As well as having a mind hell-bent on working against me, I also have a body that harbours similarly self-defeating ambitions.

Asthma, trigeminal neuralgia, occipital neuralgia, chronic sinuses, a hiatus hernia, diverticular disease, debilitating PMS, issues with my joints… None of them will kill me (although the asthma did make a few half-hearted attempts during my childhood) but they do all conspire to keep me in a fug of unabating discomfort.

How much unabating discomfort is too much? I wish I knew. My thoughts on the subject regularly ping pong between two extremes: I can’t live like this anymore and: I’m sure everybody feels like this, and it’s just me who can’t cope.

Since returning to the UK, I began slowly working through all the physical ‘issues’, getting diagnoses and treatment where applicable, but it has revealed itself to be a game of whack a mole: as soon as the diagnostic hammer fall on one problem, another one crops up elsewhere. Meanwhile depression has lumbered on alongside, seemingly unperturbed by changes in medication or dosage.

Around 10 years ago it was joined by that most unwelcome of bedfellows, anxiety. Not anxiety about specifics, but a gut-churning, unshifting fight-or-flight boulder in the chest that has slowly reduced me from an independent woman who thought nothing of packing her worldly belongs into a car and driving hundreds of kilometres alone across Europe, to someone who often cannot even cope with the school run.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to make sense of it: they are my mind and my body after all, and as much as I hate how pathetic medical visits make me feel, I hate it even more when I haven’t got a theory to lay before long-suffering doctors in the vain hope it might make their job easier. A theory, and the reassurance that I have first tried my best to resolve the issue myself before bothering them with it.

Last year those theories started to coalesce into a single nagging thought: what if there was no point attempting to resolve each individual problem? What if all the problems are entangled: the mind with the body and the body with the mind? And yet while I was being sent from ENT specialist to gynaecologist, for x-rays or for MRIs, in order to investigate the physical, I remained trapped in the GP mandated suck-it-and-see medication cycle when it came to issues of the mind.

Around the time I finally and firmly raised the prospect of a psychiatrist referral to my GP, the subject of ADHD also arose.

Now, I am far from hyperactive, in fact I would consider myself a low-energy sloth-like being. I never bounced off school walls or proved myself unable to sit still in class. Nor would I ever have considered myself particularly reckless, certainly not in the manner of the stereotypical young male ADHD sufferer: held in check solely by a constant diet of societal disapproval and Ritalin.

But I did struggle at school: with boredom, with an inability to conform, with a complete lack of discipline in completing any task that did not absorb me. I was expelled at the age of 16, never to return to full-time education. Not because I am thick necessarily, but because the classroom and I were never a good fit.

I struggled with binge drinking from my mid-teens to my mid 30s, which lead to plenty of reckless behaviour.

I have struggled with binge eating all my life.

As an adult I can be chaotic, untidy. I put off tasks for no reason I can discern, other than the intense feeling of anxiety they seem to provoke in me, step over mess it would be the work of a moment to neaten.

I’ve had around 20 different jobs since the age of 17, moved house around 18 times in the same period, lived in five different countries, and 11 different towns.

I am terrible at friendships – I have ghosted more people in my life than I have befriended simply because I cannot cope with the pressure. It becomes easier to focus on the negative, in order to justify disentanglement.

My relationship history is equally dire.

I struggle to cope with noise and bustle: I need plenty of solitary peace in order to refuel.

My mind is often too loud and too busy to enable me to grasp hold of a single thought in order to follow it through to its conclusion…

It is those traits, among others, that apparently made a diagnosis of ADHD likely.

Even more interestingly, ADHD in women can apparently also come with side servings of both depression and anxiety.

It is quite the revelation. Having had most of the milder anti-depressants on the market thrown at me in varying dosages for twenty years, if depression wasn’t ever the correct diagnosis, then maybe anti-depressants were never the correct treatment, either.

I wanted to stand in front of someone who KNOWS these things, once and for all, and for them to say: THIS is what you have got, and THIS is what you can do about it.

Or for them to say: THIS is what you have got, but NOTHING can be done about it.

Or even (my secret fear): There is NOTHING wrong with you, you are simply a lazy/flawed/hopeless/rather shit human being.

Any of the three scenarios would at least constitute an answer, and hopefully provide the springboard to either a plan of action, or a state of resignation prior to a very different-looking plan of action.

Not having had an appointment with a professional psycho-something for 20 years (I’m not sure the Italian psychiatrist who declared me a Very Bad Mother for trying not to lose my sanity during pregnancy, counted), I was more than ready to head down that path. Regardless of what the outcome might be, and despite not actually ‘feeling’ better, making an appointment for a psychological assessment already felt like more progress than I could have hoped for.