Sorry for writing this. I’m supposed to be an artist that people look up (well a few people who don’t know me personally may still do so) but my uncontained rage at how social media makes self-promotion of one’s distress, before it has even been hashtag-uttersd has made me speak more on here.

I have never felt ok as an adult, and I’m sick and tired of it. And fuck it, if speaking as a “flaky cunt” discredits any professional distance an artist is supposed to uphold.

It’s a continued wankness, worseningly interrupted by advise-givers who merely add extra voices to the self-critical monologue that lines the wank-tank.

Art that imitates life can only be posthumously celebrated, and woe-betited they who are self-aware of what they are doing.

This is no life. And yes it is my fault, before you California-indoctrinated tell me it’s up to me. I

It is up to me, but not in the way you make it out to be. Because reality is never Californian. Only it’s presentation is.

“Don’t rest your life around this hope”.

I’m 21. I’ve only been coming out in town for 7 months. In the space of 2 years I’ve gone from being in the grips of anorexia, to exchanging it for the hope that I can be who I want to be and also find happiness.

I can’t deal with bad nights out. I have too much invested in finding something that finally sorts my life out. It’s literally the end of the world when it’s shit, when my alcopop-fueled people-pleasing goes pear-shaped, and the ones who come and make me smile don’t show up.

I’m home now. Semi-pissed I binge eat, everything I can see. I do it to the point of no redemption, not in my rule book. I react by taking an overdose of paracetamols and my prescribed Sertraline tablets. I’ve no idea what it will do, whether I will collapse ot not. But I had to do it, as a symbolic confirmation of my self-condemnation.

I freak out and walk back out of the house into the dead of night. I take my Joy Division tapes and walk a loop in and out of the town centre around 4 times. Hoping someone will spot me, save me. But no.

After about 5 hours of walking I can’t do anymore. College is a safe haven, my new friends on the degree year above me will certainly be in. But it’s ages until the doors open.

I jump on the very first commuter train on this Thursday morning, in a fashion that will become deeply familiar in years to come.

What’s prompted this? A girl is making playful suggestions that she fancies. I have never experienced anything like this before. Yet I have spent too many years believing (and praying) that the day I meet somebody romantically will be the day I am saved from myself.

I’ve got the shakes, which I think must be due to the tablets. don’t know what else may happen. I want to be saved. I don’t feel depressed, just desperate to be saved from it.

I get off the train at Meadowhall, and wait for the train back in the direction I came from – in a fashion that will become all-too familiar in the rest of my 20s.

There’s still 2 hours until college is even open. I don’t know what I expect to happen. Maybe the severity of my acts will make the universe align to my current needs.

College finally opens. I still at the back of the refectory, acknowledging every face. Waiting…

We used to sit down, Cross legged. I’ve often wondered how. I can only seem to sit cross legged now on the softest of grass. That spongy moorland type of grass, where gravity gives us a break.

I was insular. But was I shy? I can’t remember.

I had a dummy until my fifth birthday. I became terrified that this secret would become public knowledge, especially as i was leading towards leaving Infant school.

It was the end of the day. I was daydreaming. Daydreaming was all I did. I used to have story after story that I lived in.

But I was chewing a pencil whilst I daydreamt. And it didn’t go unnoticed by the support teacher.

She made a spectacle of it. And said, as a form of punishment for my immaturity, she tomorrow was going to bring a dummy in and make me suck it in class.

I felt humiliated. But more than humiliation I felt dread. Dread about tomorrow.

I don’t think I slept. I woke up, breakfast became for the first time in my life an unwelcome and unpleasurable step in the day towards a thing I dreaded.

Looney Tunes was on the TV. One of the typical fall guys (Elmer Fudd, maybe?) Had a moment of humiliation. The next 10 seconds of accompanying “oh dear” music would sit deeply in my gut, mocking me before the anticipated event.

To this day that music, although I’ve never heard it since, haunts me, when I fear facing “the music”.

My parents saw I wasn’t in a good place. And asked me why. The support teacher lived next door to the house my mum grw up in on the top estate.

She told my mother she was only kidding. But that feeling of dread was one of greatest I’d felt up until that point in my life.

Guilt and shame are states that I have suffered with most of my life. They produce incredibly powerful feelings of having done something wrong, that can make other people appear as giant towering figures of authority in my head, whom I need to plead with for forgiveness so I can be free of any future condemnation.

I’m still not sure where it comes from, why I have such an exaggerated inner policeman, and friends get fed up of my constant apologising. But I apologise largely not for what I’ve done, but for what I fear I will end up doing.

I’ve always been haunted by this inner threat that I’m going to do/become something terrible, like I’m holding a heavy rock up on a steep hill, and as soon as let go it will collide down the hill, killing the village below. Preemptive apologies are my attempts at softening the blow for when the ‘Monster in me’ finally shows it’s face in public.

I say Monster, because this is something that a guilty soul worries that it will become.

