A picture of teenage depression

For a number of reasons, this week has seen my hasty and unexpected return to the ‘Shire for a couple of days. As anyone who has ever spent more than ten minutes in my conversational company will know, there’s not a lot to do here. I’ve looked at Dad’s new lettuce patch, watched a high volume of crappy chick-flicks and had a weirdly spooky moment with my mum while the dog ate a tea towel. And that’s about as much as I could hope for, activity-wise.

So, in a move that was guaranteed to end well, I decided to dig out all the boxes of sentimental teenage stuff that I had accumulated over the years. Diaries, knick-knacks, letters, an astonishing number of decorative fans (why), and quite a lot of crap with meaning I can no longer recall. That sort of thing.

And it made me really, really sad (quelle surprise), because for the first time in my adult life I sat down and read – through my many diaries – a blow-by-blow account of the mental health issues I struggled with when I was younger; a bleak narrative that has been packed away for over ten years. It made for a depressing evening, and there wasn’t even any wine in the house.

The descent from sunny, upbeat and girlish diary entries in swirly handwriting to scrawled accounts of mood, medication and mental (in)stability is marked. From Mean Girls to Girl, Interrupted over the course of mere months. Eventually, I stopped writing anything of note and simply filled in the days with single, nonsensical words such as ‘another’, ‘still’ and ‘can’t’.

My residency at the bottom of the hole is foggy in my mind, such was the volume of chemicals I was prescribed, and such is, likely, my desire to repress it all. It was a very, very unhappy period, and one that has had a pronounced effect on my life since.

However.

While there is always a hangover from any period of mental distress – like a skidmark on the clean white pants of your future – one thing I’ve taken from the whole sorry affair is resilience. A dear friend of mine is currently going through cognitive behavioural therapy for her own issues, and she maintains that she’ll be a more well-adjusted person for it – even more so than she was before her problems took hold.

And I agree. In this life, the only person you can ever rely on is yourself, and if you can get yourself through a period of genuine, personal hell – when you can’t even trust your own damn brain to help you out – then you’ve seen life stripped-back to its disturbingly bleak core and have been given the wonderful gift of perspective.

Which is something I need right now, since I’m not having a very good year at all. In moments when I feel overwhelmed by the number of crappy cards I’ve been dealt it’s easy for me to lose sight of how different I am now to the girl in these diaries. Life is tough now, but at least it’s a life, which is something Diary Girl was barely hanging on to.

During those dark days I saw countless therapists and mental health professionals. Some were great. Some made me feel much worse. But one woman – whose name I regrettably can’t remember – encouraged me to express my feelings through drawing. I have all the artistic ability of a goat wielding a pencil so it wasn’t something that came easily to me, but I do remember it helped a considerable amount. Last night I found a pile of those drawings and felt quite shaken by them, such was the force of the memories they evoked. But I found them underneath a pile of love letters, travel tickets and photographs that illustrate my life since that time.

And I felt an overwhelming sense of perspective.

Wildlife. In London.

During my first year at university I lived in student flats in a green and hilly part of Wales. One day, one of my flatmates – a girl from Birmingham – and I were leaning out of my bedroom window having a fag, and we spotted a rabbit frolicking around on the grass outside.

I remember thinking the most striking thing about the scene was that the blighter wasn’t riddled with myxomatosis. Coming from the countryside, you can’t really walk anywhere without tripping over poor little mites huddled in the middle of footpaths with their eyes all gooed up.

This girl, however, lost her shit. “OH MY GOD. Is that a real rabbit?” She was physically flapping at this point, and whipped out her phone to call her mum. “Mum, guess what? THERE’S A RABBIT OUTSIDE.” She put her hand over the receiver and whispered to me, “Do you think it could be somebody’s pet?”

And that’s when I realised that not everyone had the same nonchalant attitude towards wildlife as I did. It was quite eye-opening, really; I was living with people who had, quite literally, never seen a wild rabbit before. Anyway, I chalked it up to the great city / countryside divide, and thought nothing more of it.

Until I moved to London. When I moved to this sprawling concrete wonderland, I knew I’d miss the countryside a bit. What I do really miss is the backdrop of rolling green hills that had been a constant eye canvas throughout my moves around Wales, and even in Bristol. Now it’s just buildings, offices and fried chicken shops. But whatever. No-one moves to London for the scenery.

What I’m missing the most at the moment, though, is that in the countryside, you know what the fuck is going on with its wildlife.

