I’m really surprised at how difficult this has been. This is my third attempt, and I think I keep not sticking the landing and that’s the problem. Because I’m talking in a roundabout way and going all over the place, and I’m also trying to stick to a bit of a timeframe, it’s proving tricky to end this in a way that I feel happy with.
So let’s begin at the beginning.
My name’s Mark, and for now, I’m calling this show Remarks. If you, just between you and I, want to think about it as “remark S”, then that’s absolutely fine, but let’s not.
This is something that I’ve done on and off for about 12 years. I’ve always been interested in exploring thoughts, exploring the brain, just talking about this, that and the other – what’s in the news, what’s in my head, what’s in the world at large – in a way that is extemporaneous and we just see what comes up.
I’ve got myself tied in knots previously thinking about the duty that I have to a listener, and so with this one I’m really trying to hone in on the idea that this one’s for me. You are more than welcome to be here, and that’s it. I’m not doing this for anyone else, but you are more than welcome to sit and listen, and I hope you do.
And that’s it, really. I’m not going to try and present this as some kind of lofty project. We’re just going to sit here. I’m going to adjust my microphone. I’m even going to have a little bit of coffee because in between doing these takes I haven’t actually had any drink. This is the kind of thing.
So why am I doing this, and why am I doing this now?
I was going to call this newest iteration This Way Up, and the reason I was going to do that – and the reason I chose the music that I did, which was very jaunty – is I want to talk about, to begin with, the motivation for this. It’s about the fact that I am four days out from a meeting with a medical professional to discuss the possibility of antidepressants, which is the furthest I’ve been along in this conversation in about 25 years.
When I was a late teen, I started noticing that I was having difficulty functioning in a social way that I felt good about. I noticed I’d stopped being able to meet people’s eyes. And there’s a word that I haven’t connected with for a long time – I have in certain ways, but in this particular instance I haven’t connected with it – and we’ll come to what that word is in a tick.
I had a rubbish time at secondary school from the ages of 11 to 16 or whatever. Then a couple of years doing A-levels at the same school, which were a little bit more tolerable. But those 11 to 16 years were rubbishy, rubbishy years. In the last couple, I started to develop a slightly more extended friend group. In the first three, I didn’t. I had some holdover friends from my previous school, but we weren’t in the same classes, and so I spent a lot of time just not having a great time.
A lot of that has to do with my identity, if you like, as a person with a mostly invisible disability. Sometimes it is visible, but it is a visual disability. I’m visually impaired. What’s interesting is that in and of itself isn’t particularly problematic, or shouldn’t be. One of the reasons I say that is there’s a guy called Josh Pugh, who’s a comedian, and the TV presenter Richard Osman – both of whom are visually impaired.
Now, Josh Pugh I think of as a younger guy, and this is going to take me into a particular tangent that I hit upon when I was in my therapy session on Tuesday. It was a realisation that I put people in this world into one of two buckets: there’s mainstream and the not mainstream.
That comes from my time at school. That comes from being a kid and growing up in a primary school that was tailor-made for kids with visual impairments. It was a very, very small school – I think that was more to the point. It’s actually less what the school was there for and much more to do with the size of the school: we had six kids in our class and there were about 30 kids total in the entire school.
Then I was thrust into a mainstream school with mainstream kids, and this school also had a facility within the building that cared for people with visual impairment. It was just this weird thing. And also, being perceptive – not hugely academically smart, but I think having an intuition and a sort of felt sense – I really did feel that sense of othering, which was reinforced by my class.
So it was less the disability; it was much more feeling othered. The disability was partly the reason. The other part of the reason is I didn’t know how to cope with people who were mean. I didn’t have… and so I reacted badly. I was extremely unlikable. I didn’t take that stuff well. I took everything personally. I had very thin skin. And so I didn’t endear myself.
There were a couple of kids in my school who were, you know, meanies and bullies or whatever, but I didn’t endear myself to the rest of the class. No one ever stuck up for me, and I think that’s because I just wasn’t a particularly likable kid. I didn’t know that at the time. I just had my defences up and I was trying to survive, and all the time being baffled about, “I don’t understand where this animosity is coming from because I haven’t projected it.” But since it’s here, okay, I’m going to get my back up and I’m going to react in the way that I’ve seen members of my family, members of my immediate circle, react when they are threatened.
