By June Fish
I’ve never met Bill Nighy. I’ll probably never meet Bill Nighy. But on the 21st of April 2022, English band Florence and the Machine released a music video for their song Free, starring Bill Nighy. Cut to February 2026, after developing agoraphobia (the thing that Aunt Josephine has in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events), this fictional embodiment of Bill Nighy helped me cross the road again.
I know it doesn’t make much sense, but I suppose that is the point of this story. The lived experience of a mental illness rarely makes sense. It doesn’t always fit our expectations of how conditions like anxiety, depression, or OCD are “supposed” to present themselves–or how someone is “supposed” to deal with it. For me, Bill Nighy, the Academy Award-winning British actor who’s best known for his roles in Love Actually (a classic) and About Time (a favourite), played a pivotal role in overcoming a severe anxiety disorder, as ridiculous as that sounds.
In recent decades, Gen Z have brought about a destigmatisation of mental health conditions and disorders. Today we are surrounded by a contemporary culture where therapy is the norm–nay, a necessity–and openly discussing one’s emotional and psychological troubles over a cappuccino and a dog walk is expected. In fact, I had one of these conversations recently.
I mentioned the words “anxiety, generalised, and disorder”, hoping to provide context to my particular situation. However, this person’s immediate reaction was to assuming that I was struggling with the stresses of my final year of university or an overloaded work schedule. Most of the time I would simply agree, not wanting to cause untoward awkwardness. But on this day, I decided to be open. I told them that it wasn’t that kind of anxiety–that I was experiencing a fear and paranoia of everyday things, that a few months ago it had gotten so bad I couldn’t leave the house. I was met with a response that I’ve grown extremely acquainted to: confusion, scepticism, even slight horror.
Conversations like these, which I’ve had with an abundance of people, have made me distinctly aware of a depressing truth. Yes, mental health awareness is at an all-time high; it is widely discussed and openly sympathised with. However, while we might think we understand what mental illness looks like, when faced with a lived experience that deviates from our expectations, this acceptance can often disappear.
So, what’s the solution? It’s a difficult undertaking for sure–changing perceptions shaped by cultural and social contexts, such as the primary use of clinical language to describe mental illness or the clean, symptomatically conforming representations we see in popular media. The best thing I can think of is the art of storytelling, to continue to use our ability to share and connect despite the initial judgement we may face. By sharing authentic lived experiences, with all of the “weird” and “confusing” bits included, it becomes possible to open up people’s perceptions, break down their assumptions, and allow for an understanding of what something feels like versus what we expect it to look like. I’ll begin:
It was 6:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and I was walking to the bus stop on my way to work, a daily occurrence. When I got there, I checked the schedule to find that the bus had been delayed by 10 minutes, another daily occurrence. I sat and waited. After 11 minutes, it arrived. I stood in front of the open doors but instead of getting on, I froze. Somewhere inside me, a thought began to spiral: something bad will happen if you get on that bus.
I’d been dealing with anxiety and panic for quite some time, but in the months leading up to this particular Wednesday, I had noticed a change. The irrational side of my brain–the anxiety – had gained a newfound power, and my rational side was losing control. I didn’t know this at the time, but anxiety is like a goldfish. If you keep feeding it, it will grow exponentially (from personal experience, not scientific fact), and anxiety’s favourite food is something they call avoidance. For years, I had unknowingly been pouring the entire bottle of fish flakes into my anxiety’s tank – avoiding certain places, situations, foods, people, or anything that I felt would initiate panic. And on this day, it was the bus.
There was something utterly terrifying about the fact that a crucial part of my everyday life–getting from point A to B–was now taken away from me. I spent the next four days at home. I didn’t leave alone once. I spoke to a doctor and then a psychologist, and I was given the diagnosis of severe Generalised Anxiety Disorder. I had heard the term before, but it hadn’t resonated. I didn’t feel like I was anxious about anything. I couldn’t pinpoint a reason why I was scared of getting on the bus. I’d never had a bad experience with the 372 before–except, perhaps, an irritation towards its chronic lateness.