People tend to think the countryside is some wild, untamed animal free-for-all. That there are just pigs and sheep milling around wherever they please. That rabbits are pouring out of the ground and every single household owns a chicken. But this is not the case at all.

Wildlife in the countryside is kept in check. Farm animals are accounted for, few people own chickens because they’re bastards and rabbits, badgers and foxes keep to their bloody selves. On the rare occasion a cow starts munching your hedge, you just run at it with a novelty umbrella and they stomp off to the corner of the field, ready to be taken for milking, or turned into burgers.

You know what’s what in the countryside.

NOT LIKE SODDING LONDON, THOUGH, where the amount of wildlife I’ve encountered in the last two-and-a-bit years is simply extraordinary.

First there were the rats, which I blogged about exasperatedly at the time. What started as the odd scratching noise in the kitchen (It’s just the house settling!) quickly turned into episodes involving housemates and I hysterically throwing spoons at them as they scuttled across the cooker. Thanks to the heroic efforts of my other half, we (we – thanks for nothing Wandsworth Council and every bloody pest control agency we called in thereafter) managed to catch the offending pair, unceremoniously turfing their huge furry brown bodies into the bin (as instructed by the authorities), and leaving their nest of babies, cosy and out of reach in the ceiling, to squeak and scramble for days, until one day the noises simply stopped. It was horrible.

Then, without rats to deter them, in came an army of mice. Mice, which are able to squeeze themselves through gaps smaller than their heads, fact fans. Many weekends spent shoving wire wool down every single gap in our Victorian terrace and substantial investments in traps and sound-frequency deterrents eventually put pay to the problem, but not before several ‘hilarious’ attempts at catching the strays that saw fit to scuttle into the lounge while we were watching TV. How many grown adults does it take it catch a mouse? Seven, apparently. Five to flap around impotently, two to actually do something, but the whole group to create enough noise and panic that the poor thing eventually just drops dead from fright.

Then there were the spiders. And I don’t mean spiders. I mean spiders. Huge spiders. Over the course of one month in September, we averaged one of these monsters every two days. You’d walk into the kitchen, take a cautious glance at the floor, then go to the sink or cupboard or whatever. When you turned around – BAM. There it was. Squat and hairy, from nowhere: phobia ninjas. Both of us eyeing the other, waiting to see who’d make the first move. I’d reach behind my back, slowly, grasping for a bowl, a saucepan, anything, but its thousands of repulsive eyes would gauge the movement and it’d scuttle towards me at alarming speed, sending me tearing out of the door screaming for my life. The September rains stopped, and they left. But I know they’ll be back.

Then – and throughout our tenancy – there are the birds. We’ve an enormous tree in our back garden (some folk say it’s the tallest in Tooting), home, initially, to a pair of wood pigeons that seemed to be constantly embroiled in a domestic. I don’t know what the problem was, or indeed, what kind of problems wood pigeons have, but every day the tree would shake and they’d squawk at each other furiously, turfing bits of twigs and fluff out of their abode, which they eventually left. Maybe they split up, maybe they needed a fresh start somewhere new? Who knows? What I do know is that the tree is now home to a pair of mentally-challenged magpies that don’t understand their size and insist on flying at the tree with comically-oversized sticks, and then being all surprised when physics doesn’t work out for them. As such, the garden is covered with bits of branch and wood, and it all looks a bit Blair Witch. Which is great.

And then, most recently – and the catalyst for this lengthy rant (sorry) – the foxes. The fucking foxes. Urban foxes are as much a London landmark as Big Ben, or drunk girls falling out of Infernos. They’re just standard. The norm. But they’re utterly fearless, and whereas in the countryside they’re likely to sprint away at the first sign of a human, here they’re more likely to pull a knife on you and take your wallet. They’re everywhere. And now they’re LIVING IN MY GARDEN.

I came back from a few days away to find a family of them had dug into the plant borders around the sides of the garden and had set up camp in a the mound of earth beneath the tree. And they’d dragged a load of crap in with them: half-empty cat food tins, crisp packets, a broken plant pot (?). And, as it’s illegal to harm them with traps or poison (not that I would want to hurt them), short of shouting ‘PLEASE LEAVE’ at them through the safety of the window there’s nothing I can do. So now they join the rodents and the spiders and the stupid idiotic birds in a gang land-style territory takeover.

