In Grief

When you walk through a storm
hold your head up high
and don't be afraid of the dark 

I hope you will forgive me as I side-step depression this week to talk about another universal emotion, grief. Grief and depression is not the same thing, although some of the feelings within both can crossover. 

There are five common stages of grief:

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance

These are common but there is no blue print to the emotions we feel as we grieve the loss of a loved one. We may not experience all of the stages, we may find we flit between them all in a day, we may find that the order is wrong, and we may find ourselves languishing in one state for a long time.

Imagine if you will, that you have lost a husband, a child, a brother, a son, a daughter or an aunt. Imagine then that as you work through the shock of this person’s loss, you find people saying things about them that are untrue, imagine opening a newspaper and hearing stories that insinuate they deserved their death. 

What stage of grief is that? 

It could be denial; this isn't happening, surely no one believes this? But they do because they are being told it by an authority paid to protect them from the likes of society that your dead loved one is now associated with, and the newspaper that champions the working class football fan is the very paper telling them that your loved one was scum. 

Would you then feel anger? Anger at this betrayal of their memory, anger at your own helplessness in the face of this swarm of untruths, anger at the very people you trusted to keep you safe. Oh you would feel anger, you would feel anger every time you thought about them, you would feel anger as you watched the news, read the papers, saw the story fade into obscurity with people believing the lie that they've been told. The anger would be very real.

But whom can you bargain with now? God? "Please help them see this isn't true?" you pray. Years pass and still the lie is upheld, God seemingly has no power here. If even God has no power against the words of an earth bound authority, then what hope have you? Who can you bargain with? How can you stop this lie? How can you move on when the Nation thinks your loved one deserved to die? How can you accept that anyone, drunk or otherwise would have deserved to die? How can you accept that it is ever okay to lay blame on the victim of a crime? Her skirt was too short, she was wasted, she had been flirting all night, and everyone knows she is a slut. The blaming of female victims is so commonplace we barely even notice it. It happens because the power is skewed by the patriarchal society we still live in. So too the blaming of the poor, the migrants, the people on benefits, alcoholics happens because the power is skewed out of their favour. 

Imagine a bad day, whatever that would be for you, a bad day at work, a fight with a loved one, a day spent at hospital as your veins are pumped with chemicals to fight the cancer eating at your organs, finding a needle under your sons bed, being betrayed, learning of an affair, or simply that you broke an ornament that was beloved, how do you respond? What do you do to comfort yourself? Do you come home from work stressed and angry and open a bottle of wine, maybe two, do you sit and eat chocolate in front of the TV, do you cry to a friend? Imagine that bad day, whatever it is, imagine it happening every day, for a week, a month, a year, two years, like Groundhog Day over and over. What is your response? Do you drink the wine every day? Eat the cakes? Is all of it your fault? Say you drink the wine; imagine you drink it every day because this bad day happens every day, each day you drink a little more, because each day feels heavier and heavier. The drinking starts to affect your concentration, you start to rely on it, the people around you start to get angry, you are drunk more than you are sober, the bad day you keep having is now added to by the fact that the thing you turned to, to help comfort you is hurting you too, but you can't stop doing it, you can't cope with the constant onslaught. Is it your fault? Do you deserve everything you get?

Congratulations, you now find yourself amongst the members of society where the power is skewed against them. Before you even get a chance to explain why you have got into this mess you are judged and dismissed. You are guilty unless proven otherwise, but how do you prove yourself otherwise when no one will listen to a drunk like you? And so now, in the silence, you start to believe what people say about you, you begin to think you deserve everything you get, because that's what everyone else thinks. You don't bargain with anyone, instead you accept this worldview and you treat yourself with the disdain that is your due, you drink yourself to oblivion, to death, because that is what is expected of you. 

This is true if your comfort of choice is food, either the eating of it or the not eating of it. In your health crisis, your self-comfort that turns to self-hate, you are invisible, you are shameful, you are something society turns an eye from. 

