Journal, Diary, & Blogging / What I started a blog for
Part 1
Recently I stood at the end of Walkabout’s bar and cried on Colin’s shoulder. Apart from my granddad’s funeral last year, nobody has seen me cry since I was about 18. But I have done many times, alone. Usually before sleep comes. Something must be wrong. I keep putting the issue off, telling myself that it’s no big deal. Am I a fucking moron?
Let’s start from the top.
The move from primary to secondary school was a shock. The new place was massive and archaic, and the whole experience threw me totally. I got these strange urges to freak out and be horrendously absurd. I assumed that no one would recognise me- after all, I never recognised them- but then, no one else had memory difficulties like me. People spotted me when I didn’t have a clue as to who they were. As a result, word got around that I was a bit weird, to say the least.
It’s difficult to explain what the urge is. Imagine an inflated balloon inside your ribcage, next to the heart. Now imagine someone is squeezing the balloon. You can hear their fingers straining on the balloon, until it pops. This is what caused me to piss people off. I’d snap, but I wouldn’t be aggressive- I’d just be weird. It wasn’t long before people started to react.
In retrospect things could have been worse- I know people who say they got beat up every day in school. I rarely got anything physical. But because I was different, and small (I never got taller than 1.73m) I was an easy target and I was asking for it. Verbal abuse came on a daily basis for pretty much five years solid. I almost became numb to it. Like most victims, I tried to make myself invisible for years. I went through whole days only speaking for the register. But it didn’t work: there were still tiny things that I did that stopped me from fitting in. I couldn’t help but encourage people to hate me.
I did grass people up every now and then, but Bluecoat School’s policy on bullying consisted of looking for reasons why the victim might be encouraging harassment and making them feel like the whole thing was the victim’s fault. Admittedly, I was partly to blame.
The general relentless death threats that I got from numerous guys were never fulfilled, although for the last few days of school I was watching my back. And in all fairness, there was something else preying on my conscience. Girls. Girls generally don’t fight with their fists. They fight with words. We all know this. In Bluecoat fighting got you in a fair bit of shit, so even the guys bitched and gave tit-for-tat threats. But girls didn’t threaten, they just criticised. They probably wanted to tell me that the way I behaved was annoying, but I guess that takes a bit too much brainpower. Instead they found it much easier to criticize the way I looked. So I left school feeling like no one would ever look at me.
Girls did put a lot of effort into making me feel like shit from time to time. They would ask me out for their own amusement and dump me after a few days. And I would fall for it. One particular girl had the biggest effect on me. Helen Carey was a bitch that I will hate until the day that I fucking die. When I was 14, the effort she put into bringing me down during I.T. was ridiculous. Her and Gemma Hay (an actual prostitute at the age of 14) spent a full hour repeatedly asking me out. It was some kind of team effort to humiliate me, and Gemma was actually putting in about 70% of the effort. This was after a year of me fancying Helen and her giving me daily verbal abuse to stop me eying her up. I asked her if it was a joke. They both said no. When I eventually agreed to “go out with her”, nothing much changed.
I think most people would agree with me that this ritual of going out was bullshit, whether it was a windup or not. I think teenagers across the country- the world, even- look back and think, What the fuck was all that about? I just don’t think people took the brunt of it like I did. I was a scapegoat for the whole school. At the time, My Granddad was dying. I was struggling with GCSE’s. And of course, I was in the middle of adolescence. It wasn’t an easy time. I’ve thought about it thousands of times and I’ve traced it as being the moment that had the worst knock-on effect of my life. That week in December 1996 was to cause me massive emotional problems for the rest of my life. Bare in mind, I was fourteen, I didn’t even know I was dyslexic and was under pressure. Here’s my diary entry from 3/12/96.
REVIVAL!!!
In IT Gemma Hay asked me if I wanted to go out with H.C. I said yes, but she’s going to have to ask me herself. So she asked me out. I said I’d think about it, as I was amazingly shocked. 5 mins later, GH said, “have you made your mind up yet?” I told her I’d been messed around a lot and needed convincing well. G.H counted down from 10 and when she’d finished, she said, “Right, you’ve missed your chance”. Helen, at this time, was right behind me. I turned and said, “yes.” I sighed. I had finally cracked it. I am now going out with Helen Carey. (I can’t F*CKING believe it!) Then Gemma Hay said, well are you going to invite her to your house now? I didn’t completely agree with that, so I said to Gemma, “I think it would be a good idea to start the relationship in school and work our way out.”
Now read an entry from 6/12/96.
