This is how it feels

This is how it feels is as you may know the title of an Inspiral Carpets song from the early nineties. The first time I heard it was about five years prior to my first official depressive “incident” but I still remember I kind of understood it.  I wasn’t sure if I liked it, but I got it. I don’t think the full implications lined up in my head at the time.

A few weeks ago I was supposed to get a repeat prescription for my Fluoxetine from the doctors.  I ordered it but have not picked it up.  There is a reason for this, which I am going to attempt to explain here.  I doubt I will succeed.

I’ve dealt with my own mind now for 33 years and 5 months and with feeling inexplicably bad on and off since I was nine.  I remember knocking water over a painting I was doing at school when I was ten and sobbing hysterically, something I knew was wrong at the moment it happened but I couldn’t stop myself. Everyone, including my teacher, looked almost terrified, as if I had been possessed or something.  I just cried and remembered that I had I sat down on the eve of my ninth birthday and thanked God or someone for being eight, as I had a very strange but overwhelmingly real feeling of impending doom about being nine.  At first I thought I had been stupid; then gradually events and my own brain conspired to ensure that by the age of eleven I was thoroughly miserable almost all of the time, for no reason.

There were tangible reasons. I was scrawny, with wonky teeth and thick glasses, no one wanted to be my friend and boys thought I was gross but that’s clichéd teen stuff really.  There was something deeper wrong with me, and I also recall the friends in my class – that I somehow, sort of, had made (in school; not out of it) once cautiously asked me if I had started my periods. They thought that might be why I was so moody.  I was twelve, and they didn’t start for two more years.  I was so mortified I yelled out “NO!” and ran off, so I guess they thought I was lying.

I wasn’t.

So then at seventeen I finally ended up in a doctor’s surgery with my Mum, hearing the word “depression”.  I was given some pills that frankly might have been placebos for all the good they did, and life went on, unevenly.  The appalling realisation hit me when I was eighteen and had contact lenses, relatively clear skin, straight teeth and breasts, that the external things weren’t the problem.  I had friends, I had boyfriends, and yet I went through university in a perpetual state of incredible highs and low points where I could hardly move.  This went on and on and on, and then I was working and stuff happened and I have tried being on Fluoxetine and a few other pills, the former seems to work to an extent, and here I am.

Then earlier this month something way more disturbing than the “it wasn’t glasses/my evil step mother/my this that is causing this” happened.  I realised that there had, however far back in my mind, always been one final thing, a small shaft of light, that I really believed could “save” me, could make me normal.  It wasn’t a person – I gave that notion up at nineteen or thereabouts.  It sure as hell wasn’t a job, or a possession.

I could write a novel.  A novel some people liked, with my name on and my words in.  I wrote that last year, and this year I sold over fifty copies.  People liked it.  Some may not have done but that’s ok. To be honest I wish I had had more constructive criticism.  However, I did it.  And I’m sorry to say that for about six months I thought that was it.  I had this depression bollocks beat.  I had won!  Now, now life can be about living, not fighting to get up, fighting my natural instincts, fighting to just stay alive.

Then I tried to write the second one this month.  As with the last one, it was during Nanowrimo, where you write 50,000 words in one month.  I only got half way then got hopelessly stuck and have as of today written half of the required words.  It’s not losing Nano I mind about. Depression sucked any competitive part of me out long, long before I was ten years old.  It was the terror that even though I had written a book, failing this (or what I perceived to be failing) was sending me spiralling back into my old thoughts and ways.

I have found myself thumping my own head repeatedly in frustration – I did it at work today when someone called me, in fact they were on the phone with me at the time.  He didn’t notice, but my colleagues surely did.  Sometimes I will want to scream at my lovely housemates, who regularly sing and hum and whistle in the house, I want to pull their vocal cords out to make them stop being so fucking upbeat!  I want to take a whisk, somehow stick it into my brain and whir it around to STOP FEELING SO ANGRY about everything, to make sure I don’t scare people with my behaviour, to make sure no one is upset by the things I do and how I am.  I want to hurt myself, but my fear of blood means no cutting myself, just thudding my head on the wall until it throbs.  I have been known to hack all of my hair off before.  So far so good on that score. Ha.

This is how it begins.

