Your Are Responsible For Your Own Happiness by Elizabeth Cain

It is my pleasure to introduce author Elizabeth Cain to the blog for the first time. Like me, she is passionate about mental health and it is interesting to read her point of view, especially when the Independent Minds Festival I am organising is sponsoring the mental health charity MIND. Thank you for your insight and your time putting this article together, Liz.

Thank you for this opportunity to contribute to your blog, Val and to express my views on the importance of mental health, especially amongst writers who often become isolated because they work alone. Other people choose to write as a response to mental health challenges. Having said that, as I am unused to writing non-fiction, so you might have to bear with me here. This is also hard for me to share but I think it’s important for anyone who feels the same way to know that you are not alone. And that it doesn’t last forever. Thank you for reading my story.

 Mental health has always been at the forefront of my mind. Having struggled with it one way another since I was a teen, it has been incredible to see the increased awareness in recent years. No longer do I have to worry about judgement or hear the phrase “I don’t understand. Why don’t you just get over it?” or “You have so much to be happy for. Why aren’t you?”

I have had three points in my life where I have felt I hit rock bottom, each bad in their own way and usually a combination of what is happening in my life, and my own obsessive thoughts and spiralling. Each was handled very differently when I sought the help and support that I needed. From being dismissed as being overdramatic, to more awareness that mental health is a problem but still no help being provided, to still having to fight for support but finding that there is more tolerance for those with mental health issues.

I have had various diagnosis for my mental health issues. Depression, anxiety, stress but I don’t believe that any of these have in fact been true. I have been through several periods of turmoil in my life, and to be honest mental health has affected me in different ways depending on what has been happening around me. I prefer not to give it a label, as everyone who experiences issues with their mental health does so in a unique way. Looking back, I don’t believe that I was depressed as a teenager. But being told repeatedly that there is something wrong with you and you should be happy, can make you start to believe what you’re being told is true. I was painfully shy as a teen, with very low self-esteem – which will be very hard to believe for anyone who knows me today. I was constantly bullied at school, which made me withdraw and never wanted to leave the house.  

School as a teenager can be brutal as I’m sure we all know. I don’t like to think of those years and what I remember most is being alone, with no friends and looking forward to my escape when I left for university. Because then it would be different, wouldn’t it? It became a theme in my life that I would always look forward to the next stage, because then it would get better. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties when I suddenly realised, I was wishing my life away and that wasn’t acceptable.

 Being smart at our school was not something you could advertise. If you spoke out in class or answered questions when you were interested in the topic being discussed, then you learnt not to be alone in the corridor or restrooms. Being labelled smart was dangerous. I remember having a horse-riding accident when I was fourteen and having three months off school due to a broken arm. When I returned, I spent most days trying to think of a plausible way I could injure myself again so I could have more time off as home schooling suited me well.

I’m sure that a lot of people will agree when I say that there is nothing wrong with wanting to shut out the world and read a good book. I was particularly lucky when my parents moved us to a farmhouse in the country, in a small hamlet with a population of less than twenty people. Now I had an excuse to avoid people. The nearest bus stop was a mile away, the nearest village with a shop or pub was five miles and out nearest neighbour was a five minute walk.  I lived with my parents and two sisters, which made up a large part of the hamlet’s population and if we wanted to go anywhere, we had to be able to drive. Pretty hard when you’re only twelve and must rely on your parents to take you anywhere. It also made it hard for friends to come over to your house to hang out – that was when I did have friends.

My friends became characters in books, and I started making up my own stories as an escape from a school I hated and living in an isolated area. I was perfectly happy with this situation in my early teens, but as I got older, I knew I would have to pass my driving test as soon as I could to gain any freedom. Around the age of fifteen I was encouraged by my school to join an athletics club as I had broken the triple jump record by over two meters. I think I could write an entire book on the mental toll it takes to compete in sports. The best I achieved was representing the North of England and ranking around eighteenth in the UK for women’s triple jump. I admire anyone who has the ability to push through the mind games and self-doubt,  and succeed in following their dream to take part in a sport they can enjoy.

Needless to say, when I had the choice between continuing to pursue a career as an athlete and going to university, I chose university. I am that annoying person who never really had to try at school to get good grades. Sorry Mum! When I said I was doing my homework and revising…. I really wasn’t.

University was another story. There is certainly a large difference between A-levels and a degree. Saying that I still managed to obtain a 2:1 without much more effort. Which is why it was a shock to my system when I was suddenly struggling to achieve the qualifications in my professional career – I will cover this later.