But I digress in order to show how control and power can easily be lost, we don't believe it can ever happen to us, but it can, in moments. In can happen because our loved one has been killed whilst watching a football game, it can happen because the football team they support represents a city that is poorer than most. It can happen because the media tells us that the poor and vulnerable in our society are lazy, idle, and good for nothings, probably drunks and if they happen to be a migrant who is poor, scrounging terrorists, probably. It can happen even though the fans that were watching and the fans that died were from all walks of life and even children. They found themselves in a narrative that held more weight than the value of their lives. It doesn't matter who you were or what you did in your life (or didn’t get to do in the case of the children who died), if you were there that day you were drunk and violent and you deserved it, simply because the Police said so, simply because the Police knew they would be believed over football fans who supported Liverpool. 

It happened to Liverpool, it could have been any club that day but the blame story would only carry if the football club were from a poor area. But football itself is associated with poverty, the elite in our country (as David Cameron's Aston Villa, no West Ham, no Aston Villa has proved) don't like football, football is a sport for the plebs; the posh boys like Rugby, or Polo, or cricket. If the 96 Liverpool fans had been Rugby fans, this story would not have been possible. It was possible because the poor deserve everything they get and if you happen to get lumped in with them, even for a moment, even as you die, crushed against a railing; then you cease to be human as your body collapses beneath you. With your last breath, your humanity is exhaled. 

So here your family finds themselves, in shock and quickly anger and disbelief, without the power to bargain, surely next comes depression; the plunge into the pointlessness of life, the hopelessness of your situation, the deadening of the desire to keep going. But as you plunge into the depth of your despair something happens, a voice nags at you. I can't let this ‘truth’ win. I can't let my loved one be dismissed as a person who deserved to die; who did it to themselves who isn't human. I can't, I can't, I can't. 

And so you gather your strength and my goodness it takes a lot of strength, and you walk out of your front door and you stand up and you say, "This is a lie." And you repeat those words, over and over and over and over and over again. You repeat them as people turn their face away, you repeat them as the authorities turn a blind eye, you repeat them as you are accused of being in denial, you repeat them, over and over and over again, you repeat them until the noise gets too loud, you repeat them until it becomes embarrassing for people to keep ignoring you, you repeat them alongside the other families, the fans, the people of your city, even the rival football fans, you repeat them until the words are heard. You repeat them until the words are heard in a court that matters, you repeat them as the people who lied are stood before you, lying still, you repeat them until every single person in the Nation has heard your words and until every single person in the country now believes your word over theirs. You repeat them until your voice runs coarse and your tears have run dry. You repeat them until your words carry a weight. You repeat them until your words are accepted. 

You repeat them until the person you loved is a human again, a person who loved, was loved, knew joy, knew pain, a person who went in excitement to watch a team they loved, play a game they loved, in a tournament they loved, a person who found themselves crushed till they couldn't breath, a person whose body broke as vomit was forced through their mouth and as their eyes almost broke through their head as the life was squeezed out of them, as Police officers stood and did nothing. As people behind them were ushered in to crush them further, as a football game started before them, a human who died on a day that wasn't meant for them, a human who did nothing wrong. A human. 

So where are you in your grief now? What stage comes next? Do you finally have acceptance? Can you ever accept that it happened? Can you ever accept that not only did it happen people said it didn't happen? People left you alone; can you ever accept that? So what next? Anger? Depression? What next for you? The family members who have fought and fought through their grief to find justice in tragedy? What now? 

What victory is this when death looms over it? When lies and pain and fights and despair and silence loom over it? What victory when the paper you have long since rejected, continues to reject you? What next when other football fans continue to read the paper that holds you in contempt? What next when it doesn't matter that they don't care, still, about the damage they did to you and seemingly, neither do the people who continue to pay for a paper that doesn't just hate Liverpool, but hates everyone who reads it. A paper that markets itself to the poor, the working class, the football fans that Politicians wouldn't mingle with, the paper that pretends to be one of you whilst laughing in your face. The paper that tells you that because you don't have access to the education of the elite that you need to be told your news in a sensationalist manor, the paper that tells you, you're such an animalistic man that you need boobs with your morning coffee otherwise you probably wouldn't even read the news, a paper that tells you who you should vote for because you can't decide for yourself, a paper that tells you football is the greatest game but holds it's fans in contempt; hooligans, scum, drunks. 

