In my darkest moments, I imagined what it would be like to end it all. Dealing with Mental Health throughout my Schooling Years and Career.

Hi, my name is Aaron, and until recently, I have suffered from Mental Health problems through most of my schooling and working life. I say until recently because I firmly believe I have come out the other side, with a better handle on my mental health. I am happy, and I live a mentally healthy life.

This was not always the way, however, as I went through much of my higher education and early careers in hospitality and sales with poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and self-harming incidents.

Today, I am going to talk through my experiences, my emotions, and my thoughts on mental health.

Why? Well, the answer is simple. I wish someone wrote this kind of article for me. To show me I was not alone, that other people felt what I felt, and there were better ways of managing the darkest feelings inside me.

Disclaimer: This article is going to get raw, and at times uncomfortable. I will stress now that I strongly do not recommend you ever self-harm and you seek help from those who are qualified to help you if you feel this way. If you want more information on resources and people you can contact please send me a private message. I am always open to talk also, and happy to be a shoulder to lean or to listen to your story.

My background

At the time of writing this article, I am 30 years of age, working in Sales. I grew up in North Essex with my parents as an only child. I suffered at a young age with a major speech impediment and had to attend speech therapy in London 3 times a week during my earliest years in secondary school.

Weirdly enough, I don't think I was ever really bullied for it. A lot of kids made jokes here or there, and even today, prospects I call in cold sales calls sometimes laugh out of awkwardness, but I was lucky in the sense, my stutter did not give my school bullies much ammo.

I had a very happy childhood and my parents loved and cared for me greatly. Unfortunately, as a small child, I was diagnosed with a heart defect, a hole in the heart, and had to have surgery. I probably would not be here today if I did not have that surgery. I can only thank the amazing doctors and nurses at Great Ormand Street Hospital for saving my life.

No for the most part my childhood was a good one, surrounded by good friends (that I, unfortunately, have no contact with anymore), a loving home and good schooling.

My career can be split into two parts, Hospitality and Sales.

These are the only two careers I have ever worked in, starting as a part-time bag packer in the local Chinese after school, to my first "real" job in JD Wetherspoons, to a major career-boosting role in a 4 Red Star and 2 Rosette Hotel/Restaurant, to having a hand in management in a fresh food high customer count fresh food pub, to my first recruitment role (weirdly still recruiting for hospitality roles), to a more stable recruitment role (again hospitality) to where I am today, Information Security Sales.

That last one is the odd one out granted, but it is the role where I have settled the most comfortably, and really was able to start looking after me.

My mental health problems started initially somewhere in my late high school years, early Sixth Form years, around Year 10-11 of school.

My first mental health problems arise. Anxiety.

Anxiety was the first manifestation of my downward spiral of mental health. I started feeling nervous and stressed without trigger, cause or reason at the most random times, in the most unusual situations.

For any here who have never suffered from anxiety, I envy you. A lot of people say anxiety is "just nerves" but it goes so much deeper than that.

Imagine walking down the street, and suddenly you start to feel tense, you start sweating, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Your hands tremble, your breathing becomes shallow. Your legs feel week, your vision goes both blurry and hyper-focused. You are both exhausted and restless. It passes after a few moments, or a few minutes (anxiety is cruel like that), and you feel drained, paranoid and wanting nothing more than to retreat to your home or your safe space.

What I have just described is a pretty severe anxiety attack, and I had attacks like this all the time. What caused them? Well, nothing really. I could be sat in class, in the common room, walking down the street, eating dinner, watching TV in bed. They still hit me and hit me hard.

I didn't understand it at first, and it never started as severe as the above example, but over time, as I pushed it aside, and decided to ignore it, the worse it got.

Anxiety becomes depression

This is a phase of my personal history that feels like a distant dream, something that feels ethereal, hard to reach. Not quite real.

But it was real.

Anxiety developed in depression, and the depression was deep. I spiralled into a darkness that was hard to shift. I destroyed my personal relationships, distanced myself from society, I spiralled inward and downward.

Until one day, I picked up a pair of scissors and cut them hard against my skin.

I could lie to you and say the pain was excruciating, it was enough to put me off forever. The sight of the blood made me sick.

But it would be a lie.

In truth, it was addicting, exhilarating and the release I was so desperately looking for. Do I ever regret doing it in the first place today? Of course, I do. Am I ashamed? Maybe a little. It is how my brain works.

In reality, the first time I cut myself, and all the times after, I felt good. Or, at least, I thought I felt good. I know now, as an older and wiser person that fleeting moment of feeling good was only the adrenaline of the moment, the perception of control, the falsehood of "release".

But oh did it feel real at the time. It is why today, I understand why people do self-harm themselves. I so wish I read this post by my future self before I did.

I eventually went to see a doctor on the behest of a few close friends, and diagnosed with anxiety-induced depression and referred to a local mental health clinic.

This is the ethereal, dream-like moment of my history. I do not know if it is my brain trying to protect me by blurring all those memories, or if it was the strong dosage of Citalopram I was prescribed, but either way, I fell into a cycle. Self-harm, pretend I was ok, speak to the psychiatrist, pretend I was ok, go home, pretend I was ok, repeat.

I enter the working world.

Hospitality and the Pub, Hotel and Restaurant Trade

Hospitality. What a bitch of an industry to work in. The hours are tough, the work is tough, the appreciation doesn't exist, the pay is naff, but at the end of the day, some of my very best working experiences were in this industry.

Unfortunately, some of my worst was too.

I started work at the age of 18, on my 18th birthday day in fact. I started working in my local Wetherspoons pub and found I liked the job and wasn't half bad either. I worked up the ranks pretty quick, but I fell into a really bad habit.