At least they’re keeping the cats away, I suppose. Ah yes, then there’s the cats…

‘Oss’, or, how I’m kicking my problems in the face

In a school PE class there are two types of child. The child that can climb the gym rope, and the one that can’t. I was, and always have been, decidedly in the latter camp, dreading any kind of scenario that requires physical exertion, co-ordination and the bravery to put myself in a position where I might fall and brain myself. A sickening proposition at the best of times, never mind in front of a group of sniggering, capable individuals and an exasperated teacher.

So it was with massive apprehension that I stood on a plastic blue gymnastics mat this evening and greeted the burly man who, for the next four weeks, will be teaching me – wait for it – martial arts.

Yes, you did indeed read that correctly. I, of cack-handed running fame, am doing martial arts. Of my own free will.

Ever since The Event I have, I’ll admit, been pretty unhappy. Coming to terms with what happened, the reactions (or lack of) from people I considered friends, the brewing anger and resentment I foster towards the incident, the knock-on effects all these months later… it’s all come to a critical point during the last few weeks where I’ve been in serious danger of losing the plot completely. I’ve done that before, and it’s not a road I care to tread down again.

I’ve found some relief in my three-times-a-week gym slog (I know, right? I go to the gym. Shut up), mainly in that for 45 minutes or whatever I’m focused solely on reps and distances, rather than how much I want to kill everybody, and it was there that I saw the advert for the class I went to tonight.

I really don’t know what possessed me to sign up. Let’s be clear, martial arts is literally the last thing most people would think I’d do. In fact, when I told my mate Becky about it her reaction was: “WOW. I genuinely did not expect you to say that. I thought you were going to go see a musical or something.” Which I think that tells you all you need to know about the parameters of my comfort zone.

But sign up I did. And after a punishing ‘warm up’ and ten forward rolls in a row (from which I still feel nauseous), it was time to kick the shit out of things. And it was BRILLIANT. All my rage and anger channelled safely into a jab pad, while screaming – at my instructor’s suggestion – a list of all the things I’m mad at. Turns out there’s a lot of things I’m mad at.

And, it turns out, I don’t totally suck at martial arts. I’ve got good balance and thrust, apparently, and good focus. So I’m on a bit of a high. I’ve found a healthy channel for all the bad feels, I’ve stuck two fingers up to my increasingly restricted comfort zone and I got a pat on the back from someone who told me ‘You’re doing well’. And that’s what I really wanted to hear.

Hope is important

There are many kinds of hope. Active hope, quiet hope, false hope, hope you didn’t even know you had until something happens to make you question it. For example, I’d have hoped that Scottish rock band Idlewild (whose seminal debut album accounts for the title of this blog post) would have stayed true to their indie roots instead of subsequently releasing several albums of wishy washy pap, but here we are. It’s a hope I didn’t know I had until it was lost.

All of us are hopeful, whether we know it or not. Hopeful that we’re making the right choices in life, that we’ll be happy and content in the end, that nothing will come along to alter the finely tuned trajectories of our lives. It’s not a hope we tend to fixate on, nor even consider too frequently, but it’s there, nonetheless, nestled warmly in the corners of consciousness.

When that kind of quiet hope is fulfilled, it becomes joy. When it’s jeopardised, it becomes a fed-after-midnight gremlin popping out emotional nasties with yellow eyes and dangerous claws. Hope itself is overwhelmed by paranoia, desperation, anxiety, fear and anger, and without a metaphorical Billy Peltzer around to sort shit out, the whole damn city is soon enough overrun with the monsters, and hope hides, powerless, in an air vent.

This is why hope is important. Until all hope is gone (another musical reference there, but the less said about that one the better), these demons are kept at bay. You can see humankind’s propensity towards false hope, then. Lost hope means things have gone irrevocably wrong, so it’s easier to wrap glimmering threads of ‘maybe’ around your fingers than take the heavy shackles of reality around your wrists.

And the threat of these shackles exists everywhere that hope does. They are always just off-screen, waiting in the wings. “I hope I get this job” is, of course, quite different to “I hope my mother can beat this cancer again”, but without hope both scenarios create an undesirable reality. Unemployment, financial strain, low self-worth. Grief, sadness, depression. So we cling on to these tempting threads and not until the last one snaps out of our fingers do we entertain the unhappy gremlins that have been lurking in the backs of our minds. And where’s hope, then? Sitting in a sodding air vent.

So herein lies the problem. Hope is important. But it’s also a flight risk. We nestle down into its warm bosom and wait contentedly until it either comes good or does a runner, and in the case of the latter we’ve frequently spent so long curled up with our eyes closed that the sudden harsh glare of reality leaves us blindsided.

