Life Under Canvas.

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Mantra

I’ve heard it argued that you shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ too often. The phrase loses it’s power, they say. The words become meaningless, hollow. They don’t send shivers down your spine like the first time they were whispered in your ear, the impact is lessened, and soon the phrase becomes bland, like saying ‘what would you like for tea?’ or ‘it’s raining again, it’s supposed to be summer.’

I am here today to testify. Me and Owen say ‘I love you’ to each other at least fifty times a day. That’s no exaggeration. If anything, it’s a conservative estimate. On days where he’s at work sometimes I pick up the phone, dial his desk, wait till he answers and say ‘I love you’ then hang up.

He usually rings back:

‘I love you too’

It is something we do, something we have always done.

Yet the words have more power now than they ever did the first time: spoken by nineteen year old Jen, my nervous laying down of the cards before I even knew what those words really meant. I knew that by saying them, I crossed a line that would shape us forever. It was a week into the relationship. I said them once. It took Owen three months to respond. Maybe some people would have taken that as a snub. I didn’t. I knew very quickly that this would go the distance. But Owen is more tentative, more hesitant. He likes to be sure about things. He likes to think before he acts. I knew this from the first day we met. I had to accept him for the way he was. So for three long months I waited for the answer I wanted to hear. When I finally heard the words, I knew they were heartfelt. I was curled up on his lap. I had been crying. I don’t remember why. Owen was stroking my hair. His hands fell gently on my scalp, weaving patterns among my follicles. Nick cave was singing softly in the background. ‘Into my arms, my love… into my arms.’ I still don’t know if that was deliberate. He said ‘Jen, I think I love you too’. I fell to sleep with those words ringing in my ears. I smiled and dreamed about us holding hands, our ringed fingers interlocking.

Now its seven years later, we are married. We have said those words almost a million times. They have acquired a history. They have become a ritual. They are a part of us. There are stories I can tell about those words. Some of the times we spoke them stand out. Like the time Owen sang them to me drunkenly on our wedding night before he fell asleep and I felt happier than I ever have in my life. Or the time I said them to him when he had taken his first pill and he looked back at me in sheer delight and awe, like I had given him the secrets of the universe in one single sentence. But mostly when I think of the phrase it is almost as an invisible thread, weaving in and out of our lives, binding us tighter together, strengthening the bond between us.

It can mean different things. Rather than simply being a statement of devotion, these days there’s a whole art form involved in interpreting the sentence.

‘I love you’ can mean, amongst many other things:

‘Shut up’

‘That joke wasn’t funny but you still make me laugh.’

‘I want to have sex.’

‘I’m going to cum.’

‘That food was nice.’

‘Please?’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re annoying me.’

‘I can’t imagine life without you.’

‘You rock my world.’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Stop being silly. God, you’re a plonker.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘I’m proud of you’

‘Good luck.’

‘I’m with you.’

‘Happy birthday.’

‘Don’t leave me.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Get on with some work!’

‘That’s so typically you.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘I want to be with you forever.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘I love you. I mean really, truly, so much I’m going to explode.’


*******************

So the list goes on. We never define what the sentence means at the time. We just say the words and we both understand. It’s a language within a language. It is comforting and inspiring and reassuring and challenging. It’s sometimes a little stifling but mostly utterly utterly freeing.

Has the phrase lost it’s impact since the first time?

Well, yes and no.

The words are just words. Their power waxes and wanes with the force that moves them.

When they are said out of habit they are meaningful and nourishing but not knee knocking. However, even now after seven years, and I would hedge a bet that even after twenty seven years we will still be able to pull a mind-blowing ‘I love you’ out of the bag. It’s all in the context. The power is in the chemistry between you at the time. ‘I love you’ is the product of a reaction, a winning formula. I savour the words, I roll them round my mouth and taste them on my tongue. I have never found a more potent mantra to help me through this life. It might be a cheesy line to finish a rather cheesy entry, but ‘I love you’ is the most important thing I have ever heard, or will ever say.

More Poems from the Archives

The following poems were all written in the second year of my university course in Lancaster. It was a tumultuous time for both me and O, with my mood being all over the place and although we had some really good times we also went through some of the toughest times in our relationship to date. I do not claim that the following poems are some of my most technically competent or well written, but I am publishing them here because I think they have something to say, and capture something of this part in my life.

Pregnancy Scare

He sits in his cage
day and night.
A small box
full of his own shit.
I'm scared of him:
scared of his teeth,
scared of his tail,
scared of his potential
to run away from me.
More than just an impulse buy
guilt on legs.
If I am too scared to love a rat
then how can I
love a child?
Brittle bones
and tiny hands
she will break into pieces easier
than the cornflakes
on the kitchen floor
underneath my feet.


The Truth of the Matter.

Having a mental illness is not about slashing your wrists and rocking backwards and forwards whilst grown men hold you down in four point restraints.
No,
It’s wearing knickers that are fifteen days old.
It’s your jealous friends not being jealous of you, but full of pity.
It’s realising you can’t do something that you could do when you were five, like eat a sausage roll without thinking you were going to choke and die.
It’s being full of self doubt twenty four seven.
It’s not being able to ever participate fully.
It’s not being able to remember a film you watched last night.
It’s cringing with shame for the next week when you get somebody’s name wrong.
It’s cutting your leg with a screwdriver because you haven’t and will never finish that essay.
It’s ruminating for hours about what the last thing you eat will be before you die.
It’s going around in circles and recycling old epiphanies again and again and again.
It’s knowing in your heart of hearts that you are boring.
Its knowing you are a cliché, so clichéd you can’t even write a book about all this one day.
It’s not ever being able to think as clearly as you did the day before.
It’s over idealising yesterday and fearing everything about tomorrow.
It’s never being able to live in the moment.
It’s eating a whole chocolate cake without even feeling guilty.

It's killing time watching “A Place in the Sun” when the sun is actually shining and you sit in your gloomy living room.
It’s not being able to enjoy a kiss because you’re obsessed with the way your chin looks.
It’s not being able to think of anything artistically except illness and death.
It’s watching torture victims on the news and feeling nothing.
It’s wanting to die and being terrified of death.


Born Lucky

Right now
in this, our beautiful world
someone is taking their last breath,
someone is doubled up in agony,
someone is crying, but more than that
millions are crying at this very second.
People are starving.
People are burning.
A man is hung on a rack in a torture chamber,
A woman is spread legged on the gravel
being taken, foreign hand over her mouth.

A boy’s balloon pops.
An old man is having his teeth removed.
Some poor nurse is having to say the terminal words
I’m sorry you’ve got cancer,
I’m sorry there was nothing more we could do for him,
I’m sorry, you’ll never walk again,
Would you like us to turn the machine off?
And I look at my trainers
I think of brown hands stitching
the child at the machine
the beads of sweat along their brow.
A gun is being aimed to kill,
a needle is sliding into a vein.
Vomit is hitting the ground with a splash,
a woman is fondling herself alone in her bathroom.
Brakes fail,
hearts fail,
rain fails,
appendixes rumble.
There is mud and dirt
and endless hunger.
People are thirsty
desperately thirsty
yet on this Tuesday morning
over elevenses
you snap your head up
from your grainy cup of coffee
pick up your cupcake and growl
“What the hell are you
grinning for?”

A Sneak Preview

Defying Diana: A Guide to Fashion by the Hand Me Down Kid

Like many women of our generation, my attitude towards the very clothes I wear everyday is conflicted and confused. On the one hand, thanks to an indulgent twenty five year long diet of adverts, peer pressure, popular culture and magazines I am adept at reading the “hidden codes” behind the clothes we all wear. Like so many women I have spoken to, I learnt from a very early age that wearing the wrong thing can land you in all sorts of trouble. One bright summers day, when I was aged seven, the bullies in the playground battered me over my head with my bright green trainers that I loved but had bought from a market rather than a sports shop. At this moment I had the rather abrupt and startling realisation that this fashion thing wasn’t a passing trend, it was here to stay and how I reacted to it would shape my life. It was here the confusion began.

At such an early age, it seemed I had two choices, either to play the system: follow all the latest fashion trends and be thought of as stylish by all my friends. Or, on the other hand, I could rebel, refuse to conform and wear the green trainers, batterings be damned! I don’t think I am unique here. Consciously or unconsciously, every single child in mainstream education has to make this choice. Even when schools desperately clamp down and put uniforms in place, fashion has a way of seeping through in the little details, from shoelaces to bags to hairbands. The bullies have an eye for detail and will always find a way to separate the weak from the strong, the rich from the poor.

