Raw
Meet my multiple personalities – Brenda, Debbie and Annie!
Natasha Rea, 35, from Manchester
Cracking open a fresh bottle of Ribena, I just couldn’t get enough of the fruity drink. ‘Tash, you’ve already had three of those today,’ my friend Jen said as we stopped at the corner shop.
For weeks on end, at just 14, I really did have a sweet craving for that beverage in particular.
Amonth before that I’d been addicted to having the same dinner on repeat and after the Ribena addiction, I swiftly moved on to my next craving.
‘What’s got into you?’ my mum Lorraine, now 73, asked.
‘It’s just who I am, Mum,’ I insisted – I was just a teen with an obsessive personality.
Albeit a little strange, if I had something that I really wanted to do in my thoughts, I went out of my way to do it.
Atrait that followed me into adulthood, too. At first thinking it was a quirk that helped me, I quickly realised that my behaviour was quite disruptive.
Not only was I focused, but I had intense moods and my emotions were uncontrollable.
Only, I couldn’t put my finger on why or even how I was feeling – at times it was as if someone else was taking over.
And with this feeling came an overwhelming sense of not belonging, too.
Wanting to pursue a career in acting, to everyone else I was a big personality – but on the inside, I just wanted to shy away.
Continuing into my 20s, struggling with my emotions, going for the wrong sort of guys and never feeling settled, I partied every weekend, trying my best to ignore the fact that there was something deeper going on.
I had a sense of not belonging
‘What do you think this is?’ I asked my friends, showing them a mole on my skin.
‘It’s nothing to worry about, that’s normal,’ they’d insist – but to me, it really did seem like it was the end of the world.
Will I always feel this way? I asked myself on a daily basis – it was truly exhausting.
Something that was only heightened after welcoming my baby boy Luciano, now 12, into the world in March 2011, when I was just 23.
Sleep deprived, in love and protective of my son, my mental health plummeted – dealing with intrusive thoughts was a daily battle.
‘You’ve just had a baby, you’ll be fine,’ doctors dismissed.
Only, it didn’t feel that way – I wanted answers.
After back and forth visits to my GP and the local hospital, there was finally a conclusion.
‘You have a chemical imbalance in your brain,’ the doctor explained. ‘It’s called bipolar disorder.’
At first I felt relieved – there was finally a label to how I had been feeling, something that dated back to when I was 14.
The extreme mood swings, fixating on random things, the highs and
