Fossils from the stacks

I wrote a fairly regular diary from being about 12 until my early 20s. It is written mostly on loose leaves of A4, but also in what originally were 3 rather beautiful A4 books of unlined, white, good quality paper. The collected works now lie in my spare room in various boxes that have been carted from my parents house through what became 12 house moves in 12 years, from my art studenty slum, through halls of residence to my first flat, and on, one place to the next with only a cursory glance into the boxes to make sure that it's all still there.

After an evening spent drinking wine and eating dinner with old friends, the subject of our shared past came up. We're friends now, but 15 years ago it was slightly different. Katie was my first girlfriend. She's married to the woman she fell in love with after we split up. It wasn't pleasant, and I remembered that, but the details have long since faded from my memory. Fifteen years ago, I was in the opening stages of the depression that swallowed my 20s, and my perception of the world was very dark, often occluded by alcohol, and inevitably self centred. As a result, my usually reliable memory is a little hazy about all sorts of things from back then. Katie has epilepsy, and years of seizures have left holes and gaps in her memory. She remembers some things, others she's no idea. Sometimes it upsets her. In an uncomfortable moment, not least because her partner Bex was sitting with us, Katie mentioned one particular moment of our 9month affair. Did I remember that night down by the canal, in the rain?
"Yes," I said, not knowing what on Earth was coming next, "Do you?"
"Well I don't remember it," she said, "but I know it happened because I wrote some poetry about it, and I found it not long ago." She remembered that I kept a diary, and asked if I'd written about it. I said I hadn't read my diary for years and couldn't remember if I'd written anything. That night seems like the sort of thing I would have written about, what with it having all the elements an adventurous and angst-ridden artist like the young me would have relished being able to write about: desperately emotional sex in an enormous storm; an argument that changed everything.

On the following night, Sunday, Radio 4 was repeating Rhona Cameron's episode of "My Teenage Diary," and I decided it was time. When I went looking for that particular memory, the boxes were piled up on top of each other, the cardboard sides succumbing to pressure, sagging slightly. The collected written expression of my feelings of the times of my life I saw fit to record seemed to be turning into fossils, stratified and surrounded by the accompanying ephemera of those long past eras. I dug through the layers and eventually located the books I wrote in during my first 2 years at Uni and took them down to the dining room. Initially I was just looking for a reference to that wild night, but soon realised that I needed to see where it all started, and ended up reading all the way through both books by the following morning.

What I found there occasionally made me giggle, more than once made me cry, but most of all made me sad and angry with myself for not being honest, for not having the guts to write what was really going on, and for not writing what I actually felt.

Having told them I was not straight a few months before, by September 1998, my relationship with my parents was in freefall. My Dad barely spoke to me even in the weekly phone calls, and of all the millions of people I couldn't talk to, I especially could not talk to them. I'd always enjoyed being part of a close, warm, albeit typically Yorkshire and therefore emotionally silent, family, and the pain of alienation was just one strand of the dull ache that choked me.

One weekend I'd come home, and my brother and his girlfriend were there, and we all offered to cook Sunday lunch before my folks went out to see some other relatives and I set off back to Uni. Somehow, we'd overlooked the  potatoes, and they weren't ready at the same time as everything else. Suddenly my previously laid back and loving Dad snarled something pointed, nasty and painful at me over the dinner table. Whatever was said has been lost, but I can still recall the look on the others' faces as the blow landed. I remember crying like a wounded beast as Dan and Mim tried to soothe me afterwards, but I had been shown that I'd moved outside of the remit of my father's love. Then I caught the coach back down to the Midlands, and found myself sitting next to the worst person possible.

Two years earlier, at art college, against every bit of advice, against all of my expectations, I'd fallen in love with my best friend. Sara was straight, and younger than me. We'd shared that first art student slum in Beeston and for 18 mostly drunken, funny, thrilling months, each day I fell more in helpless lust and love with her. Eventually I'd had to tell her and my suspicious parents why I was being so weird. My world was slipping away from me. I wished I could either drop dead, or one day wake up and forget her. I continually failed to.

By the time we'd gone off to Uni, we weren't talking to each other, even though we lived in the same halls, and went to the same lectures, and even though she owed me nearly £2000. She got on the coach at Bradford. I think we sat in silence back to Wolves. I know that when I closed the door of my room that night I curled into a foetal ball and sobbed for what felt like hours.

Instead of any of this, my diary tells me that on the way back from catching up with some of Dan's old friends to celebrate one of them being released from a prison sentence that he didn't deserve, we saw a fox on the road near my parents house. It notes how much I love Mim for the way she let me know she cared about me after the meal, tells me the barest outline of the return journey, says I went out to get pissed at the Union in the evening.