For many, conformity is bliss and for the children who choose to play the system, you can see why. They buy the branded goods and follow their favourite magazine’s “Top Tips for Hot Hair”. They dutifully lower their eyes to the ground when big, stilettoed Diana from year 10 is coming down the corridor. They hope to God she won’t notice them, because they heard what she did to Tracy Evans last week for the crime of having a dodgy perm. Who can blame them, really, for playing the game, and making their life at school just that bit less hellish? Of course, there has always been bullying as long as children have congregated and not all of it is fashion related. Yet, I feel that the pressure on our mother’s and grandmother’s generations to look the same and blend in was not as intense as we have experienced, due to the prevalence of advertising and dominance of global brands in the twenty first century. I have talked so much about the school system not because of lasting trauma (although that trainer did have a nasty sting!) but because these tender years are where our attitudes to the fashion machine are forged, shaping our adult thinking for the rest of our lives.

The situation is worse for girls than boys as they are targeted more ruthlessly by the media and fashion trends seem more fickle for them, changing at a bewildering speed. I remember many midnight conversations at sleepovers with teenage girl friends when they urgently confessed deep insecurities about being ugly, the wrong size, hideous, and unworthy. In a healthy society there simply should not be such a prevalent undercurrent of self hatred in the psyche of our female youth, a time of life when you should be full of self pride and vitality, not despair and an ever present feeling of hating your own skin.

In terms of my own journey, I did not, could not, and would not conform. Even aged seven, something did not sit right with me that anyone, however big and threatening, could pressure me into wearing something I didn’t want to. Moreover, it made me angry and defiant towards them. I clearly remember, standing in the playground with tears streaming and a bruised head, that I couldn’t understand why one shoe with a tick on it was better than one without. This acute sense of the absurdity of the fashion industry has stuck with me into adulthood. So, at school I wore my hand me downs with pride, and in my teenage years when I first became responsible for buying my own clothes, made a point of shopping in charity shops and jumble sales because I felt so angry towards a system that, as I saw it, caused so much misery. Although I didn’t have any political or analytical terms to criticise it in my vocabulary I instinctively felt the injustice and stupidity of the industry.


Several years and many run ins with Diana later, I escaped the school system and enrolled at university. There my relationship with clothes became even more complex. I was enrolled on a course that encompassed theory, politics and literature, and learnt about the systems that fed the injustices that I had only experienced on a very micro level. Now I was all focused on the macro, and it blew my mind. I developed a political conscience, learning about feminism and other women’s complex relationships with the fashion industry. I read about capitalism and globalisation and was shocked to read about the depth of the very real suffering that goes into production of the latest unnecessary fashion trends. In the West we are mentally imprisoned by what Alain De Botton calls status anxiety and the compulsion to conform. That is bad enough, but on a more global scale there are sweat shop workers all over the world working 14 hour days with no breaks or rights, companies pillaging natural resources, animal experimentation, even widespread use of child labour. I just couldn’t see many good sides, and whatever you might say to me about a healthy consumer capitalist economy, I still don’t. To me the whole thing stinks. We are slaves to the brand, and whilst the wheels of the fashion machine keep turning, so do the cogs of human misery, poverty and injustice that keep the whole thing ticking over.

I am no economist. I don’t have all the answers to the global problems. I know there are some positives to the fashion industry, I’m not denying that shopping for clothes can be enjoyable, or give you a sense of creativity and pleasure. All I can say is, as far as I’m concerned, count me out. For me, clothes are mostly functional things that keep me dry and warm in winter and cool in summer. Sure, I have a couple of “best” outfits and clothes that are suitable for smart occasions and going out. I live in the real world, I do regular stuff and my wardrobe reflects that, it isn’t particularly outlandish or strange. But I mostly buy second hand and I buy what I like rather than what is fashionable. I don’t read beauty magazines, I believe (as the song goes), they only work to make you feel ugly. I don’t wear makeup, I like my own face. I haven’t shaved in years, yet my husband worships my body. I recycle and pass on things I’m not needing and gratefully receive it when people do the same for me. I don’t own anything branded, second hand or not, I believe I’m a person not a billboard. I don’t watch adverts so I hardly even know anymore what is cool and what isn’t. If all this is the most unbelievable mortifying thing you’ve ever heard then know this, I can’t tell you my life is perfect, but I do feel free. I have a thriving body image and a guilt free conscience and all this serves to make me a happier person in the long run.

My rejection of the fashion industry does not give me an easy life or the right to look down my nose at those who choose not to, the purpose of this article is not for me to guilt trip everyone into making the same choices as myself. But all the time I save not being a slave to fashion means that I actually have a lot more hours to do things that matter to me. As a small example: clothes shopping is a twice yearly rather than a weekly event for me, so that gives me so much more extra time, energy and space to read a book, take a walk in the rain, have fabulous sex or even write this article! Think of all the precious time in a week you give to the fashion industry, either by shopping, preening, talking, reading, or just thinking about it. Then think about what else you could achieve in that time. For me this is the whole crux of the issue. Any doubts I occasionally have concerning my choices and way of life are resolved by asking myself these two simple questions: are there not many more interesting and important things in the world than contemplating my own fingernails, hair, clothes, tan and makeup? If so, shouldn’t I, just possibly, be doing them?

(Due to be published on the 19th July on the womans collective website: 'Imagining Ourselves' in response to a call for articles about fashion and image around the world. I thought I'd give my blog readers first dibs!)

Pure Nostalgic Soppiness

I’ve been sorting out the ‘my documents’ section of my computer which hasn’t been reorganised since the second year of Uni, back in 2002. It has been quite some feat! I have found millions of unfinished blogs, introductory paragraphs for short stories and lots of embarrassing photographs.

Also, over the course of this frustrating dragging, sorting and deleting of files, I came across some old poems. They made me feel quite nostalgic so I thought I’d share the ‘best’ (I use the term loosely) ones on this blog so they’re not just languishing away on my hard drive for the next five years.

The following three are love poems, written over the course of mine and Owen’s relationship. They are displayed in chronological order. ‘Marked’ was a poem I wrote the morning after the first time we had sex without a condom, I was wrapped in a blanket waiting for Owen to make me a cup of tea and feeling very taken, very in love. ‘Because you must love me’ was written in the aftermath of a silly argument as a reconciliation gift, and ‘Victory’ was composed on the beach outside our Honeymoon apartment, three days after we had married.


Marked

It smells
sickly sweet
running down
my insides.
I thought it
would waft up in
savoury swirls.
I thought it was
supposed to be
salty.
It trickles out of me
soaking through my
stolen boxer shorts.
I think of them now,
swimming inside of me,
tiny little tadpoles
that all have your face.


Because I guess you must love me

I’m sorry for my clothes,
on your bedroom floor.
For never shutting the toilet door,
For being too tired and not rubbing your head,
my knickers kicked carelessly under the bed.
For turning conversation too often on me
and endlessly wondering what the future will be.
For eating all the pickled onions in the jar
and constantly dreaming of being a star.
For not washing up
and picking my nose
and ignoring five day old
stains on my clothes.
For talking and talking,
dragging heels when I’m walking
for interrupting john snow-
and finding it hard to just flow.
For not being bothered to go on top,
for keeping on going when you ask me to stop.
For wearing your dressing gown and burning the sleeve,
and just never knowing when I should leave.
For farting and wafting it under your nose,
for admiring and lusting then stealing your clothes.
For my hair brained schemes, my silly ideas
my cigarette breath and not cleaning my ears.
For the occasional tantrum when I don’t get my own way
my inevitable tendency to overlay
tell me this darling:
why the fuck do you stay?


Victory

He swims
up and down
the shore,
head bobbing
like a beautiful buoy
in the ocean.
His skin
glistens
in the sun,
his eyes
sparkle
like the water
dripping down
his body.
And I think
fuck me
how good it is
to witness
death
being cheated
by flesh
and blood.
How we've lost
before we've started
but our small
victories
are sips of
water
on a long
hot day
in Spain.

Serve the Servants

The 11th to 17th of June is national carer’s week here in the UK. I’m not usually a fan of weeks for this and days for that as I think they can often provide a pinnacle of focus for that week’s highlighted charity or issue which then gets forgotten about until roughly the same time next year. They are horribly media centric – perfect for journalists and bloggers who need a prompt for something to write about that day (self obviously guilty here). The activities that surround them are usually very cheesy or horribly decadent, designed primarily to pull on heartstrings and generate direct debits from as many people as possible. However, then I start getting into my feelings about charities in general which I surely will another time but not now. For the time being I am going to take the sound bites I’ve heard on the news and Woman’s hour as bait and talk a little bit about carers and caregivers rights in this country.

I feel qualified to talk about this as it is a subject that is deeply, deeply close to my heart, even though I wish it wasn’t. In an ideal world it wouldn’t be me who was writing this blog at all, but Owen- he’s the expert on this subject and I would love for him to guest blog on this page. I’m sure he, circumstances permitting, would have gladly obliged. Like a lot of people in his position, he’d love to have time just to write articles about things for fun, too. However, for his sins Owen is my long term carer. As well as being an ambitious full time PhD student (sans funding) with a two hour commute to his University, he additionally has to look after me and work two jobs spread over thirty five hours a week to support us both enough just to scrape by. Today, Owen got out of bed at six am, started work at seven, and isn’t planning on stopping until midnight or so. It has been this way for a long time now; he barely even takes a day off. He usually falls asleep at the keyboard sometimes around one o’ clock and staggers to bed after I have spent ten minutes giving him a list of reasons why he will make himself sick if he doesn’t at least get some rest.

