A massive Hiatus.
I beg your pardon.
Yooerd.
So, I had to decamp from Stogursey in Somerset two weeks ago
tomorrow. I am staying with very good friends, in their newly extended house in
Southend-on-Sea. I am rooming, in what should be their snug. So, from the town with
the world’s shortest pier to the town with the world’s longest pier. There is a
poetic asymmetry to that situation I have always loved. Remembering of course
that before `we’ went travelling in 2013, we lived at my brother's place in the
very same Southend-on-Sea, just a mile or two from this location (brother is
still there).
It is not an ideal situation, though my friends wouldn’t
have it any other way. What comes next is going to sound ungrateful at first
glance but will be mitigated a line or two further on. As a famous author
friend of mine told me earlier this year. Writing, any writing is like clay,
you can add, subtract, and mould as you go. You edit as you write and reread and
write again (in paragraph writing terms this is paragraph six).
Slightly grim bit (Grim is short for Graeme, not Graeme is
grim, Grim’s Reality is the reality of Graeme known as The Grim … it is about
time I cleared that up). Adjectives you could describe my current existence as,
and also the previous few weeks since I was unceremoniously asked to leave my
own home by someone, I invested all my trust in for thirteen years: wretched,
sorry, woeful, humiliating, painful, shameful. There may be more, but I do not
want to dig too deep lest I upset my fragile sanity. This piece didn’t start
where it ends.
The simple fact of the matter is, that all those adjectives
live between my ears.
The reality is my friends are proper cool, the house has
loads of room, I have my own space in it (all be it I have to move my bed out
the way each day if I am to use it to sit in the snug and give my hosts some
space for family time without Uncle Grim, cluttering up the place). It is no
sacrifice or stress at all to uplift a foam mattress topped with a Duvaly, it
is just a matter of being organised.
In this space, I can recover my fragile sanity noted above.
It is fair to say that if you are going to bare your soul and share this experience
for public consumption, then you really need to be mindful of not putting a gloss
on it, and pretend you are living your best life ever … as people try to do on social
media.
This is not a great experience. But believe me, it could be
so much worse. Fragile sanity and an example of how fucked up things can get
with the smallest of upsets follows.
This morning I awoke to go swimming. I have found a pool. I do
not like it much even though I have paid for a month’s membership and have been
twice. There are two things that fall out from this at a minimum. One, you cannot
force yourself to feel like you are in control by going swimming and pretending
that you are back on the horse. Two, the slightest upset throws number one into
stark relief. What happened? My car made a funny noise as I pulled away from
the kerb. I drove three-quarters of the way to the pool. The car was making an
odd noise and it seemed worse when steering. Of course, this meant that any
moment the car was going to fail, and I would be stuck miles from home with no
chance of rescue because I had to cancel my AA cover because I simply can’t
afford it. It is a risk; I have been a member of the AA for years. But when
money is short you have to take more risks whether you like it or not. The mind
races to the most disastrous potential outcome and your confidence and composure
collapse in a festering heap. I was emotionally ruined before 07.30am, I felt
exhausted, tearful, fearful and somewhere deep down a voice said `just fucking
end it all.’ Bear in mind it was a noise that manifested for a few moments
pulling away from a kerb and then going round three roundabouts.
Maybe you are reading this and thinking `for fucks sake man,
that’s a bit of an over-reaction.', You might be thinking `wanker, eleven hours
later you are writing about it. You’re an attention-seeking twat. Fuck off.’
I would counter that writing about it eleven hours later
says I have thought about it all day and tried to understand it. I have
listened to its words, I’ve thought about the motivation, the desire to make
the nightmare of underlying uncertainty just `FUCK OFF!’ with all haste. The
simple fact is, that voice is the voice of desperation and fear. I am going to
say now, that I am still reading -very slowly- Jordan Petersons 12 rules for
life. I understand that voice thanks to reading the book. Anger he says is the
reaction to fear. Fear in this instance is the fear of the unknown
(uncertainty), the unknown in this instance is the future. As someone pointed
out quite wisely (not Jordan Peterson), suicide is a long-term solution to a short-term
problem. The `end it all’ voice is the voice of abject terror, not fear. It is
a strange voice, it is probably in all of us, and maybe we all hear it once in
a while. When we are in highly stressful situations, you may hear it a lot.
Lately, I’ve heard it a lot. Fortunately, Jordan Peterson and just about
everyone you or I know will tell you variously that `ending it all’ isn’t the answer.
