Since I turned 40 this month, I thought I should probably say something here to mark still being alive at 40. Fuck you, Dom Passantino! Yes, I still remember you taking bets on me topping myself for a Death List. When I die, let them stuff me with tattered tenners and taxidermy me as a lamp to light your lonely room.
The other milestone is that this blog turned 18. I am now old enough to be my blog’s mother. A scary thought. No wonder my da was a raging alcoholic.
40 has been lovely so far. On my actual birthday, I had the morning off, then went to pick up my 4 year old who was desperate to give me his present (Milk Tray), most of which he ate (he gave me all the heart shaped ones, though). I got lots of lovely presents from my family, handwritten and hand-scribbled cards from the kids and hand crafted, hand-photoshopped, hang it in a gallery with big censored bars over the cheeky bits card from Robert. I had a very nice dinner, a cake whose candles we lit multiple times so everyone got a turn, played in the playground for a bit, then was going to have a bath with some of the fancy Lush soap I got but was knackered by 10pm so went to sleep. At the weekend, I did a boat tour with my sister (BOATS!) and then I went out and did karaoke while necking back tins of gin, then drank booze from glasses the size of buckets in a pub on the Falls Road while deftly avoiding being dragged onto the dancefloor by a man who was so jittery he was either on something or he had fleas up his arsehole.
Do I have any sage lessons for 40?
I haven’t written in ages. Not just here, anywhere. As you’ve probably gathered from the few posts I have written, the past few years of my life have featured more deaths than Final Destination. Coping with grief topped with grief, as well as trying to raise two children and hold down a job, hasn’t left me much brainspace or actual time to do much else. I feel a bit like I have been brain damaged to be honest. I think I’ve gotten into the habit of so reflexively suppressing grief intrusive thoughts that it’s extended into lots of other thoughts too. Maybe one day if I can ever afford it, I’ll get therapy. I can’t get grief counselling because of my diagnosis of a SMI (shitty mental illness, or severe mental illness), and have been turned away when I’ve tried. Doesn’t really feel too fair does it! Your mental illness can make grief more complex so you’re too complex for our grief counselling.
When I do have free time, I prefer to anaesthetise myself with Frasier episodes rather than do anything more productive. I feel like now as a 40 year old I should get a hobby or try to have more of a life. I also feel like I don’t really want to do anything but anaesthetise myself in whatever comfort there is. Comfort is underrated.
Or I think about how when I die, I hope that it’s to the theme of The Kids in the Hall, so I feel like I’ve just fallen asleep on the sofa while my dad’s still awake
My mid-life crisis has been more that this is the decade my dad died in, and the horror of just how young he actually was sometimes drowns me. I spent the weeks leading up to my birthday being clawed in the heart by that one.
But I could do with it being more along the lines of joining a gym, or taking up martial arts or something more wholesome and interesting and actually healthy. Maybe at 50?
It’s also because – and this is a really old fucker thing to say – the kind of writing I do has fallen out of fashion. Blogs are Mediums now, and tend towards the polemic. The kind of confessional writing people read is more confessional than even I, who has written about peeing in pint glasses when I’ve been too depressed to get out of bed, is comfortable with (I don’t, and never really have, share much about any of my relationships or my children here, for example). And everyone loves a video, and I fucking hate being filmed. And I do want people to actually read what I write. If I didn’t, I’d have kept a diary.
I did have a podcast along with lovely Mark Brown, but that wrapped up. It was great fun though, and they’ve relaunched BBC Ouch as Access All. The incredible Emma Tracey, who was our producer, now has a much more visible role, and she’s just fantastic. Do go and have a listen.
What I do have to say is more inarticulate rage than anything more considered. The world around us has pretty much pulverised my faith in humanity (the absolute indifference and sometimes outright glee of much of the world at what is happening in Gaza being the main reason I think we as a species should be fired out of the universe with a giant fucking canon) and like many others I find it hard to express. I also find it too hard to think about for long enough to actually put into words. If I sound a bit defeated in that respect, it’s because I am. I know that’s not a good thing. If you have any ideas how to change that, please do let me know.
So I have become quite introverted and quiet, focusing my energies on the small amount of things I feel I can influence, doing all the boring shit you have to do to stay well, which I need to or else we’ll lose the roof over our head. I’m still under the mental health team. As ever, sleep remains the bane of my life in that I need to prioritise it over pretty much everything else. I had a hypomanic episode in January/February but it wasn’t damaging beyond making me wish I could always be that way as I was a much funner parent and got a lot more done since I was sleeping so little. And more debt, but it’s manageable, and it was on a holiday, so worth it as well. Did end up pulling the emergency cord and throwing big doses of Quetiapine and zopiclone at it when I literally stopped sleeping and my body started disintegrating, and that pulled me back down and back into my general hum.
That probably sounds like I’m unhappy but I’m not, at all. I’ve written before about feeling small, folding up, being small, as a diminishing, disappearing. But maybe it’s comfort, cosiness, a clamshell, protection.
Life is busy but quiet, it is full of love. My children continue to be my greatest joy and frustration and ARGH and wow and all the things. My husband is still strange and wonderful and lovely. I am not at peace with the world but more at peace with myself than I ever have been. I do lament I spent the years I should have been walking around naked so mentally fucked up about my looks that I couldn’t be around a reflective surface. I care a lot less about what anyone thinks about me, probably to my detriment, but I don’t care too much about that either. I’d like to ingest myself with embarrassment reading some of my earlier entries in this blog. But I’ve even forgiven myself for those, too.
My only real regret is that we couldn’t stay in London, or that we didn’t move to another city when we had to leave. I know Belfast is home but it still doesn’t feel that way after seven years back. I haven’t really found my place here yet. I don’t like living on an island that I have to take a plane or a boat to leave. I see my siblings only marginally more than I did in London because we’re all busy. It feels even less like home now my mum is dead too.
But it’s Jack and Oisín’s home, so there’s that. And they seem to be having good childhoods – I hope. It’s a strange thought that one day I’ll be the parent that has undoubtedly – if accidentally – given them material for ChatGPT to blog with, or generate holograms about, or whatever the kids of today will do in 30 years while we’re making Instagram reel reviews of our nursing home dinners.
Anyway. To the rest of the ageing madosphere out there, for those of us who have made it this far (and there are so many of us who tragically didn’t), I’ll leave you with this from three women whom I’ve recently become intimately acquainted with.
So we were cowards
So we were liars
So we’re not heroes
We’re still survivors
Filed under: Mental health | Tagged: blog, life, love, Mental health, writing |