We don’t get any help from the government, nor have we ever done, for many complicated reasons, not least the fact that he is a student and financial help for those in higher education is pitifully hard to come by, even if your wife is so sick she can’t get out of bed and doesn’t know what day of the week it is. We don’t get any support, despite the fact that, as part of the army of unpaid carers, Owen and those like him are saving the government billions of pounds in labour costs – for the government to actually pay these carers the same as paid professionals the work they do would involve spending the same again as the annual NHS budget (57 billion). In terms of carers, Owen is one of the relatively lucky ones. Most of the time I am fairly high functioning, and can do things for myself, even if they are within a limited sphere. However, for the last five years I have been unable to work for more than a few weeks at a time and several times a year we will have a bad spell where Owen has to really take over.

During these times, which can last from a few days to a few months, Owen suddenly finds me incapacitated to the point that he has to do all my domestic jobs; the cooking, the shopping, the cleaning etc which are time consuming and annoying, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. For twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, for long stretches of time I might go into ‘I want to die’ mode, which (as I guess the name gives away), means I am actively suicidal. So, not only does Owen have to do his studies, his teaching, papers and conferences, as well as everything around the house and his mundane paid employment in museums and cafes but he has to spend countless hours watching and caring for me. On the days he doesn’t call in sick at work because he’s too scared to leave me (I think most of his employers think Owen’s immune system is pathetic when in fact it is steely) he will phone me from his desk and we will talk in code every fifteen minutes to make sure I am still alive. It is embarrassing for me to admit, but during these times he becomes responsible for everything about me; from making sure I eat, sleep, wash, dress, brush my hair, and clean my teeth and all the other things that most couples don’t think about. It is not unusual for him to take hours in the morning just getting me out of bed and looking like a human being. At night time, he has stayed up all night, for days on end, just watching me, making sure I don’t do anything daft. He takes me to appointments, liaises with doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, he learns names of drugs and therapies, negotiates what medication I should be taking when and makes sure I take it, even though this can lead to some blinding rows. He sits with me whilst I cry, listens to me for hours moaning about what an ugly bitchy shithead I am. He eats microwave food with blunt cutlery because all the knives are locked away. He accompanies me on bus and train journeys because I can’t face them alone, he walks with me in town because all the people can trigger psychosis on a grand scale.

These are just a small selection of the daily sacrifices Owen will make to give me the best life he can. Our relationship turns, (sometimes overnight) from one of absolute equality to total dependency. My personality is transformed and my functioning is grossly impaired. Yet Owen just gives and gives and gives. He does all the above and more, and has never, ever complained. Sometimes he gets tired and down with it all, sometimes he can get very upset, but has he ever snapped at me or lost his patience? Never. Not only does he do all this but he tries to give me a good quality of life; despite being so tired that he needs twenty five cups of coffee just to get up in the morning, he tries to do this all with a laugh and a smile, a hug and a kiss, a joke, a giggle and lots and lots of sympathy. He tries, whenever possible, to keep me out of hospital. He cares for me with dignity and respect and makes sure my wishes as regards my treatment are upheld as much as is humanly possible. He slaves away to make an awful situation bearable, and every night before I go to sleep he says to me ‘I believe in you, this will get better and even if it didn’t I regret not one moment: I would do it every day for the rest of my life.’ And then he is asleep before his head hits the pillow.

I know. I know. If there ever was such a thing, I am one lucky manic depressive.

But, as special as he is, Owen is not the only one.

Up and down the country there are friends, relatives, neighbours all caring for people they love not for monetary value or job satisfaction but because they feel it is the right thing to do. Many have given up well paid jobs to do so, and have to eke a living out of the pittance that the government provides for the ‘lucky’ few carers it deems eligible for financial help. At the moment, the maximum weekly carer’s budget is around £48.68, (for a minimum of 35 hours a week- equivalent to £1.39 an hour) which is significantly less than many of the other benefits going and many carers find themselves in financial dire straits. These are real people with real lives every day losing their houses, jobs, cars, and possessions in order to give their sick loved ones a life away from institutions and the slow decay they bring. The support they generally get from the system is laughable. Their hard work is often unrecognised or treated as a nuisance, their relationship with the patient undervalued. When they ask for vital support, for respite care, for some kind of state provided home help in addition to their unpaid labour, for some much needed money or equipment, it is usually an uphill struggle all the way. Forms are piled upon forms for even the most basic means of assistance and the lists of excuses soon mount up as to why you are not eligible for this or that. Many carers feel like the authorities are entities they have to constantly fight, rather than vehicles they can turn to for support. The strain is enormous, the pressure huge. Yet many of these carers are themselves are vulnerable people. A huge percentage of them are elderly, often hardly able to move properly or fully function themselves. On the other end of the spectrum, some are mere children who find themselves looking after their parents and siblings instead of concentrating on their schoolwork or social life; terrified that if they, as a ten year old child, don’t keep the family functioning then social services will get involved and split the family up. These are truly the unsung heroes of our society, for those people who have never had to care for someone day in day out then all I can say is you have no idea what it is like. I have no idea what it is like and I’m a lot closer to the action than most.

I sometimes ask Owen; ‘what do you get out of this?’ After all when we met he was just turned eighteen. He was barely an adult with patchy facial hair and a passion for computer games. He is not a super stud but he is not a bad looking bloke and he has a great personality. I think at university even if he couldn’t have pulled the Julianne Moore look-alike that he dreamt of, he could have at least chosen someone whose idea of an evening in wasn’t drinking a bottle of whiskey and locking herself in the toilet with a razor blade for three hours. To this day it mystifies me why he didn’t go running for the hills. I would have done. I have asked him this question a number of times. Sometimes I am genuinely curious, sometimes I do it when I beat myself up. He has only ever responded with these four words: ‘Jen, I love you.’ and refuses to be drawn any more on the matter.

It is, clearly, not all one way. I support Owen in many of the things he does and bring happiness into his life in many capacities other than the ones I have mentioned. Most people who care for someone deeply love the person involved and find caring for them rewarding and fulfilling, even if it is sometimes a soul-destroyingly exhausting and strenuous process. But it seems to me that it is precisely this love and devotion that the government are exploiting. They know that Owen and the six million others like him are not going to just turn their backs on their loved ones. It basically boils down to this, why pay someone for something when they are willing to do it for free? They know that Owen means it when he says ‘Jen I will do anything for you’. Even if that means year upon year of little sleep, no money, overwork and battle after battle with the authorities. When the alternative is to see their loved ones go into hospital or residential care, out of their lives and control, often putting them at risk of abuse and exploitation many carers simply say ‘over my dead body’, and battle on. That is what Owen and the rest of my family have done for me and I owe them my life several times over.

Carers, in my experience, are not asking for much.

They are asking for:

a) Enough money to provide them and the person they are caring for with a basic standard of living where crippling financial worries do not make an already fraught situation 1000 times worse.

b) Recognition of their efforts and respect of their own wishes and needs as well as the patients.

c) Respite care and more short term intensive inpatient services for when times get really tough. When they judge the situation to be unmanageable, that is, not some government crisis team’s checklist.

d) Specialist help for the things they cannot afford to provide themselves, or are not trained to do.

There are other things, but these are the main complaints I find most carers have. Of course, as a patient myself, I do realise there is a debate around giving carers too much power, in that I believe as a patient it is me who should always have the final word, if I am able to do so. Some carers may have ulterior motives and it is the authority’s job to ensure abuses do not happen. However, the truth of the matter is ‘what’s the alternative?’ If, as a patient you are not supported by those around you then there might be some limited care in the community stuff, but if you have a time of crisis or get too ill to cope, you will end up in an institution. Enter a hospital or a residential environment and you relinquish all control anyway, to people who are much more likely to abuse and neglect you than your own friends and families. Ask most patients who’d they’d rather have the power over them and I’d hedge a bet it wasn’t the syringe wielding electro-shocking multidisciplinary team at the hospital, but their loving husband, or their mum or dad or their grandparents. In most cases, patient’s rights are the one and the same as carer’s rights. These devoted caregivers are sacrificing so much and getting so little in return. That’s why we, (especially those of us who are on the receiving end of their love and attention) should be fighting together to get these unsung heroes the rights and privileges they deserve.

God Shaped Hole

It was a sunny day. Owen and I were walking down the river, hand in hand. I told him that I found the trees and the water, the ducks and the general air of peace quite spiritual. He laughed. He said that to him the word spiritual translated as ‘bullshit bullshit bullshit’ and he generally switches off whenever someone says it.

