The Ship With a Broken Compass

Promise

After this page you can explain what a compass deviation is, why I use it as a picture of an undiagnosed mind, and why a diagnosis is a check, not a verdict.

In my words (the original essay, unchanged)

I sailed for twenty years without knowing my compass was broken.

The twenty years, at least, are not a metaphor. I built a career in luxury hospitality across Sydney’s finest venues. I learned four languages. I managed multilingual teams. I charmed clients in three currencies. And the whole time, my brain was navigating with faulty instruments: pulling me left when I meant to go right, surging forward at 3am when I needed sleep, stalling completely when all I needed to do was send one email.

I know that now. Back then, I just thought I was difficult.

What a broken compass looks like from the inside

Here is what it looks like: you are brilliant at emergencies and terrible at Tuesdays. A restaurant floor in crisis? You are the calmest person in the room. A long-term project with no deadline? You spend four hours rearranging the desktop icons and call it work. You speak four languages and still cannot finish a sentence to the person who loves you most. You survive things that would flatten other people, and then fall apart over a parking ticket.

Where the needle was first pulled off course

I grew up in Chittagong, Bangladesh, the oldest child of two people who could not stop fighting. From the time I was about thirteen, my job was to keep the house from splitting apart. I became very good at reading rooms: feeling the tension before it cracked, knowing what each person needed before they asked, absorbing what nobody else wanted to carry. That skill made me exceptional at hospitality. It also meant I had been doing other people’s emotional labour since before I had a word for it.

I moved to Australia in 2005, thinking distance would fix things. It did not. My parents called separately, each one asking me to take their side, for one or two hours per call. I was twenty years old and already exhausted. I spent two years making bad choices, not to be reckless, but to stop feeling responsible for everything and everyone at once. Nobody explained to me that this is what an undiagnosed, untreated, traumatised brain does when it runs out of options. I just thought I was weak.

I was not weak. I was unequipped.

Getting accurate instruments

The diagnosis came in La Réunion, where I now live with my wife (the best decision of my life) and our daughter. A GP told me I was depressed, “like big time”. A psychiatrist eventually named the fuller picture. Four decades of my life clicked into place in one afternoon.

This is not a story about despair. It is a story about what happens when you finally get accurate instruments.

Why the compass is the right picture

A ship’s compass is not assumed to be perfect. The American Practical Navigator, a navigation manual published by the US government, defines deviation as the “deflection right or left of the magnetic meridian caused by magnetic properties of the vessel”. The remedy is not to throw the compass overboard. As the manual’s chapter on compass adjustment explains, navigators arrange magnets and soft iron correctors around the compass “so that their effects are equal and opposite to the effects of the magnetic material in the ship”. The coloured spheres in the photograph above are part of that correction. The error is measured, named and allowed for, and then the ship steers by an honest reading.

What I am describing from the age of thirteen has a name in psychology: parentification, when a child takes on adult emotional or practical responsibilities in the family. A 2011 meta-analysis in the Journal of Clinical Psychology by Lisa Hooper and colleagues pooled 12 studies with 2,472 participants and found a small but reliable link between self-reported parentification in childhood and psychological difficulties in adulthood. Small is the important word. It describes a raised risk, not a fixed outcome, and the authors call for more research.

Depression, the first word I was given, is not rare. The World Health Organization estimates that about 5.2% of adults worldwide live with it. It describes depression as different from ordinary changes of mood and notes that people who have been through traumatic or other adverse life events are more likely to develop it. It also states that there is effective treatment for mild, moderate and severe depression. A diagnosis, in other words, is the instrument check. It is not the verdict.

   a compass that pulls off course
                 |
                 v
     name the error (diagnosis)
                 |
                 v
     fit the correctors
                 |
                 v
     steer by an honest reading
                 |
                 v
     keep sailing, knowing where
     you are

Still going

A broken compass does not make you a bad sailor. It just means every destination took longer than it should have, every storm was harder than it needed to be, and the miracle is not that you arrived; it is that you kept going without knowing where you were.

I kept going. I am still going. And now I know where I am.

If you are reading this and your compass feels broken too: welcome. You are in good company. And the sea is not as large as it looks.

The takeaway: A ship’s compass is expected to err, because the ship itself pulls the needle off course; navigators measure the error and correct for it. A mind shaped by a hard childhood and years without a diagnosis can work the same way. Struggling with ordinary Tuesdays while staying calm in a crisis is not proof of weakness. A diagnosis is an instrument check, not a verdict, and depression is common and treatable. If your compass feels broken, a GP is a reasonable place to start; in my case, it was a GP who first named the depression.

If you are in crisis anywhere in France, including La Réunion, you can call the national suicide prevention line on 3114, free and open 24 hours a day, seven days a week (3114.fr). In an emergency, call 15 or 112. This post is my own account, not medical advice.

Related reading

• Five Languages, One Voice: Why I Never Felt Smart Enough
• Generational Trauma Stops Here
• What Bipolar Taught Me That Every Productivity Guru Got Wrong
• On Starting Over: What Complex PTSD Taught Me About Resilience
• My Mental Health Journey and the Resources page
• More in Mental Health

I am a multilingual writer, educator and advocate living in La Réunion. I write about mental health, neurodiversity, language and the unglamorous business of rebuilding a life.

Fact check, 28 October 2026

I re-checked the sources already linked in the essay: The American Practical Navigator chapter on compass adjustment, Hooper and colleagues (2011, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 12 studies, 2,472 participants) and the WHO depression fact sheet (about 5.2% of adults). No corrections needed. The 3114 line is the national suicide prevention number in France.