I Feel It In The Air

Here comes the cold.

See... you may go through this blog, every December, and see at least one post wherein I am being a total Grinch. Which is just... accurate. I am. I'm not good at Christmas. Never have been.

There's supplementary reasons. Like. It's not just me being obnoxious.

Seasonal Affective Disorder for one thing. Everything going dark so early kills my mood so hard. The idea of waking up in the dark and going to bed in the dark just chills me to the absolute bone. It really carves away at any mental fortitude I previously possessed. It not being light enough to read by, just at random points in the day? Hatred. Hate that. So, so much.

Another thing. The moment the weather turns cold and damp consistently... all of my joints start to ache.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a hell of a thing. And cold, and damp, makes it worse. When I first went to get it checked out, because you know having this constant pain in my joints shouldn't happen, I was told that it was because I was overweight, it meant my joints had to deal with more, and suffered as a result.

"Fair enough," I reply. "But, like, the worst of it is in my knuckles."

As I didn't walk on my hands, that proved to be a bit of a stumper.

So throughout most of the winter I just have this added extra layer of ouch, both mentally and physically. Which is why the song "The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year" makes it hard for me to follow the philosophy of not wanting to yuck anyone's yum.

And that's before we even get into this year, this particular year, and the challenges it has put at our feet.

It's been hard. We've lost people. We've had to isolate ourselves so we don't lose more, and even those of us who are actually better at coping with isolation are suffering for it. It's throwing the nature of how our society works in our faces - every selfish act, every act of government cronyism and populist cruelty. It's inescapable, and it keeps taking.

That's before anything else goes wrong. Before the economy starts to tank, before the everyday bullshit issues that are going to spring up between now and... whenever.

It's just hard, at times. It's okay to acknowledge that.

But if I'm not so jolly, that's why.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

What Follows Numbness [Mental Health]

Fair warning: what follows is going to be about my mental health, which is perhaps an ugly place to visit. So if you aren't down for that particular fantastic voyage, I'd check out an earlier blog. A further warning: this will include a frank discussion of topics such as suicide. Yet again, if you don't want to deal with that, don't make yourself. I'm not here to upset you.

I know that I have discussed this before, and I know that a popular definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

Nevertheless.

A term I see used to describe depression, often, is numbness. It's a simple way to explain a complex scenario but - on the surface of it, I agree. You become numb to certain stimuli but not to others. If it's assumed that life's positive stimuli are the "default", then yes, you are numb, because that is the stuff that gets muted. Like flattening the top end of a sine wave.

All the bad stuff, though - that gets worse. Like, even minor setbacks become insurmountable problems or breakdown-worthy complications. If we use the idea of the sine wave - just move the entire thing down. The peaks are less high, the troughs are far more low. Our mountains are flattened while our valleys gouge deep.

That would be pretty bad in and of itself, right? Because that isn't just a thing you sack up and deal with, not if it is hitting you for days, weeks, months. It robs you of life. It robs you of Good Things.

And that isn't the final step.

Not by a long shot.

So with this dunk in your serotonin, stuff that is usually fun stops being fun, and stuff that sucks increases in suck. Which means everything takes a lot more effort. Everything is more tiring. In a brain that isn't working under these conditions, something coming up that you are looking forward to makes it easier to get to the thing, to do what is necessary to enjoy that thing. The drive to go do a thing, when your ability to enjoy the good stuff it will bring you is suppressed BUT your ability to suffer from the bad stuff is heightened, takes a huge hit.

Which begins a spiral, because you start doing less good things, which leads to less good things, and... well, here we start to understand how depression is a battle of attrition against the rest of your existence.

That's what it turns into. It chips at you, digs away at your ability to just go and do things. It erodes your will to take steps to make your life better or even just less sucky. It undercuts you at every turn. All of the things you want or need in a day, become a struggle, and sooner or later, you start to lose that struggle.

You ever wonder where the nihilistic sense of humour comes from, that a lot of folks that suffer depression have? It's about here.

This is where we talk about something called passive suicidal ideation.

Suicidal - that is a very scary word, yes? A lot of people will freak out just from seeing it written down there. It's scary, and we hate to think that people we know have even considered it. When they actually perform the act (there's a reason I don't use the word succeed) then it is a heartbreaking tragedy.

The difference between passive and active suicidal ideation is relatively simple when we get down to it.

If you are active, then you are doing the thing, seeking to do the thing, wanting to actually physically do the thing. If you are passive, then you just... kind of want that, a little. Maybe not even specifically death. You just kind of wish you didn't exist any more. Didn't have to deal with it.

When you have little value for your own life, this passive ideation state is very common. Because life is tiring, and a bit rubbish, and you don't want to have to deal with it day in and day out. Like, you wake up and you are tired already. Great, right? Fucking great.

Some days it is worse than that, and those are the days when you can't really hide it.

It is at this point that, those people I know who are wondering if this is a delayed cry for help or an indictment for not being sufficiently "there" or similar - this isn't that. That's not what I am doing here.

There's not a lot of helping. Not from outside. Nothing much you can do to redress the chemical imbalance that is kicking the shit out of our will to achieve anything at all. That's a very internal thing, and no amount of positive words, friendly memes or song-and-dance numbers will actively correct that. It's like an invisible switch in our skulls.

There just comes a stage when you are halfway doing something totally normal, like something that is just everyday and ordinary and shouldn't cause anyone any issues, even you... and it's like something pops, inside.

You want to break down in tears, right on the spot. Wherever you are. Your face contorts and it is going to be ugly. You grit your teeth and swallow and you tell yourself, no, not here. Not now. Not fucking now.

Not now.

And if you're lucky that only happens once, and you can get on with your day.

That's only on real bad days, mind. But it's those real bad days that dig at you, because even the good days are only okay, and the okay days kind of suck. It's like working retail, customer-facing. You don't remember the 99% of customers who just wanted the thing, paid the fee, said thank you and left. You remember the jerkwipe that took it as a personal insult that you don't stock that brand that you've never stocked, and wants to talk to your manager about it.

That leaves the world looking like a cold place even at the best of times.

I don't know what sparked this particular quagmire of nonsense. Maybe it's the change of season - the Autumnal chill in the mornings telling my subconscious that soon shit is going to turn bad. Maybe it's because I experienced several minor triumphs in the last two weeks, including meeting some family I've never met before, and my brain is incapable of seeing that as just a thing that can happen. Maybe the universe rolled some dice and they came up Double Fuck You, and that's where my brain goes.

I don't know. It happened though.

I am mostly riding out of it, right now. Like, the less of a pit you are in, the easier it is to talk about the pit. Sort of.

If I had anything else in mind to blog about at the end of this week, it all kind of went away late Friday early Saturday. But hey, that's what this blog is for - and for god's sake, don't worry about me. I've lived with this since I was in middle school. It'll be fine.

Sorry. This one was heavy, and it doesn't have an answer or a solution, outside of this:

I am at this very moment planning on getting more help than I currently have.

There is zero shame in getting treatment for any medical condition. Mind, body, spirit.

Get help.

Don't suffer this alone.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Black Gives Way To Blue

Fair warning: I am going to be talking about mental and physical health, including some talk about suicide and depression. Read on with caution.

When you have a long-term illness, short-term illnesses are weird.

