Someone messaged me last week to say they were having an ‘Amy Blue week’ – Amy is the main character in Blue Tide Rising – adding ‘you write depression with cutting beauty and deep understanding.’

This was good to hear, because tackling raw emotion in fiction is tricky. Describing depression and anxiety in a way that is authentic yet accessible was one of my aims. 

At the start of the novel, Amy is at rock bottom. She’s living in an urban hell-hole, surrounded by dysfunction. Her life has crashed. She barely engages with anyone and she’s run out of options. 

To get inside her head, I needed to revisit a time in my 20s when, following meningitis and sudden hearing loss, my own life came crashing down around me. 

I was starting out in journalism with a promising career ahead of me when the killer illness struck. I went to bed thinking it was flu. The next morning my flat-mate found me in no fit state to string a coherent sentence together, let alone phone a doctor. Her quick thinking saved my life. Zoning in and out of consciousness, I went by ambulance – sirens screeching – to hospital, where they pumped me full of penicillin and I lived to fight another day.

“When you came in here you were an hour from death,” the consultant said. 

After the initial shock, I felt euphoric. I had survived. And for a while I was carried along on a wave of good will as people came out in their droves to support me. 

But when I returned to work just two months later I was ill-prepared for the longer term effects of the disease on my physical and mental health. 

Plus I was now profoundly deaf in one ear. 

I could no longer hear conversations going on around me. The social spaces I inhabited became places of frustration and isolation. I’d leave gatherings in tears because I simply couldn’t hear. No hearing aid could help, as there was no hearing in that ear to augment. I felt helpless. I began to withdraw. 

My previously active social life shrunk. I stopped going out. Then the dizziness started. 

Driving down the M1, the road in front of me began to spin. I was in a contraflow so couldn’t stop, but slowed right down, gripping the steering wheel. Mercifully, after a few seconds, the spinning stopped. But in the next few days and weeks, it kept happening. I was diagnosed with vertigo – an inner ear balance disorder – caused by the meningitis. Attacks came without warning, sometimes flooring me for days. I’d spend hours lying down, throwing up, watching the room gyrate. 

I struggled at work and questioned my ability to do my job. How can somebody who is deaf work as a reporter? It’s all about listening to people’s stories. Plus I needed to drive to appointments, but lived in fear of another attack while on the road. 

My sickness absence sky-rocketed. I became unreliable, and my colleagues’ patience waned.

One morning, while driving to the airport to cover a press conference, I had a vertigo attack. I pulled over till it passed. Arriving late for the press call, I couldn’t hear most of what was being said. I left with an empty notebook, and got my story by plagiarising another reporter’s account and lifting quotes from the lunchtime TV news. 

That night I went home and sobbed. The next day I handed in my notice. 

My confidence shot, I took a low-paid part-time admin role in the civil service, chastising myself daily for wasting my skills. I was a qualified journalist. What was I doing in a dead-end job shuffling paper around?

I had to move out of my accommodation, and lived for a few months in a series of short-term rentals. The final straw came when a woman I was lodging with kicked me out after just one week. 

I crashed.

I was technically homeless and sofa-surfing, conscious I’d become a ‘problem’ to those around me and scared friends would lose patience with this shell of a person I had become. Prescription drugs numbed my senses but didn’t heal my depression. Drinking got me through the night. 

Recovery

But a couple of people – I hope they know who they are – took a chance on me, giving me the time and space to heal without putting pressure on me. Things improved. The vertigo attacks became less frequent and eventually disappeared. That lowly civil service role developed into bigger, better things. I landed a job editing a magazine where I could use my journalism skills and travel. I got better at asserting my rights as a hearing-impaired person and at optimising what hearing I still had. I learnt where to position myself in a room, which situations I could deal with and which to avoid.

I found my place in the world and the future became better and brighter than I could ever have imagined during those dark days.

It’s a cliché, but that experience, which nearly killed me, did indeed make me stronger. 

Years later, revisiting that time in my life helped me get into the head of Amy Blue. Her isolation. Her anxiety. Her downer on herself. Her disintegration. I wanted Amy to get a break, as I had done. To encounter kindness and the space to heal.  Môr Tawel – the off-grid eco farm where she winds up – provided the answer. And through the medium of Jay I also brought out techniques I developed for myself to battle negative thoughts and re-emerge into the world. 

So when someone tells me I write depression well, it’s because I’ve been there. And although it was a long time ago, it retains a dark lucidity in my mind. Being able to give voice to those emotions, years later, through a fictional character, gives those dark days meaning and makes it all worthwhile.  

Blue Tide Rising is out now with Inspired Quill. Read more here.