Just over three months ago, I published my first ever book
on kindle called ‘A safe place’. The
book is a memoir of my experience with anxiety, agoraphobia and
depression.
It was pretty exciting and surreal on March 9 this year to
see the book complete, published and available for people to buy on
Amazon. The book was kind of two years
in the making, after I originally wrote the draft over spring and summer 2013
and then shoved it in a draw to hopefully do something with one day, and then
in spring 2014 I dug the notebooks out and started the mammoth task of editing
the 90,000 words of draft into the story that I truly wanted to tell.
When I started writing the draft in 2013 I was at a pretty
low point in life. I had gone through a
nervous breakdown two years before, and in the wake of that my 10 year
relationship had ended, and I had needed to leave the corporate world because my
agoraphobia and bouts of depression were too extreme for me to be able to force
myself to commit to making it into an office every day. I found myself living back at home with my
Dad in my old childhood bedroom, and I was making just enough cash to make it
through one day at a time.
To be honest I started writing the book out of boredom. Between the little bits of freelance work
that I could pick up there was a lot of dead time, and I was looking for
something to fill it with. One day the
idea came to me that maybe I could write a book about helping people to deal
with panic attacks, as I was really starting to get the hang of beating them
thanks to CBT therapy.
As I started writing though, I quickly realised that it wasn’t
the sort of book that I wanted to write.
During the time that I had been dealing with agoraphobia and anxiety I had
read so many of those ‘say goodbye to your panic attacks in ten easy steps’
books and they always left me feeling more hopeless than ever because the
techniques didn’t work for me. The books
that had helped me the most had been memoir style ones, because I always felt
like the person writing them knew exactly what I was going through, and that gave
me hope.
I decided that I wanted to tell the full story of my battles
with anxiety, right from my first ever panic attack on a bus in central London,
to my full nervous breakdown a year later, to then developing agoraphobia and
losing my confidence to leave the house for months, and all the details in
between.
When I first started writing the draft it was all a bit
clunky, and I struggled to get my emotions out on to paper, but a few weeks in
to the writing process it suddenly became a massive need in me to get my story
out on to the page. I had been the most
unenthusiastic and directionless person for the last two years, but suddenly I found
myself rushing to get to the library for opening time and I would sit at a desk
there writing solidly till 5pm, stopping only to go to the toilet or to eat
lunch.
Writing the draft became my life, and at the weekends I would
think about what I was going to write the following week and how I would
express my emotions in the story. I didn’t
have any money, but I didn’t care, the book was giving me everything that I needed. It wasn’t always easy writing about my
experiences though, I was still massively grieving for my relationship and job,
and sometimes as I wrote about something it would trigger off the loss that I felt
and I would get extremely emotional.
Sometimes after a week of writing about tough and painful memories, I would
find myself lying in bed crippled by heartache for everything that had gone from
my life.
I found editing the book a year later just as all-encompassing
as writing the draft had been. I loved
seeing this thing that I had created become a polished product. When I first started though it felt like
typing up three notebooks full of 90,000 words was going to take forever, but
like everything in life it all happened bit by bit, and I can honestly say that
I loved every day of editing the book.
I am proud of myself for telling my story and everything
that I experienced with anxiety, agoraphobia and depression. Although the book massively helped me to heal
and to release my journey, my main hope from publishing it is that somebody
going through something similar will feel a connection with it and it will give
them the strength to take that first step towards recovering and embarking on a
bright future.
If you would like to check out my book, you can find it here
on Amazon. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Safe-Place-anxiety-agoraphobia-depression-ebook/dp/B00UFTY0GQ/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1434988548&sr=1-2&keywords=a+safe+place
Thank you xxx
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