I can’t have been to this specific spot for over 20 years. Possibly not since my doings were still determined by my parents, and before walking up to ‘the Tops’ became more of a wish for transcendence.

In my 20s I’d always stick to the roads which cut through this landscape, because I wanted to reach the other side, with a catatonically-charged wish to find a better world at the other side.

What is weirdest is that I remember this landscape more from the dreamscapes, where exaggerated manifestations of it and recurred ever since.

This may be because these vast moors appear out of nowhere next to a busy commuter link road as if you were still dreaming..

The moors are a realm with their own law, their own foreboding threats and their own illusive promises. They possess that which some people find in the sea, or in the desert. These moors are an ‘out there’ specific to the imagination of Northern industrial towns.

It is so tempting to keep climbing up into them, as if you could meet that other world you feel so desperate for.

I play tricks on myself, to conjure something that transcends a reality I feel so stuck in, trying to see ghosts because everything is present up here only in its absence.

It’s the first time in 29 years I’ve seen a pile of rocks the ruins of buildings demolished to make way for the nearby reservoir. Aged 10 I tried to jump from one to the next, slipping and ending up in hospital with concussion.

I have felt threatened by life, fearful of being myself in a state of happiness from such an early age that my deepest idea of ‘true self’ now pictures itself through sadness and solitude. This is the only place I can feel at peace and safe from the perceived threats imposed, demanding I be more than I felt I could be.

It’s hurt being called negative. As the colours faded, as pop songs, that would once punctuate the passing of time, and confirm all purpose to it began to disappear, slowly covered up by a grey mass that promised nothing.

I have been living in a state of unaccepted mourning for most of adulthood, as I have watched life pass me by with increasing desperation. Constantly denying it to myself, watching those my age make lives for themselves get younger and younger; denying it fervently in spaces where other middle aged lost souls would gather for the same reason, of being bereft of ideas of where to be and how to be anywhere else. I showed zero empathy to those I share such a shameful kinship with, constantly trying to tell myself I was somehow only a temporarily embarrassed lost soul.

As I reach 40, my instincts are to panic, to put up the old forms of self-defence, as the atmosphere of our post-covid world becomes ever darker and foreboding, with no sign of letting up yet – and we all must still live in that world.

Perhaps with the act of properly mourning, it’s so seductive to think that one can remain frozen in time here, in the poetry afforded to sadness, but not to the twitching humiliating anxiety that defines life ‘down there’. There is a danger of staring for too long into submerged utopias of impossible escape that I am admittedly free to indulge in up there.

There’s so many me’s I want to love and leave behind, but maybe I daren’t.

The child who banged his head in 1994 on these rocks, or the 19 year old, who 20 years ago, returned home from a very similar North Yorks moorland as an anorexic skeleton from University trip on a course I would abandon shortly after, like many things after. A memory that I identify with so much shame, I daren’t say the name of the place to myself.

Dwelling in memories is so easy at the cost of the present, and I’ve done it so much…..

But I won’t beat myself up – I have never known how to be a body in this world.

I wish I could stay here. Walk and walk and find myself in company, company of this world or not. And I wish I could take this, and implement it down there, and find such peace where I usually finding sweat-stained anxiety.

I’m back in the same spot, the hills that separate the urban spaces of Yorkshire and the North West.

I made a bold admission the night previous: I told social media that I had lived with a mental illness for 20 years.

This kind of thing makes my many social masks turn inwards and scowl, but I had to do this: I had to make it real to myself, and I could only do this by making as many people as possible know that I meant it

It had to be an admission in one of the spheres that encourages my unpleasant gut theories about myself. My theories that I’m edging closer and closer to an irredeemable failure, and of constantly ‘doing life wrong’ .

…of being ‘wrong’ .

These feelings keep me in the cycle; praying that the next exhibition or next validation, will grant me an ‘ok-ness’ that finally finds its way into my flesh, and I’ll finally feel free of….well, myself – the self that feels trapped in a metaphorical glass cage with these theories about himself.

My most painful, potentially humbling, admission, is that I’ve been trapped here for a quarter of a century, still trying to become an adult. To shout this feels like it’s made real – to give myself some slack how shit it has been watching my young and early middle age adult life go past me whilst I bang on the inside of a cage that nobody else can see.

Over the last 2 years my body and mind have finally hit burn out, chasing “just over the next hill” con tricks that had previously been so useful. All my projects have been competing with a rotting sensation, deep in the chest, from decades of feeling trapped on the other side of an actual life.

I’ve finally recognised my fixation with a zone. The hills that roughly follow the A628 road, in an area between Barnsley and Greater Manchester.

They possess a poetry that has so much resonance.They harbour so many stories that can’t breath down below, include my truth about myself.

I rarely actually got to the duringattempts to get ‘here’ in moments of desperation. Somehow it always felt that I would be in another world once I got there – ‘a portal’ as I’d describe. Which is why I could sometimes mistake Greater Manchester for being Urban Yorkshire in a parallel reality.

The lorries and cars that negotiate this dangerous trek fit into this poetry, but, by and large, anything from ‘down there’ disturbs it. You have to be selfish here; for only you can exist up here, staying out of view of the few dog walkers and cyclists, as up here figures can only be present in absence. As a haunting poetry of what has been and gone, and why these hills are in many ways a ghost land that haunts the places below.

I make a connection between these hills and of an extreme experience of not knowing how to be: anorexia. They reciprocate that which anorexia aims to achieve: a state between life and death.

Trying to reach here in my earlier years wasn’t only about being in a space to meditate on the self in the ‘down there’, but to be in a space where I could be between life and death; just like the state of anorexia. Where NOTHING could get to me.

I see a vague shimmer of Manchester’s increasingly super-skyline over the hills, and think about the problems we face in the ‘down there’.

Manchester is once again a monster on the horizon. No longer an image of satanic mills, but of a faceless, ruthless, world-city, of extreme wealth and extreme suffering side by side as if they weren’t part of the same picture.

A sharp and cold stab of horror catches up with me: “

“...we on this island thought we’d got through to the other side of hell. We became complacent. Looking for peace on a post-political plateau. But who could blame us?“

If I try hard enough I can hear the shooting and screaming from both sides of the hills, from under the glazed over scars of the Miners Strike and Peterloo. They demand that I to show up; be a useful body. But I used to go to protests only to wage war on myself. Not knowing how to contain my self-disgust in this midst of other people who play their parts so well, I’d go hide in pubs and soothe my wounds.

As I almost slip on the path up here, I keep thinking ‘tread lightly’ not with the weight of it all.

Beyond my chesty feelings of disgust and shame, and the bitterness and resent it breeds, I know I can do so much better than this. There is more, but just now.

One day…

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.