I remember a Nurse in A&E once saying to me that I needed to stop cutting because one day I might meet a man I liked and how would I explain to him that I was covered in scars. At the time I was somewhat nonplussed as the scars were already there so the conversation would have to be had whether I stopped right now or not. However she had touched on a really tricky issue about disclosure and being identified with my past and the times I have been hurt or unwell.

At one extreme there are times I want to leave it all behind. There is much much more to me than the things I find difficult. Right now I am coping really well and I do not want people to mistakenly assume I am struggling in the way I was at my lowest point and rush in to try to help and protect me or my family when it isn’t needed. I fear that people may dismiss what I tell them without checking their facts if they see me as someone unwell. I fear that trigger words like ‘self harm’ ‘eating disorder’ ‘detained under the mental health act’ etc. will bring up negative stereotypes for people and that they will then not be able to see me at all.

However at the other extreme it feels really important to acknowledge that those bad times were real and happened. The scars that the nurse was looking at had become my way of making the fact that things were not OK unarguable. I had not found a way to acknowledge the reality of some of the abuse that had happened to me from being very young. I had focussed on forgiving and moving forward, being told over and over that this was a fresh start and I shouldn’t harp on about the past. I didn’t have the skills to tell people about it and they dismissed what they thought were imagined fears. Because I hadn’t the skills I was still being hurt.

In hospital that side of things intensified. All too often each shift wanted a fresh start and I couldn’t give it. If a group of people lied to me yesterday and the day before and the day before that so I would do as they wanted me to do without making a fuss before it was too late then I am not going to trust this group to tell the truth. For me to do so would be having ‘trust issues’ yet to the team not trusting them despite all the times bargains had been broken rules changed or lies told ‘in my best interests’ showed I was ill.

The answer as ever seems to fall between the two extremes. I’ve come to believe that many irrational responses look irrational to us because we do not have the context to understand them. To give that context I had to allow people to know something of my past and problems.

When it came to publishing sectioned the decision seemed clear. I wanted to tell my story. When I told snippets of it verbally people often told me things like being prevented from accessing my phone, email and social media were ridiculous and shouldn’t have happened. I heard over and over again that the care that I had experienced on mental health wards was not what people who hadn’t experienced them imagined they would be like. It wasn’t how I imagined they would be either.

The expectations of members of the public seemed so different to the experience of those running and using the services. I worry when I hear campaigns for better mental health that focus on bed numbers in case those campaigning also believe that being in hospital as opposed to receiving community support is much more helpful than it is for many people.

I chose to use my real name on that book so I could be found. I wanted people who had cared for me to hear how some of the incidents we went through had felt from my side in the hope that it would help them get onto the same page as some one like me more quickly the next time. When I first came out of hospital is was also a short cut for telling friends what had happened while I had been invisible and letting new friends find out about it at their own pace.

There have been times when I have felt too tied to those experiences though. I worked with my local mental health trust doing training on collaborative care planning for a year after my last admission. Telling the story of the admission as it related to the care plan pilots really helped in the first six months. However I reached a point where I needed to move away from that

time and I stopped talking about it unless a specific event triggered a particular memory. At those times I focus on projects in other genres written under a pen name.

Now I’m about to get married and add a new name into the mix. While I stay Hilary Coveney for any writing and work I do within a mental health field it is my married name that will mark this chapter in my life. Does that mean that I need to hide my past? It’s a tricky and grey area. My fiancée and I have talked briefly about explaining my scars to our child. I aim to try and talk about them at the level he is at when they come up just as I do with my insulin pump. (That can be a long and in depth conversation with some two year olds believe me!)

There are times, such as planning for birth, were the treatment I receive from mental health services casts a really long shadow and being really open about my past is the best way to move forward and create a positive experience for our family rather than repeating the patterns of the past. There are other times when other parts of life are to the fore and people might never know. The important thing for me is that those times just happen. I don’t force them or make decisions to move on because someone tells me to. When the past is triggered I try not to beat myself up for remembering. I’m not stuck I’m moving forward. That doesn’t mean that bad stuff didn’t happen and it doesn’t mean that I suddenly think that the end has justified the means where the means harmed me. There are however periods when my life and interests take my attention. That’s a good place to be right now.