Interlude: People, I've been sad

Duran Duran gave me writer's block for three years.  

They're what's next in the pile, and with momentum on my side and 68 previously published anecdote/story/album review hybrids behind me I slammed headfirst into Simon Le Bon and came to a screeching halt.  There's also a degree to which my pause coincided with Catherine's 40th Birthday celebrations, which I spent a lot of time organising, then Christmas, then a change in my job which meant my free time got pretty drastically curtailed and by the time I realised I hadn't written anything for weeks, then months, it got harder and harder to bring myself back to the keyboard and figure out what pithy bon mots I could summon up to describe my feelings for "Is There Something I Should Know?".

Given current circumstances, that's what I like to refer to as the Good Old Days.  Now, 4 months into a global pandemic that is as frustrating to sit in isolation through as it is maddening to see those around us in power so completely botch the handling of, I think back to the days where I was busy, I was stressed, but I was coping, with some degree of pleasant nostaligia

Between you and me, friends, right now I've been pretty close to the edge of "coping".

I'm going to talk a little about mental health now, and if that's the kind of discussion that makes you unhappy, or can cause you your own mental health issues, feel free to skip to the break near the bottom of this article and watch the great YouTube video of the song, and I promise the article on the Greatest Hits of Duran Duran will be less challenging and hopefully more entertaining.  Otherwise, here comes some real talk.

I think I have mentioned before (though its hard to remember what parts of myself I've upended into these blog posts in the past) that I've gone through some mental health challenges.  My family has a history of some degree of mental illness going back a few generations (always a fun sentence to type, let me tell you), and my awareness of that fact doesn't make me, sadly, any more immune.  I've had some form of anxiety related issues since I was a teen - manifesting in some fairly typical ways, chief amongst them insomnia, for which my GP at the time proscribed me with Temazipam, which I thought was cool because they were what Solid Snake used in Metal Gear Solid to be a better sniper, and in hindsight think was less cool in that the best medical advice for me at the time was for me to roofie myself.

My fairly specific form of anxiety relates specifically to society ending and apocalyptic events, which has been a blast over the last few months.  My earliest memory of this feeling was around 7 years old when, while staying with an Aunt and scared having watched the 1953 War of the Worlds movie, she reassured me that I didn't need to worry about the world ending like in the movie because she knew that the world wasn't going to end until 2012 and I would be well into my 30's by then.  

Did I mention the whole "family history of mental illness" thing? 

To this day, I'll still have nights where I will wake up at 1am, and my brain will go "While you are awake, here's a fun activity - lets envisage what would happen if right now, a rogue singularity span through the solar system and wrenched Earth out of its orbit.  Imagine the catastrophic and terrifying way in which you would be helpless to watch everything around you destroyed."  And then I get up and watch Youtube videos until that part of my brain gets tired.

For a long time, I just assumed this existential dread was a normal part of human existence, and it wasn't until I had another truly emotionally unbalancing event (the previously mentioned 1-2-3 punch of the unexpected ending of a long term relationship, redundancy, and having to rapidly find somewhere else to live over the course of 6 weeks) that led me into true capital D Depression.  In what can only be a stroke of great fortune, in my desperation to find a job at the time, I found work in the local NHS trust hospital, and while the job sucked and my boss was a terrible bully who hated me, me having a breakdown while in a HR meeting at the hospital ended up with a rapid referral to a therapist and a long course of learning just how messed up my brain was.  

Therapy was without doubt a transformative experience for me.  While it didn't take away my ongoing anxiety, it gave a toolbox to take away its power over me.  It also helped me deal with the more serious elements of my emotional instability and start to regain some control over my life.  Insanely helpful also at the time were my friends, who consciously or not, went to herculean efforts to get me to come back out of myself and rejoin the real world.  The entire thing, from inciting incident, to mental collapse, to returning to some degree of normality, took over 18 months, and must now be around 15 years ago.  It was an episode of my life that I kept largely to myself, believing that particular dragon had been, if not slain, driven off permanently.

Enter our friend, Novel Coronavirus COVID-19, and its associated societal limits.

In many ways, I've been very fortunate when it comes to the outcomes of COVID-19.  Myself and Catherine have not been sick, we both still have our jobs and are not in danger of losing our incomes, we don't have kids and are pretty capable of entertaining ourselves without leaving the house.  The beginning of lockdown was an exciting adventure, as we improvised ways to continue our routines despite not being able to see people from outside our household.  I spent time, reached out to others, made sure they were OK, convinced I was doing fine.

Three months later, I am here to tell you all - People, I've been sad.  The charming improvised replacements for socialisation became frustrating recognitions of how restricted we were.  I was (and still am) irritable and short tempered.  I would stay up late then wake up at 5am, unable to sleep.  I found myself deliberately withdrawing myself from our internet replacements for social interactions because they made me annoyed and frustrated for what we could no longer do, while I watched households out of my windows across the street carry on as if nothing in the world was happening.  I found myself lacking the emotional energy to take part, to put on a happy face.  

In the distance, the dragon circles.

But, like before, I am fortunate.  I have a plethora of helpful and supportive friends who have been understanding of my withdrawal.  I have an amazing partner who has kept me propped up and encouraged me to make better choices about my self care when generally I want to sit in a room alone.  And I have the benefit of experience, having seen this all before, and the advice and guidance won through my time in therapy continues to holds true to this day.

So worry not, dear readers.  This is not a cry for help;  these are not the words of a man in crisis.  Instead, it's my small contribution to an idea that people talking freely about their mental health isn't something to be ashamed of, or to hide.  It's to let people out there know that if they are feeling anything akin to what I feel, that at least we are in this fight together.  

* * *

That was a lot, I know.

This is ostensibly a music blog (or a midlife crisis blog masquerading as a music blog at least). so I wanted to talk about music and the inspiration for the title for this little interlude.

Music has always been a huge tool for me as a way to balance my mood.  For every negative emotional state, there's an artist, an album, a musical genre which either pulls me in the opposite direction, or provides an empathy, an outlet, an understanding and reflection of how I'm feeling which can validate, express, and release pent up emotion in a way nothing else can for me.

Because there isn't a Christine & The Queens album in The Pile, this is as good an opportunity as I think I will get to talk about my experience seeing Christine live at Manchester Apollo in 2018.  Catherine found Christine first, but I can't remember the circumstances.  She'd seen a performance of Tilted on some TV show (some months before the Glastonbury performance which seemed to launch their exposure to a wider audience in the UK), and she'd been so excited she had rewound and recorded the performance to show me.  We went to France that year, and listened to Chaleur Humaine, both in French and English, as we drove from Calais to Provence and back.  

While recognising that French electro-alternative music probably isn't for everyone, there's something incredibly special about the contrast between the deeply personal and emotional lyrics, the stellar vocalisation of those words, and the slick electro-dance production which draws me back to her music over and over.  When her second album, and associated tour, were announced, I sat on 3 different computers at the same time to ensure we got tickets for her Manchester Apollo performance.

I've been to a lot of gigs, a lot of great gigs, and a lot of great gigs at the Apollo. This wasn't a gig.  It was a Performance.  I've never really seen anything like it;  it was as much about theatre, as much about dance, and poetry, and conversation as it was about the music.  Each element worked to elevate the others, and it was personal, and dramatic, and insightful, and definitely the most dancable group therapy session I've ever been a part of.  I think about that gig a lot - it represents for me a kind of defining moment of just being blown away by the talent and emotion on display.  If there's anything which can save us collectively from the demons in our heads, I can only hope it's moments like that, a shared experience of beauty and vulnerability and emotion.  

And something we can all dance to.