Like... my lungs don't work normally in the first place, and some days they are worse than others, so - how do I really know when I have got a chest infection? My joints hurt all the time, how do I know if I have pulled something?

It changes your baseline level of "okay", which also means changing your idea of what being "not okay" is. I've heard stories - that I fully believe - of people that get menstrual cramps so bad that they actually believe that is what is happening to them when their appendix bursts or when they develop potentially deadly stomach ulceration. Barring the huge issue of sexism within the medical system, the other thing this highlights is that when you usually feel like you are 40% fucked, an additional 10% doesn't feel like much.

The thing that tells me that I am coming down with something is, usually, when my mood absolutely tanks for no apparent reason; and that is a problem, because depression also makes that happen.

So what actually happens, when the brain stops making the juice that makes stuff good and happy and leaves you basically shivering naked in the icy void emotionally speaking, is you wonder briefly - do I have a cold, or is this just a thing that is happening to me now?

There is no cure, unfortunately. One simply has to turn to coping mechanisms, and hope that you've learned good ones.

One good one I have, that I have talked about before, is songs. Music. The stuff capable of leaving me in bits usually.

There's a Brandi Carlile song called Party Of One.

If you don't know who Brandi Carlile is, she's an American folk singer. She's great. It's not my usual stuff but she's a superb singer-songwriter. One of her songs I like a lot is called The Joke, which most people should learn about if they don't know already.

So there's this other song, this Party Of One. It's the last track on her most recent album - By The Way, I Forgive You, from 2018 - and the version from the end of the album is just her singing it. The video of which is beautiful, by the way.

There's also a duet, with Sam Smith. And you better know who Sam Smith is.

The song is about two people, who have fought, and who are trying to reconcile. They've obviously been together for a while. They know each other. They live together. That is only part of what it is about, though. It's about being exhausted, about being unable to keep up a struggle, but still being there tomorrow. It's about someone being hard to love, but loving them anyway, and about them loving you anyway.

Something about Brandi Carlile's voice when she sings about how she is tired. The way her voice cracks. She is tired. She knows how tired feels. She knows how it seeps into your bones, how you can be a level of exhausted and worn out that it has a physical pain all of its own.

I know that feeling, but there aren't a lot of songs that sing that feeling to me.

The first time I heard the song, it literally stopped me in my tracks. I was heading home from work, and I had to... like PHYSICALLY stop, so I could listen to it.

It's a song I go to when I am in that place in my head, as I have been recently. When I am basically all out of spoons, mentally or physically, and I am on a scale of fatigue that makes me feel like I can feel my hair growing - and it fucking hurts. When it's all you can do to get home without screaming or laying down in the street.

Sometimes that is how it is. Sometimes that is what the world and existing in it feels like. Sometimes, it isn't that you want to literally die - you just don't want to have to continue existing.

That is what being that tired does to you.

That's why I curate these songs that are capable of just... dropping me. Songs that can dig through that grey fog of soporific exhaustion and make me react.

Songs like Fire And Rain by James Taylor.

Songs like I Am The Highway, by Audioslave, and Black Hole Sun, by Soundgarden - both sung by Chris Cornell.

Songs like Vincent, by Don McLean.

These are musicians that have saved my life in a quite literal fashion. Never, ever underestimate music's power.

For those curious - turns out I was coming down with a cold. Hah. Take that, brain.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

On Which It Is Impossible To Be Silent

Sometimes I butt heads with my mother about inconsequential things.

We're quite similar in a lot of ways, different in others. It's the differences that really adjust how we see the world, our willingness to call something out as being bullshit, our tolerances for things being bullshit in various areas but not in others.

Part of it comes from having grown up in different eras, under different styles of parenting. We both faced very different challenges during our lives. I have no doubt in my mind that she had to work harder than I did to get anywhere in life - she's always been a driven professional, which gets made that much more difficult given that she is also a woman. Having to put in extra just to be seen to be doing as much as everyone else, et cetera. It's real.

She grew up with rationing. Her older family members had all seen out the second world war. It puts things into perspective, and unfortunately, sometimes that perspective isn't useful in the modern world. She's rarely one to throw around the phrase "It Never Did Me Any Harm" but it is often implied in her tone - and she doesn't like it much if I imply that, just maybe, the harm it did is brushed under the carpet. Made to be part of who we are rather than something that is wrong with us.

After a few hours around each other, we start fraying each other's temper. I am more to blame for this than her, probably, but it's hard to judge objectively; after all, we're just going off our own lived experiences and things we have learned.

So the things that we see eye-to-eye over are pretty important - and one of those things is music.

I think I've probably talked about this before.

I am fairly empathetic at times but I can't understand people that don't like music.

Like... I just... don't understand how that can be the case. Which - if you don't like music - probably makes me absolutely unbearable, for which I can only apologise. I just don't get it. It's been built into me from a very early age, by - well, surprise surprise, my own mother.

Her musical taste and mine overlap significantly. We don't like either the Beatles OR Elvis. We're both more Stones / Hendrix fans. We like Queen, we like Led Zep, we like Crosby Stills Nash & Young a lot more than we like Neil Young by himself, and of course...

...we like Pink Floyd.

So there I was, with my fork buried in a small mountain of chicken chow mein, when - after having deflected some statements I made about how exams aren't necessarily the best way to determine someone's academic talent - my mum declares that there's a Pink Floyd gig on Sky Arts.

Sure enough, it's the video recording of A Delicate Sound Of Thunder. So we settle in to watch.

And for precisely two hours, we don't have a single argument or dispute. We bat around some waffle about the band, about how gigs and such are different these days (but understanding that there's a reason why). We talk about how it must have felt, to be in the early 70s, and to hear The Great Gig In The Sky for the first time.

I confessed to her that, the first time I ever heard Dark Side Of The Moon, I was stoned "out of my mind". She just laughed as I related to her the story about me waking up that next morning, totally unable to remember what I had listened to, but knowing that I needed to own it, and messaging the individuals that had provided the (ahem) party favours to demand to know what was in their CD player.

It consistently amazes me that, regardless of how at odds we may be about something - whatever that something is - it will be music that we reconnect over.

Perhaps that is part of why music means so much to me. Because nothing else I have ever experienced has had the ability to bridge gaps like music does. Nothing else quite heals you or puts you back together the same way. Paradoxically the four Pink Floyd albums that I feel are their best work, the four that I listen to time and again, are all about division and conflict and mental illness - they have helped bring me back together with people I have been divided from, and helped bring me back to myself.

With my dad, it was The Living Years, by Mike + The Mechanics. A song about how a father and a son can't help but be in conflict with each other, and how that relationship passes itself down when a son becomes a father. There's certain people in my life I can't uncouple from songs. I hear the song and I see their face, I hear their voice. It's like smell - forming the binding part of the neurons, the bridge to the trove of memory and experience beyond.

It's a gift. To us, as a race, as people. To be able to have this sound which we just listen to, all we have to do is listen to it - though in some cases, that is harder than others - and it takes us elsewhere. It makes things different. It changes contexts, relationships, outlooks. It can help you see the cracks in yourself by holding up the cracks of the writer and the performer and saying - hey, see? Look. It's here. You aren't alone.

