The Time When I Felt Nothing, And Everything

I’m not usually one of those people that thinks of their lives in stages, or eras, I usually try not to think about it like that at all. Rather, one endless and meandering journey that is way more boring and lacking any striking visual than most costly nature walks. Unless you consider me sprawled across the living room floor covered in a blanket of vomit and multiple battered sausages dashed about the room as a striking image. It’s hardly akin to any natural monument of beauty – it’s more of a botanical garden filled with tall trees of my most shameful times, or deep ponds filled with scum and one legged frogs. I have moments where I sink deep into myself and cringe at what I’ve done. A projection plays above me and shows me footage of some self-obsessed twat who, in-between chomping cigarettes, tries his damndest to be the centre of everybody’s attention. There’s a laugh track in this projection too, but it doesn’t sound like they’re laughing at my wine-soaked charms – I think they’re laughing at how utterly pathetic I am. 

I think I popularised self-hatred way before Fleabag did. I didn’t masturbate over a priest or sleep with a best friend’s boyfriend who then killed herself because of it. Instead I slept with a pensioner, cut my legs with a beard trimmer and became addicted to aforementioned battered sausages. Rest in peace Krispy Fish. To those who have known me a while might have guessed it, but I’m referring to a specific time in my life circa 2014 – 2017.  If I were to give these few years a title, I would probably call it, “the time when I felt nothing.” Which is a bit of an oxymoron considering I was feeling everything and everyone. It was an act of rebellion I pushed myself into. A one-man army setting out to prove everyone wrong. You think I can’t sleep with someone because I’m ugly? I’ll sleep with five. You think I will be working in the cinema forever? I’ll work in a law firm. You think I can’t go two days without a bottle of wine? I’ll go…well, never mind that one actually.  

There was one day when I was given the simplest of tasks, go to the shop across the lot and buy some biscuits for a meeting with some clients in a few hours’ time. Okay I said, grabbed some petty cash and off I went. I returned an hour later, a shaking and sweating mess. I had been in the biscuit aisle agonising over every box, every tin that lay in front of me. I just could not decide for the life of me which these clients would like better. Should I get Fox’s? How about Party Rings? No, no, get the custard creams, everyone likes custard creams. Oh fuck that what if they’re vegan…cue meltdown. The shop assistants were no help at all. Later that night I bought two bottles of wine and drank one in complete silence as my two housemates watched hesitantly. Then I wrinkled myself upstairs to bed where I finished the other. And thus began a nightly routine – whether they knew about it or not. Also, they knew me well enough to know that they could never take the bottle from my cold living dead hands. 

This didn’t seem to affect my job at all. Except the fact that I was late all the time and had to face a barrage of homophobic insults in my email inbox every time I logged on. Handing out post through the office to be jokingly wolf whistled at or have straight men pucker their lips at me was never an enjoyable thing to do with a hangover. So I left and began working at a shithole bar you may have heard of, Wetherspoons. This was worse. It’s the place somebody threw a glass at me because it had too much head (is that ever a bad thing?). It’s the place where the staff would make me unscrew the dishwasher every night as an initiation despite how much my fingers bled. It’s the place I met a boy who I took home where he masturbated onto me after I told him to stop. I never thought a phone call from the cinema, begging me to return would be the hand reaching out of the sky, but it was.  

And then I began to heal a little. A little part of me anyway. All the while I was wrestling with some pretty big feelings of unrequited love. A curse that to this very day I am still trying to break. I gave up some pretty big opportunities to be loveless, oh and how I faced the consequences. I stuck around whilst he loved other people, and would wait patiently next to my phone for him to text, call or read my messages. A never-ending cycle of sickness and self-prescribed punishment that I seemed destined to repeat. There were times I would make plans with him and then cancel hours before just to prove something to him, or to myself. Then obviously I would make a surprise appearance, hair dry-shampooed into a submission of white moving clouds and a freshly moisturised cock and booty hole. Y’know, just in case. All of the “effort” I would put in to looking glamorous would be wasted twenty minutes later after my fourth glass of red wine I would swallow in big gulps, and I’d already be well into my second packet of cigarettes by then – I’m no amateur. The only thing he probably noticed about me was that there was something wrong. Maybe he saw me as some kind of clown, or fool. But he never saw me as a lover, or anything of the like. That was fine with me, as long as he saw me. He was one of many anyway, I had plenty of disinterested fantasy lovers.

