how much for my life

I search ‘drug rehabilitation’, there are hundreds that flash up; beautiful buildings, clinical rooms, promises of a life lived like a hotel. Hidden price tags. I try again- ‘free rehab,’ up pops adverts like package holidays on a website- ‘At home detox, only £1295’, ‘7 day residential detox £2500’, LATEST OFFERS screaming from the screen like Tomas Cook’s Tenerife get away. Pay for your pain because you are the pain in society, that’s what I hear. It’s what I see in the streets, clay faces, glazed eyes, ignored. Prisons full of the aches and no escape. Almost as if our answer is in our bank balance, blind the side lines and tunnel vision to debt and empty pockets.  

I called up Bristol Wellbeing when I was low, lower than low, needed to talk to someone again. Half an hour of questions and heart and soul pouring, rated the highest on the depression “scale”. A call back months later to tell me they couldn’t help me because I am a drug addict. Because I have a disease that separates me from the rest of humanity. But this story is small, mine is small and I am lucky. I talk to recovery friends, they talk of waiting lists and bedsits and mould and mattresses on floors, park benches, fear. Hospital beds that kick from underneath them when the shaking is dulled and slowed by medication.

I understand that it’s our responsibility to get clean. Recovery is a choice, but how can you choose when no one is giving you the option? The utter bleakness of this illness is reflected in the way it’s treated. The best treatment to seems to be the hardest to find, almost a secret. It feels like our freedom is sold to us. Our lives are sold back to us. I praise the NHS, love the NHS but drug rehabilitation isn’t really provided by them at all. Just detox after detox. The irony of doctors pumping more drugs into our systems to get us clean, detoxing our bodies when the toxins are in our brains. We know more now, we are smarter than this now. Aren’t we? Can’t we look back over the years at what’s worked and what hasn’t.

I overdosed twice. I was pumped out and pumped in and once my body was better, I was sent home. But I was sick, sick stained, ready to die. Had I not been so lucky I would have. I went to a private rehab, a private rehab that cost £10,000 a month. £10,000 that my family didn’t have but they were able to find in precious people. What could I have done? Being ill is a luxury for the wealthy and dying is almost a certainty for the poor.  Recently I read that there were no beds in any mental health wards on the NHS. None. Zero. Nothing. There are stories of people being put in beds miles from home, teenagers and children separated from their families. It’s not enough. Not good enough at all. Because this isn’t just about addiction, this is about mental health. When will mental health be considered just health? When will it no longer be segregated and covered in barbed wire, for horror films to written about, fear to be spread with, lives to be played with.

The vulnerable have always been taken advantage of. The dreadful cost of the Grenfell fire was only felt by the poor and the hiding. Addicts are vulnerable, their disease tells them they want to die. It lies to them and it’s a terrifying place to be. There are free ways to escape the pain, but the place between using and that safety is a long and tough stretch during which there is very little support. Charities do incredible things, staffed with experienced survivors who know how hands should be held, know that addiction is forever and therefore treatment must be forever. But they are few and far between – underfunded and overshadowed by the promise of quick release, by a week in hospital which may seem more appealing than confronting demons. Getting sober is a battle, a bloody and hideous battle. It’s horrible and scary and we cannot do it alone. Why must that mean that we pay through skin and bone to be well? Why must that mean, just because this illness takes such an ugly shape, that we ignore it on our streets?

It seems that the homeless addict loses his or her right to be human. People pass a person who has passed out in filthy clothes but if that person was suited, briefcase in hand, they would be much more ready to help. Why do we lose our souls because of our bank balance? Everything else is treated, but our mental health is so often ignored. It’s not good enough. Our heroes are crowned – the famous drug survivors, the ones who sparkle in their sobriety and use their celebrity to shout about how good it feels to be clean. We need Russell Brand and his ilk – he inspires and he is proof that there is another ‘country’ on the other side of the demon bridge but he is a one-off and most of us don’t have his wonderful money and confidence to help to blast away the agonies.

In the meantime, the ‘crack head’ on the corner is blamed, belittled, berated and perhaps worst of all, invisible. He will keep scoring until he dies unless someone ‘sees’ him and his many many ‘friends’. The people who could make a real change need to dust off their glasses, look straight at these struggling souls who are just minutes away from being you and me and come up with some real answers.

http://www.charislondon.org/home/4541859091

http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

http://www.cauk.org.uk/index.asp

http://ukna.org/

https://www.focus12.co.uk/

word hero

Do you get those moments, where you think- ‘how the fuck has that much time passed? Only yesterday I was playing Harry Potter on a beach in fancy pink cord flares and a Tammy Girl tee-shirt and now the worlds a mess I actually need to do something about it.’ Or ‘it wasn’t that long ago that I was broken?’ Sometimes life stacks up and you suddenly realise that chapters have filled pages so much faster than you thought possible. Memories that were seconds ago are oh so quickly years in the past. We know this. You know how time works. But it never fails to shock me that it hasn’t stopped. How does it all keep going, isn’t time tired yet? Then of course, I’d only want it to stop it in a Bernard’s Watch way, you know, so I could start it again, because I relish that kind of control.