I know soon it will be all of that, uncontrollable tears at inappropriate and mystifying times.  I may lose friends (and housemates) through my rude, disturbing behaviour and saying things like “I don’t plan on living that long”, or “it’s ok, I can’t think of anywhere to hang myself inside the house”.  This is attention seeking and is shit but the words come out of my mouth and the “normal” Jenny, whoever she is, wherever she went when I was nine, is somewhere inside cringing and getting smaller and smaller until she’s hardly there any more. Possibly I will be unable to get to work, as I can’t face leaving my duvet as I am just so horrible and I can’t let the world see me like this, it’s not fair on them and why can’t I just sleep forever, I already feel dead, I want to carve open my head and pull out my brain and then maybe it will stop hurting me like this.

But the “normal” Jenny isn’t me, is it?  I take the tablets like a good girl, and I seem to all intents and purposes to be functioning, to be sociable and friendly and I work hard and I laugh and so on, but inside I am numb, have virtually no highs or lows, which fully functioning people do have.  Life is fine in that I don’t upset anybody, that nothing dramatic happens, but I can’t even feel anything.  I flinch if my Mum hugs me, so you can imagine how happy I am to get intimate with anyone, even someone who loves me and cares so much I want to cry.  I don’t go out as I can’t get excited about it, and I stay in and people eventually stop asking me.  Which is completely reasonable.  I literally come home and put my pjamas on and watch television and tweet about it and eventually eat then fall asleep. If I try to watch a film nine out of ten times I see ten minutes and give up. I can’t even enjoy watching Die Hard, for heaven’s sake.

How is that fair on me?  Is it selfish to want a life where I can fully enjoy things rather than merely existing, where I lie awake for hours wondering if maybe I don’t sleep I will actually experience some sort of emotion, even if it is frustration?  If I try to control myself around people and only hit myself on the head sometimes, is it ok for me to spend most of my time in a depression-filled haze, just so that when something good happens I have half a chance of properly understanding it rather than going through the motions?

I’m taking that chance.  Sorry world. This is how it feels, and usually it’s horrible, but at least I can FEEL it.

My So-Called Nineties Life

 

Sometimes, even in 2011, the 1990s feel so close I feel that I can almost touch them.  I can smell them, I can feel them in my bones.  This sounds mad as someone who has embraced the world of wi-fi, who can hardly go a day without Twitter, or downloading tv shows via torrents, or looking up the best films and TV shows of all time on IMDB and finding the mad reviews that completely slate them.

I have looked it all up.  All of the great films.  Some I love love love: Some Like it Hot, Grosse Point Blank, It’s A Wonderful Life, the only recently viewed 12 Angry Men, Casablanca, Brief Encounter, all have received their fair share of one star slatings.  Hilarious reasons include the idea that Some Like it Hot, set thirty years before it was made in 1959, is “dated”, that 12 Angry Men is crap purely as it was black and white, and one of my favourites from 1985 which sells itself as from that time, Back to the Future, is apparently “hideously Eighties”.

I’ve also looked up bad reviews of films that are supposedly the best that I’ve either never bothered with or hated and have chuckled, mainly about The Player.  But then I decided I had to find something, anything I liked, loved even, that not even one brain-dead “I don’t do black and white/suspending my disbelief/everything MUST BE REAL/ oh no it’s too real/It’s too much talking/It’s not enough talking” had ripped into.

I found it today.

I don’t remember why or exactly when I started to watch My So-Called Life.  I remember distinctly watching many tv shows, including Brookside (RIP) and Ellen of all things, and Friends, all in the dining room on a hideously uncomfortable wooden dining room chair on a tiny (by today’s standards) telly.  Plus I was really skinny so a bony bum on those chairs was not great.

I read the NME at the time, maybe it was in there?  All I know is right from the minute it started, though two years older than Angela, the main character, I thought “this is me…  Only prettier and with really good skin…”

In fairness at the time I was borderline (actually not borderline, just, well, just) obsessed with skin, seeing as my own was traversed with painful red, angry spots which were not content with ruining my (in retrospect) pretty, slim face, but also my upper back and chest.  I had a figure to die for, but the spots made me feel I was turning into a lizard.  Roaccutane finally freed me; I still don’t think I have ever got over being robbed of arguably my two years of attractiveness by those spots.

However, everything else rang true.  I mean, I wasn’t at school any more and when I was there I certainly wasn’t in a position to dump a friend never mind a best one for some cool girl, and the idea of any boy never mind Jordan looking at me even once was laughable…  But I got it.  I have watched and frankly enjoyed other teen shows since (well, OK, just the O.C. off the top of my head) I can honestly say, this made me go “yes! THIS IS HOW IT IS!”