Since then I’ve been thinking about the spiritual path, or more precisely the one I am walking on. What does it mean to be spiritual? How would I define that in my own life? I do consider myself to be a spiritual person but I think I have a weird definition of what that means- on which I will elaborate later. I also see Owen’s point. There is a hell of a lot of bullshit out there. Most religious people, including many many Buddhists, anger me with their illogicality, superstition and intolerance. So, I’d like to do a series of three blogs dealing with different aspects of my journey and how my concept of the spiritual has changed over the years. For simplicities sake I’ll split it into the early past, later past and the present respectively.

So, the beginning. To say I had a very religious upbringing would be understatement of the decade. On the one hand it was wonderful. I was born into a close knit group of loving Christians in a small charismatic church. They were one large extended family and my early life was spent in the company of some of the kindest, gentlest, most generous and giving people I have ever met. My life was infused with love, acceptance, meaning and purpose. I felt close to God, my heavenly father and when you are a child that is a wonderfully enriching and joyous experience. Jesus, too, was my best friend and I loved him almost as much as my Mum and Dad (I was supposed to love him more, but I never quite managed that.) Every day was spent doing churchy activities; I studied the bible, played my saxophone in the music group, wore a camel outfit in the nativity play, sang in the choir, went to Sunday school and regular church twice a week as well as a multitude of ‘extracurricular’ activities. My love of justice and social issues stems from what I did in those early days at our church. We regularly visited old people’s homes and hospitals, we ran and campaigned for charities such as Tradecraft, Tearfund and Christian Aid. Through our missionaries we were always very aware of what life in the developing world was like and our youth leader slept in a cardboard box for a week on the streets of Sheffield to teach us youngsters about the sufferings of the homeless.

My whole childhood revolved around God, the first playgrounds I recall don’t involve slides and swings, but tombstones, as me and my brothers would play hopscotch over graves and clamber over stone crosses in the graveyard whilst waiting for the adults to finish a healing ceremony or a PCC meeting. Ritual and the supernatural infused every mundane event: we would pray together as a family to find a car parking space in Tesco and say another one when it ‘miraculously’ appeared- amazing on a busy Saturday! In fact, praying was the bee’s knees. We were encouraged to pray anywhere and everywhere and by the age of six or seven I had an almost unstoppable chatter to God in my head. We prayed before eating, sleeping and traveling and a million times in between. We would pray for everything: to heal grandmas gammy leg, for the weather to clear up before the church bazaar, to protect the house from fires and burglars when we went on holiday, for world peace, for the presents from Santa to be the ones we wanted, for our toothache to clear up, for Sheffield Wednesday to win the cup, that we would find the TV remote, the end of child poverty and that our hamsters would never, ever die.

Although we never called it this; mine was a magical childhood in the literal sense, dominated by the mystical. Our daily lives were, we perceived, being guided by the invisible hand of a loving but knee tremblingly powerful creator God. We were his special children and we knew it. As I got older, I got more into the heavy stuff. Encouraged by my parents and those in the church around me, I would have visions, really intense intricate ones and I started to speak in tongues at large rallies. Strangers would come to me on trains and in the streets at random and give me bible verses. I had a strong feeling of being divinely blessed, of being a vessel to channel God’s love and his all important message. I would go on marches with churches from the area; walking through the streets of my town with a banner in my hand shouting ‘Jesus loves you’ and ‘Be bold! Be strong! For the Lord your God is with you’. The kids from my school would snigger and laugh at me but I would wave my banner proudly safe in the knowledge I was going to heaven. When I was sick I would be prayed over by all my Mum and Dad’s Christian friends in their beautiful and personal holy languages, I remember feeling such peace, reveling in their divine lullaby as I shut my fevered eyes. I soon got baptized, then later confirmed. I drank the blood and ate the body of God incarnate. It tasted bittersweet. I loved God with every ounce of my being and he was so, so real to me. He spoke to me in words and in pictures, in music, song and through the words of others. He was present in the natural world around me, I saw him in the trees and the wind and the thunder. We were told, repeatedly, that he knows everything about you; he knows how many hairs are on your head and is listening to every single thought you have. There is no escaping him; we used to sing in Sunday school: ‘so high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get round it, oh wonderful love.’ My mother told us that if we were ever stuck for an answer to something, pray to Jesus and then open the bible at random. When I did this there always seemed to be something of guidance, so I did it a lot.

Life was just so deep, so rich and so intense. There were layers within layers within layers. Signs and symbols abounded everywhere, we wore our fish badges on our clothes and on our cars and eagerly spotted them on long journeys like other kids do to Ferraris. God didn’t keep his views to himself; everything was charged with significance. Turning the TV on in the morning to find a story about local traffic congestion was God personally telling you to set off early for school that day. There was an unseen world beyond our world brimming with angels and demons and, we were told, they were every bit as real as you or I. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny might have been fictions, but in our house the devil was alive and kicking. It was possible, even, to see the future, although this was dangerous territory for a mere child. Possession was real, the occult a deadly threat and in our church exorcisms were not unheard of. After all, ours was a battle, a spiritual battle. There was a judgment day coming, it could be any day now, any minute. We were at war with evil and what’s more we were on the winning team, the Bible told us that was so. I believed so much I gave part of my £1 pocket money every week to the cause. I went to emotional praise services where I raised my arms in the air and sang, ‘hallelujah’ over and over again with tears of joy streaming down my face. I went to healing groups where men who hadn’t walked for twenty years threw away their wheels and went tottering down the aisle like a fifteen stone baby taking its first steps. I saw grown women collapse through the power of the Holy Spirit and heard grown men speak terrifying prophecies of things that surely would pass, (praise be to Christ our Lord). At the age of eleven I was more in love with God than any boy at school and I was more than secure in the fact that the feeling was mutual.

I write this now, read it back and I think, fuck. Actually, that paragraph explains a lot. Because I’m so close to my parents now, I always forget how fucking fucked up my childhood was, in some senses. Goddammit, is there any wonder that I am writing these words through the hazy filter of a cocktail of some of the worlds strongest antipsychotic drugs? I mean, I spent my childhood chattering away in a divine language to a god who could read my mind, who paid for my sins with the blood I drank every Sunday, who could give or take away everything I had and smite at will; instead of thinking fairies and pop stars like most kids I was, at least some of the time, caught in a cataclysmic battle between good and evil.

No, this love affair did not end happily. In fact, it ended very badly.

When I was thirteen or fourteen my dad got a new job at a different church, and I was wrenched away from the bosom of St James, the church I grew up in, and transplanted to a new one where I never fitted in. The church was a lot less charismatic, a lot more ‘normal’ and I couldn’t really cope with the implications of that. I missed the community, I missed the friendship of St James, but more than that I missed the intense fusion of the spiritual with the everyday, the raw, emotive worship of an awe inspiring god. At the new church, they were more likely to argue for hours about the colour of the choir robes and the grape variety of the communion wine rather than harnessing Gods power to heal lame men. It was all a bit middle England and the teachings were totally different. The spark died, the romance began to fizzle out. I also began to read more widely than the children’s literature and Christian books I had been brought up on. I started reading newspapers, and a lifelong curiosity towards other cultures and their belief systems kicked in. Doubts arose- Why is there suffering? Why is homosexuality a sin? Is the bible really the divinely inspired word of God? What about dinosaurs? What about Feminism? For the first time my unshakable faith faltered. Over the following years the doubts grew and grew. I stepped further and further away from my roots. To my parents dismay, I became a ‘liberal Christian’ then a ‘Unitarian Universalist’ then an agnostic until, when I left home and consequently the church, I took a deep breath and proclaimed myself an atheist. My house, as they say, was built upon the sand.

The God shaped hole physically hurt me. It left a void in my life so huge it nearly consumed me. It ached and itched and gnawed away at me. I could not feel peace. I was haunted by guilt and doubt and anger. I was sure I was going to hell, an eternal separation from happiness and peace. My head did not know how to cope without my hotline to God. Who now would I turn to for help, for guidance? All my coping mechanisms were taken from under my feet. My black and white worldview dissolved, leaving only a huge grey area that confused and disturbed me. My whole interior world basically collapsed. I did not know what or who to believe about anything. I found it hard to trust anyone. When I discovered alcohol and marijuana, I saw the oblivion as a refuge from the whirlwind inside me, but this would ultimately (as you’d expect) exacerbate rather than solve my problems.