A few weeks after this horrible non-entry, I threw myself into seeing Katie, and again, my diary writes what I wanted to believe, what I wanted a future me to remember about what was happening. There's the blooming sweetness between us, there's the first steps in a new sexual adventure, there's excitement, uncertainty, fun.... but between those lines which try to blot out the truth, I can see nothing but the shadow of the pain of Sara. Eventually, I stopped writing. 

I remember the storm as an April thing. There's no entries between late February and the end of 1999, when I'd moved house and mine and Katie's relationship had ended as lovers and changed to supposedly close friends. The following year's sporadically kept diary is then full of my growing understanding and acceptance of depression and the medication I was on. My writing is full of worry about fitting in and little conflicts with the other lesbians, of small jealousies, confusion, worry about Katie and Bex, of the minutiae of a relationship I wasn't having but was hearing about in far too much detail.

At the end of the second book, Sara's left Uni and I've taken her to court, had the case judged in her absence and won back the money, and although that's almost the only mention of her, the whole thing is heavy with loneliness and pain for that lost friendship, wasted love and the company of someone who knew me so well.

The simple answer to Katie's question "did I write anything about that night down by the canal in the rain" is no, but perhaps it's better that I didn't. This way, the story can be a naughty-sexy-daring-shocking thing - we went off to have lesbian sex outside in the middle of a crashing thunder storm! That was the story I was writing. I can only imagine what Katie's poetic account is like.

In truth, I had to end something I knew wasn't right and I didn't want to hurt the lovely woman I had to end it with. We went out in the storm because it felt like the only way to release the mixed up feelings. I told her I wasn't in love with her because I was still in love with Sara, and we both cried. Then we kissed goodbye and the lightning flashed, and it went too far and turned into a final fantastic fuck. It was supposed to be the end, but it wasn't.

Memory is a strange thing, and I'm renowned for having a long and detailed one. Looking back on the diaries of the worst time in my life has told me a lot. Mainly, it seems obvious that the thyroid trouble was starting in the first weeks of Uni - anxiety, poor sleep, too much alcohol, too much nervous energy. It coincided with the onset of depression too, although my writing of the time links further past ideas about myself into the resulting poor self esteem.

On reflection, the details, the feelings were probably too intense, confusing and painful to write at the time. Diaries are for remembering things, and I didn't want to remember. Mostly I don't any more, and I don't worry about things that happened in exceptional times. Anyone else but me reading my pages wouldn't know what had happened, would find the personality behind the lines curiously blank. Only I can read the shorthand of elided feelings, and I do know.

Fifteen years on, my Dad and I have had many emotional make-ups, a break of roughly 6 years improved mine and Katie's friendship, Dan and Mim are married with kids, and I know there were reasons why it all felt so bad. It's time to close the book and bury it again deep among the geology of the back bedroom. Yet another future me might come to look at it in years to come and understand even more.

The Last of Last Year's Beer

Last year, I started brewing my own beer. Over the last couple of years I seem to have moved without any apparent choice or fuss into the same early-middle age hobbies that were previously enjoyed by my Dad. Looking back now, it's as though becoming a runner, starting to grow my own vegetables and brewing my own beer was inevitable: it was always going to happen, there's probably something genetic about it.

My lovely brother and sister-in-law gave me the brewing kit for Christmas, and I eventually got started last summer with a Yorkshire Bitter, and it took 6 weeks or so to be ready to drink. It was really rather good, but I knew I could do better, and so went straight on to a London Bitter which was ready for the cold December and saw me through to the beginning of this year. I wanted to drink the last bottle at a special time so I saved it to have with my Dad, knowing my parents would be coming over from Portugal in the Spring for the second of Mum's knee replacement operations. It doesn't travel very well, and they've so far not come to the house for a visit because Mum's not driving yet, so that last bottle has been sitting around taking up house room.

Today I finally got chance to spend some time on my poor neglected vegetables. When I'm thinking about the veggies, something happens to me that I can't really explain. I am totally focussed, and completely calm. I can stare at the greenery for many long minutes at a time, thinking only about how far the plants are spaced apart, and what the soil needs (made from previous years' potting remnants, all my shredded paper and cardboard scraps, coffee grounds from the cafe at work and composted veggy kitchen waste), and what I might need to do the next time I get chance, but somehow my mind is free to solve other problems without my knowledge. I love sitting on the back step first thing in the morning with a cuppa and my breakfast, but that hasn't happened as often this year thanks to rain and my early runs. Whilst enjoying breaking the soil apart and re-potting my tomatoes, I realised how different this year is from last year.

