People Saw My Performance. They Didn’t See the Price.
A personal account of disability, masking and burnout — and why suicide prevention begins before a crisis.
For World Suicide Prevention Day
Content note: This article discusses childhood trauma, abuse, domestic violence, disability, workplace burnout and suicidal thoughts. It does not describe methods. Please read with care.
I remember standing on the balcony.
Looking down.
Thinking about ending my life.
On paper, I was exactly where I had fought to be.
A law degree. A master’s degree. The LPC. A place on a competitive graduate programme.
I was educated. Ambitious. Hard-working.
And I didn’t want to be alive.
How does that happen?
The answer doesn’t begin on a balcony.
It begins much earlier.
0.5
Years before that balcony, I was a little girl sitting in a maths classroom when my teacher held up my test paper.
She announced a drum roll. My result?
Zero.
Then came a correction: 0.5 — not because I had answered anything correctly, but because, she explained, the rules did not allow a zero if I had written my name.
The class laughed.
Even now, I remember what I learned that day.
Not mathematics. Shame.
I learned that struggling could make you entertainment. I began to believe: Maybe I’m stupid.
School saw the poor maths result, the tiredness, the clumsiness. It did not see the life that child was trying to survive.
My childhood included sexual abuse, domestic violence and fear. Eventually, my mum and I left the country to escape that violence. We moved from place to place, sleeping on other people’s couches while we tried to start again.
I developed insomnia, became hyper-alert to sudden sounds and was bullied. Then I walked into classrooms expected to learn as though none of that existed.
They saw the 0.5. They didn’t see the child behind it.
Years later, I would recognise the same pattern at work.
People saw my performance. They didn’t see the price I was paying to produce it.
Then someone finally asked the right question.
Something changed when I reached university.
I was assessed: dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia.
For years, the question had felt like: “What’s wrong with you?” Suddenly it became: “How does your brain learn?”
With appropriate strategies and support, my grades improved.
The girl who received 0.5 earned a law degree, a master’s and the LPC.
But achievement had quietly become proof of my worth.
So when I entered the workplace, failure didn’t feel like something that happened. Failure felt like something I was.
I became very good at looking fine.
I entered the workplace with my disabilities known. Assessments had been completed and recommendations made about reasonable adjustments.
But in another rotation, the support I had expected did not materialise.
The work relied heavily on Excel and analytics — unfamiliar territory for me — and the training materials were provided in a font size I found inaccessible because of my visual needs.
So I adapted. Of course I did.
I turned to YouTube and taught myself Excel through video tutorials. Pause. Rewind. Watch again. Practise. Repeat.
I had to teach myself how to do the work before I could even begin doing the work.
Compensating had become almost a second job.
I wasn’t sleeping or eating properly. I was living away from my family without a strong support network.
But I kept producing. I kept showing up. I kept finding ways to get the work done — while continuing to need the reasonable adjustments that had been identified.
I became so good at compensating for the barriers that the extent of my struggle was not always visible.
But coping visibly was never the same as not needing support. That is the paradox of masking: the effort that makes a disability less visible can also hide the enormous cost of functioning without the right support.
And so I did what I had learned to do long before I entered any workplace: adapt.
When life became unsafe, I adapted. When we had to start again, I adapted. When school did not understand how I learned, I adapted. And when my workplace did not adapt to my disability, I adapted again.
Adjustment isn’t there? Find another way. Exhausted? Keep going. Afraid of disappointing your manager? Work later.
Then came the surgery — and the conversation that broke through the mask.
Late in the graduate programme, when I was almost at the finish line, there was something important I could still hold onto: my performance had been satisfactory.
I had received positive feedback in previous rotations. I had even been publicly recognised as Graduate of the Month.
I wasn’t someone who had stopped trying. I was someone trying extraordinarily hard to keep performing while barriers were accumulating around me.
Then things changed.
I needed surgery and had already been granted annual leave.
A work deadline was subsequently placed within that period. I explained that I would be having surgery and asked whether it could be changed.
It wasn’t.
I wasn’t asking not to do the work. I was asking for the opportunity to do it when I wasn’t undergoing surgery.
I struggled to meet the deadline.
Then I was told I would be placed on probation.
That was difficult to reconcile.
How had I gone from Graduate of the Month to being told my place on the scheme was at risk?
I had not stopped caring. I had not stopped trying.
I had run out of ways to compensate for the support I wasn’t receiving.
Everything I had learned about survival told me to keep proving myself.
And there was something else.
I remember being told that, to succeed on the scheme, I needed to be “as good as or better than” my manager.
I had relocated because I believed in what I was working towards. I had moved away from my support network. I had learned unfamiliar systems. I had worked late into the night.
I had spent my childhood surviving instability.
I had spent my education proving I was intelligent.
And now I was spending my career proving I deserved to stay.
The message that reached me was painfully familiar:
You are still not good enough.
Something in me broke.
Not because of one sentence.
Not because of one deadline.
Not because of one manager.
Because that moment landed on top of everything that had come before it.
And eventually, I found myself on that balcony.
“Hold on.”
Reaching out that day may have saved my life.
I called someone who has been like a father to me. Through the distress, I told him what I had struggled even to admit to myself: I didn’t want to exist anymore.
He stayed on the phone. He reminded me that I was loved, that I was valuable, that there was a life beyond my career.
Then he got in his car and drove from London to Leeds.
“Hold on.” So I did.
When he reached me, we left Leeds and travelled back to London. A GP told me I needed urgent psychological support.
Eventually, I found a therapist who helped me understand not only what had happened at work, but what I had been carrying for years.
That support is one of the reasons I can write these words today.
Suicide prevention begins before the balcony.
Maybe that is the most important thing I have learned.
Suicide prevention cannot begin only when someone reaches crisis. It has to begin earlier.
If you’re a parent, notice the child who constantly calls themselves stupid, who can’t sleep, who suddenly changes.
If you’re a teacher, choose your words carefully. Something you say for thirty seconds can live inside a child for thirty years.
If you’re an educator, don’t mistake a different way of learning for a lack of intelligence.
If you’re a manager, never confuse silence with coping. Pay attention. Listen. Communicate. Make agreed adjustments real.
If you’re a colleague or friend, notice. Ask. And sometimes, ask again.
Whatever your role, help create the conditions in which someone can say, “I’m not okay,” before they have to scream it.
All these years later, I no longer believe the balcony was the most important part of my story.
It wasn’t. The most important part was everything that happened before it.
The abuse. The violence. Starting again. The couches. The classroom. The 0.5. The diagnosis. The masking. The sleepless nights. The missing support. The increasingly exhausted employee who still looked absolutely fine.
Those were all moments when somebody had an opportunity to change the story.
That is why suicide prevention belongs to all of us — in our homes, classrooms, universities, workplaces and friendships.
Sometimes saving a life doesn’t begin with knowing the perfect words. Sometimes it begins with noticing. With listening. With believing somebody when they tell you what they need.
Today, I know something that the little girl holding that 0.5 paper desperately needed somebody to tell her:
Your performance is not your worth.
Your career is not your worth.
Your productivity is not your worth.
You are.
The balcony wasn’t where my story began.
And thankfully, it wasn’t where my story ended.
But not everybody gets the opportunity to write that sentence.
So I leave you with one question:
Who around you might be looking absolutely fine — and what could you do today to make it safer for them to tell you they’re not?
If this story has brought something up for you
You do not have to deal with suicidal thoughts alone.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans are available day or night, 365 days a year. You can call free on 116 123.
If someone is in immediate danger, contact the emergency services.