Before Science H.C said, “Do you want my number?” I said, “I think I’ve already got it.” I took out my homework diary on the last few pages and said, “Is it no. 8?”… “No, that’s my old one. This is my new one.” She wrote a number on the side of the page. “Ring me up tonight.” “Okay.” Later in the lesson she said she was going to Gemma Hay’s house and the phone number was Gemma’s. I was to ask for Gemma and then she would get Helen. I got home and didn’t ring cause I knew that they wouldn’t be in yet- Gemma lives in Manchester. Mum came home so I couldn’t ring then- I don’t want her to know about it. I went out to the hospital to see Granddad and to get some shopping including new school shoes. I got home and realised Helen would have left Gemma’s house by that time. I hope to all the gods (including Helen) that she doesn’t dump me tomorrow.
So let’s get this straight. 2 attractive girls wind up childish insecure moron. They play a trick on him. He tests them vigorously, but still falls for it. He learns: Women are bullshitters. Be wary.
The next day Gemma told me that Helen had waited at her house till 10pm for me to ring, then got a bus home. I’d been dumped in front of Helen and the whole science class.
After this incident I felt lower than I ever had done in my life. To date. As adults, a struggle in life can be handled by glamourising the situations we get into to make us look like some kind of celebrity- maybe we have drug problems, mental problems, relationship problems: they all damage us but it’s better sometimes to show off life’s hardships and how we deal with them than just to be ashamed of them and hide them from the world. Thank god for blogging, on that note. At that moment, I couldn’t glamourise anything. I was in a world of shit.
Diary entry- 9/12/96
At lunch on Friday I went to the library where I could find a big book and hide my head in it. I settled for “The Complete Works of Shakespeare”, where I looked in the index for “The Taming of the Shrew”, which I knew was about what I as trying to do. I read a sentence, reading for words, not really plot, thinking about what had just happened.
I remember this incident like it was yesterday. Taming of the Shrew, for those aren’t familiar, is about a guy dating a “strong and fiery woman” (Wikipedia) and can’t really handle her. I picked the book partly because of it’s very vague connection to my situation and partly because it was the biggest book in the library. I could prop it up and hide behind it. I was short enough. And I cried.
A lot of people from my year were in the library that day. I remember usually I found it hard to get people to notice me- I’d pissed that many people off that most people avoided me like the plague. But there’s something about a teenage boy with stupidly long hair crying behind an oversized Shakespeare book that attracts attention. Hence after this moment there were even more reasons for people to take the piss.
Somebody was going to ask. Not everyone in that school was a cunt, just the majority of them. Some were nice people. Without Jenny Patterson’s intervention, I’d probably be a raging misogynist. Or maybe I am. She guessed I’d been dumped, and comforted me. She told me a) I could still be friends with Helen (no), and b) girls like that aren’t worth wasting time with (yes). This made me aware that not all girls are the same. Some are not bullshitters, piss-takers or backstabbers. I now have a good number of female friends who I care a lot about.
This is the worst experience I had of being fucked about and lied to by a girl. Although there were plenty of other incidents through school that generally stop me achieving what I want today.
For a long time after I left fifth form I blamed myself for the way I acted and for the problems it led to. I am now 25. I can’t count any of the girls I have “dated” as girlfriends. I’m still a virgin. I live with my parents. I’ve got 2 part-time jobs. I’m dealing with a serious lack of understanding from anyone I know. Until I was about 18, any time a girl came onto me (which wasn’t very often anyway) I’d think it was a joke. The amount of opportunities I missed because of this presumption defies belief. To this day I still feel like I’m having the piss taken out of me if a girl comes onto me. That’s why I’ve not lost my virginity or stayed with a girl for more than a month. I’ve finally pushed myself to write this after dating an amazing woman and fucking it up spectacularly. I’m still amazed how I can accidentally attract one of the best looking girls in Oldham (better than it sounds, for those of you who have only heard of the place) and go from her being really interested in me and really disappointed if I can’t see her, through to telling me she doesn’t want to be with me any more.
Part 2
Steph is a sweetheart. A girl as good-looking as her you would expect to be ultra-confident, blasé, and used to knocking guys back every day. She’s full of surprises though, and I still never know what to expect. I first met her in Walkabout when I manned the guns in a wet-t-shirt competition. She looked stunning in a ripped t-shirt and thong. All I had to do was fire a super-soaker at her.
