Retirement and Rain clouds.

July 13th. 4am.

The clouds come out and the men and women below, looking to the sky, remark on their blocking of the sun; and wish it was not so. The clouds –each uniquely beautiful- sensing this disdain, begin to cry. From this pain the people hide away, until the crying stops and the clouds, feeling loathed and alone, retreat into their hiding places scorned by the lack of want and understanding.

I feel like my entire identity is ‘mentally ill addict’. I think I got lost somewhere in the middle of my twenties and stopped being a real person, and started being my diagnosis. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, Generalized anxiety disorder and narcissistic personality disorder when I was twenty-two, and living in the countryside. I was put on a mild dose of Sertraline with a view to increase the dosage gradually. When I moved back to my home town a couple of years later, and began to realize that my mental health wasn’t improving, the Doctors changed my medication. I was put on a low dose of Quetiapine, and have been gradually increasing the dose once or twice a year since. My drinking got worse, and after a couple of failed attempts at getting sober I stopped trying, and just let it happen. I dropped out of university again, partly because I couldn’t emotionally handle the stress and partly because I was regularly too depressed to get out of bed, and let myself fall into a downward spiral. This was fine, because I was sick. This is what sick people do. This is how sick people live. They rest and they take their medicine and they stop engaging with the world as they lay in darkness waiting to die.

I worked a little here and there, but I couldn’t hold down any job for very long. My girlfriend broke up with me because my problems were too large for her to deal with. I was alone. I’d never felt so alone. My Father and I had fallen out and my Mother was back in the countryside and here I was, unemployed, uneducated, drunk and miserable and renting the spare room in my friends house. I wanted to die.

Then I started working. I fell into bar work because it fit my schedule. I could sleep until the late afternoon and stay up all night every night. I didn’t take it very seriously. I had worked a bar back in Suffolk for a few months and had some event experience so it was easy to find work. But as was often the case, I couldn’t stick to one job for very long. Cut forward three years and I am steadily employed. I am for the most part sober (bar a couple of after work drinks –an experiment in moderation, if you will) and I work anywhere from thirty to forty hours a week. A transformation has taken place, and I am for all intent and purpose, succeeding in my chosen field. I say chosen, it was of course my hundredth choice. I could quite as easily have fallen into any other low skilled low paid job role three years ago if I had it in me to get up at 7am and eat lunch at twelve and wear a shirt and tie everyday and talk shit about politics by a coffee machine in a cheap kitchenette with some middle management wanker named Brad... But I didn’t. I fell into the job that fit my lifestyle so if you can call that a ‘chosen field’ then by all means, sure, I chose it.

I’ve done all this work on myself –and I am by no means fixed- and still, I don’t feel like I have any real identity. I am two things now. I am my job and I am my diagnosis. I get up when the alarm goes off and I take my meds. I get dressed and I go to work. Halfway through my shift a little alarm goes off and it’s time to take a second dose. I work, I eat (sometimes, if I’m not too depressed) then I go home. I sit, I read, I watch something on Netflix, take another dose and go to bed. Rinse and repeat. On the outside it looks like I have my shit together (at least, in comparison to the outside view of my earlier self), but in all honesty; I am tired. I can’t do this for forty odd more. I can’t chase this carrot for the rest of my fucking life only to get to the end of the journey, look back and see nothing but footprints in the mud. Living for the sake of living; walking the path for the simple sake of getting to the other end. Why did the chicken cross the fucking road? What was the fucking point? He’s still going to end up on someone’s Sunday table.

So what is the answer? Give up, lie down and play dead? Well I can’t can I? You have to keep going even when you don’t want to and let’s be honest how many of us ever really want to? Do you enjoy the 7am alarm? Do you enjoy the kitchenette politics with wanky Brad and his Burton suit brigade of lanyard wearing boot lickers? Do you enjoy working for an infinitesimal fraction of the millions your company rakes in off the back of your hard work and dedication? Do you enjoy crossing the road just to get to the other fucking side? If you do, you’re either deluded or disabled or otherwise completely detached from the intrinsic value of your existence.

We spend the majority of our time hiding who we really are for the sake of jobs that would have us replaced before we were even in the fucking ground and we lose ourselves completely. Everything that is beautiful and unique about us that they couldn’t drill out of you in school gets beaten out of you in ‘the real world’ so that by the time you get to the other side, you’re just so happy that its fucking finished with that you’ll settle for the pathetic pittance you’re awarded for your efforts. Your efforts being your entire, fucking, life. All sixty odd years of it in trade for a bungalow with a nice three piece suite and a decent sized TV and some potted plants and a cat that no one’s going to want to look after when you kick the fucking bucket. I don’t know who I am anymore. I know my diagnosis and I know my job and all I do is get up, take my medication and go to work. I spend my days off so emotionally exhausted that I can hardly bare to leave the house and although it’s starting to look like I have my shit together, I have no idea what actually constitutes ‘my shit’. What is my shit? Who am I? And what have I done with the confident young man who was going to take the world by storm and live a grandiose life of existential adventure?

I’ve been getting up and getting on and hiding who I am from the world for long enough now, that who I really am is hidden even from me. And sometimes, when that real version of myself tries to pop his head out and say hello to the world, people withdraw and wait until he’s gone. Wait until the mask is back on and it’s safe to say hello again. Like a crowd of people taking shelter from the rain, waiting for the clouds to dissipate.

Walter Laurence, on Retirement and Rain Clouds.