Kimberley Nixon\u2019s memoir, She Seems Fine to Me, is out on 7 May, and she\u2019s quite terrified. This isn\u2019t an author worried by sales figures or reviews. Nixon\u2019s book is an up-close-and-personal account of perinatal OCD. It tells of the dark, disturbing thoughts that taunted and haunted her after the birth of her son: her racing mind, relentless rumination, the Technicolor horror stories that played inside her head, always centred on harms to her baby. The book holds nothing back.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it really brave or is it really stupid?\u201d says Nixon. \u201cIn my head, I\u2019ve written a book about what a horrible person I was and put it out in the world \u2013 and I have to keep reminding myself that\u2019s not it. I\u2019ve written a book about a mental health condition and trying to fight it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Its publication coincides with maternal mental health awareness week. \u201cThe nature of this \u2013 the content, the detail \u2013 is so taboo. You don\u2019t want to share it. You keep it hidden, and that made me worse and stopped me getting better for a long time. I\u2019m genuinely worried that people will misunderstand or read snippets and look at me differently and think I must be a horrible person to have those horrible thoughts \u2013 then all my insecurities about my OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) will come true.\u201d On the other hand, this book might help set her free. \u201cIf I can do this,\u201d she says, \u201cif I can say it out loud and let it wash over me, it\u2019ll be the biggest step in my recovery yet. Fingers crossed!\u201d<\/p>\n
Nixon (centre) in Fresh Meat, with, from left, Joe Thomas, Zawe Ashton, Greg McHugh, Charlotte Ritchie and Jack Whitehall. Photograph: Ray Burmiston\/Channel 4<\/p>\n
Most people will know Nixon as the Welsh actor who played \u201cSlaggy Lindsay\u201d in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, and the wayward Josie in Fresh Meat. Now 40, Nixon says she seems to have \u201cmoved casting brackets\u201d \u2013 in the recent crime drama Under Salt Marsh<\/a>, she played Shell, the bereaved mother whose son was found dead in a ditch.<\/p>\n There will be some people, though, new mothers especially, who know Nixon not for any of this, but more for her Instagram and Substack where she shares her complicated experience of motherhood. Talking about her son, now five and a half, she lights up. \u201cHe\u2019s the happiest, most well-adjusted kid,\u201d she says, \u201cfull into superheroes, curious about everything \u2013 he asks the best questions.\u201d But his arrival dropped her into a dark space where she lost herself, feared for his safety, wanted to die and planned her suicide.<\/p>\n We meet in a cafe in Pontypridd, close to where Nixon grew up and where she now lives with her son and husband. (He attended the same school and they have been together for 21 years.) Neither are named in her book. They didn\u2019t choose to be in the public eye, she says. \u201cThe least I can do is let them keep their names.\u201d<\/p>\n She Seems Fine to Me reads like Nixon speaks \u2013 it\u2019s sparky, crackling with rage, but also, somehow, laugh-out-loud funny. She describes her experience of infertility, IVF, then becoming pregnant, giving birth and bringing home her baby in a pandemic with little support available. Maybe its power is that, by the end, you question who could get through all that unscathed. Instead of seeming \u201cabnormal\u201d, Nixon\u2019s poor mental health makes a lot of sense.<\/p>\n She and her husband had been trying for a baby for four years before the IVF that brought them their son. Her book digs into the detail, each bit of good news, then bad news, the hormonal highs and lows, the tests, egg collection and transfer, then constant monitoring. One time, newly pregnant, Nixon is in London for a voiceover, waiting to enter the studio, when her clinic calls to inform her that her latest blood tests show that she is about to miscarry. (She didn\u2019t.) For each subsequent scan, braced for bad news, Nixon is alone because of lockdown rules. As her due date approaches, she becomes increasingly anxious \u2013 and writes to her MP \u2013 about the rules surrounding labour, which meant her husband couldn\u2019t join her until she was 5cm dilated, and would have to leave one hour after the birth. (This was while the rest of the UK was being urged to \u201ceat out to help out\u201d.) \u201cIf I\u2019d given birth in this cafe, I could have had five friends with me,\u201d she says, \u201cwhereas in hospital I\u2019d have to be on my own.