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….)

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.