I believe this may have been the catalyst (and I’m not blaming him for this) for me trying to feel loved, physically, by anybody that would have me. A man who once described me as, “I thought this date was gonna be shit because you’re a bit ugly but you’re actually great” invited me on a second date at his place. “Can you believe it! A second date!” I thought. It wasn’t until after he had pinned me down with his arm around my neck and his penis inside me that I realised I’d made a mistake. Even after I had tearfully asked him to stop before entering me without permission, I just let him finish. It’s like the dentist David, pain for five minutes and then it’s over, hang in there! Afterwards he made me massage his back with scented oils and then forced me to leave. And as the door closed behind me, I still wanted him to let me back in. I never told my friends or family about this really, and there’s a lot more detail I just won’t go into, but it made me feel dirty. I did what I knew best to do and made my way to the nearest supermarket, bought three bottles of wine, headed to Plattfields Park and began to drink the first. I looked up and thought about what had just happened. I quickly drowned my broken ship in a sea of merlot and proceeded to go about my life, ignoring the assault and hoping it would go away. I’m still hoping it will go away. It’s why I haven’t let anybody touch me since, despite numerous attempts. If you’re one of those attempts, I hope now you know why. I’ve lost many a future lover to my loneliness.

Not long after, I went on a holiday with my older sister to the boringly sunny shores of Fuerteventura. I thought, perfect, a holiday. Some sea and sand and my big sister. But when I got there, all I wanted to do was drown myself in the holiday pool. Too lazy for suicide, I sought different ways of self-punishment such as purposeful sun burn and staring at my naked self in the mirror. I didn’t have my beard trimmer and didn’t want to risk my sister seeing freshly julienne’d inner thighs, so I improvised. I lay in the sun, let it beat down it’s toxic rays and blister my skin. The heat helped, it softened me in some ways. I read two books which I hadn’t been able to do in years, and a rather aggressive Spanish woman offered me a freshly caught sardine fish by sticking a blue biro into its head and asking, “this one?” Truthfully, I only remember a couple of things more about that holiday. How I fought with my dad, how I got excitedly drunk with my brilliant sister on night one, and how I tried very, very hard not to hurt myself.

The years after have been a slow-burn of recovery that have included a job move, a house move and a return to Liverpool to live with my grandparents; one who had been rapidly affected by her Dementia. And their chickens. I’m still trying to recover now, and I have days, weeks, where I don’t want to talk to anybody. Where the guilt from over-drinking and over-smoking or blame for being sexually assaulted and hiding it becomes like a huge boil full of blisteringly hot puss and blood. But I allow myself to feel it, to feel every tiny sensory needle pricking my skin until they are no more. And I would suggest that you do the same. My beard trimmers are now for shaving use only, and I don’t allow myself to drink alone very often. Little victories, cherish them.

I don’t think there is a point to this, and I’m not trying to open up about anything in particular. I’m coming out of an episode and these things are what have been on my mind mostly. A lot happened in three years, and a lot has happened since, and a lot will happen in the next three. I just have to remind myself that I made it through the absolute fucking worst time, and that I can make it through the next. One of my favourite writers, Sylvia Plath (shut up) writes in her arguably-autobiographical novel about a potential-filled suicidal writer, The Bell Jar, with the following lines, which I think sums up whatever type of bloated point I’m trying to make here:

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am I am.”

Take that, post traumatic stress disorder.