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LOST IN THE CITY Hood up, head down – lost in a sea of faceless faces. I’ve never felt so alone. Nikki Hayes
I wrote the above line in 2015, not long before I was hospita-
lised for an acute mental breakdown. I wrote it in a tweet and sent it out into the public domain. When I think back to that
moment, I see that I was in severe mental pain as I walked
along Dublin’s O’Connell Street. The street was full of tourists, workers on their lunch break and school kids clearly bunking
off their day of learning. I was in a crowded area and I felt
everyone was looking at me, judging me. I imagined them saying the things I already thought about myself: ‘She’s a bad mother.’
‘She’s an awful wife.’
‘She has scars all over herself.’ ‘She’s a psycho.’
I was seriously ill and I didn’t even know it.
Since I’ve started to speak out about my illness I have been
contacted by partners and family members of people who have 15
Crying into the Saucepan
been diagnosed with BPD. Their first concern is being able
to effectively communicate with and support the person they
love; secondly, they worry about the safety of their loved ones
and the situations they seem to be driven into by their unstable mental state.
But there is hope. People with BPD can live perfectly
functional lives. The hardest part is getting the diagnosis be-
cause the symptoms of the disorder are so diverse. However, once the diagnosis is made, a treatment plan can be agreed and they can learn to work with it.
I have lost a decade of my life to BPD. I spent that time
feeling unworthy, unreasonable, upset and despairing, and suffering from a chronic neediness and illogical thinking. It’s frightening to think of some of the situations I managed to
get myself into. When it comes down to it, I should be dead. I should have died a long time ago.
A lot of people have asked me about the mood swings I
suffer from. They wonder how someone can go from crying, curled up in a ball, to standing on a dance floor doing their best Lady Gaga impersonation within a few hours. The truth is, the mind of a BPD sufferer moves so quickly that everything is
frantic. A thought pops into your head and you just do it. If
you are feeling very low and someone suggests something fun, you jump on it. Packing your bags and heading to the airport
on a whim, for example, may seem carefree and fun, but it’s those impulsive decisions that can make someone with BPD endanger themselves.
I remember sitting in a psychiatric ward after a minor
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breakdown in 2008, a year after my dad’s death. As I spoke to the other patients, I decided in a split second that I didn’t
need to be there. I was a voluntary inpatient (I had agreed
to treatment and wasn’t sectioned), so I was free to walk out whenever I wanted. That evening I packed my case and
walked free. I got a taxi to the airport and flew to London. The decision-making took two seconds; the journey, including
transfers, took two hours. I found myself in the hub of London, Oxford Circus. I remember thinking – how can I be ill? I went
to dinner in the exclusive L’Atelier restaurant, a bottle of wine my perfect companion. I spotted Hollywood actress Julianne Moore at the table next to me. My mood darkened as I drank the entirety of my perfect companion (the bottle of wine and
my solitude weren’t a good combination). After the meal, I retreated back to my hotel and made my way to the roof with every intention of jumping off. A phone call to my sister was all that talked me down.
Another time I spontaneously agreed to jump out of
a plane for charity. The lead-up to the skydiving involved a
broadcast from the Galway Races, the day spent in the Fianna Fáil tent, drinking copiously. Then I went on to the g Hotel
to judge a best-dressed lady competition before I fell into bed quite intoxicated around 2 a.m. The next morning I woke, hit the road for Birr in Co. Offaly and participated in the world
record-breaking skydiving attempt with Skydive4Charity. I
never thought things through; I just agreed and did it. Nothing about this sequence of events seemed extreme or abnormal to me. I thought nothing about driving so far or doing the 17
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skydive after such a late night. I was asked so I did it. And I’ve always been bad at time management, so quite often I’d be running from one event to another.
A lot of the extreme situations that I found myself in with
BPD were most definitely fuelled by the presence of alcohol. I am not an alcoholic, as I don’t crave alcohol, but when I am being extreme and reckless it is mostly alcohol standing there
lighting the fire. Because of the high levels of medication I am
on, I have made the decision not to drink any more, as I cannot treat it with respect and I haven’t reached a stage where I can control myself if drink comes into play. It has been with the
help of my medical team that I have learned to admit that it is a crutch when the going gets tough and a crutch that leads to erratic moods and thoughts, and potentially embarrassing situations.
One example of this was when I was invited to London
by Microsoft to launch their new computer console, the Xbox 360. It was a swanky affair in the Embankment area of
London. The party was attended by celebs such as Calum Best, members of the cast of EastEnders and Coronation Street, and
the boy band Blue. Inside my mind I felt like a fraud. Someone like me didn’t belong with all these celebrities. However, on the outside I introduced myself to everyone, while drinking cocktails all night to the point where the actor Philip Olivier
shouted at me: ‘Any more sea breezes, Irish [my name for the evening], and you’ll be floating back home tomorrow.’