There is no victory in death, there is no victory in grief but there is victory in being heard when all the odds were stacked against you, there is victory in being the voice that breaks through the power barrier, there is victory in making the silent be heard. Let us not accept this balance of power, let us not allow victims to be blamed, let us not buy papers that insult us, let us not let Politician's tell us what we are worth and let us not ever, ever forget, that the balance of power can always be skewed from our favour in just a moment. Don't let the power take from others what you wouldn't want to be taken from you.

We are all human, even the Policemen who lied, even the Editor who wouldn't give the front page to a tragedy their paper perpetrated, even the drunk on the corner, the homeless man that you passed this morning, the Junior Doctor who cares about his job, we are all human. Some of us are cowards, some of us have strength we cannot know until it is called upon and some of us have had bad day, after bad day, after bad day but we are all human. 

Don't let a newspaper tell us otherwise, don't let a force of power tell us otherwise and don't forget that it could have been you; it could have been your brother, your child, your parent. It could be 3000 migrant children now in danger of trafficking, children who we might read about in five years time as we let another Rotherham happen in the silence that comes when we forget the horrors we've witnessed.

It could have been any one of us, and if we let it, it will happen again, and again, and again, to those we allow to be silenced. 

Simply a bad day

To be, or not to be, that is the question: 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die - to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come...


Shakespeare died 400 years ago on Saturday so I thought I would borrow his words as I talk you through a bad day; no I am not suicidal but Hamlet so brilliantly puts into words not just our very fear of death, but fear itself. Here he fears both what he knows and what he does not know, which is basically how depression itself operates. The ability to decide if you want to be in company or alone, at work or home asleep, want to watch the funny film or the one that might let you cry. On a bad day, the depressed person is scared of every decision, lest they make the wrong one. Here, Hamlet is afraid of life and afraid of death, even as he contemplates it he cannot imagine it and he fears it could be worse. This talk through the pros and cons of being and not being makes a very human argument for life. Even when it is difficult, it is a known versus an unknown. And fear of nothing is not as scary as fear of the unknown. 


To sleep is to dream but as Hamlet worried, to sleep eternally could be to be stuck in an eternal dream, one you didn't choose. One of the side affects of depression can be some extremely violent and scary dreams, what if those are the manifestation of hell after death? His thought process here brilliantly highlights the eternal doubts of the depressed mind, although here, Hamlet is contemplating life or death, this thought process could work if he were contemplating simply whether to stay at home with 'the fear' or go to work and try and drown out 'the fear'. Which can be a daily argument of the person with depression. 


Hamlet's fear of death is a fear that can save lives. No matter how difficult life is, what if death is worse? When I was little I had a real fear that death meant I would be floating in the blackness of space forever more. I never believed in heaven or hell or God, from as young as I can remember. And with that atheism came a fear of nothingness, being nothing, in nothing, because to be able to contemplate not existing is to not be human. It is an alien concept because our very survival depends on us being unable to contemplate our own demise. Which is what makes suicide so unfathomable, as Hamlet muses, to be, or not to be, but how not to be, even in our imagined death we cannot imagine not being. There we are, floating in darkness, stuck in a nightmare, walking through the pearly gates, floating in clouds, burning in a pit, whatever we believe it is that comes next or don't believe, we still picture ourselves there as if we will always be. 


This week is Depression awareness week and I have woken to one of my anxious days. A day like today starts with a nervous feeling that won't go away. It is like waiting to go on stage to speak publicly but without the event you fear. You fear but you have nothing to fear. 
I am in my flat and I don't need to leave until this evening when I am meeting a dear friend, nothing at all scary about today. But I am scared: of nothing. 


That is depression on a bad day; a fear of nothing. A fear of the words on this page because even as I write them my mind is not clear but a jumbled mess, a fear of watching TV and not being able to concentrate because words are hard to process, a fear of reading because I already feel too tired to understand the writing on the page, a fear of working because all my ideas are unoriginal and boring and there is nothing I have to offer that can't be done by someone else. 


