Like a lot of people, I’ve been struggling with my mental health over the course of the last two years.

Honestly, it took me a long time even to admit that. I thought everyone around me was feeling the same creeping lethargy; that my constant state of brain fog was a normal reaction to these very un-normal times. I thought the things I did to combat my malaise were clever life hacks, not signs of a problem. On days where summoning the energy to get out of bed felt like a Herculean task, it was amazing how far I could drag myself using well-timed jolts of pain as a substitute for motivation. Even when that pain became an anchor, the only way I could feel anything at all, I still didn’t realise quite how bad things were. Not until my girlfriend starting asking questions about the marks on my arms.

She’s been amazing through all of this. My girlfriend, that is. She’s the one who convinced me that the way I was feeling wasn’t normal, that I deserved better, and that it was okay to ask for help. When the day of my first group therapy session rolled around, she walked me right up to the door of the outpatient centre. She was standing there when I came out, too, holding a cup of tea and a fresh pastry. Apple and cinnamon: she knows it’s my favourite.

I’m so grateful for her and how she’s stuck by me, even when things have been hard. The therapy helps, for the most part, but sometimes it strikes a raw nerve and I spend the next few hours just sobbing with my head under a pillow. Or the therapist will set a homework assignment that I’ll have real trouble completing, which I hate. I was always a straight-A student back in school.

This week has been a particularly difficult one. We’d been talking in group about self-harm, which was hard enough to begin with, and then came the assignment: take the things you use to harm yourself and try keeping them in a padlocked box for a week. I was resistant to the very idea of it, at first. There’s some things you get used to having around, and it’s not as if I only use them for hurting. My girlfriend knows how much I love to cook—she even bought me a set of fancy kitchen knives for our first anniversary—and I cried to her for an hour after I got this assignment, asking what I was supposed to do about dinner now. But she’s so supportive, and she knows how important it is for me to do my homework. She encouraged me to give it a go, and I know she’ll be really proud at me for having managed it.

It took me hours of blood, pain and tears, but I finally did it. I finally got every one of my teeth into that box.