Healing While Drowning
An honest account of what it costs to finally understand yourself in a world that makes healing nearly impossible.
My mental health has been a wild ride these past four years — kicked off by the chaos of the pandemic. At times, it’s been pure survival.
As I’ve slowly unpicked myself, the most recent discovery has been my neurodiversity: two months ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 37.
Since then, I finally feel like I’m on the right track toward building a sustainable life — with a clearer vision of what I need to maintain happiness and stability. Of course, the goalposts are always moving as the world bends and flexes around us, but I’m slowly getting there.
I try not to think too hard about how much I’ve spent on mental health care over the years. But as my finances dwindle in light of this latest chapter, the cost weighs heavily on my mind.
And it’s not just the spend on actual care (that was useful) — the investigation process has been by far the biggest outgoing.
Therapy
Supplements
Dietician
Massage
Yoga membership(s)
Reiki
Energy work
Breathwork
Medication
Whoop wristband
Meditation app
Clinical psychology
CBT
EMDR
Gym membership(s)
Thrive Program
Burnout coach
That’s not even a joke list. That’s genuinely the extent of my investment in myself over the last four years.
And then there’s everything else — the flights I didn’t board after airport panic attacks. The non-refundable Airbnbs I cancelled the day before. The plans made and abandoned. All the tiny costs I can’t even remember. It’s ridiculous.
As my understanding grows, two things are coming sharply into focus — and it’s clear why healing has all been so difficult.
First: accessing care is SO FUCKING HARD.
I live in the UK (as unromantic as that is), and while I’m deeply grateful for the NHS — (I’ve never been sent a bill for breaking a leg or accidentally setting fire to my face) — I’ve fallen through the cracks in the system again and again. I’ve been misdiagnosed by every doctor I’ve ever seen. After a nervous breakdown, one GP even had the audacity to tell me that I was the fittest person she’d ever seen in her clinic.
Then there are the private practitioners, all too happy to take your money despite only seeing 2% of what’s actually going on in your brain box. A £2000 breathwork retreat ain’t gonna do shit to fix a lifetime of masking ADHD.
Even if you do have the money, the right therapists either don’t reply, are fully booked, only run sessions online from their mansion in fucking Wiltshire… and and and. It’s a shit show.
Second: most of us can’t afford the environment we’d actually need to heal.
The cost of living is extortionate, and it’s only getting worse. Trying to run a household while healing is brutal. Healing while working is savage.
Unless you’re lucky enough to have had your breakdown on Goldman Sachs’ payroll, it’s hard. Not all of us can just disappear to a cabin in the woods like Justin Vernon.
And even if you had the cash — where would you even go? Most of us barely understand ourselves well enough to know what kind of healing environment we’d even need.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re like me — still working, still studying, still raising kids, running a home, trying to stay functional in a system that doesn’t care whether you’re drowning.
So, whats the point of this bark into the Substack echo chamber?
I wanted to share that, what I’m coming to terms with is that there may be no end to this process. Healing might not be something you complete — it might just be something you carry. I’ve started to embrace personal improvement as a perpetual thing, because there is no finish line. And honestly, I like myself a lot more now that I’ve stopped comparing myself to some imaginary “optimal” version at the end of the work.
So maybe healing isn’t something you finish — it’s something you learn to live alongside. A rhythm you grow into. Some days, it still feels impossible. But I know more now. I know myself better. And even if the system is broken and the cost has been absurd, I’m managing to carve out something that resembles a life I can live with.
That, in itself, feels like a kind of win.
💙🤍❤️