Changing Lanes and Breaking Down

For two days my posts have been music-orientated. This is a fair reflection on the fact that music was such a huge part of my life (still is but in a very different way now). What Jane wanted to know was, how did I get from there to where I am now so I want to write about the first part of that journey today.

Leaving music behind was an almost impossible task particularly as I thrashed around wondering what on earth my life was for if I was no longer trying to get somewhere as a musician. Mostly I did not regret walking out on the best opportunity I’d ever had to make a full time career of it, to make a living from it. But at times I did think I had been an idiot as I had no other transferable skills I could think of. Except…

…As a kid it had been writing, not music, which had most fascinated me. I tried to write a book when I was about nine or ten years old, got seven chapters in and then forgot about it. Sadly I no longer have those seven chapters; no longer really have anything material from my childhood besides one or two toys. Alongside the songs which poured out of me as I grew up there were occasional stories and some poems too. At first I did not see these as of any value, just thought they were attempts to explore creative energy when songwriting wasn’t quite happening for a day or a week. Eventually I wrote a poem or two I was proud of and even managed to get one published in a book. It was a vanity project – the sort of thing they put your poem in if you agree to purchase a copy of the book. Still, there I was in print.

After quitting my musical vocation I worked at a few jobs, found I was a relatively fast learner for menial tasks if they had some element of creativity to them, but also found that they rarely held my interest for long. In three or four years I drifted through quite a lot of jobs – bartender, chamber person in a hotel, model painter, saw operator for a small company hand-making decorative clocks, delivery driver, tele-sales person, and, crucially, I spent some time volunteering as a youth worker. It was during the youth work that I was nudged towards using my musical knowledge and ended up supervising the efforts of a group of youngsters who wanted to form a band. They started out without the ability to play any instruments but with a lot of enthusiasm. After those sessions two of the people involved went on to sing in public and some of the others took some guitar lessons. And I felt as though I should learn from how much I enjoyed being able to share some of the things I had experienced as a musician and see if I couldn’t find another way to use my knowledge.

I’d love to say that my plan to do so worked perfectly and that I began to write gig reviews and occasional articles for a local magazine. Well, I did write for that magazine but it actually fell in my lap rather than happening because of any clear-thought plan of mine. A friend wanted to launch a listings magazine for the area and knew from past experience that one way to make such mags interesting was to ensure there was a fair bit of editorial as well as the pages and pages of advertising which ensures revenue for that type of publication. As I was still sometimes gigging myself, to supplement my income rather than as a way of being ‘discovered’, I wrote my reviews under a pseudonym. I quickly found that the alias allowed me to be more honest about the bands I was watching perform than I might have been if people had known it was me. So one or two of the reviews were pretty scathing. Most of them were encouraging and positive but once or twice I watched experienced bands failing to connect with their audience or simply playing bad music, and I wrote it how I saw it. Oh the controversy. Which of course made the magazine more notorious, increased our readership and pleased the owner no end.

From writing for that magazine I went on to get articles and reviews in quite a lot of other local publications (the national ones always sent me polite rejection letters by return of post). I broadened my scope by writing theatre and cinema reviews as well as music ones, which meant that I was given a lot of free tickets to see plays and films and even go to art exhibitions. I tried never to pretend I knew more than I did but to record my personal response to the performance/installation I was reviewing. Writing became a new bug for me and as well as the reviews and the songs which were still coming out at a reasonable rate, I wrote more poems than I had before and also started work on some short stories, most of which lay unfinished.

What happened next seemed like the culmination of several years of struggle and tragedy. With hindsight it proved to be the most momentous turning point of my life to date. Put very simply, I had a breakdown. There were plenty of contributing factors. Four years earlier I had split up with my daughter’s mother, acrimoniously and, largely because of my own inability to manage healthy communication with the mother, I estranged myself from my daughter’s life. My next relationship brought another child into the world, my son. His mum already had a little girl when we got together, a wide-eyed, curly-mopped little girl. Devastatingly she died before our son was born, aged just sixteen months old. It is impossible to say what emotions people experience when a child dies. All I can think is that, if my son had not already been conceived we might not have felt we had a great deal to keep living for.

Our relationship lasted three more years after that tragic turn of events but I think it was inevitable in the end that we would separate. Some people cling together after such things, because they know the other person is the only one in the world who truly understands what they have been through. Other people fall apart because they know that together they will forever remind one another of the worst of all possible times. We fell into the latter category. After we broke up I was at yet another crossroads in my life. Two failed relationships. Two children (one of whom I was a stranger to) by two different women. No real job, just pin money from reviews and a whole bunch of bills to pay. No apparent prospects.

When Sean had killed himself some years earlier I never imagined I myself could ever feel so desperate that I would want to die. And yet it happened. From someone who has always had a somewhat healthy fear of death I transformed into a person who was more than ready to throw in the towel. Before I could succeed, however, a concerned friend made me go to see my doctor who recommended that I spend some time in a local hospital. As I walked through the entrance to the place I felt that this was it, I was a diagnosed lunatic and things really had fallen to pieces for me now. Over the first few days I found it hard to look anyone in the eye; not the nurses or the the doctors, not even my fellow patients. The only glimmer of humour I found myself capable of was of the gallows variety when I went in for my first formal assessment and found I was facing a panel of some six members of staff. They asked all manner of questions, trying to discern what label to stick on my present state of mental health. When I was asked if I felt there were some kind of plot I finally managed to crack a smile. “I’d assume there are plenty of plots going on in the world,” I answered, “But they’d involve politicians, or royalty, or important people. Can’t really see anyone bothering to plot about me, can you?” I didn’t realize at the time but this moment of glibness assured them that I was merely clinically depressed as opposed to having a form of inherent psychiatric disorder. Phew!

The details of why I came to see my breakdown as more of a breakthrough can wait until tomorrow. For now I will finish by saying that by the end of that week I was more than comfortable with staying at the hospital for a while – it was warm, they fed me regularly, I was surrounded by helpful staff and also by people who were going through something similar to me. So I stopped feeling like a freak and a failure and decided that I’d just been going through a really, really rough patch, just like my new friends.