Rationally-speaking, then, the business of hoping can just make things much worse in the end (going back to the Gremlin’s reference which is somehow dominating this post, if Gizmo had just been left in Chinatown Billy and Kate would be in smooch city instead of trying to save the world from monsters). Ironically, as my mother so fondly says: “Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.” (EXPLAINS EVERYTHING, RIGHT?)

And yet despite all of this, despite the rationale against ‘pinning your hopes’, and the nauseating knowledge that unfounded hope brings distressing consequences, we do it nonetheless. Like tobacco for smokers, alcohol for drinkers and casinos for gamblers, hope can provide a short-term fix for an issue we just don’t know how to deal with.

And that, unfortunately, is why hope is important.

Mate Expectations

I was 12 years old, sitting in the car with my Dad after my year seven parents’ evening. I’d just been given a massive bollocking for persistently talking in my French class, and I was waiting for the onslaught of parental punishment.

“The thing is, Dad,” I said. “I’m not just chatting. I’m helping the girl next to me because she’s not very good at languages.” He then very quietly took out his wallet and handed me £20. “The most important thing in life is that you always look out for your mates,” he said. And nothing more was said on the matter.

That memory has stuck with me for my whole life since. It’s a noble notion, and one I’ve always striven to honour, but it’s caused me no end of grief as a result. Several months after that incident, the girl in question turned on me for no reason whatsoever – as teenage girls are wont to do – spearheading a hate campaign against me that resulted in me having a something of a nervous breakdown aged 15. And then she slept with my boyfriend.

It was a great time to be young.

Still, that kind of catty school-girl shit was something I tolerated because I knew that those years – formative and crucial as they were – were not going to form the backbone of my entire life, and that once I’d recovered from my meltdown I would be free to meet people that identified with the same values as me. Namely, don’t be a dick, and don’t shit on the people that care about you.

Fast forward and I’m at university, having all the ill-advised adventures one does when they finally fly the nest. I’m surrounded by ‘cool’ people, and – on Dad’s advice – I make a concerted effort to listen to their tedious back stories and lend them washing powder and pick them up off the floor after they’ve vomited entire bottles of vodka down their fronts. They’d do the same for me, I reason, and everything is grand.

Until one night. I’d stayed in to study, and at about 2am everyone came home screaming and shouting – and not in a way that would suggest they’d had a good night. It emerged that one of the girls had accused one of the blokes of raping her, and had then tried to slit her wrists. He’d been carted off to the police station, and she’d been taken to A&E.

Trying to make sense of their garbled nonsense, it became clear that their consensus was ‘she was lying’ and ‘poor him’. This conversation spread out over the coming days until I eventually suggested that, regardless of the true events that had transpired (of which we were none the wiser), they were both likely to be unhappy right now, and that we should support them both until we figured out what was going on.

Well fuck me if that wasn’t like throwing a piece of meat into a room full of hyenas. I might as well have suggested that Hitler was actually an ‘okay guy’ for the reaction that statement received. It wasn’t acceptable to be neutral on this, it seemed. We had to pick sides, and if I wasn’t willing to choose his then I was just as much a pariah as her. And so the remaining university term was lived out in ostracisation and the kind of shitty behaviour I thought I’d left at school. (Meanwhile, her life was made so unbearably difficult she left university altogether – after another suicide attempt).

So I was pretty glum. Not only because I felt unfairly condemned for trying to be a good friend to all concerned, but also because I was shocked and quite saddened by the way the group had turned on this girl like a pack of wolves when she was clearly going through some serious stuff. Rape allegations aside, slitting your wrists is usually a strong indicator that something’s not right.

But, like the high-school debacle, I took comfort in the fact that university wasn’t a fair representation of life overall, and I was confident that the coming years would bring a new batch of people that would hopefully be the friends, instead of the ‘starter friends’ making transient and (often, it seemed) unpleasant appearances in my life.

And so here I am in my late 20s. This is life now, unless I radically alter it myself – there’s no obvious stepping stone to a new phase, as there is with school and university. I’m surrounded by people I’ve known for years, many of whom I’ve also picked up off the floor after they’ve vomited bottles of vodka down themselves and many of which – heeding Pa’s wisdom – I like to think I’ve come through for when it’s gone to shit for them in one way or another.

