What must I have looked like?
What sort of person must have I portrayed to provoke a girl, probably 4 school years younger, to shout “he’s’ one wi’ problem!”?
My friends made sure I knew they found it hilarious, which would had caused me far more immediate humiliation if I hadn’t had got other priorities.
I feel humiliated now, if I look back, and recall my shape. In my last year of secondary school, running everywhere, literally. Wearing ill-shaped school shoes, with an hair cut that had become a confidence-less variation on a style I assumed some years before.
The colours all seem grey. My uniform was ugly greys, a once-black jumper that always stunk, like everyone else’s, of the cooking fat used in the dinner hall. The greys of the old post war buildings, a mish-mash of make-shift blocks, with the exception of 2 walkways over the cut, which still seem retro-futuristic.
The sky was grey, my eyes were filled with grey, as was my mood. A grey, underlying anxiety.
My day was about getting from the start to end and fitting in as much exercise as possible to appease some demon I’d acquired a year or so back, coinciding with the mid-adolescent pressures that accompany GCSEs.
I wasn’t as thin as I was 6 months ago. A series of niggling injuries from playing football with my mates on the shittest of football pitches, and a boredom over eating too little, meant I was probably back no longer quite as gaunt.
And I knew it, and hated it. But I also hated exercise – or at least the punishment involved that I’d made sure of.
But I still ‘had’ to do it.
The evening would bring so much dread. Dread if I didn’t have any exercise fixture, forcing me to face my own willpower, and dread if I did – if tonight’s training session was going to make me gasp for air when deep down I’d rather be at peace.
The only exercise I actually looked forward to was five-a-side football with my mates at the nearest Leisure Centre. Their informality made the prospect more appealing, and not the apprehensiveness I’d get encountering the low-level bullying in games with the local football team.
My obsession with booking these five-a-sides was evident to my mates. They could clearly see it was “him wi’ problem”, which is why they found it so funny when the girl shouted this in my direction.
Of course, I didn’t see this, or if I did, it was damage limitation. I had no self-confidence, or self worth, and to be honest, none of our group did! But we treated each other terribly, rather than banding together, as young mates do in television shoes.
It was all background noise, to my bigger command to keep exercising for fear of….. Fear of something. The fear of being ‘fat’ was the shape my anxieties took, and only in hindsight do I know it was mostly a dread over being in this world: how to be? how to be a me I liked? how to go forth and be an adult, when I felt soaked in ridiculousness?
But back then, none of this was evident.
We were all Oasis fans, that’s just culture we came of age into.
They had just realised new music. In my head, lyrics about make believing one wouldn’t grow old became “let’s all make believe that in the end we want get fat” .
The aptly named ‘Gas Panic’ was going through my head like a worried ghost as I ran between the science and P.E blocks, making sure I exercised when I could.
I wonder who that then young girl was. She was probably not even teenager as she shouted this thing was somehow very accurate. Something that would haunt me for 23 years.
I’m still haunted by the version of myself who was running around between school blocks. Memories that are all in greyscale colours, the kind that makes you think of 20th century TV school dramas like Grange Hill.
It haunts me, because in differing ways I never stopped being this person. The only thing that is different now is a catalogue of manifestations of this coping mechanism, sometimes feeling like they are now coming home to roost.
John B Ledger 