This is my depression. And when it talks so loudly you just have to lie down somewhere quiet and let it scream and rant until it's worn itself out. In fact, days like today are often best spent sleeping, like you would if you had a cold or a bug, you would sleep until it passed. A bad depression day should be slept away. But often we can't do that because we have commitments and jobs and bills to pay. Sometimes we have to face the World even though just eating is terrifying. But you won't spot our fear; you'll see a smile. We might even tell you a joke, talk loudly and appear super confident, but inside our stomach is telling us to be afraid, be very afraid and our brain is telling us we are useless and nothing we do or say has a point. 


Doubt. 


As I write each sentence I am plagued by doubt and the butterflies in my stomach, which have accompanied me since my dreams last night, intensify. This is pointless. 


Every sentence feels like climbing the peak of a mountain, only at each full stop another mountain peak appears. That is the tiredness of depression; the smallest of jobs feels like a gargantuan task. These are only words, nothing at all scary about them, they will be read, they will be forgotten, they will be followed by ever more words. 


But even as the end of the page looms and the need for a conclusion, a point gets ever closer, the butterflies begin to dance a little faster. I don't have a point because on a day like today there is no point. It is what it is, and the kindest thing a person with depression can do on a day like today is to accept that it is happening and know it will pass. Tomorrow will come. The butterflies will stop dancing; the fear of nothing will go. It will be okay. 


And look, I wrote a series of words, a thing I was scared to do as I stared at the empty page an hour ago. That will do for today. 


Love me (and the butterflies) xx


I would probably not have written this post were it not Depression awareness week, but in honour of that fact, this is a jumbled mess of a look into my mind on a bad day. I hope in its confusion, it sheds a little light on how depression can feel. 

Just say no

Did you hear me? Nah bruv.  

The word ‘No’ keeps popping up this week; it came up in an email newsletter I have subscribed to, an article in the Pool about saying no to IVF and during an interview with Marian Keyes that I attended on Tuesday.

Just say no.

Went the drugs campaign by the Grange Hill gang back in the 90’s (no, no I won’t stop harping on about the 90’s, just shut up and get used to it). It’s such a simple idea: just say no.

But saying “no” is actually a really difficult thing to do and a vital skill we all need to learn. From the freelancer drowning under a workload that is unrealistic for one person who feels they can’t say “no” because it is WORK and who knows when work will STOP, as if that is even possible, to the Actor who has filmed 6 short films in a year, for free (even though the crew got paid), all of them utter shit who can’t say “no” because it is WORK, albeit not at all fulfilling and not at all paid, to the alcoholic being offered a free drink at an event, to the person with depression who knows that one social occasion a week is probably about all they can manage but who doesn’t want to offend to the office worker presented with a free tin of biscuits.

No is a really, really hard word to say.

Saying no, however, mostly benefits us. Saying no to the biscuit you want to eat because it’s 11am or 3pm and you’re bored at work and want a distraction benefits your health. Yes, take the break, you’ve earned it, but if you were at home and stimulated, would you be craving that biscuit? Probably not, so take a break, find an article online that stimulates, walk to someone’s desk and have a chat, do something to stimulate your brain. Then, if you’re actually still really hungry, then have the bloody biscuit.

Saying no to a drink when you know you have a problem with alcohol, or feel like you just need a week off because you’ve been excessive what with all the joy of spring arriving, or because actually right now, even though it’s free, you just don’t fancy it, saying no is for you. Saying yes is because you want to be polite, the friend with you is having one and you don’t want to spoil their fun by not indulging, insert excuse here, etc.

And that is why we find the word so unbelievably difficult. Saying “No” is about establishing boundaries for yourself, telling the World your needs and we are surprisingly bad at asserting those for ourselves and very good at putting the needs of others first, on a personal level, we are shockingly bad at putting the needs of others before us on a societal level (shout out to capitalist offshore tax barons), probably because on a personal level there is an immediate form of judgement. “Go on, have a drink, it’s Thursday!” “Don’t be a bore, we’re all in the pub, come down!” “I haven’t seen you all week.”

