30-9-2021: Day 111
The man in the tatty Burberry cap was looking wearily and warily into the camera on the computer screen. He had deep sunken eyes betraying the pain of a life-long addiction to a cocktail of downers and anti-psychotics. His depressed, furrowed brow spelt out decades of battling conspiring voices, demonic hallucinations, and mind-bending alternative realities. But despite the odds, he could still shine like a rough diamond and grin like a Cheshire cat for this online hearing voices group.
Three weeks into these group sessions, and it’s been a whirlwind journey across the mental health spectrum, encountering a unique tribe of characters through the raw unfiltered lens of Zoom meetings. From the chronically ill members broadcasting from their psychiatric wards to energetic, high-functioning, bi-polar members in their bedsits, the group has the feel of a virtual Alcoholics Anonymous. Switch-up the demon drink for mind bending pharmaceutical drugs and voice-terrorising demons on the psychic spectrum – and you have a pinhole camera shot of this crazy cohort of digital comrades flying high over the wireless cuckoo’s nest.
1-10-2021: Day 112
Another day, another bend in the finite watercourse of life. Crossing over the Old Toll bridge, a flock of starlings rose in synchronised flight over the mudflats of the River Adur.
Spelling out a rough, hewn question mark over the muddy waters lapping near my feet, the starlings triggered a dark memory like a traumatic in-flight movie.
Looking over towards the blue inky storm clouds gathering on the horizon, I could see myself fifteen years ago on the beach at Brighton Marina. Desperate to drown the powerful storm of demonic Voices, I began the long, lonely walk into the cold ocean.
Under the cover of the dark forbidding night.
Under a near-forgotten suicide star.
Fate froze that night. Without rusty anchor or pair of concrete shoes, my body spurned, spat out by the moon-lit swelling tide, and washed back to shore.
And when the sun eventually rose, it was with the new dawn of a survivor mentality, forged under the suicide star all those years ago.
4-10-2021: Day 115
I was mourning the sudden death of an old friend on this storm-kissed wintery day in October. As the rain lashed the south coast and the searing wind rattled the window frame, I could feel a fond, teary, and emotional farewell rising inside. Yes, I was four days into a dry October. Old red eyes gone, all booze shipped out of the cupboards, and I’m saddled up on the beaten-up sobriety wagon.
So here it is, a last orders lament to the perfect poured pint, the toasted wine glass, the double shot, the secret snifter, the cheeky chaser, the wee dram, the tiny tot. It’s been a one-way passionate love affair since misspent teenage years swigging Special Brew and Thunderbird on street corners. And since then, it’s been all take, take, take.
It’s been a lifelong journey into the bottomless bottle of deep oblivion, a constant flashback to the infinity drunk tank of ceaseless tipple pouring bartenders, and it’s goodbye, for now, to the immortal nights of the sodden soul. But, hey, there’s always November.