That habit?

Alcohol.

Coor blimey did I drink. As soon as my shift finished I was back around the other side of the bar knocking back a few drinks. On my day off I was in my place of work, drinking. When out with colleagues, we were drinking.

I only know now, again looking back (hindsight is beautiful isn't it?), how much I drank, and how much it was torturing me.

I stopped self-harming, I threw myself into work, and when I was not at work, I was throwing myself into the drink.

Self-harming had manifested its way into another form.

I have a million and one anecdotes about working in the pub trade that I may share another time, including people trying to bottle me, but I think we best move forwards in time to when I left Wetherspoons and went to work for a private 4 Red Star Hotel as Assistant Restaurant Manager in their restaurant.

The hours were long, the pay was criminal, the work was difficult. High-end service and dining like nothing I had ever seen before.

I threw myself into the role, and this time, rather than drink when off duty, I would work more. I found I was working hours past my shift, spending extra time in the office and even doing nothing but work when at home. I had replaced self-harming with alcohol and replaced it again with work.

You may see where I am going with this, self-harm is not just the physical harm you put yourself through, it can also be the other actions in your life that harm you physically or mentally.

By this point in the story, I am getting pretty exhausted with the long hours, underappreciation, and the politics of both places of work I had been in.

I needed a change.

This was none more evident than when, one day, I walked into the Hotel Operations Manager's office, and told him two nights before I had cut myself so bad I was rushed to hospital.

On that particular night, I had used a very sharp chefs knife to cut a large slash into my leg, and in the panic of seeing just how much blood was gushing from my leg I called out to my parents in the next room.

My only memories, my dad putting his entire body weight onto the wound, the ride in the ambulance, and the hours spent in A&E having stitches and being seen by different mental health doctors.

Seeing the panic in my parent's faces. Feeling the panic I felt then, I knew something had to change, and I had to work on making myself better.

This was my turning point.

This was the first time I had self-harmed physically in a long time, and we will not go too much into that now, it is not fair to my parents who might read this to live through that horror again.

Needless to say, I have never self-harmed since. Physically, alcoholically, workaholicly.

More importantly, I had learnt how to talk to people about it. And I s**t you not, it made all the difference. You see, when laying in the A&E bed, I had to talk to my parents, I had to talk to doctors, and actually, over a short period of time, I felt better after talking about it.

I am not kidding, a simple conversation that I had played out so much for years in my head, and dreaded, was actually nothing to it.

I left the hotel industry and went into a fresh food gastro pub in the north of Cambridge. I loved this job. It gave me responsibility, it gave me passion, and it gave me a chance to show how good a worker I really am. There is not much to tell here, I was genuinely getting better.

I kept talking, to friends, family, counsellors, punters. I kept talking, and the more I talked, the more I realised I like the sound of my own voice.

Anyway, working here was fun. It was tough and challenging at times, but I was going in the right direction.

I am pretty sure I never thought about self-harming once during my time there.

All was good.

But this is not the end. No. In fact, the restaurant got taken over, and things starting slipping. The new owners were trying to establish themselves, get their team sorted and all in all, I did not fit in there. I was being worked the most stupid hours, starting at 9 am, finishing past midnight, 6 days a week and still coming in on the 7th for "training".

I was done with hospitality, I wanted out and to never come back.

I would not let this industry kill my mental health any further.

One small step out of hospitality, one giant leap into sales.

Sales. What an interesting industry.

I will not bore you with too much detail here, as for the most part, my mental health was pretty solid. I will make this observation though, recruitment, in particular, is broken when it comes to mental health, and as an industry lives in the '80s.

I was actually pretty scared to speak out about my mental health. It is a cutthroat industry, where there is no job security. Why would I put myself at risk?

Eventually, a little later on, I was a little more open about it.

As I was doing hospitality recruitment, I wanted to do what was best for the candidates I looked after. This was in vain, as at the end of the day, temp workers and perm candidates are treated as products, and our job was to get them jobs, earn the fee. No matter what.

It is no wonder so many recruiters have bad reps. Do not get me wrong, there are some great ones out there, but the industry still has a long way to go.

And here I am today, working in information security sales, and I have found my "home". A company that appreciates me, pays me well, values my opinion and actually give two craps about how I feel.

I am in a good place but like to reflect on the bad places I have been. In my darkest hours, I contemplated ending it all. I still have to live with the scars on my legs. I still have to sit here knowing there are so many out there suffering.

Conclusion

I wished that when I was 17-23, when I was self-harming, I had read this very article. I would never have done it. I was so scared to talk to people I shut myself down inwards. I didn't want to think I could be helped.

Mental health does not define who a person is, and for some, bad mental health, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, alcoholism, drug misuse is going to be part of their journey.

But it doesn't need to be. You can remember there is always someone out there willing to listen. I am willing to listen.

The conversation is the first step to recovery. If you want to know whom you can have a conversation with, please message me and I will remain discreet.

If you do not wish to speak to me the NHS is there to help too!

One question I get asked often is "how did your parents handle this?". For the most part, I was so good at keeping it in the dark, and pretending I was ok, no one had a clue just how bad it was.

My parents loved me, they cared for me, but I didn't talk to them for a long time. It may have been a shame looking back, I am not too sure, but if you are a parent concerned for you or a loved one, again use the resources above.

It is not your fault if your son or daughter suffers from mental health without you knowing about it. It is no one's fault. All you can do is be there, and be ready when they are ready to talk.

Love who are you, love what you do, I love you all, you are all 10/10's and no one can tell you differently.

Please tune in to the PodBarber in the next couple of weeks to hear me talk about all the above in much more detail! I recorded not long ago, and the episode featuring me should be airing in the next couple of weeks.