Could you tell me a time you felt tired?

I’ll always remember the night before my trial day as a painter on a popular TV series as the first one I didn’t slept a wink. Before that night I’d miraculously slept very well! But something about ‘proper adulting’ after university unlocked some issues with anxiety I had managed to suppress for a while as I survived the rest of art school. 

 As the hours went by I got more and more anxious that I was only able to get five hours of sleep, then four ... to the extent that I anticipated my alarm going off at 5am. I tried reading, watching tv, podcasts, breathing slower, nothing worked! In fact the opposite, I felt way more anxious and breathless after focusing on breathing. After engaging with medical services, I now understand that I was experiencing an anxiety attack. 

Eventually I got the bus, then train, then taxi to this random location outside Glasgow to complete a trial day, even though I’d never felt as fatigued in my life before. It became a case of just surviving the 12 hours, and I didn’t have high hopes for the outcome. And I was right, I didn’t get the apprenticeship I applied for. This was devastating but I persevered, finding temporary employment at the Fringe. 

Turns out I didn’t do as terribly as I thought as the production company offered me three months of work anyway so I still got an incredible taste of working in TV. More importantly I learnt that you can live off of very little sleep and still function! I was naive enough to never even consider this becoming a part of my reality, even though I now can see my parents have both struggled with sleep for years, past the stages of our infancy. 

However it isn’t a sustainable way to be, and I knew there was more than a scattering of sleepless nights in my life after art school. This came to a crux in early 2018, after a bad relationship uncovered some other unresolved mental health issues I had been ignoring in order to live as normally as I could. My GP was incredibly helpful and guided me to the right medication and therapy. This came in the form of visiting the Rivers Centre in Edinburgh, a specialist NHS service for anyone who has experienced psychological trauma. I attended a meeting called the lightbulb course, which aptly helped me to understand that what I had been dealing with for the last four years was in fact PTSD. 

The course was great for helping me understand what happens in my brain to make me feel this way, and to allow me to stay awake for more than 24 hours. It took a different perspective than the talking therapy that I had sought closer to the time of the traumatic event, and honestly helped me look more objectively about why I am the way I am. By looking at PTSD from all these different angles, I am able to be empathetic to myself and others who have experienced trauma. Indeed seeking this help has actually empowered me to make a significant career change into nursing, a profession in which I hope to be able to provide the care and dignity that I was given by the NHS during my diagnosis.