don’t want to interrupt Matthew. I can barely concentrate on what he’s saying anymore. I get out my apple and try and each that, but I know it doesn’t have enough carbs in to fix me quick enough.

I start to imagine telling him that I’m going low. That it’s an emergency and I need to leave my desk and find some sugar. I haven’t told him about my diabetes because, even though we’ve worked together for nearly two years, my health condition is not something that our short meetings require discussion about.

I imagine telling him that there’s an emergency and that I’ll call him back but it feels so abrupt and rude. And then I’ll have to tell him about my diabetes and I really don’t want to. I still don’t want to admit it exists. I almost feel like the emergency doesn’t register. Maybe I would rather die than make a nuisance of myself.

By the time the call ends my blood sugar is at 2.4 and I rush downstairs for Fanta. It’s a strange feeling to know that I could have died in pursuit of making this man feel comfortable. Relying on the understanding of others is not something I am getting used to accepting.

I was wearing a dress from Urban Outfitters and playing ‘Madrigal’ – a piece by Spanish composer Enrique Granados. As I discover the listing on YouTube, I see that from my own account I had issued it a past ‘dislike’. I quickly remove the dislike and feel sad.

The scratching of my cello playing ensues and it’s out of tune. But on my face is the worst sound. That of utter fear and self-deprecation. The day had begun like most days I was performing. With an argument. I was governed by complete fear and distress which clouded everything around me for days prior. My mum and I would argue about what I was going to wear. She would listen to my practice and make comments and it would freak me out so I’d shout at her.

Then on the day itself: ‘Weird question, but when I used to perform as a teenager, I seem to remember us often having an argument before’. I have to phone a friend [my mother] because I really can’t remember. Maybe I’d refused to eat, or been short with her or forgotten to bring my ‘black hole’ to put my spike in.

Listening back, the performance gets more assured and interesting as it goes on and I think my playing is cute. I even nail a ridiculously hard shift which comes out of no where. Definitely a shift beyond grade 8. And it’s still there on the B list of the ABRSM syllabus.

I remember being so impressed that the pianist sight read the Granados piece so well and I remember another girl messing up her piece and not being able to finish it. I also remember my teacher promising to be there and not turning up. I scanned the room to see her familiar shining face, full of kindness and enthusiasm, but she wasn’t there.

When it was over, my mum was quick to criticise. I played badly because I was stressed and felt immense pressure having to prove the ‘high score’ that I had achieved. That number. A number that my mum had etched into an iPod touch as a congratulations for my grade 8. ‘139! congratulations Hattie on a grade 8 distinction!’

She was always more concerned with me playing beautifully and to the best of my ability than the achievement of a number. But the number was everything to me.

Kirsty looks confused and yet utterly sympathetic as I wheeze through my tears, trying to explain why my life has come to an end. The striving and suffering and enduring have resulted in a mark at the end of my second year at RCM that feels utterly appalling. I’m embarrassed, ashamed and decide I can’t perform again until I have returned to the drawing board and understood exactly what went wrong.

Is it the mark? 66/100? Or is it that I know Findlay and Shizuku and practically all of Bess’s students will get marks over 75? I’m petrified to tell her.

Kirsty is so kind and reflects something about how much pressure it looks like I put on myself. I’ve been seeing her for three months at this stage and she has illuminated so much about the classical music world I’ve chosen to embed myself in. I see myself wheezing through her eyes and I glimpse that it might be a bit ridiculous. But how real it all feels.

‘Well, you couldn’t really have expected anything better than that,’ Bess is honest when I see her in Notting Hill a few days later. ‘That Paganini was too hard for you.’ Paganini’s variations had been a dream for me since watching Tortelier and his wife play them on a BBC documentary, and then Nazan Haknazaryan on YouTube waft through them like butter.

‘We need to sort out your right hand’. She’s been trying to sort out my right hand for two years and nothing seems to help. I look back on old videos of myself playing from Chets and my right hand looks much more fluid and in control. But Bess can’t see it. And she is always right.

