Rebuilding Your Life After a Mental Health Crisis: What No-one Tells You
No-one gives you a guidebook on how to rebuild your life after a mental health crisis. You’re just expected to get on with it. To pick up the pieces and carry on. Even though your identity has been shaken to its core and everything feels like it has come crashing down around you. Professionals declare that you are ‘better’, but no-one prepares you for the emotions you are left with, for the feeling of brokenness that won’t lift, for the fact that your journey of healing, or processing what has happened to you, often begins only once the crisis has passed.
You are left to construct a new narrative - one that includes this experience that terrified you, that distorted your reality, that shattered your sense of normality, an experience you somehow have to accept. No matter how much you wish it hadn’t happened, it did. It’s part of your story now, and it can’t be rewritten. You can’t cross out the memories of paralysing fear. You can’t invent a backstory to try to make it make sense. You can’t ignore the fact that it could, in theory, happen again. This reality sits in your mind day after day, even as time crawls on, raising questions you can’t quite shake. Will you have to live on edge forever, waiting for another episode? How will you ever feel safe - or at peace - again?
And then there is the destabilising sense of loss that comes with not feeling like yourself. The parts of you that make you you are numbed by exhaustion, medication, and trauma. The memories - of being constantly watched, locked up, and out of control - linger. Long after the real danger has gone, your mind is still trying to make sense of it all: why did it have to happen? How could you have stopped it? What does recovery look like? How are you meant to move on? And the unsettling shift of identity, unfolding without your permission. You aren’t the same person you were before.
To the outside world, you look ‘better’. You’re no longer paranoid, no longer trapped in delusional thinking, no longer deemed to be ‘at risk’. You get up each morning, go to work, smile during conversations, make plans for the future. You repeatedly reassure yourself that you’re okay, it’s over. But it’s like your body doesn’t believe it. It’s stuck in the in-between - part of you living in the present, going through the motions of life, another part of you caught in the past, bracing yourself for it to happen again.
Mixed into all of this is fear. You’re afraid to let go of the hyper-vigilance that once felt protective. You’re afraid of the expectations - both yours and others’. What will people expect from you now that the crisis is supposedly over? What does the future look like when it’s no longer defined by survival? And is the ‘old you’ still reachable, or have you been left to grieve that version of yourself, stuck forever in the past?
Rebuilding your life after a mental health crisis is far harder than anyone ever warned you. It’s grief - for your past self. Sadness - that it had to happen. Loneliness - that no-one else can quite understand. Uncertainty - at how you move forward. And desire - to reclaim your sense of self, a feeling of safety, and a future that is waiting for you, even if you can’t see it. Whilst there is no guidebook, others have walked this journey before you, so you aren’t alone. This is just a quiet, complex part of recovery that is often invisible to everyone around you.
GIRL UNMASKED (The Sunday Times Bestseller) is available to order from Amazon and all major bookstores as a hardback, paperback, audiobook and ebook.
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