There was a gay character, the awesome Ricky, and there was no apology for this, he was there, he was normal, get over it.  I still believe that sadly this was a reason for the abrupt axing of the show by closed-minded TV execs. “Poor ratings” my arse.  There were drugs, there was drink, sex…  It felt real.  At times it was brutal.  Who can forget poor Brian’s face at the end of the final episode?

And now going back and watching this again… It’s like a time capsule, as somebody on IMDB said.  Like a fly caught in amber.  It’s this perfect, nineteen episode almost documentary as to how life was in 1994/5 for people.  And I honestly feel that if I reached far enough, I could touch it, and I could be there again.

For Love – A Post For Chris Acland

19 years ago, a 30-year-old man died. I didn’t know him,
though I had met him once, but I still think of him often.  He wasn’t
really very famous, but many people mourned him.

In May 1994, when I was 15 and doing GCSE revision (which consisted of
pretending to revise and writing stories, which worked as I didn’t get anything
below a B) I would still always break off for the now legendary ITV Chart
Show.  Back when ITV was not ITV1, even then the graphics were
laughable.  As older readers no doubt remember, every week there would be
a different featured chart at some point, Rock, Indie or Dance. I liked the
former two best. The week before I had seen a video featuring a beautiful woman
with letterbox red hair, another very pretty woman and two nice looking blokes
set in a fairground.  The song had caught my attention immediately, it was
called Hypocrite and the lyrics made me smile, as it took apart the
every day bitchiness I had just escaped at last now I had left high school. (I
went to City College in Norwich at 16, purely as I could no longer bear to be
around the people I grew up with. Not because I felt superior, but because of
the opposite. I felt I had to leave and avoid the various nearby sixth forms if
I had any chance of being accepted as normal.)

So this particular weekend was the Indie Chart.  At that time I knew
little about “indie” music, unless maybe it broke into the charts
like I suppose James or the Farm or Blur. (For all I know they weren’t
officially indie, but I was very young and lived in Norfolk, so give me a
break!) That or it was a band called the Cranes who seemed to be on the Indie
Chart each week purely as they had a girl singer.

To my surprise not only were this band with the Hypocrite song
number one in the chart, they were also number two with a dreamy sounding thing
that was only played for a few seconds.  Having watched the fairground video
again I decided to try to find their album.

A week or so later I was 16 and had finished my exams, and as was usual for
a Saturday morning, we went in the car to one of the nearest towns, Diss.
Diss’s high street consisted of a Woolworth’s and a WHSmith, so hope for
finding an elusive indie album was slim.  However there it was, at about
number 67 in their chart, a forlorn looking cassette that had probably assumed
it would sit there for two weeks before going back to wherever it had come
from. A few minutes later and I had this mysterious prize in my hands, a voice
in my head saying “are you mad? You just spent all your money on a tape by
some weird band and it’ll probably be crap.”

The album was called Split and the band were called Lush, Chris
Acland was the drummer, and it is still one of my top five albums. I pretty
much wore the tape out on my last family holiday that summer.

During my time at City College every time I had some money I would gradually
buy Lush’s back catalogue which at that time was still available at frankly
inflated prices in various shops in Norwich, HMV, Virgin Megastore, Andy’s
Records and the late lamented Lizard. (OK apart from HMV they’re all gone but
Lizard was COOL.)

To everyone else this seemed like an obscene waste of money – I worked two
nights in the local Spar for about a pound an hour and was blowing six quid a
time for a CD single which only had two unknown songs on, the others being on
an album or something – but I knew I couldn’t stop until I had EVERYTHING. I had
never before, and never would again, feel this passion for a band.  Whilst
the “Britpop” era of Oasis, Blur, Suede… christ even Sleeper, raged
about me, I would show a mild interest, I went to see Suede and Elastica, but
all I really wanted was Lush.

By late 1995, I had all but one CD single, For Love, which was
released at the end of 1991 and actually broke into the top 40 on account of
the post-Christmas lull. I was listening to the Evening Session and suddenly
either Jo Whiley or Steve Lamaq announced “this is the new Lush
single…”

When it had finished, about two and a half breathless minutes later, both of
them sounded shocked it was so poppy. I wasn’t; but I had learned enough in the
past 18 months to know that Split had gone largely unnoticed by the
world in general, even indie types, being released as it was, right when all
everyone was looking at was Oasis and Blur.  Their previous music was
classic “shoegaze”, and they were still regarded as a sort of relic
from the very early 90s. Some people I met years later thought Lush
“copied” Sleeper, when it was more like the other way around, and
besides, Sleeper were a bit shit (in my opinion).

