John B Ledger

20 year of coffees and Train tickets to nowhere in particular

“If only this next journey unveils something.”

Chasing the idea. An idea that The idea might finally manifest itself. Chasing it for 20 years.

The infamous accusation aimed at Millennials is that they can’t afford their own homes because they spend all their money on avocado on toast – a distorted presentation of reality, so to ignore specific generational struggles.

I’m not really even a millennial. Well, only just. I turn 40 in 4 months. I was a ‘proto-Millennial’. I spent enough time in a pre-internet, analogue age, with enough time to anticipate what a post-2000 world would look like before the lived-reality.

Perhaps what I’m about to explain has something to do with this anticipation of the arrival of something. I turned 16 just days into the 2000s, and thus its arrival was deeply wedded to the anticipation of what adulthood would be.

Since then, I, reduced to an economic agent, have been a waster, wasting my future property-investment funds in a manner maybe more despicable in the eyes of cartoon-character Baby Boomers than that of the avocado eaters of Hoxton.

I’ve spent most my adult life having nowhere to head to, but no place I wanted to remain in.

I’ve always been to drawn to public spaces where I can sit without reason for being there. Their transience would sooth a deep dread of descending further down the one-way descent into adulthood, whilst simultaneously going nowhere.

Train journeys always lifted my spirits. Or, at least the idea of them; of perpetual, rhythmic motion, cutting through a society alive by daylight – occasionally the journeys would even live up to the ideal. There was never a big reason, an important journey that warranted paying the price to more far-flung cities.

After all, no matter how far I travelled I always realised what I was trying to find wasn’t located in space, and if anywhere at all, in another time. Liverpool was just another city of more shops and cafes, London had infinitely more options, but in reality every single establishment felt just like the ones in Leeds or Sheffield.

And situated 20 miles between them both, Leeds and Sheffield would become my go to cities. As long as I could find a cafe here where I could sit, and remain relatively anonymous, I would be at ease. To become overly-familiar with staff and other customers would potentially make the space feel more like the kind of space I have perpetually tried to escape: one I have to be present in.

Presence has always been what I cannot face, because I have never known how to be a body, present in a society.

All societies ask that one ‘shows up’. In older societal structures a man must show up for tough, dangerous work; for war and, to some extent, to the ever-present potential of violence descending on his family/community. A woman must show up to be enslaved to their role as a wife and child-bearer.

I spent many a childhood day peering towards the coming Millennium, relieved that this world had gone, and I wouldn’t have to go to war or work down the pits, and live a hard life.

But how does one ‘ show up’ instead?

They ‘be themselves’.

‘Being yourself’ was the golden ticket that all early Millennials were given, en-route to the Millennium. It was sold as the ‘get in free’ pass.

How did that go?

The cynical eye may argue that all that has happened is that disciplinary structures have simply been internalised. We no longer have to be forced into jobs and social roles, we must now do the forcing ourselves. Strive, push, and carve ourselves into a go-getter, go-getting a job that we may have had been made to get previously without half the stress. The despairing eye would go further, and argue that we become perpetual sculptors of our own flesh for our value on the market, be it intellectually, or physically (in the gym, in having the perfect diet, perfect sleep regime etc).

I saw no role for myself in this adult world, I was too aware what would grind my soul down in no time. And as adulthood decision-making hurtled towards me I developed eating disorders, a way of trying control the flesh’s descent towards the earth.

Not only was this a side-step from not knowing how to ‘show up’ in a world where I couldn’t see myself, it was also a side-step from the handshake with mortality that arrives in adulthood. Most adulthoods make this handshake through rites of passage, most obviously through marriage and child-rearing.

To some extent I’ve been in the waiting room for life since my late teens, wondering when it finally happens.

I’ve never been able to deal with ageing. I now frantically pluck wirey white hair from sides, because mortality can only be accepted by those who are truly in life, and not its waiting room.

My dad would on occasion express bafflement at my inability to be at ease in the domestic space. And if I’d had found ease, I’d had found life. I probably wouldn’t be regrettably still in that same domestic space as a 40 year old (despite an overarching economic reality equally playing a part in this for many).