I have been writing about my brain for almost two years now, and sometimes I worry* I’ve run out, dried out, exhausted those letters on my keyboard. Because all the talk of recovery and therapy and brains has become my normality. It can be so thick and so boring, like paying a gas bill or purchasing a bus ticket, but worst of all, it can feel like it defines me. It doesn’t. Each of us suffers are so much more than our troubles, some of us are really good at bowling, not me, I’m terrible at it. But you see my point. 

However, after all of that, I realised there is more to say, because you don’t go into recovery all shiny and new, sometimes it all fucks up, sometimes it doesn't. It is constant and ongoing. Sometimes being in recovery feels like I’ve found the secret. Like I and all the others, who stand with courage against the monsters in our brains, know something that no one else knows. I’m not even sure what it is, possibly that we can get better, or that we already are, I’m not sure. But it can feel like a super power. Going through the pain and learning how to feel it and not let it kill you. That’s heroic, fuck it, we are super heroes, we are the Batman’s and Wonder Woman’s of this sometimes seemingly post-apocalyptic world. Sometimes it’s not heroic at all though, sometimes the pain creeps in and we forget how to operate. Our capes and our tool box of brain fixing things are abandoned. But on the good days, we are Superman. We find hope in little tiny hidden places. We make the choice to be happy, it’s not as easy as waking up in the morning and saying, ‘I’m going to be happy,’ and putting on that ‘Friday feeling’ playlist on Spotify. It’s could be running away from day time TV into yoga studios, or coffee shops with friends, or (maybe possibly) the gym. Then of course, it’s talking, loud and strong and brave until stories that once made blood burn veins turn from The Shinning to Sharknado. Then it’s up to you, people or high powers, you can choice. Make your film a comedy; the only difference between Ghostbusters and Paranormal Activity is how the character’s deal with the ghosts, (sort of). Laugh, because time does that thing where it catches you, sneaks up behind you and makes you forget the child that still lives in you. They need listening to sometimes, when they need to be loved and looked after. Maybe not the times when they want to eat their body weight in Chewits or get upset because you dropped a 99 flake that cost two pounds twenty, (actually ice cream spillage is totally valued) but mostly listen when they are scared, hear them when they ask for help and courageously take them to it. You can, you’re a super hero. 

*(I also worry that there are so many more important things to write about, but I am writing about them, just in play form- http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2917150 )

being

I am on medication for depression.

I have been on and off. 

Tried so many types.

Different variations. 

Cocktails. 

A pick-a-mix of anti depressants, sleeping pills, anti anxiety, and so on. 

Meds that dull the senses. That stop tears in their tracks. That hold me. That let me sleep. My medication lets me 'be'. It takes the racing heart and sweaty palms out of ordering coffee. It lets my head creep up from staring at the floor. It takes some of my pain away. On the darkest of days it gives me a slice of light. It gives me the ability to be. This medication helps me and many others turn days of despair into days where getting out of bed is a possibility. 

However there is a foggy stigma when it comes my little tablets. It rears it's ugly head whenever this subject is mentioned. And I am angry. I am angry that mental illness can sometimes hold hands with shame. I have felt that shame. I have clasped my mouth closed with quivering hands when I should have shouted the loudest. I have whispered when I should have screamed. I have said those words 'no, I doing fine' hoping someone would hear the hidden meaning, that had sunk so deep I didn't even know how to breathe. This stigma scares me. This stigma must leave. 

No one smuggles in a secret Lemsip when they have a cold. No one asks a patient in a coma if they've tried 'getting up.' No one tells someone with a broken leg 'to go running.' So why do we do this with mental illness? Why do people tell me to 'cheer up' when there is something damaged in my brain? Just because it's not visible does not mean it's not there. And the stark reality is that people die. These illnesses are vicious. They kill. If a little pill can stop that, if medication can save a life, or even just make a life livable. Then it must be okay. It has to be. 

It might not be the only answer. Medication is not the one and only. There are therapies. There are other answers. It just so happens that it helps me. And that is okay. 

we will not forget who we are.