Last year, having made the decision to get off my arse (again - this time for good), I lost 2 and a half stone, and made myself much healthier. When Jem came up with the 200MMM idea, I knew the running would become really serious, and I welcomed it, knowing that my depression needed me to be active. Although I was too terrified to admit it to myself, I was beginning to feel that no amount of exercise would be enough to chase away the horrible dark waters that seemed to have welled up around me. I knew I was surrounded and chest deep in heaviness, and when I did consciously think about how I was feeling I had begun to accept as objective facts some of the conclusions my poor head  had reached. It seemed reasonable to believe "I am never going to be good at anything," "I am not as intelligent as I used to think I was" and "I do not deserve to feel loved." Despite being open about my mental illness since diagnosis in 1999, there are still very few friends I can ever be totally honest with about just how dark things get. Not many people know how to take the information that a friend regularly uses considering different methods of suicide as a management technique for their low moods. I'm not saying I'd ever do it, but on many, many occasions, my way of knowing if I'm able to go on with life the way it is, is wondering if that tree over there is tall and strong enough, or what might happen if I jumped off that bridge. If the tree isn't suitable, or the bridge jump would just leave me wet and cold, then it's clearly not time to do it yet, and I go on.

By early May, I felt that the edges of my vision had begun to close in, as though the colour was seeping out of my world, and not just in the metaphorical way. It being time to update them anyway, I got new glasses and contact lenses, and my overall vision improved, but as a photographer, I was mildly concerned. By this point, I'd run my first half-marathon and was doing the distance fairly regularly in training, but was becoming aware that the runners high, the pay-off for all that hard work, was increasingly short-lived. I'd also totally failed to lose the spare tyre around my waist, and it was this that took me to the doctor.

I didn't really expect there to be any other answer apart from perhaps to do different exercises, do more. The blood tests for all the usual early middle age suspects - sugars, iron, thyroid - were a formality. The results changed my life.

My blood was taken, and roughly a week later I got a call to say the result for the thyroid was abnormal and that the doctor wanted to see me. In the week after that phone call and before the appointment, I did some internet research and read as much as I could about thyroid problems, so that when the doctor told me my results were "blooming awful," it came as a great relief.

Previously, all I'd known about thyroid glands was that they had something to do with iodine, and that fat people blamed their weight on them. Now I understood that without the right amount of thyroxine, your whole body does weird things. An under-active thyroid gland, creating too little thyroxine, can result in every organ and process of the body slowing down, cutting out non-essential functions, slowing down metabolism. To preserve the resources it has, your body cuts out any fancy stuff, like higher cerebral functions, peripheral vision and keeping your hair and nails hydrated, and just keeps you ticking over. Thyroxine is the hormone for the body's basic running mode, it keeps the heart beating regularly, it helps you draw energy from food, it enables the cells of your brain to communicate with each other. Adrenaline is similar, but it's the emergency hormone, it gives you a faster heartbeat, faster reactions, and creates feelings of excitement and the runners high. The doctor explained to me that my thyroid results were so bad that it had to be the adrenaline from running that was keeping me going. No wonder I was feeling rubbish. Whenever the adrenaline levels receded, my body was going into safety mode, leaving behind a crashing low.

I started taking 50mg of thyroxine every day immediately after diagnosis, and now I'm about to go for another blood test to see how I'm reacting to that dose. It's been 2months, and over the last 2 or 3 weeks, I'm beginning to notice how much I've improved. I've lost 10lbs since then, but that's not the biggest change.

Doing the veggies today helped me remember that last year I did all those new pottering-hobby type things without really thinking I would be doing them this year, or any other year. For most of the last few years I've had a background thought ticking away in the back of my head that a 5 year plan was too long. Nothing really meant anything to me, I just went through the motions to look like I was doing normal human things that people are supposed to do. Business, relationships... nothing was important. The future meant nothing to me, because I didn't really want to be in it. With thyroxine helping my cells do what they're supposed to be doing, I've recovered some self esteem, I can think critically and logically, and I remember what simple happiness is, and it's been waiting for me in these little, small places all this time: making things from scratch, spending time with people, talking.

I walked into town today thinking about how things are changing for the better, and while I was smiling to myself, I caught the eye of an old Sikh guy on a bike. He looked so cool, with his dark t-shirt and a bright golden-orange turban on, and below his dark sunglasses he wore a full, flowing grey beard, and a massive smile. He waved at me as he went past, and I waved back, smiling from the core of my being. A white van with the window down, following a couple of cars behind, slowed down to allow the guy in the passenger seat to lean out and call "Born smiling!" to me and let my smile spread to his face too. I smiled all the rest of the way into town. It's cheesy, I know, but that's how smiling works and I can do it too now. 

I thought about the one remaining bottle of last year's beer, and the person who brewed it. That person, that version of myself is so different to the person I am today. She was heavy, dark, and becoming desperate.The new, better me appreciates what she did, and would very much like to raise that bottle of beer to her in thanks and appreciation. Here's to you, and thanks for the beer - it is even better with a few months wait!

Thanks for hanging in there, and getting me safely through all that dark stuff. I know it was hard work. You were so strong and you did brilliantly. It's ok now. I'll take it from here.