‘I love myself and I want to die.” Twenty-four years later, I still remember those first words I uttered to the psychiatrist on duty at the Maudsley hospital in London. I had been escorted there that morning by two police officers after being found on the platform of Brixton tube acting, in their words, “suspiciously”.
I was detained under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act for the next 28 days while they tried to work out what was wrong with me: a conveyor belt of plausible-sounding illnesses that came with an accompanying smörgåsbord of pacifying drugs.
It was the first public display of weakness I had shown to the world at large, a world that reflected back its shock at the ingratitude shown to my bright and enviable future. I had recently graduated from the National Film and Television School, where my final project had won prizes at international festivals; the BBC was knocking at my door; agents were keen to represent me. Yet, blinded by the glare of that sun, and unbeknown to anyone, I had lost sight of myself.
I remember little about that day, or the ones that followed, but in the subsequent months I grew thankful that I was still around to take stock of my life. In the seclusion of the ward, and with various therapists, I was encouraged to talk about my past. The process was slow and reluctant.
I laughingly reminded them that I had grown up in the “post-Larkin generation”, in a working-class, single-parent family with my Chinese immigrant mother who, when told I was being sectioned, asked unironically if I would be back for tea, as I had promised to take her to B&Q.
I reflected occasionally on a phase in my adolescence when I had become a prolific shoplifter, albeit only of things we needed – milk, eggs, novels – undeterred by the prospect of being caught. To be caught, I reasoned, was to finally relinquish control to someone else, someone who would tell me when to eat, when to sleep; to finally feel the weight of the world off my shoulders.
“You were always funny,” my sister said in the aftermath of my diagnosis. “Funny-strange or funny ha ha?” I asked. “Funny different.”
As frightening and isolating as those first months were, I realised how much I had minimised the impact of feeling “different” on my mental health, how I had deliberately replaced the word with sanitised synonyms such as “quirky” and “eccentric”. The irony of having bipolar was not lost on me: the way it reflected how I had always felt growing up – not one thing or the other.
Therapy helped me admit that my experiences as a mixed-race kid in the 70s were, in hindsight, chaotic and traumatic. I shook as I remembered the molotov cocktails through our letterbox, the racist abuse in the streets, how we were forbidden by my white British father from learning Cantonese because: “When in Rome …” I mourned how we had lived a lie: celebrating our Chinese heritage behind closed doors, but pretending to be white on the outside, despite our physical appearance. It was no wonder the centre couldn’t hold.
I’m not sure you have to hit rock bottom before you begin to surface, but it was true for me. As I got stronger, I began to address how those early years of fear had undermined my adult life. I took assertiveness training and stopped being the people-pleaser who laughed off the passive-aggressive racism of my colleagues and bosses rather than risk a confrontation.
In private, I dismantled the borders around my creativity as a writer and stopped producing the bland, exclusively west-leaning stories that I thought the market demanded but which, I suspect, had also been my way of trying to “pick a side”, to plant a flag in my own identity.
Being sectioned gave me the pause I needed to evaluate these choices and learn to live more authentically. Although I’ll always have bipolar, I have found a new joy in celebrating my difference, through learning more about my Chinese ancestry in terms of its food, culture and language, and by volunteering as an advocate for others in the mental health system who might also have lost sight of who they are. I firmly believe that our fight to be seen is everyone’s responsibility. I’m also finally published, with a book that tells the story of women unashamedly reclaiming themselves.
The most wonderful gift, however, was being around to have children of my own. My son is autistic and of dual heritage; although he lives in a slightly more tolerant generation, I also like to believe that the lessons I have passed on to him have helped him become the incredibly self-aware and self‑affirming young man he is. It’s liberating to reclaim your identity in this way, to no longer feel you have to explain that you’re half this or half that; to finally experience the positivity in no longer feeling you are a fraction of the whole but rather everything, all at once.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton (Hodder & Stoughton) is out now