‘Stop hitting the string!’ It feels like I’m playing the Haydn the same way I did last week but this week she is frustrated with me. ‘Gently darling.’ Bess comes over and manipulates my right arm in circles so I can feel the movement she wants. She smells like a mix of sweet tobacco and expensive linen. Her voice becomes quieter as she makes circles with my arm that it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. ‘There. See, do you feel it?’

When my arm is returned to me, I play again with the newfound freedom and Bess swoops in a semi circle, gesturing with her arm as the phrase develops.

‘You were warned, and you still wanted to go’ my mum says when I read her this piece.

I get it out of its case and commiserate about how my bow needs a rehair. Then I think of all the other things I could spend £100, like going to see Kirsty (therapist) to tell her about my shot love life. And my strings probably need changing. Do people realise that a Spirocore C string (the lowest cello string) costs £98 on its own? Because it has to be tungsten wound. The ‘chrome wound’ ones are almost £40 cheaper, but I was always told to buy tungsten.

Then I play some open notes, put on my practice mute so as not to irritate half of Brixton and play some slow G major scales. Then I open my light blue Bach manuscript and play through some of the C major suite, but quite badly. My fingers don’t move very fast but I can’t be bothered to warm them up.

It’s like I’m rebelling against 10 years of slow morning warm ups and swearing back now that I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to follow any rules. I can do what I like with my cello, even neglect and curse at it.

Popper studies come next, then the familiar passage of Elgar’s cello concert 4th movement, semiquavers starting on an E flat and winding around the full spectrum of the beast. It’s really fun to play. Then maybe I’ll play the big scale in the Elgar’s first movement. Not bad seeing as how.

Back to Bach and this time I wonder how bad the 6th movement will sound. It sounds bad and out of tune but the thought of how much time it will take to get it in tune makes me return to the first, G major suite. Because that wasn’t written for a 5 string cello.

Schumann usually comes next because I’ve always felt closest to crying when playing his music. It never makes sense without the piano though, so I fantasise about plucking up the courage to ask Jasmin if she’d play through these with me one day. Then I think we could do a concert series together of Schumann, maybe with spoken word, or even do it in the Bethlem Museum of the Mind.

It never happens and I never entertain the thought again until the next 6 month session. My creativity for the cello is private and rare and I like it that way. It means I don’t have to return to feeling how I felt all those years at college.

When she opened the door, the familiar fumes of sweet cigarillos combined with Lime, Basil and Mandarin hit my soul with urgent fear. I took my cello off my back and shunted into the warm up bedroom to the right of the door. Shoes were always off and I’d recognise the previous incumbent if not from their cello playing, then from the shoes in the bedroom.

As the previous lesson finished, murmurs of dates, times, next lessons were exchanged before they entered the warm up room. ‘How was it?’ I’d ask. ‘Fine.’

She had a lot of male students, and they all looked the same flavour of determined, serious and mildly terrified. Sometimes it wasn’t fine and they’d pass on the tip that she was in fact in a foul mood. ‘So it’s not you if she starts to have a pop.’ But as much as we exchanged these reassurances, of course it was me. All her misgivings were because of me.

Ascending the stairs, I thought a lot about falling, dying, smashing my cello and breaking my neck. They were windey and not easy to navigate through the fog of dissociative panic and hazy cigarillo smoke. ‘How are you darling?’

The room was large and safe-looking. An open kitchen-living room with french windows opening onto a leafy balcony from which she would smoke. The room was impeccably designed with bohemian Charleston suggestions all over it. Pastel, dusty pinks and blues and beiges. A sofa with beautiful cushions and a wide fire place. A dark oak grand piano sat in the bay window on the street side.

I sat next to the piano, facing the smoking Bess on her balcony. Being careful not to stab my spike into the rug or wooden floor, I sat down ready to play, propping my music on her flimsy, short stand which often blew over under the shaking weight of my sweaty hand.

‘What are you going to play me?’

I wanted to play her all the greatest concertos and sonatas but somehow it was hard to move on from anything we worked on together. Haydn held his claws deep into my 2018, unrelenting as week after week the lesson would rest on how well my wrist met the string to pull the vibrant C major chord at the start of his first concerto.

We weren’t supposed to record our lessons with her but I did sometimes. I could never remember what happened in my lessons so I felt I had no choice but to place my phone stealthily underneath my notebook to the right-hand side of me.