An insect doesn’t understand the concept of glass. On a hot day it will repeatedly fly into the window trying to get out, to the point of exhaustion and death. Like this insect, I haven’t understood what I am stuck behind, and have been banging against it also to the point of exhaustion.

A little less self-awareness and a heck of a lot more self-assurance and I could’ve been an activist, fighting that which reproduces a reality I see no place for myself in. And lacking a bit of self-awareness in favour of being more self-assured, I’d keep on fighting even if my vision was flawed.

I don’t really know what will come of the next decade. All I know is that I’ve written this before, probably on this blog, as I reached 30.

I have held back on writing for a bit, because I became embarrassed at how self-consumed my writing was. I stopped commenters wading in. But this is my predicament, and this is the predicament I need to the story of.

Do we need ‘The New Deal’ for sex?

Very typical ‘Noughties’ image. That’s myself, second from the right.

“How the fuck do you know if that’s in your head or not?” Prez Pryzbylewski, The Wire.

Before I even begin to scrawl these admittedly conceptually disjointed thoughts, I realise I could be acting recklessly.

I, in no way, intend to speak in favour of abusers, but such grey areas of consideration must now be forced to bleed either black or white, with the haste of our compressed and high speed swarm-debates transforming everything.

Ultimately, I’m a white heterosexual bloke, and none of us can fully visualise and encompass what we are not when amidst projecting ourselves into this world. Our words and their consequences always have an underbelly that only certain others can see, but rarely we – and perhaps only in then in aftermath. So, if I’m speaking in favour of abusers without knowing so, I apologise beforehand.

The above quote is from an episode of the US drama series ‘The Wire’. After accidentally shooting a black colleague, white cop Prez Pryzbylewski, who consciously doesn’t identify with having racist thoughts, begins to wonder if those very thoughts might be ‘inside him’ on a subconscious level.

I grew up when sex and gender relations were being reconfigured. My formative years were in the 1990s, which was still under the long shadow of the 1960s – specifically the individualism and sexual liberation of that decade. But since then these cultural ideas had merged, and been warped by the combination of individualism with the arch-conservatism that followed it in the Thatcher and Reagan 1980s. To put it crudely, female liberation was bastardised into the transformation from domestically-enslaved Victorian Nora Batty-types into self-empowered sex symbols, with no sense of contradiction. And to young men it looked exciting and enticing and required no self-reflection at all.

I became an adult male in the 2000s—a very important decade to talk about. The 2000s, or the noughties, were truly the last party, an exhausted and decadent last tango to the hedonism of 1960s pop culture.

We all know it ended 15 years ago with the financial crash, almost exactly to the day. Since then, everybody has a smart phone, everybody has an ever-present camera – everybody is tethered to something that we idly call “social media”, mainly because we don’t yet have the distance and hindsight to give better definition to life locked inside this madhouse.

It’s so fitting that Russell Brand, who, not being an actual noughties’s rockstar, but a walking fever-dream through which we recall every indie disco we went to, has finally been ousted for what, if you read between the lines in his earlier YouTube presence, he was already indirectly admitting to and anticipating retribution for. So many of his references to the behaviour of other addicts were also clearly references to himself.

If he is guilty of all that he is accused, like Saville before him, he expressed it all in clear daylight. However, unlike Saville (and the 70s ghoulishness of Saville was infinitely Other to the 00s sex-addiction of Brand), Brand was trying to publicly rehabilitate himself in a cultural moment that eventually he knew would come for him, which is, in my opinion, why he became so conspiratorial – I believe it was a coded (perhaps unconsciously so) series of accusations towards a ‘liberal elite’ that he knew would eventually ‘get him’.

I do not think there’s one man who became an adult in the noughties who doesn’t recall saying, maybe even doing things (minor or major) in that decade that now would be both unacceptable and called out. I think anyone who says otherwise is being creative with their past.