More importantly, perhaps, it can hold those cracks up to others without. It can show them, tell them, what it is like to be in this position. To be stood in those shoes, to have walked that mile. The struggle of a troubled genius to make the world see the things he could see - Don McLean gives us that. The utter adoration of loving someone more than you can encapsulate in simple words - Coheed & Cambria give us that.

To feel disjointed from those around you - people that you knew and loved, that you just aren't quite walking in step with any more, and not knowing quite how to get back to level...

Pink Floyd give us that.

Victor Hugo said that:

"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."

And frankly, he is right.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Back On The Shelf

When I was asked when I was five years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said with full confidence that I wanted to be a robot.

It didn't take long for that to become wanting to be an astronaut, I think maybe because I realised when I was about six that robots get built and people get born and I was in the latter section of society. I don't remember being that upset about the revelation. I mean, today - if I was fully of the belief that in several years I would be contained in the chassis of an immortal machine, then told today that it wasn't going to happen, I'd be livid.

Other, more feasible dreams followed.

Being wealthy and happy after an indeterminate period of time, because all you had to do was live that long. Being a rock star. Being a professional writer. Being a rock star again. Being a writer again. That kind of calibre of aspiration, running at that kind of level of want or need. It was joined with a variety of other dreams, like travelling the entire world, living in California (I was young enough that I couldn't really differentiate different bits of an albeit huge state), owning a Lamborghini, owning a private jet.

I can tell you the approximate moment in my life when depression really started to kick in, and that was when I was thirteen years old, because my dreams and aspirations started to change.

Now, a lot of folks - the kind of folks who like to use terms like "never did me any harm" or "back in my day" or "that's just the way it is suck it up" - would point out that this is just part of growing up. You put your childish dreams away, and you start having adult ones. Right?

Well, my dreams and aspirations started to include getting through a school day without being verbally abused or physically assaulted.

Dreams of getting out of school and having a job, and maybe owning a record store, and having a flat that was near the shops. Of living near a railway line so I could hear the trains rattling through the night. Of being able to open my windows and hear the world existing outside them, without having to be out in it. Things became a lot more prosaic.

Around about 15, when I had to put down the groundwork for the rest of my educational life, I had dreams that I'd be successful. That I'd have an office in a legal firm, and a bowl on my desk which I would fill with cherry tomatoes, and eat throughout the day. ...I mean, I had no idea what a career in law actually entailed but I had to pick something, and the panic attack I had during the careers meeting didn't help much. Those dreams included waking up and wanting to do the things that I had to do that day, which was steadily becoming more and more unlikely - but the vague dreams of travel, of seeing things that interested me, of seeing the bands I loved, still remained.

Funny how things change.

When you're a teenager you never conceive of having a medical condition that could literally stop you doing things you want to do. Physical OR mental. It happens to other people you know, but you never really consider what it means, let alone what it is like to have it happen to you. That is, in fairness, partly because of society's habit to assume that every illness or condition can be prevented as long as you do the right thing. If you ever need evidence of that, ask people with chronic health conditions the advice they have been given by people without those conditions. (I have some stories, I tell you.)

So life happens to you - life in the boundary of the world as it stands today, here and now. Life in the expanding gulf between rich and poor, wherein all the things that you were promised as a child of the seventies, eighties or nineties becomes the purview of a thinner and thinner slice of society.

It can feel like calcification. Like a million doors that were previously open are closing one at a time, even if now and then a new one opens.

That's why it's important to grab onto the ones that are left, where you can.

It is easy to spend one's life staring at the aspirations on the shelf that we can't reach for any more. I understand that. The mentality of it - how hard it can be to reach for the new thing, when the old things we wanted so badly are unreachable. We have to find the things to reach for that we can grasp. We need to find our victories where we can, rather than pine for win conditions that no longer exist. It's the only way we can keep going. And if those win conditions are as simple as having a day end wherein you actually look forward to waking up tomorrow, then draw your plans and march your troops.

Everyone needs something to strive for.

I don't think there is some overarching point to this ramble. It's something that has been occupying my thoughts recently, after I was asked what I wanted to be when I was a kid, and I had the most incredible wave of nostalgia wash over me as I remembered the one thing I really, really wanted to be was a robot.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Between The Cracks

I'd like to preface this blog with a content warning; below, I am going to be discussing depression and suicide. If you would rather not read that, no harm no foul - I have other blogs on more wholesome topics. This one, for example, is about good music covers.

My National Novel Writing Month attempt opens with the words, Jimmy Drift Killed Himself.

I take a hop, skip and a jump over the initial arc. This is the inciting event. There isn't a day-as-normal beforehand. It is literally the first thing that the reader learns about the world: that a man whose name we are meant to know took his own life.

It opens this way because while this is new and unusual to the characters involved - the main character in particular, Alya K, a childhood friend of Jimmy Drift - this isn't new or unusual to the world the book is set in.

In a corporatocracy - the definition of which can be found here - the workers and citizens being ruled are essentially a resource.

Anyone who has worked in a business that requires a large amount of raw aggregate or materials for processing will know that there are margins of acceptable loss. That not every nut and bolt that comes into the workshop will be considered worthy or acceptable, and that if you find a screw that is damaged, you don't use it. You need a bucket of fine sand but this one got damp? Got to go get another one.

Stepping into a more modern setting, who hasn't been into a store with an automated check-out machine? Who hasn't found that out of the four machines available, one of them seems to be perpetually broken? All they are waiting for is a part, right? But there is a line of problems that leads to that part not being fitted. It has to be done by the company that put in the machines, and they have to clear everything, all of which is a very tidy earner for the company that makes those machines. Why sell someone a single unit, when you could sell them years upon years of continued service?

If the store could repair it themselves, though - no doubt they would just yank the unit open, put in the replacement part and throw the old one away immediately. Got to keep the store running, after all.

Under a corporatocracy, human beings who aren't shareholders or otherwise considered of primary importance to the company are either the consumers of the goods the company provides or part of the construction and delivery process. They are the nuts, bolts and screws. They are the aggregate. They are the bits in the self-service machine.

If they don't work according to the user or manufacturer's specifics, they get thrown out.

I've blogged before about Blade Runner - about how the treatment of the Replicants should be a warning to us, how it is a parable for an underclass considered too low or base to see as people. You know who I am talking about, what I am talking about. The Replicants - specifically the more advanced Replicants presented in the original movie - are built in with a limited lifespan because it is easier than giving them freedom or happiness.

So what do the people who made them and who used them care? What does anyone care? The usefulness of a person becomes the standard by which they are judged, and that isn't even something new. A great many societies have sought to minimise and marginalise those that they don't see as being useful in a societal sense. Can't work? No help for you. Can't do something we value? No help for you. Get into this camp. Get into this asylum.

When your only value or worth is tied to the work you do - when your life revolves around how your cogs turn as part of that great machine - then is it surprising that those who don't turn the same as anyone else would find themselves at a loss? Lacking in purpose? Would find the things that make life worthwhile harder and harder to achieve?

Especially knowing that, if anything happened to make an individual not useful - the individual would be replaced without a thought.