Again, being intuitive, being sensitive, having these felt senses and seeing what adults do, seeing what the adults did around me – that’s not what you should do in the playground, to try and thump someone. That’s probably a more well-adjusted thing to do than what I did. I was a lot more… I don’t know, just the way I spoke to people did not endear me to the rest of the class.
So I had a really bum-ass time of it. It was what it was. But then, as I started to find other groups outside of school, and started hanging around and having romantic ideals and various things, this sense of being othered, this sense of feeling different, really started to grow.
And what that sense is – to take the pin out of that particular word from earlier and have a look at it – that word is shame.
This is why I couldn’t meet people’s eyes. It’s why I became a little bit shifty. I’d always been, to some degree, shy as a kid. I don’t know why, but from a very, very young age, one of my earliest memories is of knowing that I was different and having this sense that there are mainstream kids and there are non-mainstream kids. That has filtered through to adulthood.
It wasn’t until Tuesday that I realised this: my whole world, my whole viewpoint, my whole everything is about surviving in a world that doesn’t feel like it wants me to be safe, like it wants me to really be here. I feel unsafe – not in a knives-out kind of way, but definitely not in a welcoming sense.
There are people in the world who can walk into any space and feel welcome, or at least feel like they should be welcome. They often don’t understand why other people don’t feel like that, or that other people do feel like that.
That’s the work I’ve been doing with my therapist.
A couple of weeks ago, after the latest reincarnation of that pattern – which, for me, often manifests as overeating (I’m a big “eat my feelings” guy, and I have lots of feelings) – we got to this point. I can also cook, and I can make a decent meal. More to the point, I enjoy cooking. It’s very grounding. It’s an activity I like to engage in because, like I said, it is grounding. I can put on some music or a podcast and set myself to a task, and then that task is finished and at the end of it there’s some yummy food.
But then there’s too much yummy food and lots of other problems. It’s… you know.
We were in the latest incarnation of that conversation, and my guy said, “Should we talk about antidepressants?” I was kind of taken aback.
Like I said earlier – bear in mind this is the third go-round of this I’ve had, so I can’t remember what I’ve said to you and what I’ve said that’s gone in the bin – I’ve had struggles with this stuff since my late teens into my early 20s. I’ve had this sense that the stuff that I bear, the baggage, isn’t all that heavy. I get it, I’ve got my difficulties, I’m not going to minimise that, but other people seem to be able to carry heavy bags with broader shoulders or whatever. They don’t seem to be buckling under the weight, and I constantly feel like I don’t seem to be able to. I don’t have the resilience or whatever, and that comes with its own shame and whatever.
So yeah, 20–25 years ago it wasn’t even unfashionable to talk about this stuff; it was, in many ways, actively discouraged. “No, no, you don’t talk about this stuff, because that’s information that people can use against you.” Seeking help is a sign… well, even needing help is a sign that you’ve just got to figure it out for yourself, because you can’t go asking people. You can’t go to a medical professional because there’ll be some sort of permanent record, or there was all sorts of nonsense back in the day that an employer can see all that information. Of course they can’t.
I feel kind of angry that that was allowed to be perpetuated within the people around me as a way of… whatever.
I was lucky enough to have friends in the latter part of university who were like, “Try taking this stuff, you might find this is helpful.” I took a bit of St John’s wort and I can’t remember if it actually helped, but I remember even people talking to me then saying, “No, it’s a placebo,” basically brushing whatever I felt under the carpet.
And having gone to the odd medical professional over the years and them essentially just offering counselling that then comes three or four months later, after which your depressive period has kind of ended… it all makes it a little bit tricky.
So we are now T minus four days away from me discovering whether I get to leave my GP surgery with a prescription for something that is tailor-made, apparently, to combat shame. I’m excited to see where that goes, and I hope you’ll be along with me for the journey.
hellosteadman.com, I think, is probably where this podcast is going to live. I’ll hopefully be with you again tomorrow, but until then, thank you so much for listening. It’s been a real pleasure.
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