 Being one of three children can be difficult. I’ve never understood why parents choose to have three children. My husband and I are both one of three, and at different times each one will feel left out. The eldest two will be close to begin with, as the youngest is still the baby, but as the eldest gets older and moves out the younger two becoming close. I think it’s safe to say that over the years, despite living with my middle sister twice since moving out of our parent’s house, it was always me that felt left out. I still do some days as my parent moved south to be closer to both my sisters who now live in the same area as each other. Even though they only live a couple of hours away, it seems a lot further.

Now you may wonder what this has to do with mental health but support from your family is incredibly important. Their dismissal of your feelings, or inability to understand what you are going through can make everything a lot worse. I know my mum struggled, desperate to do anything to make things better but being constantly fussed over and your inability to pull yourself out of it being pointed out every day can make things worse. It can make you feel like a burden or that you don’t deserve help because you aren’t trying hard enough to be happy. That it is your fault that you feel the way you feel, and you need to “Be happy”. I can assure you; it is not your fault and you are not a burden. I wish I could have told myself that on so many occasions and if only one person reads this and believes it then I will consider that a huge achievement.

 I started faking it around my family. Telling the doctor what they wanted to hear so I could come off my medication, telling my mum that I was fine and acting happy all the time. This in itself can add another dimension to anyone with mental health issues. The sheer exhaustion from having to pretend you are fine can be a deep, dark hole. In my twenties, I found myself in a job I hated and continuing to fake my happiness at having a successful career. Fourteen to fifteen hours a day due to staff shortages and lack of vacancies being filled causing further exhaustion. Most of the time I worked six days a week, having to get up at 5:30am to make it to work on time.

During this time, I was expected to complete a training scheme to achieve the qualification I needed to be able to continue working in my profession. Without this I would have been asked to resign. When I did not achieve this qualification, disciplinary action was brought against me which resulted in extra stress at work and more pressure to complete my training within a short time frame.

Long story short I took a leave of absence, signed off with stress for three months. Something had to give, and I was lucky that my doctor was willing to give me a sick note. I will add at this point that when the three months was over, nothing had changed, and my doctor decided that I should be over it by now so I should go back to work. I am grateful that now it is more appreciated that mental health issues can become long term. During my leave of absence, I attended mandatory counselling, and having never had counselling before I didn’t know what to expect. I guess it helped. I don’t really remember. I gained coping mechanisms that helped me get through each day. Or at least that is what I was told, I took their word for it as I can’t remember what they were. Instead, I developed a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol as it was the only way I could get any sleep on a night and a way to not feel what I was feeling. Some days I felt too much, every emotion was overwhelming and physically painful. Other days I felt nothing, and those days were worse in their own way.

 Returning to that job was one of the hardest days of my life. I clearly remember the pressure weighing down on me, threatening to crush me as I walked down the long corridor to the open plan office I shared with the rest of the department. I wanted to get in there, keep my head down and get on with what I needed to do. Getting through one day at a time. But every step was a gauntlet. I work in an extremely specialised field, one in which there are very few jobs which come up each year. How I wish I had discovered writing then as an outlet, I do wonder how things would have turned out if I had.

Writing is more than reading was to me, more than an outlet and an escape. It has become a joy, a way for me to release those feelings I hold in until I can’t take it anymore. In my debut series there is a line that appears in every book. “One step at a time.” This is a tribute to how I cope with my mental health issues, when everything is overwhelming me and it’s all too much. I take a moment to break everything I need to do down into a list. And I choose one step to take. When that is done, I choose another. Knowing that I can get through it if I achieve one step at a time. This came from walking down that corridor, where every step was an achievement. Over the next eighteen months I had twelve job interviews, which went well but all had the same outcome. I got great feedback but kept hearing the phrase I didn’t want to hear. “We just can’t take you on until you’re qualified.”

 Whether it was my own determination or whether the coping mechanisms helped, I managed to gain the qualification I needed by taking annual leave and using my free time to do the work I needed to do; to submit the required evidence. This gave me the freedom to apply to other jobs in the same field, away from the place of work I hated and the area I live in. Sadly, this area is now where my sisters and parents live and it can be daunting heading back to where I feel I hit the lowest point in my life.

The day I received the qualification I applied for a job located within an hour of where I grew up. Away from the area I hated and back to a part of the country I loved. The North! I nearly backed out of the interview when I was asked to give a presentation as part of it, I still struggled with my confidence, but I pulled up my big girl pants and managed to smash the interview. No longer would I hear that dreaded phrase. Now that I had the qualification, I was immediately offered the job.

At the time, I had just started dating my now husband. He is the older brother of someone I went to school with and was in the same Form as me. A fellow victim of the bullies, who also spent most days trying not to draw their attention. While we reminisced over escaping that hellhole, his older brother caught my eye. It was only by chance we ended up in the same pub when I was visiting my parents and we both are grateful that we happened to be in the same place at the same time.