Businesses can't be trusted to look after people. It's like asking sharks to look after seal pups, bears to look after salmon. We are food. We are a resource. We are the grains of sand used to file down the imperfections of a surface. If we can't be used, we can be discarded. They don't really have to care very much about what happens if we discard ourselves, after the very environment they created opens the fissures into which we fall. Those fissures sell products - they are a thing held up as a place you will end up if you don't spend, don't save, don't do the things you are being told to.

Things we can't afford to do. So we fall down anyway.

And there's always another consumer, and always another worker.

Let's just remember that when those statistics come out - the amount of people that commit suicide every year - those are lives destroyed. Real lives. Not resources, as the shareholders would see them. Lives.

Just letting it happen is a monstrous but very everyday sin.

A Three-Letter Word

(Content warning: what follows will be a frank monologue that talks about body issues, weight, self image, self esteem, depression, anxiety, bullying, trauma and suicide. If you really don't want to read any of that, no judgement whatsoever. I understand. Feel free to check out one of my other blogs which are less heavy. This one is about Blade Runner. If you're into that sort of thing.)

Hi folks. My name is John, and I'm fat.

Here's a picture of me at Nine Worlds this year.

Yes, I am the one on the left, har har har. (This person cosplaying Ellen Ripley was really cool. Very friendly. Many thanks to her!)

I am fat. I use that word to describe myself, not to take the piss out of myself, not to disarm people who weaponise it against me, but because it is true. I am overweight. Obese, is the term. The BMI chart - if anyone even thinks that is a thing any more - doesn't go up far enough to account for my height or my weight, but I probably sit in the red bit.

Ever since I hit puberty I have been this shape.

Like, you can look at kid pictures of me and I've got pudgy little cheeks. You can look at teenager pictures of me and I am, yes, fat. I am fat, have always been fat, and will remain fat until such a time as I actually decompose or am otherwise reduced by being dead.

As you can imagine, this has led to my certain life experiences. I lucked out in many other areas of my life - I recognise that I have the privileges of being white-passing, straight-passing, cis, and coming from an only slightly poor household. This thing, though - this thing is something that can affect just about everyone.

Being generally treated like shit by half of the people I ever met was a strong motivator toward changing something. So I tried.

This is where a lot of people are going to roll their eyes and close this window, but stick it out, because this is the literal truth.

None of it worked.

I can understand your skepticism, trust me, because for all my life I was surrounded by people telling me I was wrong, and I was lying, and I was doing something wrong. To the point wherein I actually started doubting myself. Doubting whether or not I remembered how things went, properly.

It goes like this: I try to lose weight by just reducing my calories and doing more exercise. Two months pass. I put on a few ounces. I reduce the calories more, do more exercise. Doesn't work, again - this time I put on four pounds, which is absurd. My mother and father are confused at this, because mum's the one making my meals, and there's only so much snack food you can buy on £2 a week pocket money. So they assume I am sneaking food elsewhere, I promise them I'm not, I get the "Alright then" with the roll of the eyes which basically tells me they don't believe me at all.

So then, I am put into the care of the health services. Referred to a dietitian. I am issued a rather strict eating plan. Everything not on the plan gets lobbed out of the house and my pocket money goes away so I can't spend it on food. For six months I am on the first plan, and my weight actually - this time - doesn't change at all. It remains constant. I AM miserable, but - you know. Constant. The dietitian, who predicted the loss of three stone in those six months, throws up her hands and declares that I am either not doing enough exercise (har fucking har) or I am cheating on the plan. Except this time my mum is on my side here - because I haven't been.

We see another dietitian. This one swears by the cups-of-rice diet. Like all your food is measured in cups of rice. The idea of which actually made me burst into tears when I was in the back of the car on the way home. Nothing but rice, forever. But hey - at least I wouldn't be fat any more. Right?

I lost a pound in the first week.

I put on three in the second.

I had monthly weigh-ins. I was meant to be referred for six months but after the third the lady didn't want me to go any more, because I was half a stone heavier,and her heavy hints of "something else going on" pretty much told me she thought I had cheated on this diet, too.

Which I hadn't.

My food had basically been plain rice, for three months. It killed me. It absolutely killed me. I like food, that is no surprise to anyone. I like food, and here I am, eating basically plain rice. I got sauce sometimes, that was a luxury. Carrots, too. I love carrots. Maybe I love them because they were the only interesting thing I got to eat in that period of my life.

It was during this three months that I was written out of doing PE classes at school, anything high-impact like running or basketball, because my knee joints were already deteriorating. But you don't get Arthritis when you're young, so it can't have been that. That was because I was fat, too.

Now, there will be a lot of people shaking their head at me. "John," they will say, a knowing smile on their lips, an understanding hand on my shoulder. "You don't need to justify yourself. Everyone tries and fails to diet. Everyone does. You just need to try again, and you need to stick to it."

I mean, right, I fully agree.

The idea of not sticking to it was alien to me. I was highly motivated to make this work, and that was why I never cheated - because I was tired of being beaten up for it. Literally being physically assaulted for being fat. I was tired of being called names constantly, of always being self-conscious of myself, of always flattening myself against corridor walls and taking seats that people couldn't move behind me. People made my life an absolute hell. As a child, many times, I considered doing something very drastic about it. I must have been broken. There must have been something wrong with me. Didn't you just eat less and then the fat went away? Didn't you just jog and do the exercise bike and play the stupid football and eat the boring stuff and then it went away?

Except it never, ever fucking did.

It flies in the face of common wisdom, I know. But then a lot of actual facts in terms of weight loss don't actually marry up with common wisdom - here's a Time article on the topic. What it comes down to is that nobody loses weight the same way, and some people can lose it easily, and some people find it difficult to put any on, and some people find it nigh on impossible to actually lose it.

You will find it difficult to get any hits on actual science for this on Google, obviously, because dieting is an industry and a lifestyle - and it is one that is primarily fed by insecurity. Nobody in that industry wants one of the first ten results on Google to be "Actually Maybe You Are Already An Okay Weight, Just Eat More Veggies".

The notion of someone being a size and being okay with that size is an alien one. If you find it very, very hard to lose weight, that is your body pushing back. If you enter starvation mode and stop burning calories the moment you cut out your daily snacks, then that weight is probably not going anywhere. Nobody cares about though, because just wanting it bad enough and not drinking Coca-Cola any more worked for their uncle Derek, who put on eight stone when he quit his job, but now he's managed to lose seven, so literally anyone can lose weight, right?

Medical fat-phobia is such a common thing, too. Relatively recently, I talked to a doctor about joint pain. He didn't even blink, just suggested that if I lost weight it would help. After an awkward silence, I explained to him that I meant my knuckles. He cleared his throat, looked at my medical records, found the word Rheumatoid, and told me he couldn't do anything. Well, glad we sorted that one out.

For a long time I hated the word fat, because it was a knife that was stuck in my back constantly.

It carried a lot of hostility in it, and a lot of my own hang-ups. It carried the hatred and derision of my peers (and hell, just normal people who didn't even know me), and it carried the feeling of failure of constantly trying without any success. It also carried the constant accusations of being a liar. A treble-whammy of shit.

...if people weren't actually shit to me, though, I don't think I would have thought twice about it.