I’d heard that she was going out with some meathead, so I hardly even looked at her. Taken girls aren’t worth the effort. But then about a week after this in Cuba Cuba, she sent her gay mate over to tell me she fancies me. Yes, she’s the same age as me. 25. He’s older. I found out she’d split from her boyfriend and pretty much come straight for me. The first surprise was that she’s very shy and comes across as really innocent. To this day I can’t figure out whether it’s an act.
The first thing I thought was something that people have told me never to think. She’s Oldham’s most beautiful girl. She can have whoever she wants. Why go from seeing a guy who’s built like a brick shithouse, to me? Granted, I’m alright looking. But there are better looking guys. I’ve got a good body. But I’m not that ripped. Nowhere near as much as her ex. I’m pretty confident, in some ways. Just not in others. (She found out all about that eventually.) It didn’t make sense. And the feeling I used to get up until I was about 19- that I was having a joke made out of me- came back in a flash.
When Steph came back in the next night I remember noticing her walk in the bar from the other side of the room. Nerves kicked in instantly. I’d not felt that shy in years, and everything I thought I’d overcome I realised I hadn’t. Dating her was hard work.
I thought that I’d got over that suspicion a long time ago: I thought that if a girl shows some interest I’d just follow it up, without thinking that everything was a hoax. I feel like I’ve realised that I am truly paranoid, and that- well, that just makes me more nervous. It slipped apart because her mates, and more importantly, Steph, noticed things slipping. When I meet a girl I always make a good first impression- then a feeling creeps in. I think she’s eventually going to see a side of me that she’s not going to like.
Steph’s friends told me that she felt that I wasn’t into her. I’d been seeing her for 2 weeks and I’d still not kissed her. The pressure was mounting. That night I did, but just as things were coming together- just as I started to offer her the trust she deserved- somebody started to spread shit about me.
Whenever I went to Walkabout people were asking me about her. I’d heard that she’d finished me. I’d heard that she’d stood on the door of Walkabout and ripped the piss out of me in front of the doorman, for being a virgin. It just didn’t make sense. Steph’s too sweet and innocent for that. But then, I’ve been lied to before. I’d been hardwired not to trust girls. Just because she’s beautiful didn’t mean I was going to bend over and let her make an idiot out of me.
On top of this I’d been dabbling in coke and listening for bats in Alexandra Park, which probably didn’t help. A friend of mine took me out there and he couldn’t hear the high-pitched noises that I could. Was I just imagining things? Was my grip on reality looser than I thought? And was my friend joking when he claimed to notice laser-sighted BB guns pointing at us from the bushes? I only went out there to try, unsuccessfully, to explain to him what I’m explaining now. It seems this is the only way to express.
I carried on seeing Steph for as long as I could. I could feel that she was going to finish me and I knew I was going to be extremely fucked off. Her friends could tell that I wasn’t comfortable. Gay Colin’s boyfriend told me he thought I seemed “a bit slow”. He said, “I don’t mean slow in the head, just- slow to act”. He asked me why that was. I said girls had bullied me in school. A moment of realisation crossed his face: He’d started to get a glimpse of what kind of mind-frame I had. But what was pissing me off the most was that I was explaining this to people other than Steph. I wanted her to see things from my perspective. To this day I still haven’t let her do that.
I didn’t have much of a chance. She finished me eventually, claiming I’d done nothing wrong and her ex was causing her hassle. Maybe he had, but I was fully aware of my mistake. But whatever hassles she was having, if I’d been braver she wouldn’t have finished me. She felt I didn’t trust her and that I always looked really nervous around her. I tried so hard to hide that from her.
After this people continued to slag her off. She’s no angel- she’s a major pisshead- but she didn’t deserve to have to deal with peoples attitudes, and neither did I.
Why can’t I go through the dating process like most other people? When they meet someone they feel good. One of my Facebook friends updated her status as “excited about the next few months” when she got with her boyfriend. When Colin met Daisy, he rang me to tell me all about it (graphic sex details included. Sorry dude) and he was really enthusiastic. When I meet someone and I’m attracted to her personality as well as her body, I feel emotionally at risk. She could hurt me. The more attracted I am, the bigger risk I face. That’s why I was so unbelievably stressed dating Steph. This has to change.
I took this as the last straw. I figured it was time I took drastic measures, like I kept telling myself I would. I went to see Nadine, probably the best listener out of all my friends, with the intention of letting her see things from my perspective. I was shaking. I’d been trying to talk things out with her since January- I’d made a decision that 2007 was the year that I was going to sort my life out and overcome my fears. The first thing I needed to do was tell Nadine about them. Things got in my way, though.
