Please note: If you are under 16, please talk to your parent or guardian before reading. One night when I was 22, I spoke to a woman whose name I never found out. I was working a night shift, playing solitaire until I couldn't see the screen when she called. I couldn't understand her at first. It took a few repetitions, her voice was so thick and slurred, from crying, and alcohol, and as it turned out, all the pills she'd necked before she made the call. Eventually I established the basics - she had lost her husband and child. After some time and after a fashion, this fact and everything that came from it had overwhelmed any sense she had that her life was a thing worth having. She wasn't going to change her mind on this, she told me. She didn't want to debate it. There was nothing to debate. What she wanted was someone to talk to her while she waited. What she was asking me to do was to be there with her, for there to be a voice in her ear so she would not be alone as she died.
It was the nature of my job that I couldn't do this. It was illegal, in fact. Neither could I do what I was supposed to do, which was to give her another number and hang up. In the end, while people ran about trying to glean a location from the puzzle pieces of information she gave me, after almost two hours, she cut the line. I have no idea what happened after that. One night when I was 24, I sat in a side room in A&E, where I had been put after they had bandaged me up and told me I couldn’t leave because they believed I was planning my suicide and had access to the means, and that there was a pretty good chance I’d go back and kill myself, and so I’d been sectioned. How dare they. What did they think this was, Holby City? Does this look like a soundstage in Elstree, that just happens to have someone Exorcist vomiting in the room next door? Do I look like I went to RADA then did a summer’s experimental comedy mime at the Edinburgh Fringe before giving it all up as a bad gig and probably becoming a florist? (Don’t answer that. Shut up. SHUSH) The trouble was, though, they were absolutely right. I’d spent more time researching, planning and carefully executing this than I probably did on revising for my Media Studies A Level, and I mean I got a friggin’ B in that, so with the proper application - imagine! But they could do what they wanted, I wasn’t going to change my mind on this. I didn’t want to debate my worthlessness, and the complete lack of point in my continuing occupation of space and air. There was nothing to debate. What I had to do, clearly, was just get my shit together just this one time and do the decent thing and stop existing, stop taking, stop hurting, stop failing, just fucking STOP. Except - well, how did that happen? - tonight I am 31, and sitting in bed eating chocolate mis-shapes, and I have to get up for work tomorrow, and I have conspicuously failed to kill myself as yet. Now you may be seriously wondering if I am sitting here telling you this because I actually literally want a medal for stuff most people do without even thinking about it, and probably with much better skin than me. If you are, don’t worry. I’ve got a girl here sneering through her dismissive head shake, telling me this. She also says to tell you even if anyone wanted to hear this, it never would have happened if I hadn’t been such a monumental shitcanoe and hands up everyone who wants me to sit still and shut up and just try not to fuck anything else up or get any ideas that nobody has noticed, just by the by, that I am as cringeworthy and witless as I am thick and self satisfied. She’s got one of those clicker things that she presses constantly to count the ways I have fucked up and the ways I have failed, and my audacity in even thinking about daring to address this subject. That girl is, unfortunately, me. She lives behind the mirror and she’s like googling your name idly one dinnertime and finding out people write dissertations on why you’re a tit. She’s been doing that for as long as I can remember. I’ve never done anything more significant than buy a packet of Polos without being paralysed by my own internal monologue, by the way that I know in the same way I know what date I was born on that I am: wrong/bad/stupid/fat/ugly/boring/worthless/wrong/selfish/arrogant/deluded/evil/ lazy/too much/too little/an idiot/an embarrassment/a waste/a shame ...over and over again. She tells me I am stupid to do something, usually writing because the wench knows how I love it, and that I will inevitably fail and humiliate myself, and so I don’t do it, and then she berates me for being a lazy coward. Another of her favourites is to tell me I’d better do something about the state of my features before I expose the public to them, then laughs at me for wearing makeup and bothering to dress nicely because do I think everyone can’t see I’m hideous and find the effort hilarious? I mean, sometimes she has a point, like when she reminds me of how I tried to translate Manics lyrics into French to look clever in my oral exam and failed, or when I gleefully humiliated my poor mortified dad in the shops when my mum had sent him to buy Feminine Hygiene Products. I have to concede her point on the time when I was five and I wet myself Morris dancing (and the fact that no part of that sentence was exaggerated for comic effect) but a lot of the time it’s just hard, and it hurts, and in a very compact nutshell, that’s why I know how you feel, if you’ve ever felt like you wanted to die. Or if you do now. Or even if you never wanted to die, but still wished you could rip your stupid skin off and be someone far better. Apparently a lot of people get that. People you wouldn’t expect. Good people. Clever people. Cool people. Beautiful people. Brave people. Funny people. All this time I thought it was only for freaks like me. I read a very brave and clever book once, and it had a quote in it, something along the lines of: when you write about yourself, you write about other people. And that’s what I’m trying to do. Obviously, there’s a lot I’m not saying here about my life, and what happened, and what precipitated it. And I’m scared. I’m scared I’m not capable of saying what I mean, and that it