While I was fat, it didn't stop me doing things. It didn't stop me riding a bike or playing football - though I wasn't very good at the latter, I still did it, and did it every single school day and most Saturdays. I would walk a lot of places. I was still capable of every physical task in front of me, aside from winning any running races. Even if I hated doing it, I could still do cross-country races. We played cricket, and rugby, and (against my doctor's advice) basketball. While I was told my knees were in serious trouble, I kind of ignored that, because they didn't hurt unless I jumped around on them or dropped down on them - though when I got to fifteen they started crunching whenever I bent them. They still do.

It's as I got on in life, and I paid less attention to people that don't matter, and I found my confidence and my capabilities in the outside world, that I started using the word fat again.

Yes, at first, it was to disarm people that would use it against me as a weapon - but then I started to think, why should it be a weapon? We're not in school any more. Is fat really a bad thing? Is fat really a thing I shouldn't be? Is it a thing that you should scold me for being, in the street? Is it worse than being a racist, a sexist, a bigot, a thug?

The fact is, no. It isn't a thing that is inherently bad in and of itself.

Some people will throw up their hands at this, tell you how bad it is for you to be overweight, so on. If any of them had a similar childhood to me, or anyone that knew me, then I understand why.

Anyone remember the Two Minutes Hate from Nineteen Eighty-Four?

That one.

I will never use the word Fat to describe someone else unless they have told me I can or should. Just because that's my word now, doesn't mean it is theirs, and that's because the word still carries the same trauma, the same pain that it carried for me. And it carries that pain and trauma because we got to be the target of the two minutes hate.

I've talked before about insecurity, and how it drives people to turn on others. When Person A decides they need to lose weight because that will fix the hole they have inside, they go out and do so, but they find that Person B is apparently happy without having to do the same. I mean, I've also - in that same mini-series - done a blog about how high school never ends, which is also relevant, so...

So this word. This three-letter word. Fat.

We don't hate it because it is what we are.

We hate it because of how it was used on us. We hate it because people told us it was the reason why they treated us badly. We hate it because out parents and other people told us it was a bad thing to be and constantly, constantly pushed us to not be that thing any more. We're told from an early age that fat is mutually exclusive to beautiful or attractive or handsome, which leads to me being told, when I use the word to describe myself, to sometimes be told: "No you're not, you're lovely!" Which usually results in a snarky comment along the lines of: I didn't say I wasn't, did I stutter? But in these people's heads, fat is a definite negative. It precludes everything else.

You can probably replicate the same effect with any other word, with a concerted effort. If any school-age brunette was beaten up for being a brunette, and the word Brunette was spat at them from across the room as a term of abuse and hatred, and their parents constantly told them that, actually, it would just be a little easier for them if they just bleached their hair...

It's got so little to do with our own weight, and so much more to do with other people. With the fact that this was how other people were raised, how they get their kicks, how they make themselves feel better. Sure, they might be powerless in a sea of confusion in a world they don't understand and surrounded by people they have no empathetic connection with, incapable of illustrating their thoughts and hopes and dreams, and feeling like they will never achieve the things they aren't even sure they actually want to achieve...

...but at least they're not fat.

People want to make sure that chronic illness can't happen to them. It's why they offer such insipid solutions if it ever comes out that you suffer from one. They are just the things they cling to as reasons why it can't happen to them. It's the same with being fat - they don't like the notion of having to suffer from how society treats you, so they make themselves feel better with the thought of "Well, if you didn't like it, you could just lose it really easily".

Insecurity made manifest. And the easiest and quickest way people find to deal with it is to dump it on someone else.

Well I'm not letting that happen to me, any more.

I'm fat. I've always been fat. It's the shape I am, it's a shape I tried not to be and failed at. In the failing, and in other people's treatment of me even while I was failing, my mental health got very seriously snarled up. At least part of the reason behind my attempt to kill myself was tied to it,and to the clinical depression and generalised anxiety which was probably fed by it.

Except I wasn't depressed or anxious or suicidal because I was fat, if I am at all honest.

I was depressed, anxious and suicidal because every other fucker that I knew decided to punish me for being fat.

And I'm not taking that bullshit. Not against me, and not against anyone else I know.

This three letter word is my shape, and fuck you if you don't like it.

People As Thorns

Most of us have been there: a relationship, friendship or personal situation that went sideways, fast and hard, and left deep wounds.

It's a pain that lasts, and it can be caused by all manner of things. One thing that has become increasingly clear to me throughout my life, which is a life somewhat dictated by bad health conditions, is that managing pain is very important.

How do you do that, though, when the pain is an internal one? When it's caused by a person rather than a physical trauma?

Not to say that physical trauma can't be caused by people, but I digress.

It sucks, but it IS going to hurt, for a while. Like, that won't go away. It's part of the process, and it sucks, and it continues to suck. It's why this blog isn't about making pain go away. It's about managing it.

Exacerbating it is the big risk, and a lot of people don't even necessarily know they are doing it.

I mean we've all done it to our meat, right? Our knee has made a funny noise and we've thought it might ache a little so we've just tried to walk it out - or as the Crossfit people call it, "active recovery" - and then the next day it is the size of a cantaloupe and feels like it is filled with molten glass.

If we're smart - we feel our knee do that little click-pop thing, then we slow down, we sit down, and we see how it feels. And then we go a little easier on it. And sure, the next day it aches - but it isn't the size of a cantaloupe, and it may well recover in a day, let alone a week.

We can do the same for our souls.

If this person hurt you - hurt you bad enough that it comes back at the most unsuspecting times and plagues you with anguish - then dealing with them isn't going to make it better.

So - if you can at all help it - don't.

Don't talk to them. Don't hang out with them. Don't randomly skim their social media. Don't spend time checking up on them.

It sounds kind of basic, maybe even childish, but - if you have no need to talk to them, if you aren't tied to any kind of responsibility that includes them, if the only real connection is that you two used to be together before this person did the thing they did...then there is no need.

We find this hard, though - because for a long time, this person was involved in our lives, and change is sometimes more difficult and intimidating to bear than abuse or torment. It gets easier, though. It's always easier to rip the plaster (band-aid to you folks in the US) off in one clean stroke and then ache through the aftermath, than to tug it off a micron at a time as if in dread of the discomfort.

Front-load your pain. Take it in one hit, then move past it.

The thing is that anything that could be gained by not doing this will end up bitter. If this person betrayed you, if this person hurt you bad enough that you want a revenge against them, then - tailing after them isn't going to help you.

There isn't a win condition, there.

They won't hurt the way you hurt, and certainly not visibly. They won't be disadvantaged the way you have been. They won't suffer that impact of poorly-imagined karmic justice that you thirst for - and even if something bad happens to them...it probably won't be bad enough, because they'll get up afterwards, and how dare they recover when you still hurt?

You won't find victory there. You won't even find a draw.

The reason for this is pretty simple: it's because we think that, once Person X stumbles and falls the way we believe they should, the hurting will stop and that hollow feeling in our gut will go away. The moment they fall into the bear trap or the person they cheated on you with leaves them, you turn in glee to your inner self and wait for the hurt/hollow to vanish, and...

...it just doesn't.

We do a lot of things to make that go away. A lot of folks don't even need to be damaged by anyone or anything specific to have that hurt/hollow in their gut. It is there already, for a variety of reasons - some of us are born with it. I've blogged about this kind of thing before, actually. Right over here. It's part of a four blog series I did on insecurity.

