Each month, I go to Korle Bu Hospital’s Melody Centre for review of my antidepressant medications. Each visit, I see a different doctor, because I am on the basic plan, GHS 150, which means you see whichever doctor is available; you don’t have an assigned psychiatrist. In over six months, I have not seen the same doctor. It’s actually incredible. I guess it must mean they are pretty well-staffed. Anyways, the Korle Bu records system has been down for a while, so during every visit, I end up repeating all my diagnoses (medical and psychological), my medications, and my past, present and ongoing symptoms. I keep these in a notebook I update before each visit, then read them calmly and coolly to the doctor. And I get the same reaction from every single doctor: Wow. All of this? Do you have a caregiver? And are you working?
And my answers are always the same: No, I do not have a caregiver, and yes, I am fully working.
During my last visit, actually most visits, a senior psychiatrist is called in to help with the consultation. I can understand. Someone walks in with chronic depression, borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD, non-convulsive seizure disorder, undifferentiated autoimmune disease and some endocrine challenges, including obesity (the WHO has declared that obesity is a chronic disease); so yeah, you do need a senior doctor in the room for the evaluation. The senior doctor wanted to understand the source of these diagnoses. I gave her the names of my specialists, and my neurologist, endocrinologist, and rheumatologist are all Korle Bu-affiliated doctors, so that lends credibility to the diagnoses I’m carrying around. Sometimes I show them labs. Eyeballs pop.
Each time, the doctors are stunned that I am sitting there, with a notebook, calm, poised, clinical, rattling diagnoses and medications like I’m talking about food. It reminds me that something is wrong with me.
To be honest, I don’t always want to be poised in front of the psychiatrists. I want to collapse and be fragile, but if I do that, they might up my dose, and I feel fully drugged out already. I need a safe container that will listen, and not just a container that will throw drugs at me, or even something worse.
This last visit got me thinking deeply about something that has been on my mind a lot lately, the true dichotomy of my mental and chronic illnesses. The extremes I experience are due to all that I am dealing with.
Craving isolation versus seeking connection
My natural inclination, my natural state, is to seek isolation. I just want to lie on my bed, flat on my back, resting, sleeping, cosy, reading, doomscrolling, watching TV, sometimes playing games with my son, but for the most part, just lying down. I just want to be home, safe, sound, secure, with no pressures to engage. And yet, YET! I also get sad when I come across pictures or information of people I know out and about, having fun, bonding. I feel sad that I couldn’t go, wasn’t invited, or didn’t want to. I want to be around people, and yet I don’t want to be around people. I want to have community, and yet I want to be alone. I feel a heaviness in my heart when I feel left out, not informed, not invited, and yet, half the time, I am most likely to decline. It makes no sense to me, but I want to feel wanted, I want to feel connected, while still desperately craving aloneness from people.
Ignoring messages versus communicating
Just recently, I told a girlfriend I didn’t have the emotional capacity and the bandwidth to maintain a close friendship. I can’t text often, call daily, or be available. I see the messages, I see the texts, but something holds me back from clicking on them because I feel my emotional battery will be drained. So messages keep piling up, and I go days without connecting or communicating. I don’t want it to be so. I do want to talk to people, see how they’re doing, but I feel like I don’t have the capacity to share or to listen. I’ve ignored messages that have cost me opportunities.
A member of one of my book clubs tried to connect me with a prominent scriptwriter who could have helped my work, but I didn’t read her messages for days. When I finally got to it, I had to send her a voice note to explain that it wasn’t on purpose. It is never intentional, but I pick up the phone and cringe, freeze, and instead decide to doomscroll on Instagram, read a book, watch TV, or do something else. But respond to actual people? That’s a lot. And sometimes I go through periods of repeated engagement with someone, only for it to die out. I wasn’t like this three or four years ago. Maybe it was happening, but now it’s definitely worse.
