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To wind back a little, I hadn’t been looking forward to a fourth decade. My father had died three years before and I’d responded, with great resourcefulness, by having a comprehensive breakdown, ending a nurturing relationship, and moving back home. I couldn’t work, or go out, and didn’t want to be seen. A life shrunk to four small walls was all that seemed manageable. I was watching The Lion King a lot, and doing all the voices.
Depression had left me uncommunicative, paralysed, angry with the world. There is so much shame attached to not being able to function, and I knew my life hadn’t progressed. I was turning thirty having not realised any dreams. I felt small.
No one tells you the truth about adulthood, which is that you spend most of it missing people, and only a handful of moments last. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to not shut out the people we love, because they’re all that keeps us here. I wasn’t magically transformed that Christmas – I’m still grumpy, ungrateful and complain a lot. But I started to understand; and I started to mend.
Stories bring us comfort, even when they are not comforting stories, because the moral of every one is that whatever we have experienced, we are not alone. They can be a hand in the dark, a reminder that others have struggled, and prevailed.
According to Jung, ‘The greatest and most important problems in life are fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.’
That is why the other purpose of this book, running through its pages like a seam of golden regret, is the urge to mend.
They are addressed to the people who still rattle around my heart in unresolved ways.
A relationship with depression has been the longest, most intimate and yet opaque I’ve ever known. It’s always been the two of us; a miracle we’ve stayed together so long.
‘The thing about inertia is it’s what happens when the forces acting on an object are exactly equal,’ she said, sketching a box pressed by arrows from different directions. ‘It doesn’t mean nothing’s happening.’
Genetics determines whether we grow flat feet, have blue eyes, or a predisposition to complex mood disorders. Depression runs through families like a Soho rickshaw driver. Funny how people talk about a genetic lottery, as if we originally had a say in the numbers.
I had never been much of a talker, and the condition had further crushed my ability to relate to others. Intimacy asked too much, and I was a coward, with a liver so lily it could poison cats.
Startling how the world reconfigures itself to your emotional state.
This is another of my signature moves, mentally checking out of difficult conversations. To this day, if someone attempts to talk to me seriously about money, relationship problems or unchecked moles, I immediately start feeling drowsy.
Anxiety expands to fill whatever container it’s in, like a gas.
Depression had pushed me to self-harm, suicidal ideation and drama school. Where did this devastating force come from, and would I always be under its power?
When asked what depression feels like, I’m reminded that there are as many notions of hell as there are human minds to conceive them. What’s worse about the water torture of negative thoughts is that it leads us into silence. The more it takes, the less that can be spoken, nothing clearly seen.
I know that all it takes to unpick a happy ending is to stay with the story a little longer.
But the biggest obstacle to writing about my life was an internal, arguably serious, handicap: the fact I didn’t remember it.
It dawned on me that I was making the subtle yet chasmic shift from having a bad memory to becoming a person with few memories; a much lonelier predicament.
But my impressions of myself, the bedrock of identity, were chaotic and strung out of order, a spilled necklace badly reassembled. And that wasn’t the only reason I was unsure of sharing my story. There was a strong sense that forgetfulness, and the corrosion of my mental health at a young age, were bound together. I was hesitant to step into the fog, because I knew there were monsters in it.
I looked at her now, hobbling more than I remembered, not confident in her walking. She had falls she didn’t tell me about, I knew. Well past retirement age, she was still working. I could not support her financially, probably would never be able to. Moreover, if everything fell apart for me again, she would have to provide for both of us once more, feed us and keep the heating on. We didn’t talk about these things.
I have this theory that the best twist in films is always incest, because no one ever sees it coming. Oldboy, Star Wars, Chinatown, all classics of the genre. Am I the only person who was always hoping Ross and Monica would get together on Friends? I can’t be. It’s narrative dynamite, I’m telling you. A very close second to incest, however, is childhood sexual abuse.
I never wrote a sexual-abuse twist, because I know it’s never a twist, or a neatly plotted revelation. It’s always there, has always been there, eclipsing everything else. It’s also a thief, stealing memories adjacent to it in time and space, undermining the capacity to hang onto events decades later.
But there’s no such thing as a six-year-old man – only a child with decades of trouble ahead.
After trauma, our brains change, interacting with our nervous system in new patterns. Depressive responses are all but inevitable. Feelings of threat remain near the surface, with the stress hormone cortisol released on a hair trigger. Following a situation of extreme helplessness, we can lose our fight-or-flight instinct: adjusting to the reality that episodes of violation are inevitable, we give up trying to avoid them. Often, we seek them out instead. Repeating dangerous experiences of the past, in an unconscious attempt to fix them.
A neurological reaction to trauma explained why I was a stranger to myself.
