One day…

I’m back in the same spot, the hills that separate the urban spaces of Yorkshire and the North West.

I made a bold admission the night previous: I told social media that I had lived with a mental illness for 20 years.

This kind of thing makes my many social masks turn inwards and scowl, but I had to do this: I had to make it real to myself, and I could only do this by making as many people as possible know that I meant it

It had to be an admission in one of the spheres that encourages my unpleasant gut theories about myself. My theories that I’m edging closer and closer to an irredeemable failure, and of constantly ‘doing life wrong’ .

…of being ‘wrong’ .

These feelings keep me in the cycle; praying that the next exhibition or next validation, will grant me an ‘ok-ness’ that finally finds its way into my flesh, and I’ll finally feel free of….well, myself – the self that feels trapped in a metaphorical glass cage with these theories about himself.

My most painful, potentially humbling, admission, is that I’ve been trapped here for a quarter of a century, still trying to become an adult. To shout this feels like it’s made real – to give myself some slack how shit it has been watching my young and early middle age adult life go past me whilst I bang on the inside of a cage that nobody else can see.

Over the last 2 years my body and mind have finally hit burn out, chasing “just over the next hill” con tricks that had previously been so useful. All my projects have been competing with a rotting sensation, deep in the chest, from decades of feeling trapped on the other side of an actual life.

I’ve finally recognised my fixation with a zone. The hills that roughly follow the A628 road, in an area between Barnsley and Greater Manchester.

They possess a poetry that has so much resonance.They harbour so many stories that can’t breath down below, include my truth about myself.

I rarely actually got to the duringattempts to get ‘here’ in moments of desperation. Somehow it always felt that I would be in another world once I got there – ‘a portal’ as I’d describe. Which is why I could sometimes mistake Greater Manchester for being Urban Yorkshire in a parallel reality.

The lorries and cars that negotiate this dangerous trek fit into this poetry, but, by and large, anything from ‘down there’ disturbs it. You have to be selfish here; for only you can exist up here, staying out of view of the few dog walkers and cyclists, as up here figures can only be present in absence. As a haunting poetry of what has been and gone, and why these hills are in many ways a ghost land that haunts the places below.

I make a connection between these hills and of an extreme experience of not knowing how to be: anorexia. They reciprocate that which anorexia aims to achieve: a state between life and death.

Trying to reach here in my earlier years wasn’t only about being in a space to meditate on the self in the ‘down there’, but to be in a space where I could be between life and death; just like the state of anorexia. Where NOTHING could get to me.

I see a vague shimmer of Manchester’s increasingly super-skyline over the hills, and think about the problems we face in the ‘down there’.

Manchester is once again a monster on the horizon. No longer an image of satanic mills, but of a faceless, ruthless, world-city, of extreme wealth and extreme suffering side by side as if they weren’t part of the same picture.

A sharp and cold stab of horror catches up with me: “

“...we on this island thought we’d got through to the other side of hell. We became complacent. Looking for peace on a post-political plateau. But who could blame us?“

If I try hard enough I can hear the shooting and screaming from both sides of the hills, from under the glazed over scars of the Miners Strike and Peterloo. They demand that I to show up; be a useful body. But I used to go to protests only to wage war on myself. Not knowing how to contain my self-disgust in this midst of other people who play their parts so well, I’d go hide in pubs and soothe my wounds.

As I almost slip on the path up here, I keep thinking ‘tread lightly’ not with the weight of it all.

Beyond my chesty feelings of disgust and shame, and the bitterness and resent it breeds, I know I can do so much better than this. There is more, but just now.

One day…