STORIES

Today I’m missing the man who sat on a milk crate in the middle of Union Square, New York City, selling vegetable peelers.

He was, it’s important to note, always dressed in a tailored suit.

I lost my virginity in LA to a boy with a leopard print mohawk. I was a teenager so I felt like I’d just found cheat codes to a much cooler life.

However the following is also true: I lost my virginity to a boy with a Pikachu tattoo whose mum liked me more than he did.

I was 17 when I left Hastings for the bright lights of London. It was never by choice, I was way too young, I just escaped a situation that has me in trauma therapy 16 years later…

It’s no secret that music can offer us a source of escape during our darkest moments. For me, one of the go-to mood-lifters has always been The Stone Roses - Waterfall, as a welcome reminder to ‘carry on through it all’ whatever chaos life swings my way - a great deal in recent years.

So before you read on, I only talk from my own life experiences and I am by no means enlightened. I’m a 29yr old recovering alcoholic (hello my names Luke and I’m an alcoholic) ex cocaine wrongdoer and generally a bit fucking unwell.

“I am not a victim. I am a survivor.”

This is what I kept telling myself when shaking violently whilst crying uncontrollably.

This is what I still tell myself when that buried memory comes to the forefront.

As May is mental health month I thought I’d share something that I’ve been reflecting on recently for anyone who’s struggling, in whatever capacity. This may be a really obvious thing to say but I’ve realised lately that mental health is repairable, just like physical health.

And what about your mum?

Oh, my mum? She died when I was five. God that’s young.

Yeah, I guess it is, but you know it’s made me strong and you can’t really miss what you never had.

I made my therapist cry. He's not the first either!! 🤣

Well, that was embellished for dramatic effect. His face went red and he welled up....it still counts.

Tonight, I feel like I’m losing it.

And everything started off so well earlier.

Poor B has a nasty mouth infection and isn’t sleeping. I slept downstairs with him last night and felt surprisingly ok this morning, despite only getting two to three-hour intervals of sleep.

2019 was hands down the year in which I was called a psycho the most.

Not in a nice way either.

As ridiculous as it sounds the truth is that last March, in London, I saw an 8 minute live solo sketch called Drank- and it turned me gay.

Between passes, you poke your fingers into the crochet holes in the blanket. First the pink section, then the blue. Throwing the ball becomes secondary to your attention – you seem to do it to please me and then return to the blanket.

14 Years ago.....

Year 2000 I was diagnosed Bipolar and admitted to The Denis Scott Unit (Psychiatric Unit).

Year 2014 I have been asked if I would like to be discharged on June 14th and returned to the care of my doctor

TRIGGER WARNING: this story contains miscarriage.

I am 1 in 4. The story I wish I didn’t have to share. The club that nobody wants to be in, nor asks to join.

2 under 2 call me crazy but that’s what I wanted. I wanted the chaos, the sleepless nights, the bond of siblings very close in age. And in my mind I had that picture.

It's a Tuesday night in early October and I'm sat at the kitchen table in the share house I live in drinking a hot toddy. My housemate tells me I'd be mad to go on a first Tinder date sober. I look in the fridge for an estranged beer, all we have is a miniature bottle of whiskey. It doesn't quite fit the occasion but the warm alcohol settles my nerves. She texts me.

My sister Cyndie was pregnant with her second child conceived using IVF. Unlike her, her partner did not want another child. Her decision almost tore their relationship apart. This is her story. It’s a story about the urge to become a mother, especially when you aren’t able to naturally.

I approached motherhood with a wholly misplaced confidence. I was a teacher, specialising in early years. Children were my thing, they responded well to me; I had taught, helped and cared for hundreds in my career. So while I knew my transition to being a mother wouldn’t be seamless I had no concrete concerns aside from the common-knowledge exhaustion and some new restrictions on my life.

Sometimes a new colleague or friend will ask for my Coming Out story. These days, the question causes a quick flicker of surprise, as I forget that I am supposed to have one. How privileged I am, and how far we must have come, for me to be able to forget, even temporarily, and just… be me.

The scene: I am sitting cross legged on a round cushion, in a silent, darkened room. I sense the flicker of candlelight through my closed eyelids, and the heady scent of sandalwood smoke creeps into my nostrils. I can hear the patter of rain on the windows outside, but I feel warm and still, wrapped in a black shawl.

When I watched the news and saw that schools and nurseries were closing, I walked away from my children and crumbled. Besides from a deadly virus doing the rounds, being locked-in with my two darling children for the foreseeable was personally my biggest fear.

In the summer I want nothing more than to lie on the beach in St Leonards.

A few years ago I started messing about with pebbles, making odd characters that I’d photograph on my Turkish towel before shaking them out and returning them to the wild. I made a lot of them, infact it became quite an obsession.

“Please don’t cut her down”

Jan lent against the rotting beam of her porch, squinting into the afternoon sky. It was late October and the sun shone on her skin, illuminating the deep lines of life around her mouth that framed the gray of her eyes.

“It has a life you know, it is older than me and you a thousand times over, the things she has seen Lily”

The problem with obsessively trying to prove one’s not mad, is that it makes one look very mad. Well, that’s the case when you’re a patient on a psychiatric ward anyway. It’s like prison, where everyone is innocent. The nurse asked us if we would like anything from the corner shop she was popping to. I requested a notebook and pen. And cigarettes.

My only legal reason to leave the house is to go to the supermarket or pharmacy, so I have taken to doing no exercise and watching music videos from the 60s, 70s and 80s - God, how lucky they had it. They could drive all night to make love to someone and Martha and the Vandellas were just out there, dancing in the street, all 4 of them, together. Imagine.

I’ve never been very well, it used to show alot (through my bones and skin) and I remember the constant comments from working at the Dragon, or the offers to chat 'because you don't look like you're doing too well' from friends, family, even strangers.

My grandma was the most petite and elegant lady I have met. She was the definition of grace. Standing at five foot tall, she always dressed impeccably and her dedication to wearing stiletto heels every day earned her the beloved family nickname of Granny Stilletos.

I am lying face down and upside down on this narrow bed, the first time I have moved from a tight foetus position in hours, possibly all day. My feet are tucked under the pillow, my hand trails on the floor and from this new viewpoint out of the corner of my eye I see her. Well I say her, but I have no idea really if it is, just an instinct to think of it as her.

Much of my young life was spent in a Toyota Hilux, or a “troopy”, which may or may not be the same thing*. To my little boy mind they were towering obelisks dusted rust-red on which you could draw little pictures with your finger in clean white eraser lines. They were hugely powerful - fortresses from the crushing Kimberly heat and cyclones and great dumb Brahman bulls that bolted across the road when they saw a car coming.

I have studied the skies, flown through trains watching them pass me by, and I them.

Absorbed.

The fading splendour, the colours giving life to that which lays beneath.

Pink bails of hey picked out by nights approaching sway.

I have swayed on the train, succumbed to its soft jog, flown with it through the flow, through the rock, through the stone of love and scent and sound.