Why am I doing this?

I thought I’d overcome my sense of ‘otherness’, and the complexity of being a highly-sensitive person, but in my late twenties, my world disintegrated. My lowest ebb, and I hadn’t allowed myself to see it coming.

Just twelve months earlier and on the surface, life was on an upward trajectory. Emboldened by a happy relationship with my now wife and a hunger for a fresh start, I’d gambled on quitting my humdrum post in mortgage-lending to seek new horizons; to find myself and be who I’d always wanted to be.

But that’s not how the story unfolded.

Fast forward to an unremarkable day in 2008 and there I was, crouching over a handful of discarded toothbrushes strewn on the bedroom floor. I’d failed to remove them perfectly from their packaging and in my mind, I’d contaminated them. They were of no use to me. Hyper-focused, I feverishly set at the next one, silently praying that I’d get it right this time. I knew it was farcical, but I just had to.

My girlfriend watched on, not knowing what to do, or how to act. If she could help, or if I was now beyond it completely.

There were many moments like this during my protracted breakdown, but that one remains lodged in my memory above all others. The mundanity of it; the investment in something that’d be so trivial to others. The minor details mattered so much, all else was fast becoming peripheral.

And that’s the private face of anxiety you seldom hear of. No drama, no volatility; a vulnerable person trapped in the moment, in silent fragility.

In hindsight, this had been a long time coming:

Of dual Iraqi and English heritage, I spent my childhood years in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. I was a happy child, but my prodigious ability to absorb the sustained wartime tension steered me towards an alternative path. A wide-open empath, my temperament was ill-suited to that unpredictability. The seeds had been sown early on.

We immigrated to the UK in the early 1990s in the wake of the first Gulf War, where I reluctantly contended with a new set of challenges: hormones, homesickness and an uphill battle to fit in.

Predictably, as many do without the proper support in place, I coped by shutting down a part of me to exist. A sacrifice to put one foot in front of the other, rendering my emotional needs redundant in order to survive.

It worked. Spoiler alert: I did survive, but all it took was a break from the established routine to pitch that suppressed emotion outwards, with catastrophic momentum.

Anxiety and paralysis by overthinking swept in as soon as I left my job, their all encompassing effects limiting my life in innumerable ways. It’s been a slow recovery ever since.