Many of us passively participated in the idea that we should find joy in attitudes towards women and getting laid that in truth felt like disembodied endevours. The weird thing with a dominant culture, such as that of the noughties, is that you perform as if you enjoy it, even if you don’t. Just watch any episode of the noughties comedy ‘The Inbetweeners’ and cringe at what was culturally expected of young men, and then watch the more recent series based around a group of men of a similar age and era, ‘Ladhood’ to see how patriarchal male roles had to be made, often through displeasure and alienation.

Sex is fundamentally anarchic, it is the Mr Hyde to Dr Jekyll, and we daren’t look it in the eyes, because at heart it abides by no laws, no codes of conduct, it exists outside society but inside it at the same time.

However, what we are living in, in the age of #Metoo and the ongoing almost daily celebrity ‘exposures’, is the fallout of the hedonistic ideology of the last 60 years. You could call it a set of ‘implicit instructions’ that one feels rather than knows, and these instructions under the long shadow of the 1960s were that everyone must have fun, and if one isn’t having fun, they best find some fun pretty soon, in whatever form that takes.

Now we are living in an era of schizophrenic temporalities amidst the ruins of any overarching cultural consensus. We simultaneously exist in the aftermath of our current society whilst still living within it. This situation has been created by the collective haste to seek justice that social media generates. We live in a post-patriarchal, post-racial, post-inequality aftermath where justice is dealt out, whilst the aforementioned oppressive structures still exist, arguably stronger than ever.

But our current desire for retribution has a terminal nature to it, the outcome of the progressive energies of a society knowing nowhere to progress towards.

What I mean is ‘we’ (the progressive church of ‘we’) no longer have a future vision. Individual accountability for acts of injustice becomes magnified into a place of hysterical haste, precisely due to the lack of the vision of where collective justice needs to move into.

Climate change, or ‘global boiling’ as one European minister recently called it, is the most symbolical feature of our near future. Indeed, a future without a future that feeds into every aspect of our zeitgeist. This terminalism in progressive energies exists alongside a moral haste to seek justice, and it creates a culture of accountability for its own sake.

This isn’t to say that what is being held to account shouldn’t be, it is built upon strong ethical principles of justice and equality. But a movement without a vision begins to look like an anarchic free-for-all of individual call outs, which, in turn, encourages us to point and call out in fear of being called ourselves. The void in vision and direction is a fuel to the wildfire of holding others to account.

Whether one can blame social media or not, it has certainly produced an online world split between two opposing camps. For all of life’s social, political, and individual complexities, in our social media lives we have to become either one or the other: progressive on all counts or reactionary on all counts.

If we are caught out ‘liking’ a post that is a bit ethically ‘dodgy’ despite being largely progressive in our ideals, there grows a suspicion about our ‘true nature’. We have to be all or nothing. And in truth no human being is 100 percent ethically progress down to the bone.

That Russell Brand is an extreme case of this (a man who, on one hand, publicly supported the Metoo movement, and who deeply supported a fair and more just world, but was haunted by his former lifestyle that was once merely seen as promiscuous hedonism for white blokes with an ability to ‘get away with it’) means that enough people who feel burned and ostracised by the progressive camp already could begin to see in him a martyr,

That legitimately awful people like Andrew Tate and Tucker Carlson are already showing solidarity with him is a warning sign we need to pay attention to. I have friends who are genuinely decent people, but with flaws, with cultural muscle memory that makes them imperfect for the progressive camp, and they are drawn in by such influencers.

I admit that like Prez Pryzbylewski of The Wire, I have been horrified to find out what might be lodged in my own head. I tend to internalise. I self-monsterise, often to the point of seeing my lowly self in big stage celebs who have abused their power to extreme ends. Others, perhaps less hyper self-critical are retreating to the fake safe-houses designed by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, the kind of houses that merely radicalise you as opposed to re-conciliating you with your shadows.

This is why I somewhat recklessly suggest that perhaps we don’t just need a Green New DEAL, but a New Deal for Sex.

I apologise it this is sounds like a flippant suggestion for something so triggering. I haven’t any experience of sexual abuse, which I understand most women alive today have, in some form. But the road we are currently on seems to be only making us more distrustful and divided and, most worrying of all, it lacks any vision of a world beyond this collapsing one.