won’t matter anyway, and that the people in my life who didn’t know this will be horrified and people reading it who don’t know me will think, what a gobshite. But that doesn’t matter. Because it’s not about me. I’m good. Got a brew here and everything. It’s about this thought I had about the girl who died when she was 25, and before that how she starved herself into hospital when she was 19 and scrubbed the skin off her hands when she was 16, who dragged a sharp blade up her arm when she was 11 and kept doing all those things, believing she’d never, ever feel forgiven enough to stop. The girl who soothed herself to sleep counting the days til her heart could stop and really, truly believing that her family and friends would grieve less for her death than for the space between that and her birth. The girl talking to you now, who didn’t die when she was 25, and is now past 30 (!!) and doesn’t want to die. Which is the whole point. I don’t really believe in fate, or miraculous transformations. I don’t believe in pulling yourself together and awareness ribbons on Facebook. I believe in books, lots of books, and songs, and books about songs, songs about books, and long conversations about either. I believe people are mostly basically decent and I believe in their stories, telling them and being told them and asking nosy questions and getting into all the dark corners and laughing about, but not at, the really not funny stuff. I believe that those things are what save me. And I believe they could save any one of us, and that they do, every day. And so that’s why I thought I’d tell you the bit about how that worked for me. I call it, because I have never had any discretion, Emma’s Handy Shiny Guide To Not Killing Yourself! Yaaay! First thing is: REMEMBER AT TIMES OF POISONOUS SELF DOUBT THAT YOUR BRAIN IS TRYING TO KILL YOU RIGHT NOW. The logic you are experiencing in moments like this does not bear any resemblance to genuine logic. It is an Evil Plot, and what do we do with Evil Plots? WE FOIL THE BASTARDS. See, even at my worst when I thought of the people around me, I never believed they didn’t love me. I just couldn’t understand why anybody would. I mean, it would hurt them, sure, but wasn’t it better to just hurt them this one last time, and then they could grieve and there’d be funerals and then they could all get on with their lives without worrying about me or bailing me out or listening to me whinge, and the space I left would knit together like I was never there. This, of course, is bullshit. The people who love me couldn’t see me like this, because it was a distortion. And yes, I also thought that might be true for everyone else but I was REALLY awful. And in the time since The A&E Incident, the very same people have got married and divorced and had babies and lost jobs and become adults and all this other stuff that if I hadn’t been there would still have happened, but without me, and they would know that I had been there and now I wasn’t and they carried on and I couldn’t, and that would hurt every day, and that wouldn’t be my fault, because suicide is not a selfish action or anything other than an absolutely horrific tragedy, but it wouldn’t have been the best thing for them. That was just some nasty shit the girl in my head told me, BECAUSE SHE’S A CRUEL BITCH. Get me? Now. Second thing: if you’re anything like me, there’s probably a lot of stuff you want to do that you’re too scared to do. Like, you’ve got to pay your rent or please your parents or whatever. And you won’t do it now anyway because you’re fucked. Here’s the thing about being fucked: if nothing matters, you can do whatever you want. I’m a social worker now. Can you believe they let me? When I was 22 and doing the job I did then, people told me it was something I’d be good at. That I should stop what I was doing and do that. That I’d be good at it. Because I love people, and stories, and minds, and how they work, and because I wanted to change things (and probably because I am essentially the most nosy person ever born). But I was scared. That sounded like a big adult thing someone like me shouldn’t be allowed to do, so because of my rent and my boyfriend and my student loans I didn’t do it. Two years later, dazed and reeling, just out of the hospital with no home and no boyfriend and no job, someone I hadn’t known very long (who would go on to become one of my very best friends as well as the most gorgeous person I ever kissed, and who would save me this time and over and over again) mildly suggested the same thing. And I thought: fuck it. I can live wherever, I can eke out a bursary as opposed to eking nothing, I do any worse than I have already. I decided in the course of all this that I should probably stop hurting myself, if I wasn’t going to be a total hypocrite. This proved difficult. For over a decade I’d been fluent in self harm, going at myself in various gruesome and coldly thought out ways that would constitute torture if you did it to someone else, and was torture for my poor ex boyfriend who once had to kick the bathroom door in because I was behind it bleeding rather more than I’d meant to. I didn’t see why he would be upset, why he couldn’t understand that this was all I was worth. I didn’t know any other way to quiet that voice in my head, to bargain with myself that I know, I know I’m terrible but if I can just... It was incredibly hard to give that up. I wasn’t sure I could live with myself without it, and I had never dared hope I might. It was just the price I had to pay for breathing air. But even despite all the times I was literally seconds away from caving in (and there were many) something weird happened: I started to think about the things I’d done before, and feel sad about them, and sorry for the girl who felt like she had to do them, and believe that nobody deserves that. Nobody. Not me, not you, not anybody. I started to feel something like respect for what I needed to exist physically. Initially it wasn’t for my own sake, and if I’m honest it’s ongoing, my having not cut myself for eight years but spent much of this weekend in tears about two triple chocolate cookies because it’s still not easy to give myself permission to