I love you to the moon: a tale of compassion

Excerpt

Compassion started with me. Three years ago, after my first child was born during the pandemic, I felt like my world had silently imploded around me. Looking back, I am certain now that anxiety and obsessive thoughts have been ingrained in me for most of my life. These dark thoughts, however, became more prevalent, and angrier, in the months after my son was born. This was a fragile and exceptionally emotional time, having a tiny innocent, entirely dependent on me. I would battle intrusive thoughts daily, and often multiple times a day. The hours we spent alone in lockdown felt tainted with the sound of this constant and unrelenting darkness. I pleaded with myself daily, begging me to stop. All I desperately desired was the constant noise in my head to stop. I can recount every single word of that first tearful conversation with my general practitioner, saying the words aloud whilst my husband grasped by hand tightly. Something needed to change for me to function as a wife, as a mother and as me. The journey of healing and recovery started with medication. I was enrolled in regular cognitive behavioural therapy sessions. I was forced to master the art of self-compassion, something which, to be brutally honest, was alien to me. I had hidden behind my illness for so long, subdued by my internal conflict with these toxic, unruly thoughts. I often found myself consumed with shame for the monstrous ideas which would invade my subconscious, both unwelcome and uninvited. …