Our sex culture lay in the ruins of late 20^th century lassie faire hedonism, patriarchy, and ideas of equality of justice that are deprived of a cohesive direction forward. Sex is the de-facto Jekyll and Hyde within a species that, unlike other species, is both conscious and unconscious in its search for copulation. We are removed from other animals, but not far enough. This has always been our problem, but most notably when it comes to sex. Unlike racial and political injustice it is much harder to shine the torch of injustice on it and come up with a clear idea of an clear solution of how to do things better.

In it’s anarchic, accused, and paranoid state, the spectre of late 20^th century sex hangs over us in a way that requires a debate as big as that about 21^st century capitalism and ecological collapse.

Maybe Brand, Weinstein (although I think both cases are vastly different) are mirror images of reckless financiers. Maybe a new social contract for sexual relations, neither harking back to more rigid, straight-forwardly oppressive forms of patriarchy, nor like the hedonist, sexual liberation of the last 60 years, that has often merely allowed those high on power to abuse.

This isn’t a cohesive plan, and I have nothing else to add. But I think something along this line needs to start being debated more often.

Thanks, for reading.

The white noise of self-improvement instructions

It’s 6am, I’m back at my parents, lying in bed after a skinful that actually lifted me for once. But as the dog barks from early walkers trigger prongs of an intruder’s morality, I remember that I’m a body that must act, and act quickly.

One must lift up and make their flesh out of their own volition, only to submit themselves to work and to a labour market they have no control over. The contemporary consequences of this self micro-management are too numerous to list.

I’ve never known what I want to do, but I’ve known where I don’t want to end up – made waste of.

I pick up a reprint of an 100 year old map of the local area. Collieries on one side, ‘lunatic’ asylums, a word that explains in itself how they treated those with mental health issues, on the other. Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat, a song we sung in Primary school assembly, a song that emanates childhood innocence, wierdly accompanies way to many waking hours at the moment. Why this matters I can’t quite tell. Perhaps it still rings out, to ask ‘what happened to that better world?’.

It could have been replayed in this fashion for 30 plus years, in confusion, amidst the white noise of signs that has defined adulthood.

One must be their own maker. As if we were our own gods.

What I never understood, refuse to understand infact, is, if I am supposed to be my own maker, why am I then told that I must subject myself to a reality that I have no control over?

It’s like a game of of different character archetypes from whom we must choose. But we weren’t told this, that it was a game. And what if I didn’t want to play?

I didn’t want to play. My teenage social role was group whipping boy, laughing stock. My future economic role still seems like such an alien concept that I still feel like a 17 year old staring blankly at a reality that expects me to show up for my new role, very soon.

This wasn’t a game I wanted to play, so I did my shy teenage version of sticking two fingers up, and I just stepped off the playing field, and hid in the margins.

But to stay there required more than I expected. One must be a body in this world, one must be here, consuming, expanding, decaying, polluting.

My teenage eating and running regime got worse as the pressure to self-manifest into adulthood grew nearer.

“Don’t just sit there, be something!”

What if I become nothing, because nothing is the only thing left?

What if in a world that demanded positive bodying on a competitive stage, yet excreted such horror, one was too self-aware to go forth?

Not possible. At last you have to lurch, lunge. It’s the survival mechanism, raising hope in the body that the dead dreams of childhood can be resuscitated. Lunge for the all-too-familiar – the white noise of self improvement instructions still gives no clues

If only I’d been kept behind

I remembered something today that I don’t often think about, and, thus doesn’t feature in my personal narrative.

When I was 4 years old my nursery school teacher was concerned that I wasn’t developing to the same standards as the rest of my group, and she suggested to my mother that I be kept behind a year to catch up, before entering infant school.

I don’t know what to make of this, other than as time has gone on a know that if I’d had grown up some 15 years later, I’d had been classed as neurodiverse, or something similar.

I found it strangely comforting, on a day in which my inner monologue has been torturously relentless in the war it fights.

It goes into battle against the building feelings of having failed, it tries to justify, excuse, bide more time, against the continually injested concrete dust of social norms. It ultimately produces the most horrible of outlooks on everything.

