Over the years, I have experienced some pretty extreme periods of loneliness. It led to my nearly taking my own life. We need to love more and compete less to stop others from facing the same problems.
1989: A fight for a dining table seat
Until I went to the Royal Hospital School in 1987, I was growing up alright. Eccentric but with a developing character that beguiled many and repelled only a few. I wasn’t ‘normal’ given my particular background—by age 12 I’d spent half my life abroad and never had what one would call ‘community’ as many grow up in rural Dorset—or, for that matter, the school’s feeder cities of Plymouth and Portsmouth.
Schools can be ugly. 700 sons of seafarers? Nearly every old boy I speak to refers to the Lord of the Flies novel when they remember that place. I was rapidly picked out as the white crow, and white crows get pecked to death. I won’t go into the politics, but suffice to say I was too young to play the high-stakes game I was forced to play and lost.
At the school dining hall each table had 12 places. In my house year group, a 13th boy arrived. We decided that I should fight the new boy for the place at the table. Bare knuckled, no holds barred fighting. We were semi-conscious on our chairs having pummelled each other to a standstill when one of my ‘friends’ psyched me out to go for the killer blow. My opponent got a good punch in, and I was out for a full 2 minutes. For the next three years, I would be the ‘school reject’. Open season to attack and abuse me as I had no one to back me up.
Needless to say I avoid much social contact even to this day, more than 30 years later.
An Englishman in New York
I went to sea on a tall ship in the US for a year straight after my A levels. By this stage I’d discovered that happiness was at the bottom of a bottle, so being a sailor was a great place to get happy, as soon as we hit the dock (and frequently before I’d discharged my duties, getting into trouble!). We had to spend the winter in a skeleton crew of just myself and the Bos’un in a marina in a place called Black Rock, Connecticut. Black Rock was a notorious crack ghetto. White boys didn’t walk outside the marina after dark, and white people driving were told not to stop at red traffic lights by the police for fear of being robbed or shot.
There was a bar next to the ship, but being under age (I was 19 by this stage). The minimum drinking age was 21. I wasn’t allowed in for fear of making a tit of myself and the bar losing its license. Winter came in with around 30ft of snow.
The song rang in my ears by Sting, an Englishman in New York:
“Oh, I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien
I’m an Englishman in New York
Oh, I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien
I’m an Englishman in New York”
It is a song of dejection and loneliness due to cultural isolation. You may disagree, but that’s how I felt as I spent eight hours a day on various jobs getting the ship ready for the next season, and the other 16 with just myself.
At this stage I was in a letter-writing exchange with a girl I’d known since we were seven year olds in Virginia Beach. She was at university in North Carolina. Emily would go on to save my life from much farther away than she was while I was in Black Rock.
Depression bit hard. 3500 miles from home and without any real friends. It was horrifying after three months, but soon enough, new crew came aboard, and the next season would begin.
Hop, skip and jump to Bristol
By the time I’d finished my degree and taken every mind-altering substance I could get my hands on at university in Southampton, my depression had developed into something far worse. I was tormented by perceptions I only partially rejected as unreal. I was very weird and no one liked spending time with me.
I moved to Bristol. I fell out with my family and became homeless for two weeks, staying in a youth hostel while I was setting about getting a bedsit. I moved into the unheated bedsit and temped for a year before getting thrown out due to rent arrears. Again, I would find another bedsit in time to not be homeless and then fried every temp agency in Bristol.
There were weeks when the only person I’d speak to was the checkout assistant at the corner shop. Christmas was hell on earth as the whole world was apparently having fun. Having become jobless, I was entering the worst time of my life from pure social isolation. I took to walking the three or so miles to the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The worst day was when I stood on its wall, about to jump 350ft to my death. I had a flash of a question: “Who would tell Emily?” No one in my family knew we were emailing and I was frightened she might only have complete radio silence on my death. That made me step off the wall and walk home.
Alive, I was rescued
I started talking about my perceptions to my family. This is a tale we laugh about to this day as I basically scared the crap out of my father due to something that happened to him in the Royal Navy. My perceptions were coincidental to and unrelated to a kidnapping attempt in the Cold War. He ferreted about and asked the powers that be before tricking me into going to see my GP, where I spoke openly about what I perceived. I soon saw a psychiatrist and talked my way out of the mental hospital and into a course at the local day hospital.
I was allocated shared social housing—a house full of fellow schizophrenics in their 20’s. Five years later, I would do my Master’s Degree and go on to get married and become a full-time writer.
So you know my tale. What for you?
In my view, I was lucky enough to be diagnosed and treated when the NHS was well funded and budgets were only a theory. The welfare state was about the welfare of those in receipt, not ‘cracking down on scroungers’. That has all changed. I have a family member I believe to have schizophrenia, and in my view, until he starts getting violent, there won’t be the resources to look after him.
Margaret Thatcher once declared the ‘death of society’. That means you either compete or die. Capitalism is about turning citizens into consumers. We competitively consume, and if really good, consumers will give a grandmother a right hook at Black Friday sales to get that TV off her. We no longer look out for one another; we compete. While the world where everyone kept an eye out for one another was carefully destroyed, I was lucky enough to be looked after by the state that hadn’t quite been destroyed by that stage.
Now in Dorset, I see much stronger bonds than I ever did in Bristol. Some say you aren’t from around here unless you have been here for 30 years. I have found some great people locally, even so.
My outlook has been shaped by my experiences. I will try to look after those in need. I will always try to find time to talk to someone. I am never too busy to stop to talk to someone who needs help. You never know—that moment of kindness and thought may just give them that impetus to stop them from harming themselves.
We need to love more and compete less.
