I started believing these last couple years that my family would be better off without me. It got to the very dark stage where I would walk the canal for hours, trapped inside my head with my worst demons, tears down my face, hating myself for feeling so selfish.
I lost our beautiful house three years ago, forced to sell up because my freelance business was not bringing in the type of money it used to. We bought a smaller house around the corner so the kids weren't forced to quit their schools, and with the equity the sale released, we were at least able to put a decent chunk of money in the bank.
The sense of guilt and shame was enormous.
Having money in the bank didn't change a thing.
I became more and more depressed, sleeping two hours a night, lying in bed with the anxiety of what groundhog day would inevitably bring.
Essentially, I had a complete physical and mental breakdown, 25 years of working for myself, the daily grind of supporting a family and starting every day from absolute scratch, a media industry changing quicker that I could possibly keep pace with.
My self-esteem was at zero, supplemented by overeating to try and make myself feel better for a while at least, putting on nearly four stone and hating what was staring back at myself in the mirror, a complete and utter hatred of the pathetic man I had become.
I don't really have many friends, I work in isolation from home and would go days without speaking to anyone or actual human contact, outside of my wife coming home and asking how my day was, waiting to unload on her.
My young kids would walk around on eggshells and my wife just kept on saying something needed to change. After one particular moaning she just burst into tears and said we couldn't go on like this, she had reached her limit.
I had spent so long talking about all the things I couldn't change, how I'm not qualified at the age of 45 to start all again, even though I despise what journalism has become, still a slave to earning a living from it.
I've been with my beautiful wife since she was 15 and yet 26 years later, she has always had my back, I just didn't appreciate what I do have going for me.
My doctor had previously tried to prescribe me beta-blockers to control my general anxiety disorder, supposedly because my cortisol levels were always through the roof because my body was always in fight or flight mode, owing to my high state of readiness, even when danger was far away.
I vowed to my wife I would "try" to get better and the next day I booked an appointment with the nurse at the surgery, she always seemed to have a friendly face.
I told her everything and said I was just "sick of fighting myself every day" and she gave me a hug and could see how much I was hurting. She referred me to Trafford Self Help Therapies for CBT therapy and, after a few weeks, got myself a counsellor.
This amazing woman stripped me down, making it so easy for me to tell her my deepest thoughts and fears. How I had conditioned my mind to have automatic negative thoughts, thinking I was protecting myself from harm by isolating myself.
How I can't say no to anyone, always going out of my way for everyone, needing to be liked, even if it compromised myself. Having a father, more through his generational thoughtlessness and complete lack of emotional intelligence, who had fat shamed me from an early age, even though I wasn't that big, just not perfect.
Setting myself up for failure, time and again, an all or or nothing attitude, nothing in between.
My therapist helped me to identify my qualities, a completely impartial observer. How she "admired" my drive every day to get up and start work at 5.30am every day from the age of 16, but there comes a point when something will give.
I was given a different way of looking at things, from an intellectual level, working backwards and using my previous experiences of bad situations to inform me that things invariably worked out okay, so there was no need to sweat the the things which happen in the interim?
I finished 12 months of therapy recently and can maybe see I wasn't ready previously to change at other similar periods of my life.
This year was about working on what was going on inside my head and improving my physical state. I went back to the gym, every day, I've lost nearly three stone in two months, no meat, no alcohol, no sugars. I'm almost back to my prime weight of 12 stone and I am sleeping like a baby.
I am still not sure what my future job prospects are like, I feel the world has moved on a lot and don't quite know where my place will be in it.
All I know is that I am enjoying meeting new people, playing squash, bench pressing 100kg, feeling like my life isn't just passing me by. Next year I will put myself out there to try and work out the next career step.
More importantly, my wife has got back the man she has always loved, she just loves me a little bit more for trying to "fix" myself.
This was very hard for me to share, but if it can give a glimmer of hope to anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation, then it will have been worth it.
I've stopped caring about the things I cannot change.
Peace and love, Blues.x