It’s been getting worse. I’ve been trying and trying to reckon with the distressed monologue. But it just keeps going and going. The feelings of failing are so ingrained, it’s like all my life is a performance rating.

Which is why I sometimes look for an exit through an explanation that proves that it isn’t my fault: “I was neurologically unsuited to the world I was expected to succeed in” etc.

It’s not a solution. But as things stand I have no solution. I’ve once more lost the will to work towards a future within the system. Post pandemic, in a way I fear many silently understand, previous grasps on reality, on a personal right up geopolitical level, feel like they’ve been ground into dust.

I’m 40 in 4 months. And I can’t deny it’s hard to shake off the sense that so many things I maybe wanted in life will now never happen.

I’m at work.. toiling away, disturbed by my own lowly, sweaty shape. Looking in the mirrors at the straight A’s of Ageing, Anorexia, Anxiety, Alcohol and Austerity as the slowly destroy my facial features.

Hateful of my own privelage for believing I was meant to better than this. Set up by the 1990s con of perpetual Mediterranean bliss in Britain.

I now ee a world of pain without meaning; social justice without meaning; a future of hardships wwithout meaning. I am haunted by the trace of what could have been, and if this is it, I am condemned to be tortured by the bitter tattoo of high expectations

Is there freedom in accepting failure?

Another heavy night, waking up cringing at the ritual, the darkest of my albums on my last played. Regrettable messages sent.

Yet somehow, despite an aching injury keeping me awake, I woke up feeling alright.

The inner monologue, the mode I go into as I react to the world and the state of affairs I must live through.

It is momentarily as if I have been cured of it. That private civil war – the noise has gone.

And I don’t know why.

Yet, I imagine the mind must have to look after itself from time to time, and some survival instinct must say “we can’t feel like that again, at least not today”.

It is a momentary experience of freedom, that will inevitably dissolve away when I listen to one too many news stories, when I think about my future prospects for 1 second longer than I should in order to maintain this experience, this experience of ‘lightness’.

I’m reminded of myself in younger years; buffeted by my student loan, and experiencing the future in front of me as something I can warmly explore, as opposed to one of violent contraction towards the zero sum of mortality.

I used to wake up, write songs, record songs, before I’d even clean my teeth or put my socks on. Excited at the new things I’d produced.

But I’m here now, in a car park, clutching grey hairs from my sides, desperate for the next ‘thing’, the next project, the next affirmation of the infinity of youth.

But, it’s been a deeply unstable path, propped up by illusion for some years now. And one day I have to face what I have been trying to avoid for most of my 30s: that I failed.

Perhaps there would be a liberation if I could finally own failure. I’m fed up of the teeth grinding of the denial, that’s for sure.

Of course failure is subjective. But this subjectivity is cupped by the dual forces of societal expectations and the ageing of the body. And, as I limp around my job tasks, totally at sea in the world I’m supposed to belong to (the artistic world), failure does indeed appear to be objective.

I’ve willed for its ruination for years. The deep deep displeasure in upholding this artistic selfhood, has spread into the actual act of making, diseasing the only thing I understand, the only articulation of existing I know.

I hold back from ruining it, because I’m scared of this nothingness that would envelope all impulse to act thereon after.

Yet, I know now, that it has to be ruined, I have to fail, I have to admit my failure, in order to move on.

But nobody can predict how they will fail/fall.

Neither here nor there – somewhere only fleeting.

I stand at the railway station anxiously tensing my stomach to look as flat as possible, arms tight and reluctant to leave their position next to my rib cage. It’s all so familiar, countless adulthood hours stranded in discontent at nearby transport terminals, waiting to be delivered from this daily dis-ease.

A kind of inertia, repetitively trying to get somewhere, to a place on this earth, hoping that this time when the train pulls in, the constellation at the final destination has reconstituted itself into somewhere I can inhabit.

I’ve spent my life wanting to get beyond what has felt like an invisible wall, preventing my transcendence into an actual adulthood I can embody, as of yet unable to grapple with applying inner peace to a self that feels so deeply insufficient and wanting. That’s why I’m stood on this platform at 3pm which actual teenagers, 20+ years younger than myself.