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really interesting \u2013 I didn\u2019t remotely put two and two together and think that maybe years of infertility and then IVF and the precariousness of being pregnant in a pandemic made me super vulnerable and anxious and aware of risk,\u201d Nixon continues. \u201cThen suddenly, they put this baby in my arms, I\u2019d lost two pints of blood, my hormones plummeted \u2013 and something happened. As soon as they lifted him up and showed me, it was like somebody flipped a switch in my brain. The lights went out. It was bizarre because I\u2019d read so much about instantly falling in love with your baby. What were they talking about? I felt the crushing weight of responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Her hospital stay was, she says, a \u201cwaking nightmare\u201d. Shortly after his birth, her son was transferred to the special care baby unit with possible sepsis. Nixon couldn\u2019t go with him \u2013 she was having a blood transfusion \u2013 so her husband had to decide whether to remain with her, or go with their son. Whichever he chose would be the only one he\u2019d be able to see from then on. (Covid rules prohibited moving between the two spaces.) Though Nixon pushed him to the door, that first stretch alone on the ward was perhaps the start of her spiralling, of believing the worst and seeing it in her mind\u2019s eye. She became convinced her son had died and no one was telling her. In truth, he was fine, and was returned to Nixon hours later.<\/p>\n Photograph: Francesca Jones\/The Guardian<\/p>\n For the next few days until her discharge, she remained sleepless and hypervigilant in a hot, eerie, empty, brightly lit ward sealed off from the world. On returning home, another lockdown was announced and the clocks went forward. \u201cMaybe it wasn\u2019t all in my head,\u201d she writes in her book, \u201cthat I was plummeting into both a darkness and an isolation, the likes of which I\u2019d never known.\u201d<\/p>\n Almost immediately, Nixon found herself second- and third-guessing every little decision involving her son. Some of her exhausting thought trails are in the book. Should she take him with her to the bathroom when she had a shower, to ensure he was safe? Or was that inappropriate? If she turned her back on him to sleep, did it mean she didn\u2019t love him? She saw danger everywhere. She imagined her son\u2019s death from hypothermia, or dog-attack, a fatal fall, or him being kidnapped and abused. Often, her thoughts were sexual or violent. Had a paedophile ordered her son on the dark web? Had his milk powder been spiked with anthrax?<\/p>\n She doubted her power to keep her son safe, and feared she was a danger to him, too. \u201cIt\u2019s all the time, every minute of every day, variations on a theme,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can\u2019t live like that. After four months, I started thinking: \u2018Oh my God, maybe there is a way out.\u2019\u201d Her thoughts became suicidal.<\/p>\n OCD, which has many subtypes, is believed to affect 3% of the population, and frequently worsens or appears during pregnancy or after birth. Intrusive thoughts are far more common \u2013 in fact, there\u2019s research suggesting that more than 95% of new parents<\/a> have them. In cases of OCD, though, they spiral, they\u2019re obsessional and all-consuming.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I didn\u2019t know then was that the thoughts themselves don\u2019t matter \u2013 it\u2019s how we react to them,\u201d says Nixon. \u201cThe more you try to stop them, the harder they come. Your brain is sending false emergency flares all the time, as you\u2019re trying to analyse each thought and what it says about you. It\u2019s like my body was saying: \u2018Oh my God, this thought is really important, we need to pay attention to this and solve it or someone\u2019s going to die, there\u2019s a gun to our head!\u2019 You have to retrain your brain to just let the thoughts come in. Don\u2019t judge them, don\u2019t beat yourself up, and they drop off. Your body starts saying: \u2018Yeah, we\u2019ve seen this, don\u2019t worry about it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Nixon learned all this through exposure and response prevention (ERP), a highly specialised cognitive behavioural therapy, and the gold standard treatment for OCD. She had to find and pay for it herself at \u00a3100 a session. (She spent her entire \u201cactor\u2019s nest egg\u201d on therapy.) The lack of support from perinatal mental health services is the most enraging aspect of her story. \u201cEverything was done by phone and no one really saw you,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to talk about the darkest time of your life over the phone to a stranger and even harder doing it for the 20th time, when you never speak to the same person again.\u201d<\/p>\n Besides the ERP, what else helped her through? Her husband, for sure. \u201cI was lucky we\u2019d been together a long time,\u201d she says. \u201cHe knew me \u2013 because how the hell do you explain all this?\u201d Years earlier, as a drama student, Nixon had experienced something similar over a six-month period. Watching an interminable Shakespeare production, her mind wandered to a gross sexual image of a family member. \u201cI couldn\u2019t let it go,\u201d she says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the fact that I\u2019d thought it.