One Year

This morning I looked at the notes on my phone. My notes are entirely populated with wholly ridiculous drunken messages to myself, including “if you fuck like you dance, we’ve got a problem”- could have been a savage critique of a potential suitor, could have been a statement of self-hatred after catching myself dancing in a mirror.

One of my notes is different. A year ago today I stood on the southbound Central Line platform at Liverpool Street on my way to work feeling like the world was ending, feeling like I had let myself unravel and take every left turn available to me until there was no way to get home to myself. I opened my notes and started writing. One bullet point for everything I hated about myself- 42 bullet points. One bullet point for every wrong decision I’d made to lead me to that moment on the tube platform- a further 25 bullet points. They poured out of me like a stream of consciousness as I stood letting each train thunder past me, increasingly late for work.

I have always written for catharsis, hoping that the act of unloading onto paper would take something away from me. Perhaps I hope that, in a similar vein to the belief that a photograph will steal a part of someone’s soul, committing the problems I have with myself will somehow take them away and give them a new vessel. Those feelings belong to a piece of paper now, not me. Following each therapy session, appointment, argument, meltdown- I’d come home and write. Everything I write pertaining to my mental health and my problems with myself, I keep in the hope that I can look back on them one day and smile at how far I’ve come. I couldn’t smile and feel proud reading the note on my phone this morning. Rather than seeing how far I’d come, I saw that the same themes occur in each cathartic written piece year on year, packed notebook by packed notebook. The difference is that these greatest hits themes manifest in different ways for different reasons and at varying levels of severity. Sometimes they’re a scratching in the back of my head; other times they’re a raging storm that sees me unable to get off the platform and board the train that would take me somewhere else.

I want to read my past writing and see a different person. My notebooks from a few years ago seem to belong to someone who overreacted and catastrophized- a person whose situational problems seem tiny now, but whose broader issues certainly never went away. The note on my phone belongs to a person who had realised that they had brought themselves with them when they moved to London in August 2018, a person who couldn’t fathom why they’d been afforded a place in the best city in the world when they so clearly didn’t deserve it. This piece you’re reading now belongs to someone who knows they’ve not moved forward, a person who might always find ways to frame themselves as fundamentally bad, all but invisible, a faded black and white paper copy of something that should be a tangible and touchable being with even the faintest glimmer of worth- the words I write are just marks on a page and they haven’t taken anything from me. They never will. This piece belongs to a person who finds solace in words and pictures, but craves purpose to them. If anything I’ve ever written has impacted you in even the most insignificant way, I’m thrilled about that. I just wish I could find the one thing I want in them.

This is not to say there is no value in writing about your feelings. Any time someone comes to me with a mental health concern, almost the first thing I will suggest is to buy a notebook and to use it every day. As great as it would be to read my notebooks back and hear a completely different voice, read a person absolutely detached from who I am now, there is value in seeing the same problems rising up again and again. I mentioned earlier that I am desperate to get home to myself- perhaps there is real value to writing everything down like a stream of consciousness, unflinchingly digging down into who you are. When I am confident that no one will read it, writing gives me an understanding of myself. While I cannot get what I want from revisiting my writing, I can see what home might look like. Perhaps more accurately, I can see what it doesn’t look like. Home is not self-punishment, feeling silly, small and insignificant, the constant internal image of failure, and the relentless greatest hits rotation of being Not Enough. By that logic, I can see that something closer to home might be personal and professional self-acceptance- feeling like I do enough and I am enough. This doesn’t shine through in anything I write because it doesn’t exist in my head.

Rather than revisiting my previous writing hoping not to recognise any of the thoughts I’ve described, maybe home is an understanding that each thing I write has come from the same person. I think we all have a proclivity to divide ourselves into distinct phases or personas: our teenage self, our 2014 self, our drunk self. However you divide yourself and your personality, you slice yourself up according to the things you believe you are detached from right now. There is nothing of that person in me now, so I can cordon that off and give it a name. Each persona becomes separated, so when they bleed into one another it can be really unpleasant. Displaying characteristics you believe solely belong to a past rendering of yourself can be upsetting because you believe yourself to be beyond that. For me, when my pre-London persona poisons my current self, I see it as an abject failure because I hate the thought of being that person. Perhaps home is knowing that I could have written the note on my phone in 2014, I could have written it a year ago today or I could have written it this morning. The progress lies in understanding that I can’t just choose to amputate the part of myself that would stand on the southbound Central Line platform writing the note. Perhaps home is knowing that each phase of yourself, each element of you that you’ve diced off, exists somewhere- it’s how you choose to relate to that element. Each notebook, the note on my phone, the piece you’re reading now- they were all written by a version of myself that might always exist.