Child abuse is a spreading stain; a gradually disfiguring ugliness. For survivors, it feels existentially threatening to acknowledge, yet impossible to think around. Impossible to be at home in your body, without at once admitting the body’s total vulnerability. Most people don’t know this about me, that I went through this. It is the dread I dare not speak. When I force myself to, I’m astonished at how near the surface the emotions are, horrified by my feelings of guilt, and appalled by my silence even now – why? Because it reflects my silence then?
The special status of child abuse obscures how exceptionally unexotic it is too. It’s common, banal, and more devastating for being so. Statistics vary, but most indicate that one in five girls have been abused, and one in twelve boys. It’s a meaningless figure. Here’s another – one in three of these don’t tell anyone. Except, by definition, later they do.
What makes me sick now is the knowledge that I did not believe they felt no pain. I did it because I imagined they did. I could feel the scream and disorder of that pain, its blackness. The gutting signal jam that someone could reach inside your soul and switch you off.
Impossible to dampen the panic quicksilvering up the sides of me – until I noticed that the silence felt soft, not hard. As if she were leaving space for me to talk more. I had left the thought open, as if more were to come.
My body could not accept tenderness; it wanted someone to blame. I watched myself turning away, walking away. Hands dug into pockets, fisting the material taut like a sail.
Even in the few seconds it took, the meaning was clear, felt clear to me even then: I was not safe, and could not make myself safe. This is a threshold beyond which innocence cannot cross. Is it fair to lay the blame for everything that followed at his door? Hard to say. But I know I will always be a child reaching for a bolt.
I liked books – another way of saying I didn’t have loads and loads of friends – so English was an obvious choice.
It dawned on me that I was at university for the wrong reasons. Rather than academic rigour, I was looking for therapy, or perhaps a priest.
That same night, I left the others to a card game, roll-up cigarettes and boxes of wine. The air was like a bruise, almost crackling. The ozone and unease were an obscure call.
The storm was now over me, throwing down crackling white lassos, repeatedly, without pause. And then it hit me. All this power was looking for my heart. The little electrical generator that had kept me alive this long, against my expectations. I would merge with the source. I was going home. And wasn’t it what I wanted? That’s what all this had been about.
Stay open, because life only gets richer as it unfolds. We know the end of the story, but not how we get there, or who we’ll be when we do.
Advice is like being handed a large amount of foreign currency.
It’s clear from the Gregory Peck spectacles that I’m not an exercise person. Exercise my soul, sure: I work out answers to the oldest human problems. Deadlift the question of the cosmos. I squat God. An interest in fitness has always struck me as a defining and limiting trait, like wearing a bucket hat. It’s a red flag; a warning the conversation has a low ceiling.
The first question of a character on day one of rehearsal, and the final thought before stepping on stage, was the same. What did they want? In every scene, characters pursue something simple. These little actions, strung together, add up to a larger, possibly unconscious directive. Their life’s desire. What did they want above all else? To pursue these threads, to enable the sympathetic magic to begin, an act of identification was necessary, and so we were instructed to always speak in the first person. What did I want?
The most essential identification, and often hardest to clarify, was with a character’s internal obstacle. The invisible struggles are the ones that resonate with us all.
Although the characters were fictional, their situations extreme, their search for meaning was mine too.
If I opened the split stitch of my mouth, cotton wool would spill forth.
can’t remember, and am still unsure why, one day, one’s worst thoughts may tip over like this. How coping strategies fail. This is my worst fear: that at my lowest point, I will be impervious to advice or sense. All I remember is looking at myself and seeing very clearly that it would be intolerable to live a whole life through as this person, every day waking up as him, with this brain, seeing through the same eyes, with no way out. No way except this. The decision made me feel strong, in place of the usual weakness.
I made the first pass. My skin was a nap of velvet rubbed the wrong way, kicking up tendrils like new shoots. I went again. I went again.
I was struck by the absence of sound in the room. Butchering myself in silence, despite a screaming brain, because we cry out from the shock, not the pain.
It was as if I could see myself, a half-person bent over by lamplight, trying to buff himself to a lethal smoothness.
Not that this vessel will ever be anything but a mystery to me. Sometimes, even now, I have the oddest feeling of my body as a second self, that knows more about me than I do. I’ll look down and notice, with surprise, my thumb closed tight inside my fingers, craving the security of the fist. A jaw ache can tell me how I really feel about someone, and I swear one of my early stress indicators is the bony lumps at the back of my skull growing more pronounced.
Bodies are built on the principle of recovery, that there is a way back to health. My body was constantly healing itself, far before my mind caught up. Bearing me through the world, asking nothing but the strength to serve.
In a funny way, you’re one of the most important teachers I’ve known. Maybe you did teach me something after all. You taught me there is no organisation, no school of learning, no church better than the people chosen to run it. Taught me to see through a myth I wanted to believe in, and that is a valuable thing. I also learned that I always have choice, and that repercussions are bearable if we stand by our choices. So, I suppose, thank you for that. Although you should stop being a cunt.