In early 1996, Lush were everywhere, which I absolutely loved. They got to
number 21 with Single Girl and were all over the NME, Melody Maker and
even went on Top of the Pops! They repeated the weird number 21
success with Ladykillers and released their album Lovelife,
which wasn’t completely panned in the press! Hurray!

Then they announced a tour, and they were coming to Norwich, first to the
Virgin Megastore to sign things, then playing the tiny Arts Centre that
night.  The date was 1st April, so many friends ribbed me it was all a
joke.  Undeterred, I bought all the CDs and paid my friend Kathy to take
me to the gig and let me crash at hers afterwards.

On the day, my sister Vikki and I went to the signing. Vikki took my Split
cassette to be signed, and to her credit never asked me to give it to her. She
still likes Lush though. I was a starstruck mess (let’s hope I never meet
anyone really famous eh?) but Vikki took it all in her stride, chatting to
Chris, who was on the end.  I decided both Phil (bass) and Chris (drums) were hot…I fancied All Men at 17, simply as none of them wanted me!

The gig was sold out, and lots of my friends went. Jimmy interviewed Emma
(Singing, guitar, brown hair) and Phil for a local radio station and I was sick with
jealousy.  Richard brought along his latest girlfriend. Kathy really liked
it, which pleased me.  I drank Strongbow for the first time, as I had read
Miki (red hair, singer, guitars) drank it, and I wanted to BE her at that
point. I knew every word to every song, and people behind me thought I was on
drugs. I assured them it was just two halves of cider and “MY FAVOURITE
BAND”.

They released one more single, by which time I was living in Southend
temporarily with Dmac (dad) and my Evil Stepmother, Evil Stepsister and Not So
Bad Stepbrother. One Friday in October I was sitting wolfing down chips before
going to the pub with my friends and boyfriend, and teletext music news was
slowly changing pages in front of me.  I looked down for a second to see
my food as the page changed, and Dmac strode in, and read the text in front of
him.

“Lush drummer kills himself… Oh dear.” He didn’t sound remotely
concerned, and almost tutted.

I froze and looked up, managing to press the HOLD button to keep on that
page. Chris was dead, and though it wasn’t formally announced for months, Lush
were over.  I knew they were in that moment. It felt like a death of a
friend, though I didn’t know what that felt like until several years
later.  I went to the pub and friends asked if I was going to be ok. I
laughed it off, “don’t be daft, I didn’t like, know him,” but I felt
inexplicably sad.  It wasn’t depression; I had been diagnosed with that
about a year before and knew how that felt. This was almost grief.  I
didn’t cry or anything, even I am not that dramatic, but I guess I knew that
something I loved was over.

I still didn’t have the For Love CD.  The song is about a
woman changing herself to please a man then wondering why he still dumps her,
something I actually did whilst at uni, so it shows how much I learnt from the
lyrics. On a whim I wrote to teletext in February 1997 to see if anyone wanted
to sell it to me, or simply be Lush loving pen pals. My post was up on 13th
February and rather amusingly on the first Valentine’s day since 1986 I got a
card (from my then boyfriend) I actually got several letters from blokes
offering all kinds of Lush goods, including the elusive For Love.

For the next six months I also kept up writing to a number of fellow Lush
fans, all confused and sad about Chris’s death (he seemed so cheerful in
interviews, such a nice bloke, no enemies unless you count Arsenal fans, him
being a lifelong Spurs supporter, etc etc).  I obtained all manner of
tapes and even later got a mention on the sleeve notes of an album by a man
called Kevin Hewick (“Jenny MacDonald and all Lush fans”).
Eventually this all dried up and I went to uni, but I never forgot Lush, and my
two-year love affair with them.

If someone asks me my favourite artists, I always mutter “lots of them, Buddy Holly to Hendrix and the Who, to En Vogue to Tori Amos to erm, Roxette…” but Lush will always be my real answer. Every time I hear them I remember how they helped me through those difficult years of college, through the failed spot treatments,
my first panic attack, my depression being diagnosed, but also good things like
getting contact lenses, finally losing the spots, getting a boyfriend, going to
indie clubs.

And I remember, that even when I feel so low and feel like ending it all,
that someone will care about me, the way I still care about Chris Acland. RIP.

I have updated this slightly to say YIPPEEEEEEEEE THEY REFORMED AND OMG!