The problem is, after years and years spent in heightened states of paranoia and anxiety, you become very tuned in to subtext, and aware of others’ behaviour – particularly in times when you actually need someone to come through for you. From conversations stopping abruptly as you walk in to a room and catching glimpses of exchanged looks not meant for you, to that exquisite formula of playground cliqueyness and piecing together parts of different stories and realising that you’re being fibbed to.  All stuff many people would overlook, but not the people that have always tried to do right by their mates, and have been let down.

So thanks for the advice, Dad, but right now, as I consider ways to LVL UP to some new phase, I find myself wishing I’d been more of an unruly teen and ignored it.

Haters gonna hate, or, why I made THAT video

It’s now been over a month since The Event. My eye no longer resembles a plum, Himself is able to cope without pain medication, and while I still have a lump on my bonce and he’ll be hopping around on crutches for a good while yet, life is slowly returning to normal.

There’s been no word from the police, and I’m not surprised, really. Given the lack of CCTV footage from traffic deterrent cameras that don’t actually record anything and only a single two-weeks-later eFit to go on, the only way we’ll ever see that scumbag brought to justice is if he gets pulled in for a subsequent crime and has a DNA swab taken. Also probably unlikely.

In light of all that, some people have asked me why I made that video. Trolls, mainly. Trolls insinuating that the video was a waste of time, that I was looking for attention, that I was trying to get hits on my blog. Trolls that also helpfully pointed out that my room was too messy and that I could’ve washed my hair. Trolls that thought the whole thing was bloody hilarious, subsequently making parody videos of ‘me’ bawling my eyes out and pleading pathetically with the camera.

I am no stranger to trolls, and so I have taken little notice of their ignorant bleatings. However, it is perhaps pertinent to actually address why I did make that video, given the seemingly slim likelihood of it having any tangible consequence.

#1 Actually, it might have had a tangible consequence

Who’s to say that one of my Twitter followers – or one of their followers – wasn’t in the area that night and saw a dodgy looking man scurrying away from the scene of the crime, and could shed some light on his appearance, or the direction he was heading? Is it statistically unlikely? Yep. Is it impossible? No. Not even a little bit. Thanks to Twitter, people have been reunited with wedding rings lost down the side of mountains, for fuck’s sake. Why would I overlook this potential avenue of information, no matter how small? And of course  I put the video on my blog – from there it’s extremely easy to contact me, and that’s where the traffic already goes anyway. Social media!

#2 I’m not going cry about it

I made that video three days after the attack. The police were dragging their heels and Andy was still in hospital. I was alone, and I was angry. The kind of angry that courses through your veins and clouds your vision. The kind of angry that makes your chest swell and your breathing irregular. The kind of angry that consumes you, if you’re not careful.

I’m not the sort of person that sits in the corner and mopes about the shit hand that life deals, so I had to do something. And with my limited resources I made a video, which was not only shared thousands and thousands of times (thus increasing the chances of someone coming forward with information), but also kicked the local police into gear thanks to the press coverage it received. If my bruised mug hadn’t been slapped all over the local papers and news sites, I might well still be waiting for them to take a statement. By actively doing something I helped to shunt this thing along, and preserved my own sanity in the immediate aftermath of it all.

#3 So actually, yeah, I did want the attention

…because I wanted people to see what had happened, and to get angry about it – to get angry about the fact that they live in a society where people do this to each other, and to get angry about the fact that one young man’s life has been trashed because they live in a society where degenerates consistently get away with this shit. Feel sorry for me if you like, but I don’t want your pity. I want you to be angry with me.

Incidentally, I assure you that I’m less-than-happy about making my visual debut looking like an actual sack of crap. If I’d wanted attention in the traditional sense, dear Trolls, then perhaps I would’ve at least washed my hair – AS YOU SO HELPFULLY POINTED OUT.

#4 But it’s not even about me

Yep, I got punched in the face and it fucking hurt, but the video wasn’t about me being punched in the face. It was about everyone who has ever been punched in the face, or had their legs broken, or worse, and has had to deal with the indescribable frustrations that follow. It was my way of putting my hand up and saying ‘Yep, this has happened and it shouldn’t have. But I’m not going to be quiet, and I’m not going to be a victim. Let’s talk about this’.

And talk about it, people did. Even now – over a month later – I’m still getting kind emails and tweets from people that have picked up on the story. The majority are from people who have had similar experiences, or are equally frustrated with their seemingly impotent hopes for justice, and yes, it’s depressing; each case of assault is merely a drop in the ocean of crime. However, nearly every single person who has approached me with their own tale has said the same thing. “Thank you for making that video. It made me feel much stronger, and less like a victim.”

And that’s why I made that video.

Please help me find my attacker