Sharing on social media versus hiding in real life
When that comes back to me in person, I clam up because I feel too vulnerable, putting names and faces to those on the other end of my camera. What I share online, I also can’t seem to voice to those close to me. For instance, I would rather have my close family and friends watch my videos and read my articles than actually speak to them about what I am going through. Once they read and watch, I want that to be knowledge they store and save and use, not just tell me. I know, it’s weird, it’s odd. I want people, strangers, family, friends, colleagues, to watch, listen, read and learn – but I don’t want to know that they have. I don’t want to be confronted with the knowledge that they have watched my content. But I desperately want them to watch and read my content. Don’t we sometimes send long texts, not because we want responses, but because it’s the best forum to get it all out, but we don’t want to engage, we don’t want to debate, it’s just to tell the other person something and to let it sink in? That’s all. I want to share, but I also want to hide.
Feeling exhausted and completely depleted versus needing to produce personally and professionally
The exhaustion I am going through now is next level, and yet I need to produce, to earn a living, to build a brand, and to secure my future. This is probably one of the biggest conflicts I am going through.
I am a highly disciplined, conscientious, consistent and hard-working person, who is also deeply exhausted, carrying the mental and physical load of about seven chronic illnesses. And yet, 4:30 am each weekday, I wake up. By 5:30 am, out of the house. By 7 am, I am in the gym after dropping off my son at school – and I don’t play in the gym. When I am in the gym, I don’t touch my phone at all; it’s all training. Then work for the rest of the day – and this is focused, hard work, I don’t slack. Evening schedule: dinner, time with my son, prep a social media post, and then wind down.
Repeat Monday to Friday. Saturdays, 2-mile walk while my son trains, get errands and hair done, and some social activities like funerals, and some work. Saturdays are just a mixed bag. On Sundays, I try really hard not to leave my house after six straight days of commuting to town. But Sundays aren’t necessarily restful either. My son and I swim, and I help him with homework. I am writing this article on Sunday, and at the same time, I’m helping my son prep for midterms starting on Monday. In a couple of hours, I need to make him lunch, clean up the house, post this article, do some work emails, and then some personal brand stuff.
Mind you, each day, I am taking about 10 pills that have tough side effects on my body, including fatigue, muscle weakness, and sometimes I have seizures and panic attacks.
I got lab results recently with a new challenge, and my mom said, ” What’s going on, and I said, ” You know, you guys sometimes forget that I’m sick, I have an autoimmune condition.
They forget I am sick because I don’t behave like I’m sick, but I am.
I have dreams – to be a globally renowned author and speaker with books, movies and content that impact millions.
That’s my vision statement. But I am nearly 47 years old, riddled with multiple chronic illnesses and completely exhausted. Yes, yes, yes, I am also a warrior, but the conflict is real. I speak about retirement at work a lot. My entire team knows I am praying and working hard just to get to 55 and take early retirement. I want my health and body to get me to early retirement. Those who are 75 and working, bless them. I want to continue working my full-time gig for another eight years and still build this global vision I have. I want to do it! But this body, this mind, is dragging me down.
It’s interesting when I engage with people who throw ideas at me. My mind recoils, and my body starts to shut down. They probably think I am lazy or that I don’t care for their ideas, but I’m in a burnout. It’s not like I don’t want to promote myself, my brand or my books. It’s a crisis. I have to prioritise my energy and my health first; my job, which pays me, is a close second; then my son, my mother, and my personal brand. And when I come across the success of colleagues and friends and other creatives, I feel sad, not jealous, just sad, because my life is so different. I am not giving up, but I am accepting and adapting to the fact that my journey will be different.
Research in trauma, depression, and Borderline Personality Disorder consistently shows that what I’m describing is nervous-system dysregulation or collapse. Chronic trauma and depression alter the brain’s threat, reward, and energy systems, creating simultaneous and opposing drives: the need for connection alongside withdrawal, the desire to communicate alongside emotional shutdown, and high external functioning alongside profound internal exhaustion. This is why discipline, insight, and ambition can live alongside fatigue, isolation, and shutdown. Perhaps the work now is not to resolve the tension, but to honour it with more patience, compassion, and gentleness than I’ve allowed myself before.
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