\u201d She was misdiagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and given three therapy sessions. \u201cSo all these years later, when I said to my husband: \u2018I think it\u2019s happening again,\u2019 he just got it in a way that I think saved my life.\u201d<\/p>\n His support and quiet faith never faltered. \u201cHe believed in me where I didn\u2019t,\u201d she says. \u201cHe didn\u2019t have to say it all the time, but even in my OCD-addled \u2018you can\u2019t trust anyone\u2019 brain, I knew I could trust him. I\u2019d ask him: \u2018How can you leave me with the baby? What if I\u2019m a danger to him?\u2019 and he\u2019d say: \u2018Because I have absolutely no worries whatsoever. You\u2019d give your life in a second for the baby.\u2019 I clung on to that.\u201d<\/p>\n Kimberley Nixon and her child. Photograph: Courtesy of Kimberley Nixon<\/p>\n Perhaps the biggest breakthrough, though, was posting about all this on Instagram. \u201cIf someone had told me that social media would play a part in my recovery, they\u2019d have got the biggest eye-roll,\u201d she says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t even on Instagram before I had a baby.\u201d (She downloaded the app only because someone had told her there was an account offering free dungarees.) \u201cWhen I started posting, I didn\u2019t have the bandwidth to put a front on, I didn\u2019t have the energy to lie.\u201d<\/p>\n The overwhelming response to her first tentative posts about struggling with motherhood made her braver. \u201cIt made me share more and more,\u201d she says. \u201cI was getting hundreds and hundreds of messages. There\u2019d be women who were 18 months postpartum going to see their GP because of a post. There were women in the middle of it and women in their 50s and 60s saying they\u2019d never forgiven themselves for how ill they were in the first couple of years of motherhood \u2013 and they\u2019d never told their husband. I had loads of messages from partners saying: \u2018This is my wife. How can I help her?\u2019 I\u2019d be reading them and crying \u2013 but it was a different crying. I wasn\u2019t hiding any more.\u201d<\/p>\n Mental illness thrives in the dark. \u201cYour OCD tells you that you\u2019re a terrible person, and people only like you because they don\u2019t know the \u2018real you\u2019,\u201d she says. Opening up on Instagram was, in her words, \u201cthe biggest fuck you to OCD I\u2019d ever done\u201d. Writing a book is the next level up.<\/p>\n Nixon is busy now \u2013 with her son, the book launch and also a one-woman comedy show, Baby Brain, set in a mother-and-baby unit, which she\u2019s taking on tour. Recovery isn\u2019t straightforward. It was 18 months before she stopped wishing she was dead, maybe two years before she began to trust \u2013 and forgive \u2013 herself. \u201cI still have a little stumble now and again,\u201d she says. Medication, journalling and breathing exercises all help. Last June, Nixon was also diagnosed with autism and ADHD, which shed more light on her life. \u201cTheres a huge crossover between OCD and autism,\u201d she says. \u201cIt helped me understand the way I think, the way I process things.\u201d<\/p>\n One question Nixon is often asked \u2013 especially by mothers in the midst of it \u2013 is how long was it before she felt like she used to? The answer is that she doesn\u2019t and never will. \u201cI can\u2019t ever go back to being the person I was,\u201d she says, \u201cand wanting to go back stopped me getting better for a very long time.\u201d But she can be stronger \u2013 happier, even.<\/p>\n \u201cAll my life, I was looking to see if I was in trouble somehow,\u201d she says. \u201cI used to care too much about everything, about what people thought of me, or if I\u2019d upset someone without knowing it. I\u2019ve learned not to do that now. If all this hadn\u2019t happened, my son wouldn\u2019t be here, I wouldn\u2019t have written a book, I wouldn\u2019t have found out so much about how my brain works. I\u2019m so much happier for it.\u201d<\/p>\n She Seems Fine to Me: Behind the Scenes of Birth, Babies and My Broken Brain by Kimberley Nixon (Gallery UK, \u00a320) is published on 7 May. To support the Guardian, order a copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a><\/p>\n In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans<\/a> can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org<\/a> or jo@samaritans.ie<\/a>. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline<\/a> at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org<\/a>. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline<\/a> is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org<\/a><\/p>\n In the UK, the charity Mind<\/a> is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline<\/a> on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America<\/a> at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue<\/a> on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline<\/a> on 13 11 14, and at MensLine<\/a> on 1300 789 978<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kimberley Nixon\u2019s memoir, She Seems Fine to Me, is out on 7 May, and she\u2019s quite terrified. 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