Every age has its monsters. Today, they are plentiful, because, through our current dominant ways of communicating, which leave zero breathing space between the extreme black and white of a situation, we can no longer tell quite the difference between bad and really really bad. In turn, when we project another’s acts of injustice, it projects back on us an image of ourselves/our tribe as pure and free of any misdoings, whatsoever.

For for Guilty at Heart, feeling like they’re heading towards becoming a monster, social media is a horrible space, because you begin to identify with the ‘wrongdoers’, morally, criminally, sexually, racially, and think “I’m like that, that’s what I am”. Panicking, you think ” I need to do everything I can to stop myself becoming that!”.

But sometimes I fear that when we self-monsterise, we set the conditions for ourselves to become what the thing we fear. Because we are thinking about it all the time. Our inner policeman is constantly bringing us into the police station in our heads to interrogate us on crimes we fear we may commit. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”. You et day release because in flesh world, you haven’t yet done what they suggest you have….not yet.

It goes without saying that I believe this is a much larger societal phenomena, but I just wish I could pull a plug, press a halt button, and stop the self-monstering, and the fear that I am always one bad month away from it unleashing the worst in me.

In truth, I have done many things, many over the last few years, that I am deeply deeply regretful of, a lot of time through the state of drunkeness, which is something I still haven’t been able to stop using as an evening soul-crutch and relying on.

Also in truth, these regrets have probably been only harmful to me, and nobody else, even if they’ve made people less willing to spend time in my company. In fact I’m almost certain of this. But what prompts it is caused by the self-monsterising, which will not let me enjoy life and connect with people in ways I’d deem ‘healthy’ and constructive, because it tells me that once I reach out to touch, that’s when the terrible things might happen.

For some reason I grew up with a very fixed rigid idea of what a good person is, one that I find impossible to achieve, and in fact the guilt of not doing so often produces acts that are driven to destroy this ‘good person’ presentation of myself.

I don’t know what reading this sounds like. I’m not a closet murderer, serial sex offender, neo-nazi, or even a petty criminal, so no need to call the police. I have just decided to open up a little more on this blog, and see where it goes. And part of this means doing my best to escape the worsening affect that social media has had on this mental health condition.

I woke up with deep uneasy sighs, memorising a lad I once knew confronting me and pushing me into a state of defencelessness, the state I’d drop into when confronted by anyone who actually knew how to handle themselves.

Once again I was 11 going on 12. I’d come out of school, into the top estate of the village. I was looking forward to having to stay at my grandmas just around the block, to eat crap food rather than go home.

But now I felt in an utterly foul mood. Not only had I been well and truly put in my place, and rightfully so. I’d happily been a passive member of a group ripping the piss out of this lad earlier in the school day, perhaps the least excusable role you can take in a gang. But he instinctively knew that I was also a weak link, that he could confront me alone and rinse my latent guilt out into this grey miserable late autumn day.

I can’t recollect what was said by the mouthy members of this makeshift gang, but I know the context. Me and this lad grew up together, went to the same primary school, but he was a little rougher than I was.

Yet, he wasn’t ‘the rough‘ of the estates that could be a match for the cocky kids from the private estates who could afford the Adidas tracksuits, Lynx deodorant, and even sometimes a Berghaus coat. No, in hindsight he was destined to be beaten down, as young lads instinctively acted out the emerging prejudices of a post-Thatcher Britain. At this time it was common to hear some of the more cocky kids sing a rendition of Blur’s recent hit ‘Country House’, as ‘he lives in a box, a cardboard box in Kendray‘, taking the piss out of one the most deprived estates in the borough.

In my early morning heavy sighs, I recalled seeing this lad, now a man, very much beaten down. Without the family safety net that has since, admittedly, been my saviour at times. He, like some many from the top two estates, have been squeezed out of sight, possibly priced out of an area that has slowly become more desirable to healthier-looking families.

I know why I was part of this group. I was hiding behind the guns, so to speak, so that they wouldn’t fire my way. I found the first part of the first year of secondary school the most brutal processs of character assassination, in what is like a cleansing of pre-teen childhood. A preparation for the world, in and outside lessons.

I remember the grey v-necks, that we were told we had to wear, only to then see the cooler kids walking about in round-neck Fruit of the Loom jumpers, in what was a clear distinction of social capital.

I was either badly bullied, or I at least experienced it that way. It’s often hard to remember the truth now, just that I found it a time when all my character aspects, all personal qualities were drained of any potency, which isn’t a good feeling – everyone needs something to grip onto.

It’s a moment out of joint, within what otherwise felt, until then, a largely positive linear procession into growing up. But I remember this time like a frozen moment, like I’d dropped into a previous decade, a regressive relapse, where the colours and tones were always darker. I remember thinking “these are not good times”. I was already too self-aware too early.

But also too swayed by what was easiest. I knew it was wrong to stand behind the guns, to see have to done to others what had at times been done to me. But I did it nonetheless. And on this miserable autumn evening I paid the price. I always did, as justice follows those who are guilty in their hearts.