I did not know how to be a body down there in the towns. I didn’t know how to be flesh.

In my younger adult years my guts were saying “take me to the moors, take me to the moors”. It was compulsive thought. Perhaps it was put in my head by words of the ‘The Smiths’. Although I find it more likely that the Smiths were also not the owners of these words, and were but carriers.

It’s a gut instinct impulse for all of those for whom these moors have formed a life-long backdrop.

I think of the moors very much in relation to my raw inability to be a body.

A friend recently spoke of the sheer slicing power of the word ‘Anorexia’, and how he believed it is really, in some way, the same word as ‘suicide’.

I think he is right, I believe they operate in the same realm; when a body feels like it is being edged out of life, as if the sky was solid walls encroaching.

I have always had a fantastical picture of the moorland horizon to the west of my town. I see it as a portal to somewhere beyond the lived experience.

It’s barrenness allows one to reach a space that isn’t dead but remains removed from that of the living.

It is a space where the unbearable feelings produced from having to be a body down there no longer applied.

“They cannot reach me here…”

Cynthia Cruz in her beautiful and personal book ‘The Melancholy of Class’ speaks about Anorexia in terms of existing a ‘living death’.

If suicide is the act of removing yourself completely, obliterating your body presence, to perform the act of living death is to remove your body from life whilst still being technically alive – removing it from its physical and erotic social role in a world where the sufferer just cannot emotionally comprehend existing.

Anorexia isn’t really about food, no more than food is fuel for the body in a body that still doesn’t know how to occupy physical and social space without feeling disgust and dread.

This is, of course, no kind of direct oppression, from any specific agent: yet the reaction is physical.

We are the lumps of clay forced to make ourselves free.

I came of age in a culture of different expectations and horizons than those of previous generations around these parts.

I have long called this world a world cast under a ‘cult of self-belief’, or a ‘cult of constant self-improvement’.

The Factories were ruins, the mines were being blown up, and new shiny retail parks with the promise of an American-style paradise were filling the gaps they left.

The old world, where society made lumps of clay of us, to be factory workers, cannon fodder, and to upkeep domestic drudgery, was melting away.

This was the future, where we, the clay, had to mould ourselves.

…to be whatever we wanted to be.

The only choice we lacked was the freedom not to choose. We had to become ourselves.

I didn’t know how to become, and didn’t know how to go forth and become my own self-made self, who could be a body in this kind of world

I can tack explanations and excuses to this – that I’d lost all my self-worth due to assuming a social-role of class whipping boy -but all I know is that I saw no future in which I could thrive, no future where I wouldn’t feel humiliated and useless.

The biggest thing I feared was the continuation of school life into adulthood as a lowly endgame.

So I fell into my head. With a body that I had no place for, but felt weirdly ashamed of. Exercise and food limitation was a way of keeping it in check, and keeping it inoffensive.

I tried to remain forever young until I found a body which was granted access through the gates.

Pathetic, perhaps, but I’ve been here since.

Early adulthood is accompanied by a greater pressure to act, as the future is no longer coming, it is the present.

It is around this time, that I literally looked sideways, westwards, to see these hills as an escape.

I’ve been coming here again recently. Because I’ve kind of hit a dead end, admittedly perhaps the same dead end as 20 years before. But with the knowledge that I need to get past it.

I’ve spent a lifetime not knowing how to be a body. I’ve watched everyone around me make a life for themselves, and I have felt like I’m stuck behind glass looking at it, banging at it, louder and louder.

I’ve spent a lifetime making increasingly louder and louder artistic statements, screaming at the capitalist constellation all of us have exist within, kind of as a last resort to feeling bereft on any tools to move forward in my own life.

People try to help. “Just do something different”, they say. But there’s something in the way, which they cannot see no matter how loudly I try to point it out.

During previous attempts to overcome this, I have depended on generating some optimism about the goal in question through an idea of myself in a new body…

That next big event, next exhibition, that move to a new place where I finally fit into that work/life in an urban community. All imaginings conjure footage in my head, where I see my body in those spaces, finally embodied by self-acceptance.