“No” is very often followed with all the reasons why everyone else thinks you should say yes. “You’re my go to insert job title here” “I know you’ve been working late all week but if you could just stay behind because I need a meeting about…” blah blah blah. People do everything to get us to say “Yes.” And it can be incredibly flattering when people want to see us socially, or want us for work, or a partner or parent or sibling needs us and when you have the energy and resources and desire to fulfil those peoples wants and needs, brilliant. But when you don’t, it’s really okay to say “No”, even whilst they protest. In fact, it is important that you do.

Saying “No” is about self-care and as the age old saying goes “Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others”. You cannot be of any use to anyone if you suffocate before able to get the oxygen mask on his or her face, so fix yours and then help. This is so true in life, when you are overworked your work suffers and ultimately so to do the clients or company you are working for. When you over-extend yourself socially, those interactions suffer because you are half listening, or too tired. When a relationship starts to make you feel anxious, or sad, or even rejected, even if that person really wants you around but can’t offer what you need, yet, or most likely ever, you do neither of you any favours by sticking around. Least of all you, living in perpetual hope will lead only to misery. In the end someone has to hurt someone and someone has to get hurt. You know the one “he’s just not that into you”. Take the hint and walk away.

“2016 is the year of No”, I declared to anyone who would listen late last year after I had reached summer without a weekend to myself and still had a diary literally full of events to take me to Christmas. I was spent, I was running on empty, I was miserable as hell at work, and I was running from all of it by saying “yes, yes, yes” to everything. So I decided to say “no” more. I meant it as I said it but I had no idea how much I meant it. I thought that I was going to apply it to just social events but so far I have said no to a lot this year. Even this week, despite asking my temp agency to consider me for work, as I really need to start earning more and generating work is still slow; I said “no” when they offered me two days work because I didn’t like the sound of it. I knew it would make me feel anxious and bored and that I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on freelance stuff whilst there. So no thanks.

I have said no to a relationship, I have said no to countless social events, I have said no to chocolate and recently I have said no to alcohol, consistently and I’m really beginning to feel the benefits, not just of giving myself more time, or eating healthier or drinking less, in fact not at all, but by putting myself first I am finally treating myself with the care and attention I deserve. And by actively doing that my self-esteem is coming back. I am spending my days pitching for work that match my skill set and asserting to anyone who will listen that “I am good enough to write for you” until eventually they crack and agree with me. I am telling my friends that although I totally love them, my brain has limited capacity for stimulation because of my depression and so I can’t see you today, but I will as soon as I can. I am deciding to put my energy to the thing I truly love, being creative, the part of me I want to nourish and encourage and I am so much happier because of it.

Which I know sounds ironic when I recently went back on the happy pills. But even that was me just taking care of me, making sure I catch myself before I fall. Last year someone said to me “maybe it’s because you feel like you’ve been looking after yourself for so long, that you just want someone else to look after you.” They were right, I did want someone to look after me, but it wasn’t because I had been looking after myself for so long, it was because I hadn’t been looking after myself for so long. I didn’t know that at the time but I see it clear as day now, I needed looking after and who better to look after me, than me. I am not going anywhere, if I die, I die with me, I can’t leave me for someone else, I can’t grow apart from me, I can’t move away from me like everyone else can. I’m in this with myself, so of course it should be me who looks after me. Absolutely I need my friends and family and lovers (even the passing ones) because we all need other people and of course I love when they listen and hold me and give me advice and help look after me, but they can only help look after me if I am willing to play a part and also take responsibility for looking after myself. And I can only look after them by looking after myself too, so that when they need help I have the strength and energy to give it to them.

Just say no.

You can’t right now.

Because by saying no, you are helping everyone.

Go on; put that oxygen mask on first.

What does Broccoli even mean?

What does broccoli really mean when you think about it? It looks like a small tree but instead of individual branches it has more small trees growing out of it. Heck, some small children would probably prefer to eat a small tree from the garden than an actual Broccoli. And always when I attempt to write the word I default to one ‘c’ and two ‘L’s until the red squiggly line tells me I’ve got those the wrong way round again.

So, some might say Brocolli, oh for fuck sake, BROCCOLI is my nemesis.

And those ‘some’ would be correct; broccoli has come to define my experience with depression.

What?

Yes, that is exactly what I said. If you wanted an animation of what my depression is, it would be a giant broccoli looming over a really small and cowering me.

