About three weeks ago I was sitting at home with my 14 year old son looking at the Do Lectures website on my computer and we were on the page that has a gallery of photographs of all the people who were going to be speaking at the event and, admittedly, I was getting a bit overexcited, but at a certain point he turned to me and he looked very serious and he said, "I don't mean to be rude, but why have they asked you?"

It was a really good question I thought. As I failed to answer it.

(You can't see quite how serious he is in this picture, but you get the general idea...)

Probably like loads of people here, I like doing things. I really like doing things and I like making things. My very favourite place to be is somewhere between the concrete reality of the everyday, here, and that wonderful incomprehensible infinitely possible space somewhere out there where all the new ideas and thoughts come from. I really love trying to draw inspiration from there and listen for ideas and then shape them into something tangible that I can see here. And so I've spent all of my life trying to do that one way or another.

But there's been a bit of a problem. And the problem is that I've had a recurring tendency over the years to get about 80 percent of the way through whatever it was that I was doing and then stop. And it's happened over and over again. I've had an idea and I've tried to do it and I've worked really, really hard. And then just at the point where I thought it was getting really promising, I'd stop - or more accurately I'd sort of crumple, fall apart and give up. So the reason why I couldn't answer my son's question is because, the way I understand it, the Do Lectures is about people who do things coming to talk about what they do, in the hope of inspiring other people to go out and do things too. And the only thing that I've done really consistently in my life is crumple - and I don't want to inspire anyone to do that.

However, a couple of years ago something happened in my life that meant that I had to learn a whole host of new and different ways of doing things. And in the process I discovered that it was possible to change some stubborn behaviours that I'd never liked but didn't really know what to do about. So what I'd like to do is tell you a little bit about that story and three of the most important things that I've learned from the process that are helping me to start doing better. 

............

So, I've drawn what I think is quite an accurate representation of my life here:

This bit here was quite nice, I think:

Up to about age five was quite good. As far as I can tell from my photo albums from that time I spent quite a lot of that time sitting in foliage, a bit like this:

See, this was back in the days when your parents would buy a roll of film and they'd put it in the camera and then, over the course of many months, they would use it up and then they'd send it away and then they'd wait a very long time for it to be developed and come back again only to discover that the photo that they took of you sitting in the long grass.... you've got your eyes closed. But that was the only one they'd got. So it made it to the photo album anyway. 

So yes, I really liked doing that. I liked sitting in foliage and I liked watching clouds and I liked daydreaming and I liked making up stories and I really liked nicking raisins off the side when my mum was baking. I liked things like that. And then when I went to school at the age of five, I discovered that going to school had a really negative impact on my ability to spend hours doing things like sitting in foliage and watching clouds. And so I decided that going to school was a really stupid idea and that I didn't want to do it, but unfortunately my parents didn't agree with me, so I carried on going. And, as I got older, the schools got bigger and noisier and more demanding, like they do, and there seemed to be more and more rules about who you could talk to and what you were supposed to like and what you were allowed to be good at. And for someone who'd spent most of their life to date living in the middle of nowhere with two elderly parents who'd already done more than their fair share of child-rearing and who basically just wanted to be in the garden and were quite happy to leave me in a hedge somewhere - in a nice way - I was totally unprepared for all of that and I found it deeply stressful. 

And suddenly at the age of 12 this happened:

I became mysteriously and acutely ill and I was taken into hospital and I had all manner of diagnostic tests and I saw all kinds of experts and I went home and got progressively more ill and lost a lot of weight and started having bizarre psychological symptoms like dissociation. My parents were terribly worried and one day after about six months, my mum and I went to see the family doctor again, none the wiser really about what was going on, and he turned to her and he said, "We can't find anything wrong. We think it's all in her mind." And we rather sheepishly left his office and went home. And I never got to ask him exactly what he meant because I didn't have a chance to talk to him. And I never quite found out what sense my parents made of it because we didn't really talk about things like that. But what I thought he meant was, "You've made it all up." All of that pain and fear and the worry that my parents went through. I thought it was my fault and I'd done something wrong and I felt deeply ashamed of myself.

And the only credible explanation I could come up with for what had happened was this:

Because what if I'd actually made it happen because I hated school so much? What if somehow I had made it possible to not go there for six months? But I didn't really understand how. And I didn't know, could people's minds do things like that? Could my mind do something like that? And if so, how could it do that? And, and if it could do that, if it could do something that big and that scary without me understanding it and without me consciously having any control over it, then how could I ever trust it?

