(This is the final chapter from the publication ‘Straight A’s: Anxiety, Anorexia, Alcohol, Ageing, and Art’, made for an exhibition of the same name).
I admit I’m still here; still trapped within the Straight A’s system of self-critical thoughts and go-to ‘remedies’, but I know I can’t physically upkeep these routines for much longer. I also admit I have written these stories countless times before. What is different now is that I can no longer use youth as a protection against truth.
My bones feel heavier…After years of walking long distances with a heavy rucksack the increasing throbbing pains tell me to stop, yet routine tells me to carry on like I’m 21. But I’m not… and the hope that there is something to save me around the corner has gone.
…But I know I’m not the only one…
I believe the struggle is partly generational. All Millennials (those who came of age in the years either side of the year 2000) were instilled with a ‘millenarian’ sense that all good things would finally reveal themselves in our near future. We’d grown up as the writer Francis Fukuyama’s famous ‘End of History’ proclamation had been willingly swallowed like a pill by an entire culture who had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of a coming age of lasting peace, where we could all find the freedom to live out our best lives.
But, by the 2010s, not only had this expectation been ground down (symbolised in the staggered punches of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash) but this collective anticipation had mutated into it’s opposite: a belief that the future would actually be worse than the present.
Whatever your current politics, I believe that this sense of a ‘lost future’ embedded in Millennials fueled the ‘momentum’ behind the Corbyn-led Labour Party, energised by what felt like a last chance to salvage a 21st century we thought we’d had been promised in the final years of the 20th century.
But after Corbyn’s terminal failure at the 2019 general election, we then faced a global pandemic lockdown, which although initially offering glimmers of a kinder way of living, ultimately ushered in an aggressive ‘back to normal’ that frog-marched us back into a world that was even worse than the one we’d had before.
Thus, I think it’s fair to say that many of us have found the years since 2020 the hardest we’ve known.
One Sunday afternoon in 2023 as I meandered around Sheffield trying to conjure a sense of purpose (something I’d done countless times during the last 20 years) I suddenly couldn’t take anymore; I had to accept the fact my life wasn’t working.
I’d ‘had enough’ many times before, but this time I’d had enough of having enough.
I’d reached a point where I was both ashamed and exhausted by the adult life I’d lead, and wished there was a ‘life amnesty’ where I could hand my life in. Lacking this option I shared a post on Instagram, publicly confirming that I had been living with a mental illness for all my adult life.
Even writing this provokes the inner critics to come out of the woodwork and shout: “you’re so fucking so self-absorbed, John!”
Throughout writing this story countless inner critics have popped into my head, criticising me and making me feel scared about what people will say to me when they get me alone.
However, worrying about somebody having a go at me, verbally cornering me in the smoker’s corner after 6 pints, is very reason I should write this! I have to escape this stage in my head; this unlimited-seater venue built for the unlimited critics and bullies; this is what keeps me ‘entombed in self-centredness’.
I have to convince myself that I’m not writing this for the approval of others: I’m writing for and to myself. It’s a letter to the life I missed due the Straight A’s, and the letter to a life I may still one day have a chance to lead.
Both Art and Anorexia were political decisions: both were subconscious rejections that manifested into states of being once adulthood encroached upon a body that didn’t know how to take shape in the world as it is presented. Both are responses to a social/political atmosphere that, even in your teenage bones, you know will never let you breathe the way you need to breathe.
Both begin as negatives to a positive that actually offer no positive at all.
As an Anorexic you retreat into the position of a ghost, standing on a fine line where you are neither present or absent. This suspense is held up in the hope that a world, a world you can live in, will come find you. You do not want to die, you just don’t want to be in a world where you cannot live.
Art, as a life practice, started from the same position as Anorexia. However, Art allows you to create your own rules, your own system of thinking, your own path, and by default your own take on ‘reality’. All Artists know how hard it is, when your world, the only world you can breathe in, is perpetually attacked by systems of doing and living that deny its right (and by extension, your right) to exist.
However, you have no choice but to carry on…
In 1999 we’d deface our high school ‘student planners’, and my mate changed my planner name from John Ledger to ‘Ooon Badger’. Initially it was a source of ridicule, but in 2006 I had the confidence to own Ooon Badger, and change it to embody the creative impulse in its spontaneous, joyous, life-full form. Ooon Badger disappeared before the end of the 2000s, but there’s something in it that I constantly crave to rekindle.
I’ll never stop making Art. But rather than only being able to perpetually say ‘fxxk you’ to a world I can’t properly live within, one day I’d love to be able to make it the positive affirmation of a life I wish to lead.
I may never stop having issues around social Anxiety, eating issues, depression, and Addictive tendencies. But I know that this is a milestone that must set a precedent where I allow myself to something better than the Straight A’s.
(I have a small amount of copies of this book remaining, if anyone is still interested in purchasing one please leave a comment).
John B Ledger 