My experience of Mental illness has been of being stuck in a space with your own thoughts about yourself, self-consumed thoughts, swirling around and around with fluctuating ferocity.
The words ‘self-consumed’ will likely produce little sympathy, yet all of my writings, all of my doings have been saying one thing, ‘help, I want to escape this’, over and over and over…
I have been in this self-consumed vortex with my own thoughts and actions, whilst watching other people live out their lives for all my adult life.
Then comes the Friday evening…
…horrid gut feelings that feel specific to this time of the week…
Alcohol…
I, like many others, use alcohol to exercise what you could call emotional blockages, that build and are difficult to process and manage.
But my relationship with weekends, especially over my 30s has been a personal horror story.
I am never sure how the British weekend experience translates in other countries…
We all live under capitalism, unless we’re rich enough not to, and even as the old work/leisure divisions have melted away in recent decades, I’m sure we all have a relatively similar experience of having a lack of time to do the emotional recovery needed after a weeks’ work.
I think weekends in the UK have kind of become a horror story of their own making. It’s there in the abrasiveness caused by the sheer volume of people clambering for their right to have fun and leisure before they return to work on Monday. It’s nobody’s fault, but it does often feel like everybody’s unworked-through demons are raging up and down the streets of our towns.
…as are my own.
Down there it has felt inescapable…
… and it’s painful and humbling to look back through years of writing, to see similar, self-absorbed pleas.
As life started to feel like it was passing me by, I felt like I had no time to actively pursue ‘leisure’, and I ended up in towns on weekend, telling myself that I had to put in the hours on my ‘projects’ – trying harder and harder to get somewhere; mentally always on the cusp of acceptable adulthood, but never quite reaching it.
As I found ways to avoid ‘banter’ from drunken revellers, who can clearly see that I’m not in weekend dress code, I’d simply join in, only to end up in bars at 1am, one of the last people out, with a rucksack on my back.
Looking down on myself almost from the vantage of this hill, it seems so obvious that this life pattern is blatantly not working. And it’s a truth that has in some way always been staring me in the face; on some level I’ve always known that it wouldn’t finally
…horrid gut feelings that feel specific to this time of the week…
Today, despite yesterday, I escaped it, and I went up onto the tops again.
…and I found myself at a place called Snailsden.
The names of places on ‘the tops’ still pertain to their origin, if only in that your imagination can still make name-places connections here in a way that is much harder down below, especially since the ‘blandalism’ of the late 20th early 21st century smoothed out every rough edge.
Bleaklow is still thus.
Holme Moss is still thus.
Marsden is still thus.
And so is Snailsden. Because, despite the presence of sheep, it feels pre-mammalian; a den pertaining to much more ancient life forms.
It’s hard to believe that this area is still classed as within the boundaries of my home town.
As I walked, sometimes through open moor, I stumbled into a valley that seemed too dramatic a ravine to be where it is. This just does not feel like it should be here, it feels out of joint with what is 10 miles down the hill
Apparently it’s called Ramsden Clough. I’ve never heard of it before.
The moors haunt our imaginations, they have a spectral presence in so much culture that has been created down below. They are in us, we are from them.
But they only uphold their poetry when there isn’t another single person in sight. You can only think of others here in their absence.
I wish to walk and walk, without fear. Reaching exhaustion, to point where you lose your sense of self to the land.
John B Ledger 