So in September I finally got round to talking to Nadine. I told her basically what I’ve told you- what happened with Steph, what happened in school- but I stopped short of telling her about the situation I’m in.
There were other people in the room- good friends of mine- but to open up completely it would have been easier if it was just the two of us, and the TV with the god-awful comedy wasn’t on. I’m very easily distracted.
Nadine has had her own struggles- she’s still working on quitting smoking. She mentioned that, in her efforts to kick the habit, she’d visited a place called E.K. Curative. Ernest King is a qualified psychotherapist working in Oldham. A professional. She gave me King’s card and suggested I gave it a shot. I felt a little better after finding this out. I had a plan. Even though I didn’t know how to pull myself together, I knew what to try next. And when you’re in my situation, you’ll try fucking anything.
Part 3
I had to psyche myself up to dial King’s number. Phoning a psychotherapist was confirmation that my problems were no joke; that I needed psychiatric and therapeutic help. Things had got to that stage.
He seemed a bit snappy over the phone.
“When would you like to come in?”
“The session costs eighty pounds, and lasts two hours.”
“Okay, I’ll see you then.”
Instantly I thought, this isn’t going to work. He reminded me of the councillors I’d seen at college and uni. It was unbelievable that those councillors had got jobs in the first place. One in particular was ignorant, cut me off when I was speaking, talked to me like I’d forgotten the most obvious of things and hence was thick as shit. Only this time, King’s service wasn’t coming for free.
King was an aging local man who constantly played the kind of “relaxing music” you find through aeroplane headphones.
“Welcome!” he said, arms open. He took my coat, sat me down and was generally overtly nice.
“So…” said King. “What would you like me to help you with today?”
“I have a fear of attractive women.”
“A fear of attractive women!”
For the next two hours everything I said seemed to tell him some supposed hidden secret, and he gasped and hummed at the various responses I gave to questions. I was becoming less convinced of his legitimacy by the second. He gave me this advice:
1) Stop eating chocolate (I could do with a separate session for that alone).
2) Use butter instead of margarine.
3) Drink full fat milk instead of semi-skimmed.
4) Remove all electrical appliances from bedroom. They give off signals that affect you in sleep, apparently.
5) Go to bed earlier and wake up earlier. When early man lived in a cave, he would fall asleep when the sun went down because there was nothing to do. And when the sun woke him up he’d go off hunting. Then the caveman invented fire, thus allowing him to stay up a little later. And the caveman slept in a little. The amount of daylight he got was reduced, which affected the receptors in his brain. His body clock crept forward, and day-by-day the caveman went to bed later and later. The less daylight he got, the less he could function. We still need vitamin D for healthy skin and to reduce the chance of developing mental illness.
6) Drink more water. The brain is mostly water. I mustn’t let it dry out. I’m trying to do this in work.
7) Take flax seed oil tablets whenever I felt like I might get nervous. (I had taken one a few hours before breaking down on Colin’s shoulder, so I’m not bowled over by the power of flax. I have seen online that taking them twice a day can help many people. Not only does it balance cholesterol levels- handy when you eat lots of steak like I do- but it can calm nerves and also quell the symptoms of schizophrenia. Nice to know, however twice-daily usage made no major changes.
King gave me a list of personality traits- words with a description of the trait next to it. They related to feelings: anxieties, behaviours, delusions- general mental problems that people sometimes have. He asked me to tick all the boxes that applied to me. The first one was described as “He who hides worry behind a brave face.” As I ticked it King said, “Everybody ticks the first one.” When I got to the bottom of the list he took it off me.
“It’s generally regarded that if you have five or more, you have a serious problem. And you have… fifteen.”
I nodded, staring into space.
Next King asked me to remove my shoes and lie on some kind of hospital bed-cum-psychiatrist’s couch. He wrapped a blanket around me. In each hand he placed a metal bar, connected to looped wires leading to a machine with a needle and dial.
I told him I’m lonely. This is behind pretty much every problem I have. It’s why I cry at night. The fear of being hurt by a woman and the idea of making my pain worse is what blights my life. We asserted that my loneliness was a steel spike in my heart.
I thought: this is bullshit. I can’t believe I’m paying through the nose to listen to this. He described us taking out the spike, going to the tip, digging a hole and burying the spike. Then we covered it with an oak tree. I was completely conscious and very sceptical throughout the whole session. After we planted the oak tree King asked me if the pain had gone. I said I didn’t know. He asked me to open my eyes. I’d had them closed for so long that even the dim yellow light in the room dazzled me.