When I got the job in Leeds, we were in that awkward phase where you aren’t sure if it will be serious, but I think we both knew that if I didn’t move closer then we weren’t going to last. Now I can hear you all thinking, “Why couldn’t he move closer to you?”. That would be because I hated where I lived, and I’d been waiting for a job to come up near my hometown for six years. I wanted to be closer to where he already lived and worked. I’d say it worked out well even though I’m still an hour away from there.

As my grandmother always told me, I never “do anything by halves.” I never made things easy for myself. The weekend I moved three hours north of where I lived, I had three concerts in Nottingham, Wolverhampton, and Leeds to see three of my favourite bands – all in the same weekend. Tickets I’d had booked since the month before I applied to the job. I did what I normally do and stuck my head in the sand, hoping that it would all work out. Thankfully it did and I successfully moved into a flat.

It is incredible how when you have mental health issues, if you have someone who listens and doesn’t try to fix you, listens but doesn’t try to solve your problems and someone who is just there for you, it can make a huge difference in how you cope. It helped that at this point in my life I had been through my darkest moments and brought myself through to the other side on my own. But it was certainly easier having someone I could trust and lean on. My husband admits that he’s never had mental health issues and can’t understand what I’m going through. But he has never let me down or made me feel like it is my fault. I knew that I had been through worse and survived, so I would survive what comes next. No matter what it is. Saying that to myself has got me through some hard times, especially during COVID when it felt like we had one incident after another.

I have become very good at absorbing stress over the years, absorbing the feelings I don’t want to feel, but there is only so much a person can take. If I hadn’t had the experience of the issues I’d suffered earlier in my life, then I would have broken down a lot earlier. I won’t say too much about what happened as I’m aware I’m on a limited word count. However, COVID wasn’t the hardest even we had to cope with over the last few years which is saying something.

At the time, I did not feel strong. I felt like a failure. I wanted to scream at the world for how unfair life could be. Why can’t I have anything easy? Why as soon as I feel happy does something happen to drag me backwards.

 “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I have always thought it would me more accurate to say that it isn’t whatever has broken you that makes you stronger. It is you. When a chair is broken, you can’t put it back together and expect to sit on it without it breaking again. You must put the time in to fix it. Whether you use wood glue or screw it back together, you need to find the tools and learn how to reinforce the part that was broken. You might need to ask for help or do research to see how you can fix the chair. But it is your actions that puts you back together again and makes you stronger. You only get one shot at life; it is your decision how you take the actions needed to ensure you are happy with it. I know how hard it can be to ask for help, I’m incredibly stubborn and have always struggled to do everything by myself. It takes some learning but when you do learn to ask for help, from the right people I might add, it’s a game changer.

I have made the mistake of trusting the wrong person multiple times in my life and ended up having to leave behind some very toxic people. I could write another essay on the events that occurred and how people have taken advantage of my willingness to give large parts of myself to help others. I still feel guilty, as if I’ve abandoned them in some way and I’m not there to help them when they need me. Even though I’m sure they don’t even remember who I am anymore. I was someone to be used and discarded when they didn’t need me. I have been much happier since letting those people go. I am not responsible for their happiness; this is my life and I’m responsible for my own happiness. That doesn’t mean treating others unkindly or ignoring those in pain. It means putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others. And making sure that you’re surrounding yourself with the right people.  

 Every mental health journey is different for each individual. This is my story and if it helps one person overcome their struggle then mission accomplished. My journey has taught me what a real friend is and how to distance myself from toxic relationships and those that don’t care about me. No matter how hard that might be.

How you feel is how you feel. You are responsible for your own happiness, and it is you who can ensure it. Life is too short to make yourself miserable to make others happy. Especially if they don’t notice or care. This was a hard lesson for me to learn but once I did, I never looked back. Be careful with those who treat you badly, guilt you into giving yourself to them when they won’t take value it.

And when it is hard, remember to take things one step at a time.

The Author

Liz Cain is a Nuclear Medicine Physicist by day, and an urban fantasy author by night.

She was born in East Yorkshire in the UK and grew up near the sea with her parents and two sisters. She moved to the midlands, which was much too far south for her, and spent 20 years trying to move back to her home town.

She has travelled at every opportunity from Thailand and Australia to touring national parks in North America. Liz has done lots of crazy things for charity, including skydiving, running, swimming, and even cutting off her hair. While out on adventures she finds herself weaving intricate tales in her head which one day she had to write down.

Liz has loved reading her whole life, growing up with Anne McCaffrey, Mary Stewart, and Terry Goodkind. Becoming an author happened by chance when she jumped at the opportunity to help a friend tell a story that deserved to be told. It inspired her to follow her lifelong dream and now she is self-publishing her own kickass, no-nonsense FMCs who you’ll love.