My ultimate refuge, as it still is, was the written word. I immersed myself in books. I wrote and wrote and wrote. By now I was deeply suspicious of the techniques our church employed to recruit and gradually shape the faithful, I sneaked books in from the library to the house and hid them under my pillow. They dealt with emotional and religious manipulation, spoke boldly about brainwashing techniques and various forms of propaganda and I read them avidly from cover to cover. I found that there were many correlations between what I had experienced and the things that people who were in so called cults had gone through. Even if the examples in the books I read were more extreme than my experiences: I had never been told to have sex with the priest or give all my possessions away, however a lot of the emotional processes had been the same. I came to the conclusion that all religions were basically cults, were harmful and dangerous. I began to think of what I had been through as abuse. Unintentional abuse, I must stress. My parents 100% believe that they acted in my best interests and they hold that view to this day. But the truth is that the church did a lot of harm to me. I found for many years reality hard to deal with and in the sober light of day, dwelling in a world without angels and demons and an omnipresent God, I struggled immensely. To have a god shaped hole is the most painful thing that to this day I have experienced. It is the loss of a father, a friend and an eternity of bliss. It is the loss of a community, a world view, a coping mechanism and a purpose. It is a loss of self, in a sense, a self that you have to rebuild from scratch without the help of your family or support networks. For many years I teetered on the edge of the God shaped hole. Sometimes, I thought I would be sucked in completely and just cave in on myself, never to return. The recovery process has been long and is not over. It was helped by many years in therapy, but still part of me aches for my unshakeable faith never to have wavered and for me to be writing this to you with my bible in hand and fish badge on my collar. But that is not my path. Once you have seen through something and identified it as a lie you can never go back.

Aged 18 I’d turned my back on God for good. There were just too many doubts and intellectual contradictions, too much guilt. As much as the church meant to me, I knew if I were ever to be happy, I had to leave it behind. I came to see God as my parent’s fictional friend and Jesus as a man who was quite inspirational but ultimately made up. I no longer believed in miracles or the mystical, I came to see my experiences as a manifestation of mass hysteria. None of it, the prophecies, the conversations with God, the healing, the miracles were real. I had been duped, good and proper and all I had to show for it was a broken heart and a disintegrating bible. At the age of eighteen I felt like a country that had been ravaged by war, torn apart and fractured into many parts. The rebuilding process would take years and the practice of forgiveness even longer. The years that lay ahead would be difficult, taking me to the edge of sanity and back but nothing, nothing I have ever done in my life was as hard as the day I finally closed my eyes and said:

Dear God

I don’t believe in you any more.

This is the last time we will ever talk.

Goodbye.



(to be continued….)

Pants on Fire

4. I undertake the precept to refrain from false speech (lying).

{OK, I admit it. This is the big one. The one I was nervous about facing, the one I’m a bit reluctant to delve into. Not only because I have friends who read this thing and I’d hate for this to affect their trust of me, but because sometimes there are things about yourself that you don’t like to dwell on. But, I decided to write this blog in the spirit of honesty, and on a subject like this it would be irony of ironies that it was now that I shied away from the truth.}

I’ll start by saying this:

I was instantly attracted to my husband for three main reasons.

1) He had long hair, a big brain and a nice, kind face.
2) I could talk to him about anything and felt immediately that I could trust him.
3) He didn’t tolerate my bullshit, and my lies.

Of course, as time went on, the list of ‘things that are great about O’ got larger and larger, but these initial three were the reasons that I went on when I decided to ask him out. In some ways, Owens’ love and devotion to facts, truth and honesty can mean he is a difficult man to talk to and get on with. He is rubbish at sycophantic smalltalk or polite niceties for their own sake. But in those first few days of the relationship, it was the thing I fell head over heals in love with and the thing I knew I needed to be a central guiding influence in my life were I ever to be a happy, well adjusted person again.

Back then, my head was more concerned with fantasy than facts. For many of my teenage years I had been best friends with a pathologically compulsive liar, and some of her behaviour had, over the years, gradually rubbed off on me. Although, unlike my friend, I don’t think my lying ever got to the stage of illness, I was certainly not grounded in reality. I was deeply in love with melodrama, exaggeration, daydreams, fiction. I was not into the hard hitting truth, I was not into mundane existence, as I saw it. Unlike my friend, I would rarely invent things that were totally not true but I was very fond of embellishing things, polishing them, editing them to my favour. I am a perceptive, imaginative woman and was generally pretty good at doing this realistically without getting caught (although like many liars I could have been delusional that I was fooling everyone).

I had been a very honest child, and I think I am fairly honest by nature, but during my teenage years I somehow lost the spirit of telling the truth. At the end of the day, it was just more interesting, more exciting to say you had drank ten pints than two, told your teacher to fuck off rather than ‘yes sir’, to say you had kissed five boys, rather than none. I’m not saying I had a serious problem, and I know that many teenagers do the same thing. It’s just that for me, I have always prized honesty so highly in my life, my family and other friends are very honest people, in fact most of the people I have been close to over the years have had painfully honest, self aware streaks. Yet I developed an unhealthy habit of deviating from the truth and each time I did so, I got a bit further away from myself. After a few years of this, it got to the stage where realised I would need serious help in breaking the habit and finding my way back.

Then Owen came along. We met on the first day of university and from the word go he would just call me on my bullshit. He stamped it out as soon as he saw it, whenever he recognised it. He both encouraged and praised the times when I was honest and chastised my deceitfulness with great force. He was acutely perceptive at telling the difference. He shaped me; he was both firm and plain speaking in his demands; ‘if you want to be with me, if you want this relationship to go the distance then you are going to have to put love of truth, rather than excitement and drama, at the centre of your world. I just can’t be with someone who has it any other way.’ I am not used to ultimatums and God, it sent shivers down my spine (the good kind). It made me sit up and listen.

He claimed, and stands by this claim to this day, that despite what I might think, I am actually ten times more interesting when I’m sweating it out and wrestling with the truth of a matter than when I’m off in fantasy land. He said that he loved me more when I was just being myself and hanging out with him; even when life was humdrum, rest assured he didn’t find me boring in any way. That to seek truth and love honesty might not always be the easiest path, but was always the right, more fulfilling way. That my own personal truths when I discovered them would be more thought provoking and impressive than any half cooked exaggeration or tall tale I could come up with.

That was pretty much the nicest, most inspiring vote of confidence that anyone has ever said to me and I took his words on board. I did this, not because of his ultimatum, although by then I wanted to be his lifelong partner more than anything I have ever wanted, but because I recognised that following his guidance would make me a better, happier person. Because more than anything I was terrified of winding up like my friend, who was getting more delusional by the day. I would speak to her on the phone and she didn’t even know who she was anymore, and her lies had escalated to the extent that she was claiming ridiculous and scary things: that she was giving blowjobs to serial killers in prison, had a heroin addict stalker and was working for the government as a spy. It sounds strange to say this now, but Owen’s upfront truthfulness was the antidote to what could have been seriously dangerous territory. It was like the lighthouse beacon warning me off the rocks, a guiding light to save me from the course I was set on. His integrity was to me back then the most important and challenging thing I had ever witnessed, and to this day, it is the thing I treasure and value most about my husband.

His plan to make an ‘honest woman’ out of me has (mostly) been successful, and despite the odd setback I continue to grow in truthfulness and integrity everyday, but the path hasn’t always been easy. I still fall into old ways sometimes. I find myself saying the silliest of things, like the bus fare was four pounds instead of three pounds fifty. Or saying I’ve done things when I haven’t. It’s stupid, petty, and basically a bad habit that I am still working on.

Like I say, I very rarely out and out lie these days but one of the remaining problems I have with false speech revolves around the way I handle my health. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I have suffered mental health problems for years and until very recently I’ve dealt with them, basically, by lying my ass off. “I’m fine” was my mantra, chanted to everyone I met in the street, to my friends, to my family… even to Owen. Unless I was drunk and banging my head against a wall, or so depressed I could hardly breathe, I would basically try and put on a smiley front. I think a lot of people who know me think of me as a ‘happy depressive’ and that, my friends, is because I lie. I’m not saying I always succeed in convincing people. But I always try. This ‘coping’ method that I would halfheartedly defend (who wants to hear all my fucked up twisted thoughts? I’ll have no friends left) was exposed for the sham it really was last year.

When I attempted suicide in October, ten minutes previously I had been on the phone to my own father, saying the same hollow phrase; ‘I’m fine’. My head was in pieces, I was literally tearing my hair out, but I simultaneously laughed at all his jokes and the conversation was light-hearted and normal. We talked about the Sheffield Wednesday scores, what I was having for lunch and the relative merits of crackerbread over ricecakes. Then I put the phone down and emptied the contents of my lithium bottle down my throat. That, right there, is the danger of false speech. That is because when you are not honest about your feelings, when you lie, when you do the whole bottling/ stiffupperlip/ braveface/ bullshit, it always ends up badly. Maybe not always as dramatically as that, but always badly. After that incident my relationships with those closest to me were damaged hugely, as none of them really knew anymore whether what I was saying was anywhere near the truth. It is only now, months later, that the wounds are even starting to heal and I think in the case of my father the trust between us has been damaged almost irreparably. I should have just faced the truth, and confided in those around me; the many friends and family who love me dearly rather than relying on my acting skills and my lies in a vain attempt to cover up the truth. Painful as it is to admit you’re not coping, it is more painful to die of liver failure, surely?