Then a moment of validity occurred. King was surprised that the needle had hardly moved throughout the whole session. It didn’t surprise me. But when I described my loneliness and the “steel spike” in my heart, the needle surged to the right.
“Somebody must really have hurt you. I mean… a steel spike?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, you could say that.” I was not impressed with King’s need for me to use mushy, poetic metaphors in order to attain a “diagnosis”. How was this going to help me?
He then gave me a bill for eighty quid and a printed report of advice. I thanked him and left.
I stepped out onto the street. Was I a changed man? Had my pain gone? I doubted it. But at least I had tried hypnotism. I’d been meaning to for a while. On top of that, I had a project to work on. Advice to take. Things to try.
So now what? I’ve got a new year to look forward to. My career is finally going somewhere. I’ve spent years worrying about being hurt, people making a fool out of me, and of course- sex. I never had any reason to be afraid. I’m trying not to think about the sheer volume of opportunities that I’ve missed out on due to lack of self-belief. I can start acting like a man instead of a boy. I’ve dated Steph, Oldham’s most beautiful woman. And if I can attract a woman like that, I can do anything. Nobody is out of my league. There’s a lot more power and opportunity at my fingertips than I thought.
I hope this is an explanation that my mates deserve, and that anyone else reading understands. When I first saw that MySpace had a blog function, I realised I had an opportunity to express myself. I wanted to make clear to people why I behave the way I do and what exactly the difficulties are that I face. All the blogs I’ve written were an attempt to dare myself into honesty. I can’t be more honest than I have in this entry. I’d like to leave you with a quote from legendary writer Bret Easton Ellis.
“There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable… All the mayhem I have caused, I have now surpassed.”
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Not bad…a look at the awkwardness of adolescence and the spillover into adult life without too much angst-y self-loathing. I like that the ending shows determination and optimism. Good luck!
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This was excellent, it should have been sad and pitifull but it was full of humor and humility. It’s the story of the underdog. I love it and think it is a great short story but you would need a more interesting title for that. This could be a great chapter book to for teenage fiction of course then it would just need to be censored. I only have one correction:”... But I have done many times” would sound better if you say ”...but I have cried many times.
I love how you say piss takers that is hilarious!
i thought this blog, journal or whatever you like to refer to it as, was very well thought out. I was a lite to read and alot to take it but wasnt hard to understand. i talk about a alot of topics but was very clear on each of them. I can tell the writer is a deep thinker and a deep person. I the middle was my favorite but the ended flowed great and tied everything together.
The story snatched my attention from the very beginning. There was never a point when I lost interest. The only thing I do not understand is the steel spike. Perhaps you should give more reference to it’s meaning whether it is an old saying or has some type of meaning in some culture. I liked the way you ended it with a quote, it was a very strong finish to a strong piece.
People act on their own accord usually of a whim. One day they may be blossoming roses, the next they may be wilting. Suffice to say, they may have been shallow. May have never been exposed to feeling unloved or severely hurt. Such is the life of someone who is spoiled and leads a sheltered life. So life to them may have just been a game. It’s sad that you had to end up an unknowing player of a game that no one asked if you wanted to play before simply dealing you in. They may have taken many things for granted due to lack of experience in emotional affairs. One thing that may make this piece stronger is if can think that far back delve more into what they may have been thinking according to their actions. One of the girls may have been more innocent than you think and simply put in the line of peer pressure to act a certain way.
I don’t have enough time to read this through. But as an avid personal blogger/essayist myself, I do want to give you few pointers on what I’ve read so far:
(1) You’ll want to avoid excessive, undiluted angst. By that I mean, include a little more wit, cynicism, pizzazz, humor, creativity, allusion, literary jump, etc. This holds true even if your ultimate point is to be angsty. My blog points often were, too. (I just typed “glob.” Dyslexia strikes again!)
(2) Limit the cursing. Really. Do. It’s not that the word “fuck” is evil, it’s just that it’s ugly. Like salt, it’s better when used sparingly. :)
(3) On the content itself--don’t hate women! We get insecure and depressed, to! :P Who is your intended audience? If it’s your friends, you want to avoid being too alienating in depression. If the world at large, you want to avoid being too cliche or common in your conclusions. If it’s your girlfriend/ex--well—we all write things for one person and when we do it’s almost impossible for anyone else to judge.
(4) This, I think, is the most important: 5,000 is simply too long for a blog post. Blog-as-confessional is fine but in low(er) doses. 500 words is still extraordinarily long.
Good luck with this. Do you edit your posts? I edit mine aggressively—so much that they are less confessional than exploration of language and thought.
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