Everything, All At Once

As told to PFU

Three years ago I spent an entire evening convinced my relationship was over because of a text message that took four hours to get a reply. That's the whole story, really, if I'm honest about how small the trigger usually was. Four hours. She was at her sister's, her phone had died, she told me that the second she got home. But by about hour two I'd already deleted her number, then put it back, then written eleven different messages I never sent, then sat on my kitchen floor at one in the morning feeling like the actual ground had gone out from under me. Not upset. Not worried. Certain. Certain it was over, certain I'd known all along it would end like this, certain I should get in first before she said it to me.

She came home to find about four hundred variations of "we need to talk" in her notifications and no explanation for any of them.

People hear "personality disorder" and assume it means something is fundamentally wrong with who you are as a person. That's not it, and it took me a long time to stop hearing it that way myself. What it actually means, for me, is that my emotional volume is turned up further than most people's, most of the time, and for a long time I didn't have anything close to the right tools to turn it back down. A minor thing — someone going quiet on me, a manager not picking me for a five-a-side at the end of training, someone catching me off guard with a joke that landed wrong — could feel, for twenty minutes, like the single worst thing that had ever happened to me. Then twenty minutes later I'd feel completely normal again, and be quietly mortified about how I'd just acted. That whiplash is more or less the whole thing.

I went through two relationships in my early twenties that ended almost exactly the same way. I'd decide, usually over something small and usually wrongly, that the other person didn't actually want me around anymore, and instead of asking them — instead of just asking — I'd end it first. "Quicker to end it myself than wait around to be left" was genuinely how it felt at the time, like some sort of logic rather than what it actually was. It wasn't fair to either of them, and I've said that to both of them since, for whatever that's worth three and five years too late.

It wasn't only relationships outside the game. I went from thinking a coach was the best I'd ever worked with to being convinced he'd turned on me, sometimes within the same week, usually off the back of nothing more than a training-ground correction that any other player would have shrugged off. I look back at some of how I reacted to normal, ordinary football criticism and I understand completely why it was exhausting to be around me. I was exhausting to be. I just didn't have a name for why yet.

I got the name three years ago, not through the club directly at first — through our sports psychologist, who I'd started seeing about something else entirely, a bad run of form, and who after a few sessions asked me some questions that felt oddly specific and then gently suggested I see someone who specialised in this particular thing. The formal diagnosis, when it came, was borderline personality disorder. I remember feeling two things almost on top of each other: relief that there was an actual name for it, that I wasn't just "difficult" or "too much," and something close to fear that it sounded permanent, like a life sentence for how my brain worked.

It isn't a life sentence. It's a condition you learn to manage, actively, on an ongoing basis, the same way you'd manage anything that requires real work rather than a fix. The treatment that's actually helped me is called dialectical behaviour therapy — DBT. It isn't lying on a couch talking about my childhood, which is maybe part of why it clicked with me the way it did. It's closer to training. There are specific, practical skills: how to physically ride out a spike of emotion for the ten or fifteen minutes it takes to peak and start coming back down, instead of acting on it straight away. How to actually check whether what I'm feeling matches the real facts of a situation, or whether I'm reacting to a story I've told myself in about four seconds flat. How to ask someone directly for what I need, instead of quietly testing whether they'll offer it first and taking the silence as an answer. I still have the workbook. I still practise the skills, most weeks, the same way I'd still be doing extra finishing drills even in a good scoring run.

It shows up in football now in much smaller, much less dramatic ways than it used to, which is honestly the whole point. I got hooked at half-time a few weeks ago in a game we were losing, no explanation given beyond a tactical one, and three years ago that would have been a genuine crisis for the rest of my evening — convinced the manager had lost faith in me completely, replaying every touch I'd had in the first half, probably short with whoever spoke to me next. This time I noticed the spike happening, named it to myself as it was happening, which is its own skill, and text my partner on the bus home instead of stewing on it alone. She said I sounded like myself. That's a genuinely big deal to me, even if it doesn't sound like one written down.

People who've been around the Levellers dressing room for a while will tell you, if you ask them directly, that I'm a different person to be around than I was three years ago. I'd tell you the same thing myself, with the one honest caveat that different doesn't mean finished. I'm not managing this once and being done with it. It's ongoing, the way fitness is ongoing, the way form is ongoing. Some weeks are harder than others. I still get it wrong sometimes, still catch myself mid-spiral more often than I'd like.

I'm putting my name to this because when our manager spoke publicly a while back about his own experience with depression, he said it was because someone in his position should have done that a long time ago and hadn't. I felt exactly the same reading it as I imagine plenty of people will feel reading this: not that it fixes anything on its own, but that it's one less person having to feel like the only one.