So, taking this precept is of vital importance to me, in fact I would take it tomorrow. I have already made gigantic strides in this area, and I work hard every day to become a more truthful person. I would say, out of all the precepts, this is the one that makes the most sense, speaks to me most powerfully and is ethically not much of a dilemma. I have learnt the hard way that lying is damaging, that your own false speech hurts both yourself and those around you. The ones you love the most are always at the epicentre. I have witnessed that those who tell lies, even white lies, lose the trust of those around them and this eventually brings them great pain; the loss of a friendship, or even a partner. Lies are corrosive and manipulative by nature, and even when they are well intentioned often do more harm than good in the long run. Personally, I am proud to say that I am more truthful than I have ever been, but I seriously have to learn to tell the truth about the shit that’s going on in my head, my mental state. I have to stop trying to protect those around me by telling cushioning lies and be open about my feelings and my thoughts. I guess you could even say my life depends on it.

In the beginning....

On one of the websites I’ve been reading this week the question has been raised; ‘when did you first realise you were a feminist or interested in feminist issues?’ My thoughts were too long to post, so I thought it would make a good blog. Here then, is my response to that:

One of the most seminal moments of my childhood came a few days before my seventh birthday. My parents sat me down and told me that, no, however much I nagged, this year (or any year) they weren’t prepared to buy me a sex change so I could be ‘the same’ as my brother and my best friend James. Neither were they, they insisted, prepared to call the depoll office (like I had researched) and change their daughters’ lovely and feminine hand picked name to ‘Jamie’. They were very nice about it, very reasonable. They suggested that I could have a very trendy Walkman instead, or even, (holy grail of holy grails) a tent. But a sex change? Out of the question. Anyway, why did I get these silly notions in my head? I was a girl, their little girl, and I had to get used to it. They loved me just the way I was. It was the way God had made me. Now go and play football with your brother.

It was all fairly harmless really. I don’t identify as a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body,’ or anything like that, I never desperately wanted a penis for it’s own sake or hated my physical appearance. My militant rejection of my gender was something, (as predicted by mum and dad) that I did eventually grow out of. I am not talking to you now harboring secret longings to be called Gerard with a beer gut and a big bushy beard. I am glad my parents reacted the way they did and didn’t hall me off to a psychiatrist or God forbid, the plastic surgery clinic I wanted.

But I understand gender confusion, I really do. This sex change notion was not a silly week long whim, it was part of my long term struggle to accept the fact that I was female. From being a toddler to about the age of puberty at 13 I was a diehard tomboy, complete with short hair, grazed knees and a firm anti dolls, dresses, makeup, fashion, boy bands, ponies, ballet and shopping policy (that mostly continues to this day). I refused to take part in girlie things at school; poured scorn on the daisy chain and skipping brigade and hung around mainly with the boys. I cried for days when they refused to let me, as a girl, into cub scouts with all my male friends (a policy that has rightfully been rectified). My childhood, when I wasn’t obsessively reading, consisted of endless hours of war games, cowboys and Indians, kung Fu fighting, football, water fights, den building, cops and robbers, etc. I just couldn’t identify with sitting and looking pretty or brushing your hair for fun (in fact, brushing your hair was stupid full stop). Playing ‘house’ or ‘mummies and daddies’ was equally pointless, I had a perfectly good house and a mummy and daddy. Come to think of it, they were both pretty boring. My idea of a good time was dissecting a dead frog in the road with the scalpel from my microscope set. Or playing a penalty shoot out with my two brothers until the sun went down and we all went inside to have a burger eating competition.

I was very strong willed, and wouldn’t do anything that compromised my ‘tomboy’ label, even if it meant putting up with bullying and abuse at school. Even if it meant I spent a lot of time feeling confused and alone. Aged nine I went as far as putting in a formal complaint to the school office against one of the dinnerladies who told me I was unladylike and had to wear a t shirt when playing football- it wouldn’t do to have me topless like all the boys in the summer heat. I said (in my terribly precocious manner) that it was discrimination against tomboys, and I didn’t tell her what to wear so she should ‘stuff off’. I think my punishment was being forbidden to play football for a week, topless or not. No one ever sides with the kids.

At the age of about eleven, I started to deduce that my problems with being a girl were not to do with myself. My issue was not my relationship to my newly discovered clitoris, my widening hips, budding breasts, or even my personality. Essentially it was with other people. This was a major epiphany that brought massive relief. It wasn’t, therefore, disgust at what I was but at what society expected me to be. It was (although I didn’t think of it in this precise terminology) the gender role I was so naturally horrified by, the heavy expectations put on little girls to be a certain way, to like certain things, to be quiet and pretty and demure. I don’t know whether it was nature or nurture that made me this way, but I certainly am not quiet, demure or even very pretty. As a child I was boisterous, opinionated, intelligent and passionate and didn’t see why I should strive to be someone I wasn’t just because it was the done thing. Yes, I realised, it was people’s attitudes that needed to alter, not me. A sex change was not the answer. Feminism, even though I’d never heard of it back then, certainly was.

I always instinctively identified with the suffragettes and women’s libbers I had heard about in history but I didn’t know a lot about them. I certainly didn’t know that there was a contemporary movement. Then, when I was twelve or thirteen I made the wonderful discovery that was the Independent on Sunday. From my weekly cover to cover readathons, I soon got a basic handle on this controversial movement called feminism. I found, through the printed words of feminist journalists and writers that I was far from the only one who had wrestled with gender issues; I wasn’t the first who had rebelled. I studied hard and learnt important words that tripped off my tongue like bullets; patriarchy, oppression, liberation, sisterhood. As I learnt about the issues involved and the historic depth of female suffering I sometimes sat under my favourite tree in the back garden and cried at the unfairness of it all. On other days I sometimes laughed out loud from the sheer joy of having found kindred spirits; even if I was still a freak at school, there was a sisterhood of women out there, who, like me, wouldn’t be put in a box and told to shut up. They were inspirational, radical, empowering, a godsend to my troubled mind. I don’t even really remember most of their names now even though I would keep cuttings of their articles in a special box under my bed and read them with utmost devotion. Although they are forgotten to me now, the point is that these women existed; I was not alone. I might have been the only girl at my school with short hair and a Sheffield Wednesday obsession, but there had been others before me who broke the mold.

I was, by the age of about fourteen, a committed feminist. Discovering the movement was such a relief to me, I have always been proud to identify with it and its history, even the bits that are troubling or difficult. I believe wholeheartedly in Feminism’s essential truths and I devour any information relating to it with great interest and urgency. As a writer, I have always written about feminist issues (and sometimes struggled with them at great length). I have tried to contribute to the movement in any way I can; encouraging other women to see both the wonderful things we have achieved and the massive mountain we still have to climb. Feminism, for me, was an instinctual thing. I have such a strong sense of equality, diversity and fair play, and such a healthy sense of rebellion that I could never see the world in any other way. For me, it wasn’t like I had a feminist epiphany where I read Germaine Greer and my life turned around. It was more like I would read feminists and think, ‘yeah, I think that too’. Discovering the feminist movement was like a homecoming, it gave me a supportive, nurturing space to put down roots so I could grow proudly into myself, my female self, and gradually out of Jamie.

Buddhing Sexuality

Warning, friends of Jen, I am going to talk frankly about sex in the following article. If you think you might find this disturbing, look away now!

3. I undertake the precept to refrain from sexual misconduct (adultery, rape, exploitation, etc).

Number three, the way I interpret it is simple, and will, I think, be easy to keep. Buddha, if he was teaching now, however, might disagree. The way I see it though, I do refrain from sexual misconduct; I am a married woman and even when temptation has sometimes come along, I have never cheated on O and hopefully never will. I define cheating as sleeping with somebody else, or doing anything sexually (even kissing) with somebody else behind his back. As for the heavy stuff, I have never raped anyone, sold someone in to sex slavery, prostitution or supported someone who did. Just to clear that up! I don’t even watch porn very often, hardly at all. I think, sexually, I am reasonably ethical. I try to be a caring, considerate lover, in the bedroom and out. I put O's needs first, and am enthusiastic about making sure he is satisfied. Sure, there’s the whole lust thing. I have a (very) dirty mind and sometimes get the occasional crush on people other than O, and once or twice I’ve, hand on heart, got a bit too carried away; started wondering if I should propose a threesome to get it out of my system! But, at least so far, its all been strictly mental activity only. To be fair, I have always told O honestly about how I’m feeling and never tried to conceal anything from him. And he tells me when he has a silly crush himself, and I have always been understanding about that in return.