You will tear their lives apart you will leave all the people you left behind
wondering what else they could have done to help you over the hump. Is that
their selfishness, that they don’t want to feel all the emotions the suicidal
person is feeling at the moment they did whatever they did to end their pain?
Possibly, probably, but it is also your friends and family saying in a round-about
way that `suicide is a long-term solution to a short-term problem.’
I often say to people who are going through a morass of shit
in their lives that `there is always light at the end of the tunnel.’ I caveat
the former with: `sometimes the tunnel is long or has curves, so the light may
not be immediately apparent.’
Back to the latest triggering event. Let us cut a long story
short. The power steering fluid was low. Before I left Somerset, I checked all
the fluids, the tyres, and cleaned the windscreen … I even found one of the internal
headlamp bulb covers was off and refitted it. I didn’t check the steering
fluid. I have owned a lot of cars. I have never once ever checked the power
steering fluid; it is just one of those things that is checked at service
time by others. My mind in its race to find the worst outcome had immediately
found a reason to look for a bill of thousands of pounds, the car being off the
road and me not being able to fix it due to a lack of funds. This of course
means that I cannot now not drive back to Somerset next week to move my
furniture and items out of the house and put them into long-term storage next
weekend. I have found a storage unit, and my mother bless her cotton socks has paid
for six months. I lose this week no matter what because I can’t exfil back to
the west country to `do the do’ and get some bodies to help me at short notice.
However, I have booked the space and one can only hope 50sqr feet is enough
with clever stacking.
This little upset brought things to a head. I realised that
I probably need to park swimming for a while. I don’t feel comfortable at the
pool. It is a bit dirty, a bit disorganised and I am not in the clique. The
lane etiquette is stated on the boards at the end of the pool, but the people
that swim ignore them, and the disinterested staff don’t enforce the etiquette.
Therefore, the best thing for me to do in the short term is not give myself
more stress by doing something I really like to do, in an environment where I
don’t like to do it (it also saves me £27 I can ill afford). After all, I am living
on charity and Universal Credit. It doesn’t sit well on my conscience, spending
the state's money on what is clearly a luxury, even though it is good for me.
I am in a form of up in the air limbo. Trying to normalise
things by force of will is expensive and counterproductive. I realise,
reluctantly that just butting heads with reality is just making my mind race in
directions it doesn’t need to go. This is probably the case with trying to
expedite my return to the west country. I want to be there, but to be there I
need a job. That’s a hard sell to employers when you are two-hundred miles away and don’t have anywhere to live of your own; trying to blag around it would be
a nightmare. So, you have to be honest with potential employers, and say you
are looking to relocate back to the place that has been your home for seven
years, that you were forced to leave six weeks ago, and then abandon the county
completely two weeks ago. Employers aren’t looking for re-locators, they are
looking for people who can turn up on Monday ready to go, and are not in deep
shit, homeless and currently prone to absolute panic at the merest hint of
upset. So, that is clearly not me right now. However, I am not a usual man, I
would live in a B&B until I found a flat to rent. However, sell that idea
to an employer.
Now re-read all the above, and then re-read it again, and
again and again. That perpetual loop is where the demons live. Knowing the
demons live there, stepping back and watching the loop, loop may save your
life, for the future the loop doesn’t see. It won’t be easy, you need your friends,
you may need the Samaritans, you may have to go to your GP tearful snotty and raggedly
crying, but if you do, you will step out of the loop of despair, step off the
road to nowhere, you will find just enough perspective to save your friends and
family the horror of not knowing what they couldn’t do to save you from yourself
and your cohort of self-destructive demons.
This has been an uncomfortable write. The recent focus on everyone’s
mental health doesn’t make it any easier to write and especially when the
notion of mental health has, in my opinion, been trivialised by people who are
actually saying `It’s so unfair’ (unfair being the restrictions created by the
pandemic). Life is unfair, the universe does not give two hoots about you or
the fact that you exist. Your friends and family do. Your mental health is not
trivial. Not being able to go to the pub for a bit, is trivial. It is not
trivial if your livelihood and your family’s welfare depends on your pub
opening. Know the difference, don’t trivialise mental health.
Final note, hopefully, whomsoever may drift by this blog by any
means, will find that they are not alone and do have a future. Remember,
sometimes the tunnel is long and has curves. Sometimes you just need to check
your steering fluid reservoir and find it’s dry … which may also be a metaphor.