I was told I needed to leave the house to remind myself that the outside world was no threat. So, on the fifth day of embodying Aunt Josephine, I decided to go to the servo. This was something I did on a regular basis; On a bad day, I’ve been known to get two bags of jellybeans and an ice cream. As I walked out the front door, turned left, then left again, a sense of dread began to grow within me–although I was yet to understand why. The servo sat just opposite the main road, one busy enough that you need to wait at a pedestrian crossing. Jaywalking is simply not an option. I walked up to the button at the lights, but I couldn’t press it. I walked away a few paces. Then back up to it. Paused. Walked away again, a little further this time. Walked back up to the button with gusto. Paused. Paralysed. I can genuinely, with complete honesty, say that this was the most terrifying experience of entire life. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance that I never knew was possible. I cross roads every day–everyone crosses roads every day. But there I was, in tears, unable to cross at all.
To continue sharing lived experiences of mental illness, let’s quickly talk about the relevance of that song: Free by Florence and the Machine. It’s about Florence Welch’s experience with anxiety–how it “chews [her] up” and “spits [her] out.” She explores the internal battle of deciding whether to be medicated, as well as the unsolicited comments received from others, like “you’re just too sensitive” (eyeroll). It’s a piece of storytelling that I have resonated with deeply–a song that embodies the feeling of what it’s like to not be in control of your own head. I’ve always believed in the idea that music can give us the confidence to overcome hard things. I know what it can do to the brain – what wires it can uncross, what forgotten paths it can light up.
With this in mind, I trudged back home and retrieved my headphones. Back out the door I went, Free on full volume. I approached the lights again, the thought still spiralling: something bad will happen if you cross the road. When I had spoken to a psychologist, we had discussed something called cognitive restructuring–a technique used in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to help alter negative thinking patterns. It’s a glass half empty versus half full kind of thing. So, I started thinking of ways to imagine my anxiety differently, and I suddenly remembered the music video for the song I was listening to. It starred Florence as herself and Bill Nighy, of all people, as her anxiety. In the desperate state that I was in, I “restructured” my anxious thoughts into a Bill Nighy shaped imaginary friend. No, I’m not joking. He waited at the lights with me, we crossed together, we grabbed a bag of chips, and we walked back home, Bill and I.
I didn’t tell anyone about this at the time, how could I? There was a kind of embarrassment that came with admitting to a coping strategy involving an imaginary friend, especially as a full-grown adult. No, I didn’t use deep breathing or meditation; I stole an idea from a music video, a depiction of Bill Nighy, and he helped me cross the road again. As the months have gone by and I’ve made the steps to take back my life, I no longer look back on this day with embarrassment. Instead, I have a sense of pride in the way that I coped. In a moment where I felt as though I had lost my ability to function as a human, I managed to find a piece of myself. A piece of my childlike imagination, a piece of my humour. These days, Bill isn’t really around anymore, although he helped me conquer other things like catching the bus again and going back to work. I’m now acquainted with my anxiety for what it is: a part of me that wants to keep me safe, a part that I can listen to but also push aside.
Living with a mental health condition is never linear or structured or limited to a single experience; it is unpredictable, messy and sometimes confusing. But that doesn’t make it any less valid. As I mentioned earlier, in 2026, talking about mental health is nowhere near as stigmatised as it once was. However, it is still often difficult to be honest about these imperfect moments—these experiences that don’t conform to others’ expectations. As writers, musicians, artists, poets, doctors, lawyers—as humans—we must aim to share these experiences without fear of judgement, with a sense of achievement for where we are compared to where we were. By doing this, we can create a society that accepts and empathises not only with the things that make sense, but also the things that don’t. Because, more often than not, the lived experience of a mental illness won’t always make sense. There won’t always be a reason or an explanation. Someone’s experience won’t look the same as someone else’s, and their way of overcoming or coping won’t look the same as mine, even though I like to imagine that everyone has a Bill Nighy-shaped angel looking out for them every now and then.