deserve to eat, but it happened. It’s happening. I have a sense now that I need to treat myself, my physical self, my hated body, reasonably. Even more so, and stronger than the desire (which is still there) to go digging in my veins for what I hate, I have a sense that this is basic decency and nothing to do with how much I hate myself on any given day. Which is probably why I never have done it again. And I kind of think thats why I’m pretty sure I’ll never go as far down as I went at 24, ever again. And I promise, I promise you, if I can say that, it is not beyond anyone. And all this I learned, because I had nothing better to do than go and learn me some books. So now after three years in the job I was too scared to do, I’m getting not-scared enough to write like I always wanted to. Weird, isn’t it? I see people every day at work now, who are down that pit. It’s what I do. I assess people referred to a Community Mental Health Team. I get their stories, and how scared they are, and how they just need it to be over, one way or the other, it just has to stop. And I can say to them, with total conviction, it can. It does. It will. That they contain multitudes they can’t imagine yet. That the backing track in their head is lies, evil poisonous lies, and they will never have to be alone with it. And all of them, I swear, every one, gets this look in their eye that is how it looks to not dare to hope for something, and it chokes me, every time. I don’t tell them about myself, because that would be grossly over the line, and because I want their hour to be about them leaving all the filth in their heads with me, because I can deconstruct it in a way you can’t when you live with it. But more than one of them has told me anyone would think I had my own story to tell there. Ah, yes. That’s the other thing. Stories. This is probably the most important bit. Like I said, you will need stories. Books, songs, films, women who sit next to you on the bus, I don’t care where you get them from, and I’ll have a straightener with anyone who tells you the things that speak to you are cheap or stupid or whatever. You’re a geek, you say? Even better. Be a geek. All that means is you’re brave enough not to hide the joy of connecting with something. Connection is what keeps us here, all of us, not just the weird kids like you and me. I wouldn’t know where to start with all the stories that saved me, or how to do them justice, but I set up this (http://compilationblues.tumblr.com) a while ago to try, and keep meaning to go back and add to it. Come over, if you want. Join in. I’d love to hear it. I could talk about it all day. Few New Years ago, I went out on Canal Street in Manchester in a Batman dress, thinking I was all cool and ironic (also: people looking at my dress are thinking “that girl in the Batman dress” not “that ugly twat over there” right? That’s a big secret of mine) Anyway, about fifteen people came over and told me they loved my dress. It was a bit like being in the Sugababes or something, and there was this one girl whose face positively lit up every time I came into her eyeline. Of course, I assumed she was pissed. Later, the people I’d come with were having some kind of feud and my best mate had got so annoyed she’d gone to another bar thinking I was behind her, and I went off sulking to buy a drink, and found myself stood next to this girl, whose eyes lit up again. Then she got this look on her face like the bitch in her head was telling her something, and said she hoped I wasn’t getting pissed off with her or thinking I was being stalked or anything, it was just she really, really loved my dress. She said the thing was she had been young and gay in some horrible little town full of horrible little dickheads who revelled in making her life a misery, and she got really into comics as a sort of diversion, and spent ages on her own reading all these things that came to mean freedom to her and allowed her to make friends, and now she was an adult and she hadn’t died and here she was in a room full of gay people and a girl in a Batman dress and she never, ever thought that would happen. When we had separated from the ensuing tearful hug, I sat in the corner wiggling my toes (I had these awesome holographic shoes on, gorgeous but killer spike heels) thinking about the bands and books and songs that allowed me to look outside when I was young and scared and hiding in my head, and the stories I made up to comfort myself, and wrote and hid under my mattress, or when I was littler, told to my sister as I held her hand between our beds so she knew I was there if she had bad dreams. What I would do with the rest of my life, if I could do anything, is to write a story someone could use to save themselves. What I would write is a story that somebody could pick up, that would speak to them behind the wall between themselves and the world. That would know who they are though they have lost themselves. I haven’t done that. I don’t know if I’m capable. This is the story I have, and I’m telling it because I want you, you right there, to tell me the story that saved you. That’s all I did. It’s all I’ve ever done. I have taken the words and the energy of strangers and I have saved myself, again and again.In my working day I sit with strangers and I try to give them the desire to save themselves. I’m not anything special. I’m not especially good at digging my way out of the shit. I’m not even totally recovered. Nowhere near. She’s still there, that girl in my head. And I do still fight her. I haven’t won. And writing this, letting someone publish it, is a flailing attempt to kick her legs out from under her that might actually end up with a falcon punch to my throat. But you know, I’m fucking sick of her bullshit anyway. I kind of started this fight with her, and I thought maybe it’s something we all have to fight. So I thought I’d ask you. Because it might hurt, but I’ve never regretted it. And neither will you, I promise. If you are affected by any of the issues mentioned, please contact Mind or Samaritans.
0 Comments
|
AuthorThe Kick Back Club is a collection of written works on friendship and mental health recovery Archives
February 2016
Categories |