After all, we’re human, we have human urges, and I believe that a lot of problems happen in relationships when you start lying about those urges or pretending to yourself that they’re not happening. Even in the past when those urges have got a bit out of hand, I’m glad that I was honest about them rather than covering them up. So I guess that if I’m going to have a problem with any of this precept, it’s going to be if people start demanding that I’m mentally pure. Fuck that. I love O more than myself, he knows that, and we are going to be together forever, but, newsflash, it’s not only men who have problems keeping their eyes to themselves. I can’t help but notice the fit Rastafarian businessman who uses the pool at the same time as me. I can’t stop my eyes lingering over his body and pausing in certain interesting places. Call it weakness, call it nature, call it what you will, sometimes I simply can’t help myself.

As well as a wonderful, loving and exciting sex life with O, I also have a healthy relationship with my vibrator, and if Buddha is going to have a problem with that, then I might have a problem with him. Fantasy and imagination are a big part of my sexual drive, and masturbation plays a big role in that, and always has. And guess what? My sexual fantasies aren’t all big bunches of flowers and running through long grass being kissed under the old Oak tree by a tall dark stranger like Mills and Boon writers would have you believe. I do not, either, as Ann Summers suggests, fantasise about a stripper with an oiled chest, a 13” cock and an even bigger ego. These, in my experience are not what most women fantasise about. In reality we’re often a lot darker, a lot more twisted than that. As the title of a certain best selling book goes: ‘screw the roses, send me the thorns’, and I think a lot of women can relate to that.

You know what else? I’m unapologetic for this. I don’t feel guilt or shame, that’s one of the reasons I can post this on such a public forum. I think its part of a healthy, natural sexual life and part of being a liberated woman is allowing yourself to come to terms with these desires. I can’t imagine anything worse than the bland, missionary focused orgasm faking sex life that frankly, so many women in Britain have to endure on a daily basis. By having a sexual relationship with myself, as well as with my husband I am able to be more explorative, mentally and physically, and more satisfied as I know my own body better and how it works so well. I don’t know where Buddhism really stands on issues like this, but if he is foolish enough to attempt it, Buddha is going to have one hell of a time trying to separate me from my rabbit! So yes, precept three is very much a matter of interpretation. I suspect my concepts of sexuality may differ somewhat from the Buddha’s who did not live in an age of sex toys and pornography. However, I hope that if I were in conversation with him today, he could see that, in my sexual conduct, I do try to be ethical, loving, and respectful even if it’s not the way things have traditionally been done.

The Birthday Blues

Oh God, how much I love The Guardian. Or The Observer as it is called on this long soapy showering, real coffee drinking, should be eating hot buttery croissants (but actually eating lukewarm ready break) day of rest. And God, how much I love the fact that it is free for me to read on the internet. I truly hope it always stays that way. There are some thought provoking articles in there this Sunday, including this article about Prozac, which got me thinking:

Prozac is twenty years old this week. Somehow I didn’t think it was as old as that, but then don't listen to me, occasionally I still go to write 1999 when signing in the date box next to my name. Sometimes I think I might, on some level, not have fully left behind my A level years. Part of me, somewhere, still longs for a headspace free of responsibilities. I hark back to a time when I carried around volumes of my mispelt stoner poetry that, naturally, was on the verge of getting published. Back then, everything that was happening to me was the first time it had happened to anyone. I was so irresistible that my religious studies teacher was about to leave his much loved wife and kids for me. I just knew I could get straight A’s without doing any work. Of course I could single-handedly bring down conservative Christianity, Patriarchy, and Right wing politics in general just by reading Bukowski, Nietzsche’s ‘The Antichrist’ and Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ like they had only just been published and were written for me alone. Back then, consuming Marlborough reds, tenner deals of petrol laced ‘rocky’ and whole bottles of Jack Daniels comprised the highlights of my tiny self absorbed existence. Delusion was piled upon delusion but I never quite managed to kid myself. Inside me a tornado whirled and consequently the year 1999, the last of my school career, was also the date I first got treated for depression.

The doctor’s appointment was short. That’s mostly what I remember. I was very nervous, my hands were shaking. I think, although I am embarrassed to admit it, it might have been the first time I had been to the doctors without one of my parents present and I was terrified. In hindsight now I know my symptoms were pretty mild. I wasn’t sleeping well, was feeling agitated and distracted, couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork and was off food. My thoughts, although often intense, had been getting darker and bleaker in nature. In short, I just wasn’t feeling my usual chirpy self. It was like I was trying to run a race with treacle on my shoes. I also was worrying a bit obsessively about some stuff that had gone on in the past, and this was manifesting itself in some ways even I knew were strange; like not being able to sleep unless I counted to a hundred twenty five times without missing a count and if I did then starting back at the beginning (hence the not sleeping). But in no way was I chronic. I was not suicidal, I did not self harm, I was functioning in my day to day life. I wasn’t crying non stop, my mood wasn’t all that low a lot of time, even my attentive parents hadn’t really noticed a dramatic change.

In other words, the weird counting thing aside, most of my symptoms could have just been put down to A’ level stress or teenage angst. Maybe in a different age they would have been. But there are three key details I remember about that doctor’s appointment:

a) There was a Prozac clock on the wall tick tocking away as we spoke.
b) The doctor was writing with an Eli Lilly pen.
c) Her coffee, which smelt nice, was contained in a mug that proudly displayed the word ‘Prozac’.

And less than five minutes later, I left her room, clutching a piece of paper in my hand that said words which amounted to the same thing: ‘Fluoxetine: 20 mg (one to be taken twice a day)’

Questions asked to me in that interview:

What’s the problem? (I told her the above symptoms)
Are you feeling suicidal (I laughed and said no)

Diagnosis after that literally three minute assessment:

Mild to moderate clinical depression. Possible obsessive compulsive disorder.

Treatment:

Prozac for six months to a year. Then come back and see me.

I don’t even think this is a bad diagnosis in terms of our health care system. Something wasn’t quite right with me and I think many psychiatrists and doctors up and down the country would have made the same call. As skeptical as I am about the psychiatric classification system you have to have some kind of guidelines for diagnosis, I suppose. The real beef I have is with the thoroughness and type of treatment that was offered to me and the care that was available. First of all, taking three minutes to diagnose someone with a mental illness, even if it is one of the milder so called common colds of the mental health spectrum is simply not good enough. The patient education and aftercare system was appalling, after being diagnosed with what to me was quite a significant problem, I was just left to get on with my life. Not even a fucking leaflet or a Samaritans phone number. This is worsened further by the fact that I was, technically at this time, a child. I had just turned seventeen years old and I was very confused about the whole thing. I was somewhat educated, I knew from reading bits and bobs on the internet and from knowing friends of the family with similar problems that having this diagnosis didn’t make me ‘nuts’. But no one, not even the doctor checked to make sure I knew that.

When I left that appointment, and for months afterwards, I felt dramatically more ill than I had done before I went in, simply because my symptoms had been given a name and had been categorically brought into the realm of ‘sickness’. It reminded me of when, as a kid, you went to the doctors with a sore throat thinking you might, if you’re lucky get given a day off school and then are told you have tonsillitis and need antibiotics. From that moment on, even if previously you had been feeling okish, for the next week it takes a crowbar to prise you from the sofa, you feel like you have swallowed sandpaper and all you can eat is ice cream and tomato soup. It's genuine, but it is also, to a certain extent, psychosomatic. Firstly, this is a very common reaction to being diagnosed with any illness, but especially mental illnesses, and someone should have been there to talk me through that. Secondly, I’m not saying my symptoms should have been ignored, but by medicalising them and giving me a diagnosis when I was so young, sending me into the wider world with a label (always a dangerous thing to give a teenager), rather than to a counsellor to talk about some of the stuff that was bothering me and thoroughly assessing my case, was, in my opinion, wrong. Also, unhealthy aspects of my life that I now know were having a massive impact on my mental health, such as my bad diet, my excessive alcohol and drug use and lack of exercise, were never even mentioned, let alone explored. If all the ‘common sense’ stuff had been dealt with before telling me I was sick and pouring Prozac down my neck, well things could have turned out very differently.

They talk about cannabis being a gateway drug for heroin and crack. Now, I don’t personally follow that logic, but if I did then I’d have to concede that Prozac was my psychiatric gateway drug. Since that day I got written the prescription, nearly a decade ago, I have not been off psychotropic drugs. In a typical dealer fashion, they have got harder and harder, pushed with more and more force and coercion. As my mental health deteriorated further over the years following that appointment, I moved from Prozac and Seroxat to Lithium and Valium to Risperdone, Stelazine, Beta Blockers, and dozens more. It’s got to the point now where I’m practically a drugs connoisseur.

