FSP #1 My mind belongs to me again.

I was 16 when the world shut down, and strangely, something inside me switched on. While everything around me felt uncertain, I started building, partly because I didn’t know what else to do. What most people didn’t see was that, beneath the drive and presented on social media, I was already fighting battles that weren’t visible.

My anxiety had started in secondary school - about 12, but it was around 16 time that depression first took hold. I was put on medication for a separate health condition, and the side effects hit hard. Isolation from lockdown mixed with a chemical fog left me struggling to function. At 17, I went through an active suicidal period. It’s a blur now, but I remember constantly trying to convince myself that I wanted to live. Eventually, I changed medication and began to stabilise, but the healing was slow and unsteady.

Still, I moved forward. I didn’t take the traditional A-Level route. I chose a BTEC instead, not because it was easier, but because i was only primary interested in one thing: Business. I started building my first brand, Kurfews. A small clothing business that felt like a piece of myself. I learned to design, sell, market, and create something from the ground up. It wasn’t about the products. It was about creating something that was mine.

To help grow it, I applied to a local entrepreneurship incubator: six months of mentorship, support and a start-up grant, and to my surprise, I was accepted. The youngest one there.

At the same time, I was dreaming even bigger. I’d been obsessed with skydiving since I was 14. Not just the adrenaline of it, but the leap. The fear. I booked my first skydive for my 16th birthday, waited months through lockdowns, and finally jumped. The first jump shifted something in me. I started seeing myself as someone who can actually accomplish something they say they will. Someone who doesn’t wait around, but chases their goals.

But then came university.

At 18, I started uni and walked straight into a version of life I didn’t recognise. Nights out. Drinking. Trying to match the energy of a lifestyle that didn’t really fit me. I closed down my business - it was all too much. On the surface, I was social and a party animal. Underneath, I was spiraling. I started self-harming after nights out. I had another stretch of deep depression and being actively suicidal at 19, which led to urgent care visits and eventually moving home. I kept telling myself that once I fixed everything on the outside, my routine, my body, my work, I’d stop feeling this way. But nothing changed.

On my 20th birthday, I hit another severe low. One of the worst depression hangovers I’ve ever had. A few months later, in October 2024, I experienced a severe mental health breakdown that would alter everything.

I had been working two bar jobs, juggling final year uni, chasing my skydiving licence, attending lectures. Everything, all at once. I was sleeping maybe three hours here and there. I thought I was managing, until I wasn’t.

I developed panic disorder, DRDP, and dementaphobia - the fear of going insane. I began experiencing something new during my panic attacks that I didn’t know how to name at the time: a constant, bone-deep sense of impending doom that took over my entire body for short periods of time (the name of the symptom is "the feeling of impending doom"). It wasn’t just panic. It felt like death was coming, like my body was already reacting to something catastrophic. My vision slowed. I couldn’t process motion or sound normally. It was like my mind was completely disconnected from the world.

One day at work, it hit me out of nowhere. I said I had a migraine and left early. I slept for days, but the symptoms didn’t go. I quit both my jobs and took time off uni. For a while, I just disappeared.

I started seeing my friends and stuff again a bit more, felt like I was slowly starting to make progress, and I just kept telling myself "im being super overdramatic, why am I panicking over literally nothing, I need to get over myself." 

Then Halloween came. I thought I could go out and feel normal. I wanted to believe I was okay. But I drank too much, had a severe episode, and ended up in hospital. My parents were called. I hit my head against the hospital bed rail repeatedly, had to be restrained, something that, I’ve since learned, is a common trauma response to acute mental distress. I remember flashes of it. Mostly, it’s a haze.

That night I realised how sick I really was. That I couldn’t fix this alone. That I wasn’t just "sensitive" or "burnt out" - I was unwell, and I needed help.

In November, I started new medication for panic disorder and depression. It lifted the depression, but not the panic. Still, it gave me enough space to begin again.

It’s been almost eight months since.

In January my initial side affects of taking anti-depressants started to ease off, for the first time since I was a child I had been waking up early and not wanting to go back to bed, not wanting to choose sleep as my only daily activity, not having to convince myself that I actually wanted to have a life, and a soul and to walk on this planet. I actually felt it, I wasn't just telling myself it, I felt it. 

My life started to change, and every month in 2025 was so deeply and intensely filled with growth, self improvement and understanding that I didn't even recognise myself 6 months ago. I had lost my drive for purpose in life and could finally say i've not just gained it back, but i'm fully on a path towards the best version of myself that ever will exist and I can now help others to do the same. 

That episode I experienced, however awful, gave me an understanding. It pushed me into getting help. It forced me to stop performing recovery and start actually choosing it. Mental health issues run in my family. Its a genertic negative that im just lucky enough to have inherited. However, that wasn't my choice, and for me to see that, I had to get worse before getting better. I used to see that as a curse. Now I see it as context.

I see people more deeply now. I want to understand lives that look nothing like mine. I want to give space to the unspoken.

That’s why I started The Freedom Edit - and that’s why I created the Freedom Stories Project. To capture the moments that change people. To document the battles no one sees. To remind anyone reading that if you’re stuck, breaking, or simply rebuilding,

you’re not alone.

Your story matters, even in the middle of it.

Freedom Story: #1

Age: 20

Nationality: British

Freedom quote: "My mind belongs to me again"

Soundtrack for this story: In My Head by Bedroom

Conducted in April 2025.