On Mental Health Representation in The Light Between Worlds

TW: depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, disordered eating

I want to tell you a story, and it’s one I’ve never really told before.

Not long after I turned fourteen, I wandered into the dark, not in a literal sense, but in a metaphorical one. It was like one morning I woke up, and the sun never rose. Or it did, but I’d become surrounded by fog and couldn’t find my way out.

I’ve always been high-functioning, and so no one noticed. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, so they couldn’t see that all the things I felt when I looked at our beautiful, terrible mess of a world had gotten to be too much. I’d felt everything so acutely for so long, and then I just stopped feeling it altogether.

Mostly, it was like being numb. Going through the motions, and not caring about anything, where before I’d cared to an intolerable degree. And the rest of the time it was sadness, and purposelessness. If I couldn’t feel, and didn’t care when I knew I should, what was the point of staying tethered to this world? For months I kept my new state of mind entirely private, hardly knowing what to call it. Mental health issues were rarely spoken of in my community, and when they were, it was with a great deal of stigma and negative thought. I blundered across a word for my new state of being while reading about Sylvia Plath, and even then, it seemed too big and too daunting for me, a lost girl who’d only just entered her teens.

Finally, after weeks upon weeks of going through the motions and thinking secret thoughts of dying, I put a word to what I was going through. Depression. And I told several people about it, but it didn’t go well. I’ve never been the sort of person who opens up easily, so after that, I clammed back up. It was hard enough wandering in the dark on my own—I didn’t want to own to it, only to be met with disbelief or shock or hurt again. I would keep this thing, as I’d done until then, a secret. I could perform happiness, put on normal life like a mask. No one needed to know.

And I lived like that until eventually, the fog let up. I started to feel again, little by little. I stopped thinking about dying. I had a good long stint in the sun, and so when the dark came back, I went into it believing it wouldn’t last.

It didn’t. It came and went, throughout my teens, and as I got older, I blundered into coping mechanisms that helped me when things got overwhelming, that kept me from going back into the dark. Some of them were healthy, and worth keeping—prayer, volunteering, exercise, reading poetry. Others weren’t—self-harm, disordered eating, a laser-like focus on meeting personal goals. I still maintain the former. I still, sometimes, struggle with the latter.

The one place I felt safe and found understanding during those years was in the pages of books. In my mid-teens, a librarian put Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light in my hands, and that book changed everything. In it, Vicky Austin grapples with the heavy realities of life and death. She feels too much. She shuts down. She finds herself in darkness. And yet, she comes out the other side into the light. I felt such an exquisite relief reading her story, and finding someone else whose internal life so closely mirrored my own.

Other books came my way, in which young women grapple with despair and depression for a whole host of reasons, but none stayed with me the way Vicky’s story did. I went back to it time and time again. And eventually, years later and almost by accident, I wrote my own story. It ended up with an unfamiliar backdrop—post-war London, and the magical alternate world of the Woodlands, but it is nevertheless my journey, from an intensity of feeling, to the the depths of depression, to the sort of coping strategies that get you through the day and not much more. But above and beyond that, it is a story about constantly moving towards hope. About grasping for it when everything else seems pointless, or impossible.

To this day, I’m in the habit of keeping everything I’ve just written about entirely private. And in a way, it would be easy to let the story I wrote, the one about lost girls, the one about finding the light when you’re caught between worlds, stand on its own. It would be simpler, perhaps, to not own that it’s my story. I’d like that. It would suit my habit of not letting others see the messy parts of me. The bits that aren’t perfect. The places that still hurt.

But my dearest wish for this book that I’m handing over to readers in three months’ time is that it would serve as a signpost along the way for other lost girls. That in its pages they’d see that yes, someone else has been here before, and walked these darkened paths, and come out again into the sunlight. That they’d know their lonely road is less lonely than it seems.

The Light Between Worlds doesn’t offer answers to the eternal questions of life and death and struggle and why some people wander into the dark. I don’t have those answers to give. But I hope that whether I do so in print or in life, I always offer companionship if you’re caught in the fog, and remind you of brighter days waiting on the other side. Because I’ve been there, in both the shadow and the sun.

And I wanted you to know.