At my worst a few years ago, before tablets and therapy, even in the early stages of tablets and therapy, a trip to the supermarket was an insurmountable task. I would attempt it because we have to eat food and in order to eat food we have to buy food, right? Not when you have flatmates with a never ending supply of cereal…sure, it can cause friction if you permanently steal cereal from your flatmates and don’t even wash your dirty incriminating bowl after because the effort of washing one bowl is enough to make you have a full blown panic attack, but it will be worth it if you can avoid a confrontation with broccoli.

Normally these supermarket trips would come at the end of a day at work pretending to be just fine. I would be totally and utterly physically and mentally spent from trying to hold actual conversations, so by the time I would get to the supermarket my brain was literally unable to process anything else.

And the first aisle I would attempt would always be the vegetable aisle. Staring at me all menacingly would be a broccoli, all green, plush, healthy and incriminating. That’s right, incriminating. One little look at it’s multiple tree head and I would know that I was not up to this job. “You don’t know what to do with me.” It would whisper, I didn’t know what a broccoli meant. What am I supposed to do with it? If I buy it, what else do I need to make it into a meal? What do all those little trees mean?

Of course I am dramatising for comedy effect but it was always the broccoli that had me stumped. It was a vegetable I used a lot before, I would easily go into a supermarket buy a broccoli and then some green beans, a steak or some fish, maybe some pasta or more veg and there would be the bare bones of a meal. But now, and this I don’t exaggerate, I had no idea what to do with a broccoli.

All the items in the supermarket became individual things that I couldn’t piece together, which was much like most of the thoughts in my head or the words I listened to as people tried to converse with me. Your words lost all meaning, I could hear them, I could recognise them, but once they were inside my brain I couldn’t put them together to make sense of them. My brain had simply stopped processing information. I was locked inside it, desperately trying to understand very simple things, like what goes with broccoli. Pretending that I understood people all day at work meant that by the time I reached the supermarket, broccoli was as complex to me as Einstein’s theory of relativity.

What would start out, as an every other day attempt to tackle the supermarket would be felled, literally, by the little tree head that is broccoli. I would dash past it to the pizza aisle, passing the wine on my way. Half a pizza, half a bottle of wine a night. Some days, they didn’t have my preferred pizza so I would exit with wine and steal cereal from my flatmates once safely behind the closed doors of my flat to avoid having to think what else I could eat.

Then I would sneak upstairs and hide. I don’t even remember if I watched telly or listened to music. I don’t remember much, but the most vivid memory and the thing I always go back to when trying to describe my depression, is that relationship with broccoli. How broccoli simply lost all meaning.

Recently I wrote an article on running the marathon with depression, it was my first experience of being edited and I found that a bit fraught, as I am sure is natural, but there was one thing that was removed in the final draft, that had survived all previous drafts, and that was a joke, written in brackets after a sentence about how difficult it was to navigate the supermarket “(because what does broccoli even mean?)”

A few people who read my pre-edited draft said it was a shame that joke had been removed so at first I thought I was smarting over it because it was funny. But I couldn’t seem to shake this feeling that something massive had been taken from my article. Which is ridiculous, it’s an aside at best and one the Editor could have no way of knowing was so important to me, especially as I hadn’t realised it was so important to me until it was removed and by then it was already published.

Really, what was the big deal?

Well, it’s the only way I can make sense of what happens inside my brain when depression takes hold. It’s the way I describe thoughts not going together, it’s the visual image I have in my head any time I feel the tiredness inside my brain that comes with depression and it’s a really easy and funny way to describe something that isn’t funny. Even the act of using that as a way of demonstrating the inner pain and panic of your brain not working is an example of how a person with depression deals with it every day, by laughing on the surface. Since that article was published I have had a lot of people tell me they had no idea I had depression, that I have always been good at putting one foot in front of the other, that I come across as so confident, that I am funny. This is because everyone with depression puts all his or her energy into hiding it. So we joke and laugh and talk as if we really understand what you are saying to us, but it’s a mask. And a joke about broccoli is another mask. Because in actual fact, there is nothing at all funny about staring at a piece of broccoli and not knowing what it means.