CONTENT WARNING: I briefly discuss mental breakdown including a suicide attempt in this post.
It’s been a year since I moved back home. I wasn’t originally going to go into much detail about how I got to be here but I wanted to give some context, so here we go.
My partner and I had been renting and my brother was meant to buy me out of the house we inherited when our mum passed so that I could put that towards a new place. In the end, my brother couldn’t get a mortgage so our options were very limited and right around that time the whole Liz Truss shitshow happened so my partner and I decided to move back in with my brother and make use of the property I own.
My brother’s dad was living with him at the time, but I gave him notice in November and even pushed back the date that we wanted to move in back to the end of March to accommodate him. Knowing that he had money problems, my partner and I gave him £450 towards the deposit for his new flat.
When we finally arrived back home, the first thing to greet us was the dead grass in the front garden. Then I opened the door to the smell of a cat litter tray that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. The carpets were absolutely covered with cat fur. A large bin in the bathroom was crammed full of disgusting rubbish that obviously hadn’t been emptied for a long time. The kitchen bin was overflowing with dirty takeaway packaging. There were dead flies along the windowsills. There was mould around all of the windows and the window in my brother’s bedroom was open by an inch or so because the hinges had broken in a way that it couldn’t be closed more than that.
The house I’d left behind two years ago was not perfect but it was clean and pleasant so I was shocked to come back to this, especially after the amount of time they had known I was coming. I thought that after paying half of the deposit, a bit of a clean-up would have been a nice gesture. I sent some angry messages to my brother’s dad and received a half-hearted apology (“sorry, I did what I could in the time I had”) but no offer of help. My brother, to his credit, cancelled a trip he had planned to help with the cleaning. I want to note here that he is autistic, and he always had either my mum or I to remind and help him with cleaning, self-care, etc. When I’d moved out originally, I thought his dad would naturally take over that role but clearly it hadn’t happened in the way I’d expected. My brother was great though, and I was really impressed at how he accepted responsibility and did something to help instead of making excuses. I was never angry with my brother for letting the house get this bad as I had trusted his dad to care for his own son and ensure he was at least, say, not freezing cold because of the draught from his broken window or getting ill from the mould.
As we cleaned, I kept finding more and more things that my brother’s dad had left behind. His clothes were still hanging up in my wardrobe. When I went to take trash out to the bins outside, they were completely full. Wet clothes, food and other junk filling the recycling bin meant that the bin men had refused to empty it. I realised how enormous this task would be and I finally broke down and cried.
At the end of that weekend my partner had to go back to our rented property to finish emptying it and to be there for our removal guys. My other brother flew over from Ireland, which was a huge help because he always cheers me up. Our dad, who I hadn’t spoken to in about twenty years, drove him to the charity shop and waste disposal/recycling centre multiple times which allowed us to clear enough room for when the removal guys brought our stuff. I also listed things for free on Olio and Facebook marketplace and donated some furniture to a local charity who could pick it up to clear space quickly.
It wasn’t easy to adjust to living back home again, and to go back to my role as a carer after a couple years away, knowing that it wasn’t the life I’d planned. Emotionally, it was also hard to come back to a place that I still saw as being my mum’s house with all of those memories and complicated feelings. Then there’s the worry about money, the thousands of pounds worth of repairs that need to be done (not all because of the neglect, some are simply due to time and how the house was built). Then for the jobs that we do have money for, the stress of having to interact with workmen as an introvert with severe social anxiety. I felt overwhelmed by everything I had to do and started to feel suicidal. I was put back on anti-depressants after a year of not taking them. I visited A&E more than once because I didn’t know what else to do but it led nowhere. The relationship with my partner was strained and after a disagreement one day he went out for a drive and I took an overdose. This got me removed from the waiting list for therapy because I was too unstable.
I was so deep in my own issues that I didn’t notice how stressed my partner was and how he was struggling too. I came to him with my problems one day and he told me that he wasn’t able to cope with this any more, so he left to live with his family again and I went with paramedics to A2ED (‘alternative to the emergency department’, it’s for people in mental health crisis but they aren’t open every day so you don’t always end up there). I was absolutely broken at this point, feeling that I’d lost the last thing that was keeping me going. My dad picked me up from the hospital. Middlest brother flew over again and stayed with me. If you’ve been through the mental health system in the UK recently, you’ll know that there just isn’t help for you – every single person you turn to will tell you it’s someone else’s responsibility, and have you tried taking a hot bath or going for a walk? I probably wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t had my family to support me but still, it’s lonely.
Because I can’t drive and have no friends, I spend a lot of time at home. Eventually, I got tired of how it felt to look around our house and always see something that needed to be repaired or replaced; niggling little things that were just bringing me down even more. I pulled myself together enough to start working on decorating my house and found that actually, I am capable of doing a lot of things on my own. I’d spent so many years around people who would point out everything wrong with me, tell me how I needed their help and wouldn’t get by on my own that I guess I’d started to believe it. I don’t have a lot of process pictures for the things I’ve worked on in the last year because I never saw the point in documenting it – I felt so much shame that it never occurred to me to share anything I was doing and especially not how I was doing it because everyone would just see how wrong it was.
I’m not sure what’s changed my mind (maybe just having the space to try things without someone else judging me?) but I am almost proud of some of the things I’ve done. I’m not wealthy so I’ve figured out how to make the best of what I have on a tight budget and I love to upcycle/repurpose things that I find. It would be nice if someone found this helpful or inspiring and if not, I guess I just hope you enjoy seeing some of the weird shit I make.
recycled robo 