So I decided I couldn't. 

Living with a belief like that is really uncomfortable. If you've believed that about yourself, you will know how uncomfortable it is and the fact that you'd probably do almost anything to stop feeling that. And that's how it was for me. I would have done almost anything to stop feeling that. So I came up with a very sophisticated strategy that I thought would fix it and this is it:

So I started doing that. I started trying really, really hard and the trying really, really hard seemed to be paying off. When I was 18 I got a place at Cambridge University to study French and Polish and no one in my family had been to university before and it felt like a really big thing. I don't even now quite know how I ended up going to study French in Polish because what I really wanted to do was go to Bali and play gamelan music, but I'd learned not to trust myself and lots of people said it was a very good idea. So I went and it was fine until I got there and discovered that I didn't want to study French and Polish. And then, well, this crumpling happened here:

And I dropped out of university and to this day I still don't have a degree.

But it was all right because I had another plan. I left university and I started giving music lessons to children and I came up with a new way of teaching children how to read and write music using puzzles and I sent off a proposal to a music publisher and, to my astonishment, they offered me a contract to write and illustrate eight books. And by the time I was 21 I was developing an entire brand with them and I was employed as a consultant and it was all looking pretty exciting.

And I remember thinking to myself - at the point when I go into a bookshop and I see my books on the shelf with my name on the cover, that will be when I've proved that I'm alright really. And I got the first three books finished and they came out and I went to a bookshop and I looked at them on the shelf with my name on the cover. And nothing happened. Nothing. 

So I went back to my drawing board, quite literally, and I carried on writing my books, but I'd kind of lost enthusiasm for them now because if they weren't going to make everything alright then really what was the point? I made it all the way to the end of the seventh book of eight and then then there was a bit more crumpling that happened and I never completed that series or developed the brand.

So by this point it was getting kind of important that I found something bigger and more amazing to do that I could believe would be the thing that would make me feel alright. So I did what any reasonable person might do. I decided to become a jazz musician. I formed a band and actually, I can't see him but I think he's here, one of the people who was in my very first band is actually here today, Ian Matthews. So in the days before he was a rock god with Kasabian. He was occasionally to be found in the back of pubs in Bristol doing gigs with me for £20. I mean that's £20 for the whole band, not individuals, obviously. Anyway, I became a jazz musician and then this happened:

And then...well all of that really...

All the way through becoming a parent for the first time and the second time and co-founding a jazz club and a social enterprise and making not one but two charity pop singles and setting up a creative music project for teenagers and an inspirational film-making project and writing and recording an album of solo piano music...

For 30 years. I tried to do big and amazing things and not one of them made me feel alright.

And the worst thing was, as time went on, I was becoming less and less likeable, because when you live like that with all of the anxiety and depression and self absorption and insecurity that goes along with it, it makes you pretty impossible to live with. And the people that I loved most and spent most time with were the ones who had to bear the worst of it and I really hated myself because I never wanted to be that person. But more and more it seemed that I was.

And somewhere, in one of those periods of crumpling, I went to see a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist looked at the pattern of up- and down-ness and listened to my story of big ideas and sleepless nights and intermittent desperation and, not surprisingly, suggested that I might have bipolar disorder. And I took his word for it and started taking medication.

I think medication might work really well for someone who actually had bipolar disorder, but it didn't seem to be very effective for someone whose main problem was that they were trying to live with a really uncomfortable thought, because the medication did all sorts of things, like make it really difficult to get up in the morning and occasionally give me episodes of lithium poisoning, but it never stopped me from thinking. The voice in my head was always still there. It was just a bit sleepier and more muffled, but it never went away.

By 2016, it felt as though a storm were brewing inside me. My strategy of trying hard and doing big, amazing things clearly hadn't worked and neither had the drugs and neither had any of the complementary or talking therapies or diets or supplements or anything that I could think of to try, and I sank into a state of despair that was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. I started having frequent nightmares and waking up in a cold sweat and feeling paranoid and avoidant and I stopped being able to make eye contact with people which, for someone who really loves people, was pretty scary.

After a few months of this, I started to think that whatever was wrong with me, must be so wrong and seemed to be so impossible to fix that the kindest thing that I could do for everyone was not be here anymore. I didn't want to hurt anybody. That's why it seemed like a good idea.

So one day I tried not to be.

.......................