So what do we do about it? After we tear ourselves away from waiting for our temporary nemesis to fall into the bear trap?

We get on with it, honestly.

It is an oft-repeated truth that success is the best revenge, and it is one I fully believe in. Success comes in a variety of forms, but the most true way to succeed in this world is to put yourself in a situation that is better than the one you were in yesterday. Or last week, last month, last year - anything. Just to take a step up and know that it isn't leading to three steps down.

Step one of that is neutralising or discarded the things that hurt us, as previously mentioned. We have to take time to identify what is a negative influence, what is a drag on our minds and our souls, and work out how to cut it loose or streamline it to the point that it doesn't slow us down any more.

This in itself can be quite painful. We don't often like what we see when we study ourselves. That, however, is part of it. Realising that we're overly critical of our own selves, accepting that this is built into our brains as some ridiculous leftover of evolved-out behaviour, and taking that skewing of our perception of ourselves into account.

That's why we can't pin our happiness on competing against someone else. It will never be enough, because we're incapable of seeing our own worth properly, especially when we're clouded by anger and resentment. There will always be something that we find that sours even the sweetest victory against our adversary, because we'll always be looking for it.

So we cut them loose. And it hurts - and every now and then, that memory will drift back, of that good time we had.

And that's fine. Those times WERE good. Just make sure you also remember the bad times, too. We can go back and play an old video game and try and ignore its flaws, because those flaws won't wound us. Nostalgia for people is a trap.

So do what is best for you. Talk to your friends, surround yourself in things you enjoy, maybe find new things to enjoy entirely. Work hard, learn something new.

One day you will go the entire day without thinking about the thorn that stuck in your side, because you'll be too busy being your best self.

That will be a really good day.

The Starry Night

Take a look at this painting.

Just...look at it.

Vincent Van Gogh painted it in 1889. It's a view from out of his window at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France - somewhere between Montpelier and Marseilles.

The thing is - it's also kind of not the same view. The church is different, for one thing; in fact the entire town is plucked from the void. It does also bear mention that - at risk of sounding obvious - the night sky just doesn't tend to look like that.

What Vincent was painting, therefore, wasn't just what he was seeing. It was what he was thinking.

We are all familiar with Van Gogh's ear, obviously. The exact circumstances that led to him severing it - either in part or as a whole isn't known - are less well known. It seems to have been the end result of his artistic relationship with Paul Gauguin, leading to an acute mental breakdown. It may sound extreme but - to finally be painting with one of your most respected peers, who ends up treating you like some kind of insolent child... we have all heard the advice of never meeting your heroes.

What followed was months of treatment, and to-and-fro between the yellow house he had shared with Gauguin and the hospital. Vincent suffered from hallucinations, and was known locally as "the red-headed madman" - the citizens of the town had the house shut, and he was forced to stay in hospital.

It was by his own admission that he entered the Saint Paul asylum in May 1889.

Imagine how it must feel to look at the world through eyes coloured by those experiences. To not only be unable to trust one's own mind and senses, but to be ostracised for it. Perhaps, if there had been sufficient support and treatment, his relationship with Gauguin wouldn't have deteriorated to the point of self-mutilation. The understanding of the working of the human mind is incomplete today, let alone 130 years ago; and our treatment of the mentally ill today hasn't necessarily improved very much, even if the science has.

So when we talk about what Vincent was thinking rather than what he was seeing, this is what we mean. All his paintings from this period of his life are distinct - put them together with his other works and even the absolutely uninitiated (like me) could pick them out as being different. The world through the eyes of a man at war with his own mind. Which makes the precision of the turbulence in the air all the more impressive and striking - the painting can be used as a model for fluid dynamics, and nobody is quite sure how.

The eye is drawn all around the piece, too. It never settles. You can stare at a specific detail, but always you are drawn on - across the town, up the cypress, up into the night sky, to the moon,, down to the brightness of Venus (which was actually in the sky at the time), across the sweep of wind and light, and back down to the town.

It doesn't show us what it feels like to be in that state of mind - how frightening, how awful it must be - but something about it echoes that deepest recess inside of us, that shadow within our skull that threatens to obliterate reason and agency. Something about the sweep of the strokes in the sky, the town nestled beneath the light of the moon, the looming cypress, the luminescence of the stars that seems to bleed liquid-like into the porous sky around them.

It's like what is there, but shifted slightly off-kilter.

I don't know if there is any comfort to be drawn from it - that doesn't seem to be what the painting is for - but I, at least, value the piece as a means of stepping outside one's own worldview. A way to see the sky at night as a totally different thing to that which your eyes show you. To demonstrate that not everything runs parallel to your worldview.

I'll see this painting in the canvas, one day. I'll stand in front of it, and I'll see how it looks from that different angle.

Slightly off-kilter.

Down Here

(You should probably be warned: this one is about depression and various other mental health issues. If you aren't in the frame of mind to read it, no offence taken. I've written plenty of blogs that are about something else. Try this one, which is about the Fermi paradox, and where all the aliens are.)

So. Hello again.

People will often talk about how depressed they are, and I can almost guarantee that - unless it is said in jest - the person in question isn't suffering from depression.

I don't mean to gatekeep. It's just such a small word for such a heavy condition.

Heavy. That's a good descriptor.

Something that comes up with fair regularity when I talk to fellow sufferers and survivors is that only the people who have been there - or are still there - can really grasp you, when you talk about the condition. Which I daresay is true of a lot of this really heavy stuff. It's true about a lot of experiences - how do you really convey how it feels to parachute jump to someone that has no frame of reference? So of course it would apply to mental health, to traumatic experiences.

In terms of depression, heavy is a good term, because it makes literally everything feel heavier. The process of achieving anything, pushing for anything, even going anywhere, even doing basic things, just takes that much more effort. You know when people talk about how hard it is to get out of bed in the morning? Imagine that, but it isn't because bed is lovely and cosy and warm. It's because actually galvanising yourself to stand up requires a literal self-pep talk and takes half an hour. Because your door is all the way over there, and everything else is all the way out there, and then you have to deal with this, and that...and it's all so god damned tiring.

I was having difficulty deciding what to write about today - while trying to drag my carcass out of bed - because every topic I half-settled on seemed so big, and so looming, or so trivial and so unimportant. And that was something I had to do after I got up, which in and of itself seemed like a task fit for Hercules (not one of the big ones, just like shovelling the shit out of the Augean stables).

So why not talk about that?

Then I wondered if maybe talking about depression was a bit much for a Sunday lunchtime. Do people really need my perspective on this illness again? Is it something that should be read? Something that deserves reading?

That's what made me decide to do it.

The thing is, with exposure comes understanding. Just like anything else on earth. I can't write about what it is like to run an Olympic marathon, or raise children, or earn a million. This, though - this I can talk about. And the more I and others talk about it, the better others who don't suffer can understand.

It's a neat little encapsulation of an experience; sitting there at the end of my bed, willing myself to move, and knowing now that this very moment is my topic.

That's what it is like.

It's a duality. A split motivation. You know you want to do the thing, you have to do the thing. The thing requires being done. But doing the thing is beyond you and you know it. You want to not have to. You desperately want to not have to even make the decision either way.

