LBD (Life Before Dog)

Life before dogs – this is a state I could not possibly imagine living in now, but for a while I didn’t have a dog in my life.

I was in my 20s, had a good job, and lived relatively care free. I had a wonderful partner, and had a job that definitely wasn’t a passion, but it paid well and I thought it made me happy enough.

Then one day everything changed. I had a breakdown triggered by a traumatic event.

I went into my own head, and lived under a very dark cloud. It’s hard to describe this feeling of living daily with stress of this level, but try and imagine your head is constantly under a very tight pressure – you can physically feel the tension in your skull. Every emotion is suppressed deep down, and your mood is a constant low level no matter what you do.

On 2 occasions I tried to kill myself by overdosing on tablets and whiskey. Thankfully I was rubbish at this, maybe subconsciously I didn’t take enough pills to kill myself, who knows. But fuck I tried, and at the time it felt like the most obvious thing to do in the world.

On the backdrop of these 2 attempts I had a team of people around me, trying to keep me alive. A physiatrist, a counsellor, my GP, a CBT specialist (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and a mental health nurse, all on suicide watch. This resulted in my admittance into a mental health facility – for my own safety. For me this is the lowest point, even more so than the suicide attempts. Here I was definitely the only sane person in a building of crazy people (Jack Nicolson-esk).

I managed to keep working, as my brain treated it as a little bubble away from the pain where I could act like a normal human being. But all my interactions were over email so I could fake being a normal human being very well.

So here I was, a social outcast, not wanting any human interactions at all, eating cheesecake by the kilo, wishing I was dead. For someone reason my partner was still around – maybe they were worried that if I actually killed myself, they would feel like they could have stopped it if they had stayed, but they were still there and we decided that we would buy a house together.

Despite having dogs as a child, I didn’t immediately take on the role of dog owner as an adult. A mixture of travelling around, and living in flats meant that I wasn’t able to have the one creature I now could never live without.

But getting a house ignited a singular thought in my head – we can now get a dog!