But I’m so tired of trying to upkeep ridiculous tricks. I’m still here, still this rigid teenager. It’s humiliating to write, and I’m too old for any of this anymore.

I can think differently up here. It kills the increasingly painful commands to manifest.

Because this is a land that is neither dead nor that of the living, I shed that pressure to shield myself in harmless but mandatory conversations about the passions and joys possessed by our living flesh..

But there’s a life out there for me, somewhere, that does exist, and isn’t through a portal to another world.

“Without examples, without models
I began to believe voices in my head, 
That I am a freak, that I am broken, 
That there is something wrong with me, 
That I will never lovable. Years later, 
I find the courage to admit that I am transgender, 
And that does not mean that I am unlovable. 
This world that we imagine in this room 
Might be used to gain access to other rooms, 
Other worlds, previously unimaginable.”

I’m slightly catatonic, beaten by a really low time, yet equally I can see something crystal clear, something never clear in the low-level panic state of the cold hard realism, down there, below.

I don’t want to come down, down from ‘the tops’, which, however inhospitable and dangerous, always seem to offer a portal to somewhere else.

Nor the night roads which eventually lose their intolerability to walkers, and become astral runways- removed from the flat destinations at every turn off, by every step into the trance.

I’ve kept looking at the photo above, one I took as I scaled the steep inclines of a river source. I wanted to fall in love with the photo, because the photo is of an idea, and idea of place, a place I wish I could remain, a portal to another realm where my physical presence seems to belong, not tangled in the icy chest stabs of ‘wrongness’.

How did I get here?

The photo is of knarled oak trees that cover a river source near the Woodhead Pass area of Dark Peak, a river that eventually goes on to help form the infamous river Mersey.

Living with the physical presence of the Dark Peak hills shapeshifting with the distant clouds, over the pennine foothills, I would walk mile upon mile up to them in a desperate period in early adulthood, with this superstitious need to believe that they would take me away to another place.

This feeling would often carry itself over to the area at the other side of the hills, momentarily second-guessing Greater Manchester and Liverpool as a Post-industrial Yorkshire in an alternative reality: similar, but weirdly Other – “maybe I can find happiness here?”

I used to scoff at the idea of a core self, thinking that we were just an accumulation of external voices and ideas that constructed us (which increased my feelings of hopelessness in trying to change), but when I don’t think through the mind/body separation, so habitually and so religiously defended by the Western Mind, I can see my core self through my body.

It’s in the pain I feel when I get laughed at still; it’s the self that comes to life when there’s brief moments of wondering if I can be in love, and it’s the self that has felt like a dying body within me over my 30s, as I have increasingly watched people live their lives, whilst I have been ever-more destructively trying to chase it from within a cage nobody else can see.

It’s no more a thinking self that a flesh-based feeling self. This is the first time in my life I have been able to see this.

To try to sit with myself, my body; my entire adult life has been an escape from this sensation.

I turned 39 last month, I can’t do another decade like this. Yet, I’ve said this before, in my 20s.

The only problem is that the void, or the space where this ‘core self’ rests, is so horrible to sit with. It’s like a thunderstorm of self-disgust. When the overthinking mind has no actions to overcome this, rather than go back to the same habits, it feels a lot easier than sitting with disgust.

This is why I chose to begin this blog with this Burial sample. It’s by somebody who is transgendered. I couldn’t quite believe how closely I related the the sample on the Burial track,

Although problematic to say, as an outsider who still does not know what to do with his own flesh, I believe ‘trans desire’ is a desire not to only exit and transcend the gender one is born in and thus defined by, but also the type of world in which we all must become, and be a body – a world where there is two types of existential threats ever-closing in, one internal to capitalism, and one external; climate breakdown.

We share desire to escape what we must be.

In this light, it is so brave, to step into the unknown, with only a faint hope of materialising within it.

Suicidal thoughts, as I have experienced them throughout my adult life, have been similar: the desire to take the body beyond the realms of the place in which something seems to prevent it existing.

I wish it was up here, on these walks, that the portal to the world I’ve always wanted to live in can be found. But the other worlds need to be found where I am, if anywhere.