My destination doubles down on my current displeasure. What was I expecting? Somebody to finally scoop me into their healing arms outside the train station doors? Put me together again like Humpty Dumpty?

Once more, I’ve forgotten the certain kind of emotions that cities provoke. That you have to train yourself to not absorb everything, not to take everything personally. Because if you do, and I have many times, your’e in a pub trying to soothe your emotional exhaustion hours before the acceptable watershed you’d previously set.

There’s a point on my current journey to and from home, on the A66, a road that almost mimics the river Tees on one side and the Eden on the other. A road where the county boundary signs literally match a symbolic threshold on a landscape, a threshold that upon seeing the outline of the Lake District can feel like a boundary between the ancient tribes that I’m sure it once was.

It is at this point, or should I say the very point where the rocks above the road hang above your vehicle, that attribute a sense of meaning and belonging to the journey. A sense that ultimately disappears once I reach my destination on either side.

I can relate to rock and landscape as a reflection of mood. These dark grey stones stand like watchmen, on a more northerly passage over the pennines to my more familiar Woodhead Pass. Yet, somehow they share its essence, they feel like they sing the same song/speak the same language. Yes, it is a mournful tune, a tune perhaps more somber than the more dramatic tune that comes from the mountainous Lake Districts, and the warmer red-stone of lower Cumbria.

I attest that there’s a difference in wallowing in ones sadness and being in a space that allows it to breath, and these thresholds between ‘realms’ on the pennines certainly allow for this. It is here that I can see myself for what I currently am: somebody uprooted at the core of myself, and lookign for it, perpetually.

I’ve not been at home in this sense since my teens, and I say this with no ignorance to the knowledge it’s on me to alter it. I just haven’t managed yet.

Until your 30s, whatever it is, if it exists or if we make-do, makeshift or make ourselves believe it’s arrived, it feels like it’s coming towards us. It is literally the train we wait for at the station.

In your 30s, we realise that the world is becoming less interested in us, that most social spaces aren’t occupied by people our age, unless in a family-orientated way. When we realise this, it is literally like the train came in the station, and, maybe we got distracted, went to the shop for a beer or something, and when we come back the train is leaving the station.

I have spent the last ten years desperately chasing a train that has already gone by. Unable to accept this, because I’m unable to face the kind of adulthood it leaves me with, because it is certainly neither an adulthood I anticipated or wanted.

However, the displeasure over presence meant I was never REALLY present “when we getting high” – when my age group was practicing life-long coupling and life-roles. I was in avoidance, waiting for the train to arrive and take me to space where I could do the aforementioned things in a way that I felt I could so.

The aimlessness doubled down in my 30s, it was prompted both by displeasure in space, and a sense of running out of time. The amount of hours I’ve sat in pubs by myself hurts to admit. Very few of them were memorable or even pleasurable, all of them sat waiting for something to arrive.

I used to just think, “this time, next time, next art show, next thing”. But even at my art shows I’d be crawling out of my skin, people-pleasing to manage outcomes, and running away for the next drink to punctuate the grey, undeclared moments in all social events.

Like usual, no conclusion only explanation.

Brookhill Close

Brookhill Close is a semi-fictional merger of my childhood upbringing at the bottom of a cul-de-sac in the late 80s/early 90s, whilst growing up watching the soap Opera Brookside on a very similar type of cul-de-sac.

Watching the soap set in post-industrial Liverpool felt like looking into somewhat warped mirror of my own world, watching people live out a life in a very similar context in another part of Britain.

This cul-de-sac, on the fringes of my home town, was sandwiched between more fancier new-build houses for an emerging commuter class using the nearby M1, and the council estates built for the disappearing coal mines.

It was all too easy to identify with the stories of fictional Liverpudlian families, in the new post-industrial 1990s, struggling to find their place in a new build estate of new social class dynamics. Whilst the times were still haunted by the spectre of the Old, in the shadow cast by unemployment, disaffected young people, the panic over drugs, sharply contrasting with the new shiny out-of-own shops and exciting new consumer world.

As an adult things have never felt ‘ok’

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.

May 2005

“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…