0.5.2 - Any day now, how's about getting out of this place?
CW: Mental Health, like, for real
In that bathroom, lying in that hot water, drinking my Red from a plastic cup, I listen to Asleep In The Back on repeat. I sing Any Day Now and Powder Blue and Asleep In The Back and Newborn and I have what I now know are dissociative episodes where I spend a lot of time trying not to be myself. The terrible financial decisions, credit cards and loans on pointless extravagances I thought would never come calling, are at my door. In the previous six months, the girl I thought I was about to propose to dumped me just before Valentine's Day, we were forced to live on in the shared house for months because I had nowhere to go and she refused to move out; The company I worked at went suddenly and immediately out of business when the owner found out her husband, the sales manager, my boss, was sleeping with one of the other staff members. I had to find a new place to live, this flat which I can barely afford, and get a new job I hate which pays peanuts just to avoid becoming destitute and homeless. My new boss is a terrible bully who undermines my confidence at every turn, but let's be real, it's a miracle I am functional enough to type letters and book rooms and file documents.
I've cut myself off from nearly everyone I know. People have tried reaching out, I've told them I need space after the breakup, that I am doing OK. I'm not. My parents are hundreds of miles away, having retired early and moved to Spain; not because they were rich, but because they hit 55 and didn't want to work for a living any more. Sold the house, moved somewhere cheaper, and made ends meet until the state pension kicked in. They don't have the resources or any interest in bailing me out; they are too busy cleaning up my sister's messes, whose family genetic curse has hit hard and early, and she's made some choices that make mine look rational. I've always dug myself out of my own holes. I can't turn to anyone else.
In about 4 months, I'm going to have a full on panic attack in the middle of what is, fortunately, the hospital where I work. I'm lucky to be living in a country where healthcare is free, where mental healthcare is starting to be understood, where what's happening inside my brain can be talked through and levelled out and understood and controlled through a combination of antidepressants I'll be too ashamed to tell anyone I am taking for four years, and regularly therapy visits for six. In a stroke of luck, just before Christmas I run in to an ex-colleague from the job I lost; she's a recruitment agent now. I tell her I need a new job, she tells me they have a vacancy they can't fill and she'll send me the details on the downlow. I think its an admin job, but it's working in a chemistry lab, something I did a little bit of in higher education. I spend 4 years there, before my boss tells me I am wasted doing titrations and quality checks, and that he's recommended me for a job in demand planning, which becomes my career for the next two decades more or less. I pay my debts, I meet Catherine. I persevere with help and support from strangers and new colleagues and old friends and eventually, I find my way back to the person I am still today.
It's 2025, and I'm lying in the bath. Catherine has gone to the cinema to see a film which is a ludicrous three hours and thirty minutes long. I was going to play my drums this evening, but for reasons too complex to go into, our living room has four 5 foot long by 2 foot wide garden border planters in the middle of it and I don't have room to set them up. So I decide the best thing to do is have a glass of wine, have a bath, and wash my now quite-long hair which takes ages to wash if I do all the nonsense with the conditioners and things that is required to keep it marginally under control. I've got a glass of red wine - it's been a long day and I haven't had a drink for like a week and a half, plus our wine rack doesn't get depleted much unless we have guests. And my brother in law Daniel got me a pint sized waterproof bluetooth speaker so I can listen to music in the bath, something I don't do while Catherine is in because it echoes around the house in a way which is good if you are in the bathroom, and bad if you are anywhere else in the building.
I don't really know what possessed me to put this on, apart from the circumstantial symmetry. Originally I'd intended my other blog post this week to be about Kendrick Lamar who I had spent the whole week listening to, but I'll scoop those albums up in the Sunday wrap-up. I'd been listening to a brace of records recommended by my friend Jenny throughout the day, but I'd reached a natural pause there and wanted something else. I think it just came back to me, a ghost of Rich long gone, reminding me that as much as stuff has changed in new and scary ways, understanding, processing, holding things together and thinking of myself and the people around me pulled me from a personal circumstance far worse than anything this current madness can throw at me.
Can the soundtrack to your mental health crisis also be one of your favourite albums of all time?
The answer for me is undoubtedly yes. While listening to this album tonight brought some pretty intense responses from me, I still lay, soaking, enraptured by it. I've never felt so connected on an emotional level with the quiet, poignant desperation of this album as I did back then, but that feeling doesn't go away; it takes you back there, lets you see and experience it again but in a safe way, a way which lets you acknowledge how far you've come, and what it took to get there. I've spent more than a few times thinking about what albums I would submit for This One Goes To 11 if I were ever invited on, and this record has never not been in that list. I love it with all my heart.
I don't have a pithy ending for this post, sorry. All I can do is say - if you feel like I felt, if you're isolated and alone and desperate and you don't know the way out, find someone and tell them. A friend, a colleague, a professional - in my experience, the majority of people out there love people, hate to see them hurt and afraid and adrift, and they will reach out and lift you up and support you if you let them. Believe in yourself, understand there is a way out from the worst times of your life, and like me, one day you can be looking back two decades, thinking how very lucky you are that things worked out like they did. If all else fails, look to music to be your saviour; I know it was mine.
