After all the shit I told you that happened around me I was battling depression secretly… I had no idea that I would be diagnosed bipolar a few years later!
Looking back now when I see the manic episodes in my mind’s eye they are pretty erratic and funny…
I used to be sitting on the sofa at 3am and I would get the sudden urge to go for a run into my granny’s… which was 8 miles away ha ha!
I would run to her house… sit at her back doorstep for half an hour and then I would run back home!
I remember the first time I had a suicidal depression.
I was sitting writing the first article for the martial arts magazine and there it was… that ultimate voice – ‘Go and kill yourself, you’re useless’.
It hit me like one of my right hooks and it basically knocked me out.
This went on for quite some time but, when my parents and my sister left our last family home… it was just me left in the house.
By that time, I had no clients left, so I had to sign onto the dole.
I basically sat in that house using my dole money to order out food from a pizza parlour and buy cigarettes.
I hadn’t smoked since my skating days, which was weird.
I even remember finding some liquor in the house and I started drinking and I even started smoking weed again to help me sleep.
This is what they would call: self-medicating!
My mum saw a change in me when she visited one time and told me I needed to get my act together.
My father saw a change in me when I started drinking with him at a party he was at one night, because he knew I didn’t drink at all before.
And my sister was even worried about me when I came back from a full night drinking party with a local rock group!
I felt like I was turning into a monster every time I looked in the mirror when I hadn’t slept in days or I was fucking hung-over like a cunt with a sexually transmitted disease.
I eventually got offered a flat in a dodgy part of the town I had lived in all my life.
Of course I accepted but… that’s when the fear kicked in!
Me and my mother fixed up the flat so it was respectable to live in, but I couldn’t seem to get one thing out of my head – ‘How am I going to deal with all these thoughts in my mind all on my own?’
It scared the living shit out of me!
I kept putting the move off and continued to stay with my granny in a small room in her house until I was ready and then it happened.
I eventually cracked one night, in the middle of the night!
My granny rang my mum and then my mum rang my uncle…
They sat with me and told me I needed help.
I went to a mental health hospital for a couple of days (the fucking worst place to be in the fucking world). But, I stayed there until I got some help to see a psychiatrist and some medication to ease the shit going on in my head.
I remember when I got out and stood in my granny’s kitchen, I felt so fucking ashamed and estranged from the world.
My flat was ready and I moved into it and I knew I needed to deal with this head on and face to face to beat it!
Now that I was all out on my own I thought; what do I do?
I had to sign on to the sick because of my depression which was a real shitty point for me, but I knew I couldn’t work where I was at in that moment in time.
I kept up my own personal training, like running and doing bodyweight exercises.
Some old friends got back in contact with me and I started skating again.
I knew I had to leave my studies in writing but… that didn’t mean I didn’t have to stop it completely… I could read books and work on it on my own beside the moonlight and the women that lay in my bed.
SURE, WHY NOT!!!!
I went to library and got a card and then I filled my boots with books on: poetry, stories, screenwriting and philosophy…
And that’s where it all happened…
A simple flat
Very little money
Coffee
Cigarettes
Chocolate
And
Good sex
WOW
This lasted for about five years and that’s when I had an epiphany…
I was juggling a lot at the one time…
I had skating on one hand, training in the other, my relationships somewhere and then my desire to write somewhere else…
I needed to make a decision and make it quick.
And yes you have it…
I gave up skating, I gave up training, I even gave up love and I became a fully-fledged writer!
It was me, my dog, a notepad and a pen and I never looked back!
I was 24 years old when I decided to do this and by fuck, the shit I did from 24 until I was 29 was fucking mental…
I spent five years preparing and now it was time to give it five years and see what I could do and achieve and see where it would go.
We’ll discuss this in the next article
Until then: here’s a poem ‘Killing doves with poetry’
LOVE
PBJ
Killing doves with poetry
Killing doves with poetry
That’s all I needed
To move forward
And rewind the past
Do not be scared
From what I have done
But you are scared
Of what you didn’t do
From what I have done
I have no pleasure now
I’m not that young poet who wrote
In his own right
In a simply lit bedroom flat
But I leave down
These retired pens
To look for a new reverie
A new musing
A new vision
Simply
A new dream
The young has come to an end for me
I killed the doves
But not well enough
I am nothing
But an old poet now
Who is not dead
But with half dead birds
And half dead words