When I woke up, I was in hospital having been sectioned. I was taken to a secure psychiatric ward and there was lots of shouting and fights and a concrete garden full of cigarette butts, but there was also a lot of kindness from the staff and from fellow patients and there was a more or less playable piano with a nice message on the front. And most of all, there was a kind of strange relief in admitting that there was no point in pretending to be alright anymore.

It was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, because whilst I was there, I saw a new psychiatrist and I got a new diagnosis of Borderline or Unstable Personality Disorder, which as mental health diagnoses go is one of the least desirable and most stigmatized. However, from my point of view, there was an upside: in the words of my psychiatrist, "I've seen people like you get better". 

So I wanted to know how and I discovered that there's an effective drug free behavioral therapy. And I also discovered that it wasn't available where I lived and I couldn't find anyone to work with. But that didn't matter anymore because I knew that it existed. And if there was a way to get better, I was going to find it. So I went home and I started studying everything I could possibly find, not just about that therapy, but about neuroplasticity and psychology and optimum performance and people who run ultramarathons and expose themselves to extreme conditions and I learned about meditation and sleep and how habits are formed and environmental design and on and on. And it was fascinating and I learned that so much more was possible than I had ever imagined. That old stories can change and stubborn, dysfunctional behaviors can, with enough patience, be replaced with healthy, new ones.

Four months after coming out of the hospital I was medication-free and I had no diagnosis for the first time in my adult life.

I've stayed well ever since.

.......................

I learned so many things that have helped me, and I wish I'd known about them sooner because life could have been so much easier and kinder not just for me, but for the people around me. 

I quickly realized that there were at least three problems with that strategy that I'd come up with:

In my case, trying very, very hard wasn't a solution. It was part of the problem. I wasn't suffering from a lack of trying hard.

Like in Aesop's fable of the sun and the wind, who compete to see who can remove the cloak from a traveller, I discovered that psychological distress is much more receptive to warmth and kindness than it is to force. I've met loads of people with mental health problems like mine and they were all trying very, very hard and they all found it really tough to be kind to themselves. I've had to learn how to do things gently.

Rather disappointingly, I felt, it turns out that doing small, not very amazing, but quite sensible things and sustaining them over time is a really effective way of rewiring your brain. Building healthy habits and routines that support you in healthy behaviors like getting regular exercise and eating and drinking well and getting enough sleep and having social contact and keeping on top of basic day to day responsibilities - those things can have a transformative effect on your mood and increase its stability and help build resilience and self confidence.

Well, you can probably all see what's wrong with that, but for the longest time I couldn't. I'd spent my whole life trying to take responsibility for things that were absolutely nothing to do with me. Learning to recognize the difference between things that were within my control and those that weren't made such a difference and actually, I would say, saved my life because in the weeks after I was discharged from hospital, I felt unimaginably ashamed of myself. How do you forgive yourself after all that? But I realized that if I wanted to do the best thing for everyone, if I wanted to make amends to the world, if I wanted to make amends to my children, the best thing I could possibly do was accept that what had happened in the past was not within my control and that all I could do was my best for the future. So I've been trying to do that.

.........

Over the last couple of years. I've realised that the kinds of things that I've learned, of which these are just three out of scores of things, they're not just applicable to people with mental health problems. They're just about being human. And I've also realised that lots of people don't have the privilege that I have. I had a lot of support whilst I was trying to get well. I had enough money to buy books and I could access things I needed. Lots of people don't have those things. Some people don't have the headspace or the time or the money. Some people can't read. So now I'm very gently doing a new thing. It's called Little Challenges and, bit by bit, I'm building a website where people can find simple, bite-sized ideas that I've drawn from all of the things that I've been learning about over the last two years. They're going to come out in videos and graphics and pieces of writing and podcasts and all sorts of different things to suit all sorts of different people, because I want to make some sort of sense of it all and give something back. 

The really wonderful thing now is that I don't have to prove anything anymore, so I get to do things for much better reasons, like because they're interesting or they make me laugh or I think they might be useful. It turns out that doing things for those reasons is much less stressful and a great deal more fun and I don't think I'm going to crumple again. It has the added advantage that every day I show up, when I make something to go on that website, I'm actually helping to keep myself well. All the big amazing things I've tried to do in the past, they depleted me, they left me tired, they left me less than, but this helps to fill me up again.

I feel really lucky to be here and I feel really lucky that now finally, after all these years, I know that I am 'alright really'. That feels really good.

Thank you so much for listening to me. 

Katie Elliott, 2018