Today World Mental Health Day. To me, yesterday, tomorrow, next Wednesday and Christmas Day are also Mental Health Days.

My story begins at the age of 13, when I first realised that something just wasn't quite right; I'd never heard of depression or anxiety because those words weren’t as common back then as they are now...but I'd heard of “nutters” and “freaks”. I'd seen people at school who were shunned because they were "weird", and I was fiercely determined not to let that happen to me, so I kept my mouth shut.

I grew up in a family where we didn't talk about mental health so all the issues I was dealing with were swept under the rug. I was always told to pray about it because prayer solved everything and I knew/felt that wasn't true. I wanted to talk about it and find out why I felt the way I did or why I hurt myself, physically and mentally, the way I did, but no one in my family wanted to help me with that.

It's her birthday she wakes up and excitedly wakes all her teddies up that lined the length of her bed, she reaches into the cupboard and pulls out a small parcel wrapped in sheets of a magazine tied in a ribbon from a rag doll, excitedly she unwraps the gift to reveal one of her favourite Moomin toys. She grabs Mousey tightly and thanks her for the gift, the only gift she would receive that day.

A gift she had wrapped herself some days before her birthday anticipating a repeat of previous birthdays.

Every day is a struggle: the battle in my mind between wanting to die to end the pain, and trying to survive to overcome the trauma of the past and live a decent life. In an instant, emotions can go from one extreme to another and it can take a very, very long time for the intense distress to come back down to the normal emotional baseline. It’s all about tolerating the distress – how can one who has never learned to self-soothe know how to tolerate extreme distress without behaving in extreme ways?