A common thing for people with non-diagnosed depression to think about themselves - or be described as by others - is lazy.

It gets used as an invective, as a pejorative. It gets used as a weapon, against ourselves, by others against us. Mostly because people like to believe that mental health is something that can be fixed by well-wishes and just Not Wanting To Be Like That, that way they don't have to worry about it. Which is ridiculous.

The guy missing two legs and one arm - if we expect him to do everything as quickly as someone with a full compliment of limbs, we're frankly mad. How could we think that? It's cruel and idiotic. Likewise, we don't expect the person undergoing heavy chemotherapy to be as full of energy and drive as anyone else. To do so would, again, be cruel and idiotic.

But depression is a mental health issue, so it pretty much gets ignored. It gets equated with people just being a little bit sad, and nobody can understand why being a bit sad can stop you doing anything.

The spread of knowledge, people's grasp of the situation, the illness for what it really is, has greatly improved in recent years. At least, as best I can tell. There is still the stigma, though. How do you talk about it? How do you talk about it to people that don't know? Especially when actually doing so is one of those aforementioned tasks, that seems all the more insurmountable from the bottom of the cliff.

Well, this is what I'm doing about it.

I'm talking about it, for anyone to read if they see fit.

I think, maybe, I ought to talk about it more.

Sure, it's daunting - but I'm not going to let that stop me.

Monetised Moments

When was the last time you truly had some time just to yourself?

I was thinking on this topic as I was sat on a bus, at 08:25, two thirds of the way into my morning commute. Usually I am on the bus half an hour before this one, but I have been working in another department - different starting times.

I was sat looking out of the window. Sat ahead of me was a mother with her three children, one in a pram, all trying to make the most noise. To my left was an older woman, who was comparing notes with her equally old equally womanly companion about who was alive or dead from their school days.

As we went across a set of traffic lights I found myself meeting the eyes of a man sat alone in his car. He was smiling.

It occurred to me at that moment that it is difficult to simply...be alone.

"But John," I hear you yell, hanging out of the windows of your octagonal residences upon the back of your gelatinous god. "But John, you can be alone any time you want! And besides, people hate being lonely!"

I'm not really speaking about loneliness. I am more speaking about something that I am very keenly aware of, being an introvert: the requirement of having time to one's own self, to not have to deal with the draining business of being around others.

Average rent and average pay being what it is, it is difficult - if not impossible - to rent a home alone. Not unless you don't eat, or similarly lack the need for any utilities. Far more likely that one will share a home, mortgaged or rented, with other people. Now, for any of my housemates reading this - I love you, but it means that alone time becomes a friggin premium grade resource, when there's more than two of you in a building.

Then there is the aspect of travel. Owning and running a car, and driving only yourself wherever you need to go, is...actually kind of expensive, if you compare how much the monthly costs (and the cost of instruction, testing and purchasing a car) run up to alongside a bus pass. What this means, though, is constantly sharing your travel space - the time spent on the way to and from the place of work is almost always occupied by other people as well, waiting for the transport, riding it, making the last hundred yards on foot. Always, always surrounded by others.

You get to work.

Who gets their own office? That's managerial only, I daresay. Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of tasks that necessitate people being stuck in places by themselves - but it's not so much your space as a space that you are occupying for a task, that anyone else can pretty much just waltz into, because of the aforementioned lack of ownership of the space. It's just where you are when you relabel the things or unload the boxes or whatever.

It's not just in our day-to-day lives. If you want to go anywhere, you pay more to earn more space. Not only more legroom but more space between yourself and the person beside you. More ways to achieve minor privacies, tiny mercies. Buying two coach tickets just so you can have both seats to yourself. Hiring a taxi to take you to the airport. Flying first class. Flying private. Hotel rooms on the top floors to avoid having to interact with your other guests. Private and personal transport to all your destinations.

You can always go outside, but - again, a new set of rules. Out in the world, literally anyone can bother you or interfere with you. You can't sit around as you see fit or just relax. You are out in the world, in the grip of the elements, and people will probably look upon you with suspicion if they find you just lurking out of the rain in the middle of a wood.

Solitude is a positive thing. The time taken to just be alone with your thoughts, to process, to be under no external person-pressures, to be in private and not have to adhere to any rules or regulations aside from those which you set yourself. It's important. Ask anyone who can't have any for an extended period of time. Ask your introvert friends, who like leaving your parties early, not because your party sucks but because they've run out of the ability to be around all the other guests.

And in the ways I list above, solitude has become something that can be charged for. Just like every other commodity, privacy and alone time - necessities for those of us wired a certain way - has become something that has a price tag, and our mental health suffers for it.

Not the most pressing problem on the world's plate, but certainly one that I notice more and more.

Chris, Chester, and the Two Hundred Thousand

Content warning: what follows discusses suicide in a frank and open and honest fashion. It may well be upsetting. Hell, I think it probably SHOULD upset you. Please be pre-warned about that before you read on.

Chris Cornell, vocalist, songwriter and musician involved with a handful of the best bands on earth, committed suicide on 17th May 2017. He was 52. It was just over two months until his 53rd birthday, which would have fallen on 20th July 2017.

Chester Bennington, vocalist, songwriter and musician primarily involved with Linkin Park but who temporarily fronted the Stone Temple Pilots, committed suicide on 20th July 2017. He was 41, and he and Chris Cornell were close friends.

In the 65 days between the two tragically linked deaths, approximately 195,000 people committed suicide - damn near two hundred thousand - and perhaps three and a half million attempted it. I'm not trying to denigrate anyone, nor am I trying to make a point about celebrity and attention. I'm merely stating a fact - or a figure. A truly devastating figure.

These figures aren't precise, obviously, but the World Health Organisation predicts that they are conservative statistics. The rate is increasing yearly.

Yes. Enough people do it that it is considered a rate.

I wrote a blog in April last year about my own experience on the topic. tl;dr - I almost became one of those 3,000 people a day that take their own lives, a long time ago, in a different place.

Nobody wants to see suicide figures that high. It's a deeply upsetting thing. Whatever the reasons, we are left hurting inside, knowing that there's more than one person per minute who is so distraught and depressed that, for whatever reason, they decide to end their own existence.

I'm not going to talk about why Cornell or Bennington did what they did. Their reasons are their own. I know why I attempted. I know why I didn't go through with it. There might be similarities, there might not be. None of us are wearing each other's shoes, even if we're all wearing the same brand. Another way I have described it is as each of us having to sink or swim, even if we're in the same sea.

It is when someone like Chris, or Chester, or Robin Williams or Chris Benoit or Marilyn Monroe, takes their own lives - or someone that we know, even vaguely, a friend of a friend - that we ask why, and we ask what we can do to help stop it happening again.

Here's the thing. Speaking from my own personal experience? The way to stop it happening has to begin a long, long time before anyone is even in a bad enough mental place to consider it for more than half a second.

The world is a cold, hard and uncaring place with islands and pools of warmth and light in it. It's a forbidding desert by default, and the oases are irregularities. Human beings are imperfect and insecure by design. For the longest time, that insecurity and imperfection has been treated in the worst way possible: by denying its own existence and chastising those that address it or try and stop it. We build a fence around the hole in who we are and we yell at people to not come any closer, especially if they want to fix it, or help us in not falling into it. It's what we as a people have done for thousands of years.