I was thrilled. I was being accepted by people that I
watched on television. I had my photo taken with the actor 18
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Will Mellor, Duncan from Blue and Martin from EastEnders. I didn’t even know his real name, so for the night I addressed
him as Martin. I don’t remember getting back to my hotel, the swish St Martin’s Lane.
An alarm woke me at 6 a.m. It was an early flight back. I
met the PR team and we groggily made our way to the airport. We ended up on a blustery flight home. Winds were high and the ride was bumpy. My stomach was still feeling delicate from
the night before. I remember standing up at one point to make
my way to the toilet. I was going to be sick, I was certain of it. I looked ahead. There was Ronan Keating, sitting ahead of me. ‘Hi Ronan.’
Then Bleeeuuuggghhhhhh.
Oh my God, I just puked in front of Ronan Keating.
Ronan looked pityingly at Nicola, the PR girl who had
been sitting beside me on the plane. She ushered me to the bathroom as Ronan did a little laugh to brush off the scene
I was making. I stayed in the bathroom for a while, puking, and then emerged, ghostly white. I looked to Ronan to mouth ‘Sorry’ and he just smiled.
I turned crimson and pulled up the hood on my jumper. I
died a death for the remainder of the journey home in more than one way.
The industry I work in lends itself to the lifestyle I had
adopted. It is seen as being somewhat normal or acceptable
to combine alcohol and socialising in your day-to-day work. There is always a product launch, a venue opening, always a
reason to pop the cork and share some bubbly. I lived, ate and 19
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slept my job. I was always turning up in the social pages of the newspapers and entertainment websites. I would turn up to
the opening of an envelope and, with free food and drink, it
didn’t cost me a penny – just my dignity. I would mingle, make connections, shoot the breeze and exchange numbers. I felt accepted when I was Nikki. People liked Nikki and they liked what she brought to the table.
Today, acquaintances and people I’ve worked with over the
years find it funny, at first, when I say that I don’t drink any more.
‘Haha, good one.’
Then they realise from the expression on my face that I’m
serious.
‘Oh, fair play to ya. Do you not miss it?’
The weird thing about my not drinking now is how it un-
settles others more than me. My friends have always known
me to be wild and unpredictable. Workmates have always
known me to be a bit mad and uncontrollable. My family have always known me as dramatic and needy. So standing in front
of everyone, sober, means they don’t quite know how to receive me. I find I am approached with caution. Is this a trick? Are they being lured into a false sense of security? Maybe this is the moment she blows up.
A ticking time bomb is not what I set out to be, but it’s
how I am viewed by my nearest and dearest, and most defi-
nitely by my peers. For them, they learned to live with the
mood bursts. It didn’t mean that they were okay with how I behaved, it just became normal, and I suppose the only way 20
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they could somewhat normalise my behaviour was to say that I
was unpredictable and wild. By doing so, they could then apply a certain label to me. Everyone has a place in society, a box in
which to fit, and for me the box was to be ‘mad’ or ‘wild’. If it meant people could accept me, then it was a label that I was happy to take. Acceptance was all that mattered to me.
The major issue with accepting the label I had been given,
however, was that it meant I fell further into the bracket of the unknown. I was being this person because it meant they could accept and make sense of me, but by being this person
I felt out of control. If you keep taking on all the traits and personalities that others expect you to have, you very quickly
suppress who you are deep down, the core you. But I felt
that the core me wasn’t someone people were prepared to
know or accept easily, so I adopted different personality traits depending on whose company I was in.
This need for acceptance started at a very young age for me.
I remember, when I was five or six years old, running to the
shops for the neighbours because I wanted them to like me. Every evening at 6 p.m. I would call and ask for their shopping list and then go to fetch newspapers, crisps, milk – whatever they needed. As I got older, I began to develop different
personalities to use with different people so they would accept me – the shy, loving, needy girl; the tomboy climbing trees
with the boys – and the more I grew up, the more personalities I created. Adopting each different personality was like putting on a mask. I felt like I was always backstage, lifting the masks and placing them on my stage persona depending on where 21
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I was and who I was with. That visualisation made sense to
me. The masks made the personalities seem normal, like I was acting as whoever I needed to be in order to gain acceptance.
Waking every morning with the sadness of not knowing
or liking the person you are is upsetting. You have two choices. Pretend and survive, or admit and fail. So I pretended to be someone else and survived for as long as my mental stability could support that choice.
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