For novelist CAROLYN JESS-COOKE, putting pen to paper has helped her confront a traumatic childhood and cope with its legacy of anxiety and depression. She explains how creative expression can be a route to recovery

Ihave suffered from anxiety and depression for most of my life, but I didn’t fully realise how seriously it had coloured my existence until I was 35. I remember frequently waking up in the middle of the night at the age of seven, unable to breathe, convinced that I was about to discover that my father had killed my mother. Living in abusive circumstances makes you normalise terror. Also, I was surrounded by people who had experienced trauma – I grew up in Belfast during the tail-end of the Troubles – so I didn’t fully grasp that my home life was abnormal and that mental illness existed until I had my own children in my mid-30s.

My dad killed himself when I was 13. He had been physically abused as a child and grew up when the Troubles were at their peak. The effect of frequent bombings, shootings, murders, kneecappings, roadblocks and riots upon a city’s denizens does not involve the level of fear and trepidation you might expect (if anything, it makes you blasé, as evidenced by my mother’s decision to cycle blithely through a riot in Belfast in December 2012 – twice). But Belfast then was the sort of place in which a child was not permitted to be left-handed. It was the sort of society in which a child could go to school covered in bruises inflicted by his father and no one would bat an eyelid.

My father was violently abusive towards me and my mother, who was 17 when she had me. Even as a young child I sensed how isolated and vulnerable she was and tried to protect her as much as she tried to protect me. It took years for her to summon the courage to leave him. When she did he made several suicide attempts, one of which I witnessed. He succeeded on the morning of my 13th Christmas.

During all of this I never had any kind of counselling – counselling was shameful, and only lunatics saw therapists. I was very close to my mother and grandmother, and I threw myself into writing. I began writing prolifically at the age of six, producing seven novels and a poetry collection by the age of 14, and on revisiting these works as an adult it’s very clear that I was expressing my anxieties about everything that was happening around me. I would frequently write stories where a young girl lost her mother and was exposed to the whims of some monstrous entity. Instinctively, I knew that writing helped me make sense of things and provided a form into which I could pour all my tangled emotions.

Over time, I realised that I loved writing precisely because it provided clarity and empowerment at a time when I felt most vulnerable. I published my first poem (about a Romanian orphanage) at the age of 17 and went on to win a scholarship for an MA in creative writing at Queen’s University, Belfast, followed by a PhD in literature. Several prestigious awards for poetry followed. I moved to England, embarked on an academic career, got married to a wonderful man, started my own family and signed a publishing contract – first for my poetry and then my novels, which were published around the world. My childhood trauma was buried and gone. Right? Not quite. In late 2013 and early 2014, at the age of 35, shortly after the birth of my fourth child, I had a significant breakdown. With hindsight, I realise that becoming a mother opened up old childhood wounds. The physical and emotional vulnerability that accompanies new motherhood echoed the fears of my five-year-old self, alone in the house with my extremely volatile father. Even at that young age I had sensed he was capable of killing me, and that knowledge – and the anxiety that accompanies it – never quite leaves you. Now, with four small children, postnatal depression and the worst sleep deprivation imaginable, I had no resilience at all, and terror crept up on me until I was in the lowest place in my life.

I had always thought that ‘anxiety’ was another word for feeling scared, but I learned sharply that it is much, much worse. An anxiety disorder makes your hair fall out, it makes you drop weight faster than any diet, it robs you of sleep, it gifts you with frequent diarrhoea and acid reflux. At its worst it feels as though you are having a heart attack, and renders you incapable of the most banal activities, such as posting a