Hernia

There is an apocryphal tale from my childhood that I still bare a scar from to remember it by. I was two years old or there about and suffering from my first serious illness. Hernias are notoriously painful and mine presumably was too. Sat with both my parents the doctor gently prodded me locating the source of the pain. Each time they asked 'does it hurt?' I would respond bravely 'no!'
Both parents recited the story making it in to family legend. I suspect my fathers presence being instrumental in my heroics.
My work ethic deserves no religious claims. Brought up by my father as a devout atheist I have none yet he had a white working class conservative attitude to work. The rhetoric still echoes in me, 'the world doesn't owe you a living' being among his favorite slogans on the matter.
For a year or two after leaving home I did rebel, trying to see work in the dark responsible way of earlier generations. The toil of pit and mill still echoed round northern towns in the 1970s. It would take Thatcher to deliver unemployment and resignation through her destruction of industry.
Choosing to become a joiner was a whim. I had no great revelation as some do on the wonders of timber and constructing frames. There was a growing awareness in me of the structure of the man made world around me and a feeling I may feel duty bound to contribute. The real feeling, if I am to be honest was much closer to dissatisfaction with shoddiness. A frustration that others hadn't thought designs through, hadn't bothered to execute them properly.
There was a sense of identity that grew. The familiarity of tools and timber. When asked what I did I could clearly explain and feeling that the explanation was easy was reassuring. Familiarity overrides safety. A common human trait to take it to the end. Death becomes preferable to stepping outside the comfort zone of knowing who you are.
There was a sense that to understand the world I should be a participant. A sense that when I woke I should join in. Scrape the ice from my windscreen. Drive to somewhere else in one of those vans and lend a hand.
Time went on and I found myself not just taking part but orchestrating work. Coming home tired, covered in dust, aching in the shower before soothing myself with alcohol had a masochistic pleasure that assuaged the guilt.
Where had this guilt come from? Why did I struggle to lie in like other folk?
Perhaps it came from my father but it feels much deeper. As I say, not so much a sense of responsibility but a sense of guilt. Like I had done something profoundly wrong that I must make daily recompense for. I socialised with freinds from a similar fold. Other workers who couldn't feel whole nor satiated till they were sore. We formed brotherhoods of support to get us through. Always drinking. Always drinking.
Neither the work nor the alcohol could hide it. There was something wrong.
Through my younger days I was always more of an observer. Always the outsider watching them at play. Never able to dance or excel at sport. Not having the innocence to be in the moment. That glorious prerequisite for sport.
Yet I could find it in art. In drawing, in writing even. It is where my strength lies.
 So often it is the case that we can not see the value in what we are skilled at because it takes no effort. It is recognised in sport that those with most aptitude do well till their teens. After this, natural ability, having always been good without having to try can be an obstacle. You train less thinking your gift will carry you but the trainers succeed. Those talentless dullards who try hardest end up on top. It is the story of Keegan and George Best.
I think of those in my old field of furniture who have no gift for design but a real hunger to be good. I think of myself who did well at school till I needed to try.
When I became ill last year I was completely incapacitated. I would wake from horrific dreams in the early hours. The streets were empty so I would take my insomnia through them. Marching along, shaking adrenalin from my back. As they day unfolded terror would keep me in. The rising volume of a boiling kettle like a train up my spine. No way to turn the volume down. Depersonalisation. Reality itself no constant. An ever changing hallucinatory storm. The anxiety and fear I had medicated against for decades came down upon me. Psychiatric diagnoses group together disparate anomalies that have nothing in common and mystify rather than clarify. Simply, I was very ill, still am ill.
Yet accepting this, giving myself space to recover had never felt an option. I thought if I can continue to work then everything else will take care of itself. As I bandaged myself up and went out to fight again I was holding up a landslide. Addictions crept in as I desperately tried to plug the holes.

Now the storm has subsided sufficiently to write this. My recovery has been long and slow. A week can go by with only a few tremors then a simple operation will catapult me in to severe mental turmoil again.
I can see now I had built a life against the grain. Fighting the natural flow had seemed part of it all. I found virtue in suffering. Pleasure in the pain.
But it brought me close to death. The call of the reaper could be heard. Each night I wanted an ending. One always comes if you want it enough.
Saul Bellow said 'death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything'. Perhaps my subconscious sniffing around the idea of self slaughter was just that. A need for a sight of the end to deliver meaning. No one knows how close they have come. It is sinful and an insult to suicides to think about suicide when you don't have it in you. I never thought of it head on. Gary Speed became a preoccupation. I read about the single biggest killer in young men almost as an abstract. Just weighing the depth of my despair.
I suspect it took the fear of the end for me to accept defeat. To hit the rock bottom recovering addicts speak of. But suicide is worse than murder, it kills everyone. The severity of the act ridicules all others. The end of everything and that means everyone is beyond the imagining.