There are, it seems, two ways of looking at this:

1) The official line. My episode, at the age of seventeen was clearly worrying, with the potential to develop into something disastrous. The experienced doctor who had seen this thing many times before was good to pick up on these signs and treat them accordingly. Drug treatment is the most quick acting and effective treatment for depression recommended by the NHS, and Prozac one of the most effective in this family of drugs, especially considering the OCD type symptoms I was displaying. The doctor followed what was the recommended course of action at the time. It was simply unfortunate that I was resistant to Prozac, and many of the other drugs she and subsequent doctors threw at me, My illness, now rediagnosed as the more chronic and lifelong bipolar disorder is notoriously difficult to treat, and with hindsight, it is unsurprising that a small dose of Prozac didn’t make me better. However, the doctor, not knowing those facts, acted correctly.

Or

2) My line. If I had been offered counseling in that first appointment which had been the course of action I wanted (I was, in fact astounded that it was that easy to get a prescription) rather than the tablets that the drug pushing companies pressure their GPs to prescribe, then I may have got to the root of the problem a lot quicker and never needed drugs. Also, If my symptoms had been treated as normal and teenage, rather than sick and mentally ill, at least in the first instance, then I may have thought of the situation in a whole different light and who knows where it would have ended up. I just have this nagging feeling in my head that without all the mind fucking chemicals that were relentlessly pumped in experimental cocktails and huge quantities into my head at such an early age, my brain could be a very different place right now. Also, from a psychological point of view, without all the confusing (and often conflicting) diagnostic labels being stuck on me like superglue, maybe I would have a better self image and be leading a healthier, happier life. There is something fundamentally damaging to be told your brain and personality isn’t working right before you even hit your eighteenth birthday. After all, self perception is of paramount importance. As a young woman to be told by those in authority that you are sick in the head, with all the stigma and implications of such a diagnosis, could be something that, in itself, makes you sicker. In other words, maybe I’d be better if I’d have never gone to the damn doctors in the first place.

I’ll never prove it of course. The establishment will always argue that I needed the medicine, that it has been good for me, that without it I might even be dead. And maybe they’re right. But I will never forget that doctor sipping from the Prozac mug, and the way she didn’t even pause for thought before signing the brain of a child away to a chemical that, I later learnt, was surrounded even back then by controversy and doubt. So happy birthday, Prozac. You may have saved a lot of lives, but you’ve also helped trivialize and oversimplify a complex and dehabilitating illness, and have changed the face of psychiatry to one dominated by branding, advertisements, and false, false promises. Once, back in 1999, I believed them. Now I can’t help but feel a little bitter. Forgive me if I don’t sing whilst you blow out your candles.

Love and Theft

I undertake the precept to refrain from stealing. (lit. "taking what is not offered")

When I first read this Buddhist precept my reaction was: “That’s easy peasy. I’m not a thief. “

Then I started thinking.

The first thing that sprang to mind is that I have stolen things, at least in my early life, mostly shoplifting when I was a teenager. This was mostly due to the peer pressure of some rebellious ‘friends’ I was trying to impress at the time who thought that kind of thing was cool. I didn’t, but was sick of being bullied and needed some allies so I went along with the crowd. This lack of conviction and deep suspicion that what I was doing was wrong meant that I was never very good at it. During our illicit sprees at Meadowhall shopping centre I would turn bright red and shake when I was doing it (always very clumsily), look incredibly suspicious when I was leaving the shop (looking over my shoulder every two seconds with a look of blind panic on my face then stumbling towards the exit). Afterwards, I would feel so guilty I would worry all the way home on bus and then go straight up to my bedroom and cry myself to sleep. Once I actually went back the next day and put the thing back on the shelf.

Then there’s the stealing from my parents. As I have mentioned before, I smoked for many years of my life. I mostly funded this by part time work, but when my own money ran out it was not unknown for me to, in the midst of a morning craving, dip into my parent’s money pot. They trustingly left it on the table for transport, food and essential things but I would often help myself to a couple of quid for a packet of Marlborough reds. I felt guilty about this too, very guilty, but I would justify it by telling myself that I would put the money back, one day, when I was richer. It was just a loan, a secret loan, granted, but it wasn’t stealing, not from my own parents. Anyway, I thought, if the bastards hadn’t have stopped my allowance (when they discovered I was smoking) then I wouldn’t have had to borrow the money. Needless to say, to this day I haven’t put the money (which probably amounts to several hundred pounds) back, although I fully intend to, when I am rich. Who knows if I will though. I haven’t stolen from my parents since I left home, nearly eight years ago. However, I still feel bad about this betrayal of trust. I know its something that most teenagers do at some point or other, especially if they have a semi serious nicotine and pot habit to feed, but still, I feel bad.

In more recent times I have stopped such blatant stealing, in such black and white terms but there are still instances I can think of where I frequently take what’s not offered. Recently me and O had a huge argument because he discovered I was eating chocolate bars and pasties when I was out in town, despite an agreement we had that junk food is off limits for both of us. It was made doubly bad because it’s him who is earning all the money and working hard paying for things like my gym membership so I can lose this damn weight. Hardly ethical living there, Jen.

Then you get onto the very, very, very difficult issue of downloading and copyright. A lot of our music is pirated and to some extent I agree with O’s strong views on the stupidity and unjustness of the copyright laws. Downloading has made me way more knowledgeable about the music industry than I could have ever afforded to be if I was actually paying for my tunes. I know more artists, am more experimental with my tastes and less taken in by hype and packaging. Still, I have never felt that easy about doing it. It is technically theft, even though nearly all of my generation do it at some point in their lives. It is undoubtedly, from a Buddhist point of view, taking what is not offered, therefore if I were to take the precepts, I guess I would have to stop.
This is where it all gets a bit tricky in my head.

1. I like music and don’t want to have no access to it. Especially since I have no money to pay for it.

2. I believe that by buying music from major record labels you are supporting a corporation rather than an artist. I also believe that most of the major corporate record labels have actually done more harm than good to the music industry. It’s better, if you want to actually support the artist, to go and see them live as much more of your money will go straight to their pocket.

3. However, since I have chosen him to be the primary moral guide in my life, based on my knowledge of his actions and his teachings, it is important to ask:

Q: Would Buddha, if teaching now, have used Limewire?

A: Probably not.

Which leads me to:

4. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a kleptomaniac, but considering I have indulged in stealing, albeit guiltily, for a large part of my life, do I actually believe that all theft is wrong? Am I at one with the Buddha on this, or are we at loggerheads? After all, my absolute childhood hero (apart from Just William) was Robin Hood, who, as the legend goes, ripped off the rich to feed the poor. Part of me still loves that idea. There is so much injustice in the world. Why not take from those who have screwed you and your beloved planet over? Why not get the corporate fatcats where it hurts?

But when I say these words, I get the same feeling I do when I was talking to the rebellious kids in Meadowhall shopping centre. I start to feel uncomfortable, overwhelmed by that sense of over justification and lack of real conviction. Despite it being the so called radical thing to say, this is not what I really believe.

Blame it on a childhood overdose on Jesus if you want, but in my heart of hearts I think theft is wrong. I don’t feel proud of all the stealing I’ve done in my life, in fact, quite the opposite. I can’t simply make myself feel at ease with it all by saying to myself :‘all property is theft’. At the end of the day, I think stealing is a negative action, and when you steal someone always ends up getting hurt. It may not be the person you think and the pain could be financial, emotional, psychological or physical. I believe that inflicting pain is wrong, whoever you inflict it upon. There is no such thing as a person who deserves pain or deserves to suffer. Even if they by their actions have harmed other people, this wrong is not solved by harming them. At the end of the day one of the Buddha’s central guiding teachings is that you should treat all beings equally and do harm to none. In my eyes theft is a harmful action, and so should be avoided.

I also believe in treating other people how I would like to be treated myself, (that old chestnut) and the times I have been stolen from have hurt me. The pain ranged from panic and rage when I had my wallet stolen to just vague annoyance that people in my halls of residence had been at my milk again. Whatever the depth of your reaction though, being stolen from is never a pleasant experience. When I think of my own stealing, of my parents maybe not being able to afford a meal out because I had swiped the last tenner, when talented bands I love lose their record contract because of declining sales, when Owen can’t have that book he wanted because I spent 3 pounds on a bacon and sausage sandwich, I think you selfish selfish bitch. That’s the crux of the matter for me, stealing is a very self centered act where you put your own desires over those of another being. In doing so you are, at least in Buddhist terms, not acting in the spirit of compassion and generosity but in terms of your own ego’s hoarding and selfishness.

Once again though, as with many of these precepts, it’s put your money where your mouth is time. Am I really ready to make the commitment and turn my back on free downloads? Am I really sure I’m sure? Its one thing believing and quite another to do. I am very attached to music and the music scene and the idea of going without it not only scares me but goes against the grain as well.

So you see, thinking about these precepts is really challenging me. O thinks the whole concept of subscribing to a formula of set precepts is outdated and ridiculous, but that’s an entry for another time. For now, its just good to be thinking these things through, and wrestling with moral issues, which, if I’m honest, I had been avoiding doing since leaving the church all those years ago.