Society isn't run for the benefit of the people who live in it. It's all trickle-up, and it has been built and reinforced for that precise purpose, like a continental pyramid scheme. Realising that, seeing it in action, is a very sobering thing - and worse, such a societal structure has no place for people like me, or people like the friends I've had that have gone the same route and not lived to tell the tale. We're not productive machines. We're "faulty".

Nobody wants to talk about it until it hurts them and then we don't have the language because we spend the rest of our lives not talking about it.

You can't identify or isolate why it happens. You can't put on magic glasses and spot everyone who is going to swim in that cold sea. You can't apply a litmus test and assign them counselling if the paper turns green. It doesn't work that way, because at some point in their lives - in everyone's lives - there will be a moment when the paper turns green, or close to it. Everyone has at least one single moment, where they plunge into the water, and they need to swim - but we never talk about learning how to swim. We just mourn everyone that doesn't make it back to the shore.

You stop it by making the world better.

Suicide nets and hotlines are treatments of secondary symptoms. If we really want to get the world into a place wherein more than a minute goes by between each suicide - and I am talking about almost halving the suicide rate, just to get to the point where there's only sixty an hour, down to sixty an hour - you treat the cause. You stop life being hopeless and hollow and cold. You do everything you can to pour light and laughter into the world, and you do everything you can to put up walls against the cold ocean. You reduce poverty. You increase support, physical and mental. You listen and you talk quietly but honestly. You learn empathy and sympathy. You hold hands. You help.

Every single person that does this helps. Every single person. If enough of us do it, if enough of us believe it can be done, then we can make things change. We can make things better. We can make life something that supports hope again. Re-prime the soil, so to speak. Plant the seeds.

So when the moment comes that we hit the water, and the cold rushes over us - we look back at the shore, and we want it so badly that we swim for it. We want our place in it, not because we're meant to, but because there IS a place for us.

So let's make a fucking place.

Because out of all the things that could have driven me to tears this week, I didn't want it to be knowing that almost six thousand people would have tried to take their own lives as I wrote this blog, and that almost three hundred of them had succeeded.

Listen, speak, care, change the world. It's all we can do. Maybe it's all we were ever meant to do. Maybe if we want purpose, that's the purpose - to make a world fit for purpose, not for profit, not for power, but for just wanting to live in it one more day than we did yesterday.

We can do that. I'm sure we can.

Written in memory of Chris, Chester, and the two hundred thousand.

Running The Asylum

 Quick, name five Batman villains.

Okay. Good.

Think about the folks you named. Like, imagine each of them. I would have a few guesses but honestly, I want y'all to do the mental footwork here. It's been a day of it, and I am running a couple cylinders short.

Hold the images of those five Batman villains in your head.

How many of them suffer from mental illness?

You'll note my choice of words, there. I didn't ask how many of them were crazy, or how many of them were lunatics or whatever. I asked how many of them suffer from mental illness.

My guess is that out of the five you guessed, we're looking at...MINIMUM two. Probably more. Maybe all five. It's certainly easy enough to go for all five.

It's not just Batman that has a significant quantity of this going on. I mean as best I can recall he has the MOST going on, but if we look at a cross section of everything - not just comic books but novels, movies, television - time and again we find that the bad guys have profound mental health complications.

I mean, just look at Split.

We are entering a dark time, right now. As I write this, the newly inaugurated 45th President of the United States is beginning his... let's call it an escapade, through the rights and wrongs of the nation. People are feeling under threat, and rightly so - the rhetoric of the man himself and his followers is inimic to justice, nobility and equality.

And in this environment of hostility and toxicity, a forthcoming movie - admittedly one directed by a man whose spectacular fall from respect in Hollywood circles is legendary - will tell people who know no better about how dangerous those who are mentally ill can be.

I have mental health problems. I know plenty of people who do, also.

We're not fucking comic book villains. We're not just waiting for our moment to strike. We don't lurk in the shadows and wear special costumes and plot our revenge against society.

See, this is part of why this shit is taboo. Because when the protagonist has a mental health issue, it's so often something that gets presented as fucking comedy. Monk, anyone? In fact, every shade of being neuroatypical is used as either the marker of villainry or something to laugh at every now and then.

Why is it considered a daring or risky thing when a MAIN character experiences something that one in FOUR of us will experience each YEAR? It's more likely that a character will experience mental health problems than them being a white male (~8% of the world's population, but classically overrepresented literally EVERYWHERE).

Just a thought.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

So Nine Worlds was my first ever convention, and I loved it.

That isn't to say it didn't have problems, or that it was easy. One of the major problems was actually one of the reasons I wanted to go - the like-minded folks I'd be surrounded by. There were freakouts, I won't lie. More than once I totally bailed on a situation because I couldn't handle it, and I spent a lot of time in the hotel room that I didn't necessarily need to, if only because there weren't any people there.

That said...the people I talked to? The people I spent any time around? They were all absolutely wonderful.

The cosplay game was strong; there was Fiona the Human, Thor, two Captain Hammers, five Doctor Horribles (one of whom was also a Giles), one Buffy Summers, one Dawn Summers and one Spike - and that was just at the Whedon singalong. (ALL OF YOU ARE AWESOME.) I saw Loki (Awesome), Cloud Strife (Awesome), multiple Ghostbusters and Mega-City judges (Awesome), Princess Bubblegum (Awesome - and knows about booze so DOUBLE AWESOME), Tiny Tina (Awesome), Baymax (Awesome), a gentleman spider (Awesome), several characters from The Wicked + The Divine (Awesome now that I recognise you) and countless other wonderful folks all over the place...

The atmosphere was so welcoming, too. To me, it was simply a regret that I hadn't worked out how to Con properly until the Sunday morning. I'd not WASTED two days there, but I'd certainly not really got my oar in. I know I didn't need to do ALL the panels, play ALL the games, see ALL the shows - but next year, I will do more.

My health didn't help, of course. The joint pain and the breathing issues weren't my friend. The social anxiety doubly so. My social batteries were flagging by the end of the first day I was in the hotel. I probably kind of scared the folks I went with on occasion, I got a little twitchy...but you know. It's only to be expected.

Ah yes. Next year. I did mention that.

I am going next year. Next year I will cosplay. Next year I will bring food with me (HUGE MISTAKE THIS YEAR). Next year I will throw caution a little closer to the wind, maybe attend the rave on the Friday or the cabaret or anything, really. Just more things. Get more involved. Be less afraid of well shit I don't know just the entire world around me.

I met some really cool people there. I learned some very interesting lessons. I picked up injokes. ("The smores! The tragic tragic smores!") I learned how to play Pandemic, and that where we go from here is we actually keep singing.

Con Crash is real; I didn't experience Con Flu, but the moment I had to shlep back into the real world, I felt dragged down by it. The people around me didn't have the same frame of reference as those I had left behind. I'm on a bus, but nobody is there out of the same love of things that I am there for. They're there because we all just happen to be travelling in the same direction.

Back to earth with a bump. I kind of hated it.

You know what, though? For the depth of the valley...it was so worth it, just for the peak of the mountain that preceded it.

Now if only I could get it on prescription to cure depression, that would be great...