Saving the only life I can

A few years ago I was introduced to the poetry of Mary Oliver during a creative workshop my friend Sophie Nicholls was running - the poem Sophie shared with us was Wild Geese and I loved it. I looked up more of Mary Oliver's poetry and came across one that stopped me in my tracks: The Journey. The whole poem is beautiful but it was the final two lines that made my bones vibrate and the words in those two lines have stayed very close by ever since:

"[...]
determined to save
the only life you could save."

For more than a year I've been thinking about doing a creative project inspired by those nine words and the time has finally arrived ... It is with great pride and delight that I announce my 'Saving the only life I can' project. Over the next 12 months I'll be gathering together a collection of songs, music, poetry and artwork. Some of it will be pieces that lifted my spirits in recent months and some of it will be things I've created as I tried to find my way out of the darkness. I'll also be creating original work and asking some of the talented folks who inspire me to contribute some new work to the project. On the 24th March 2013 I'll release a beautifully crafted, lovingly curated collection for sale and any money I make will be donated to the Maytree Respite Centre and the Tuke Centre.

I'll release more details as the project takes shape and I'll be announcing my first confirmed contributor very soon.

We were blind and now we see

I've been looking back through the photos that I've uploaded to my Flickr account over the past six years and it's hard to believe that I couldn't see how deep and fast the riptides of depression were flowing within me ... the slideshow below features the photos that I now realise were quite obviously symptomatic of my often fragile state of mind:



The levels of self-deception, secrecy and concealment are troubling to say the least - no wonder depression is sometimes called the "grinning madness" and little wonder that I felt like I was wearing a mask all the time.

Anyhoo, moving swiftly on.... As a first step towards repaying my un-repayable debt of gratitude to the Maytree Respite Centre and the Tuke Centre I've had an idea - If you like any of the photos within my Flickr Stream then you can freely download, print off, re-use them ... the only catch is that in return you have to make a donation to either the Maytree or the Tuke Centre:

• The Maytree make this super-simple, you can just make a donation via their Just Giving page.
• For the Tuke Centre it's not quite as straightforward but they are a registered charity so you can just contact them to find out the easiest way to donate.

I'm also planning a longer-term annual creative project to raise funds for both the Maytree and Tuke Centres and I'll be inviting you to contribute your creativity to that project as soon as I've got my head around how it will work :)

I have been leading a life of quiet desperation

Twelve days ago I arrived on the doorstep of the Maytree Respite Centre near Finsbury Park. Maytree is a charity that offers a 'sanctuary for the suicidal'. I don't quite know what I hoped for when I first contacted them but it felt like I was standing at the edge of an abyss without wings or a safety net to break my fall. My arrival at Maytree was the culmination of a 38 year journey during which I had slowly, almost imperceptibly, descended into a decade of chronic depression (varying from mild to severe). I didn't dare to dream it at the time but walking over the Maytree's threshold was the first step towards finally saving my own life. When I left the Maytree's warm embrace five days later I somehow emerged from the lead chrysalis that had nearly pulled me under, laid down my impenetrable battle-scarred armour and felt like I was heading home for the first time in 38 years.



Only half a dozen people knew where I was during those five days, my husband, my twin sister, one of my cousins, my best friend, my therapist and my boss. Only another half a dozen or so knew I was depressed, let alone that I had been fighting an epic, hidden battle with myself for my own survival. When I look back at my photography, poetry, art and notebooks from that decade and beyond it's glaringly obvious that I was depressed but even when I finally saw my GP and was prescribed anti-depressants, at the end of last year, I still found it hard to accept that I was ill.

"Most [people] lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them" ~ Mis-quotation of a line from Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden' [source]

The first part of that line is from Thoreau and comes from Walden which was a manifesto for living simply. The full quote reads:

"The mass of [people] lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things." Henry David Thoreau [source]

For most of my adult life I tried, and failed, to either fix myself, find myself or flee from myself but, to paraphrase Jon Kabat-Zinn, wherever I went, there I was and in the end I ran out of energy, stopped running from the insatiable hungry ghosts haunting my mind and I did the only thing left to do - I faced myself. With the last sliver of hope left inside me I hoped that a small shift would take place while I was at the Maytree - a shift that would keep me safe for a little longer while I continued the battle against my own thoughts. I have no way of explaining the total transformation that took place on my last day at the Maytree and I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand it but it was like waking up from a nightmare just as I was about to hit the ground. In February this year I wrote in my notebook: "my feet and eyes feel heavy as I drag my despair through the snow." However fast I ran, I couldn't get away from the darkness that had descended and the dark void felt like it was starting to surround me on all sides. All I wanted to do was lie down and sleep until the snow covered my tracks and any sign that I had ever existed. I held tightly to any music and poetry that soothed my soul, if only for a second. I tried to memorise one of John O'Donohue's poems in the hope that it would come true if I recited it often enough: "I would love to live / Like a river flows / Carried by the surprise / Of its own unfolding." During my train journey home from London to York last Saturday I scribbled these words down in my notebook: "There's a river of kindness following me home." The next day I added these words on the same page: "it feels so amazing to be alive today."

I will never be able to fully repay the Maytree Respite Centre or those of you who held me in your thoughts while I was there but I will spend the rest of my life breaking my own (and society's) silence around depression and suicide. My new goal in life is to be the poster-child for suicidal recovery and be a voice in the darkness for anyone who is fighting their own battle. At an existential level it's true that we are alone in life and death because we are the only ones who know what it is like to experience the weight of our thoughts and feelings but there are people out there who will walk beside you while you fight to save your own life - keep looking for those people and never give up hope that you'll find them ... they are probably already much closer than you can possibly believe.

This blogpost is just the first of what I'm hoping to share about the bewildering journey I've been on. Last week I did a BettaKultcha talk about how the Maytree had helped me save my own life and I'll post the video of that talk (eeek!) as soon as it's available, then later this month I'll be hosting Eric Maisel on my blog as part of his virtual book tour for Rethinking Depression. In the meantime though, here are the slides (including the script that I used as the basis for my 5 minute talk):

BettaKultcha Talk, York, March 2012

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Wanted: A creative manager and/or shadowy svengali

 A few months ago I came to the realisation that I need a helping hand to get done what I want to get done. After much umming and erring and some pleasant detours I'm ready to ask for that help ... If this is you then please get in touch:

a) you love the art I create and want to use your cheerleading/creative management skills to encourage me to make more and fly higher/deeper.

b)  you follow what I say on twitter with interest, curiousity, amusement and a large dose of forgiving patience.

c) you are reasonably confident that you'll be able to tell the difference between when you need to prod / coax / trick me into taking the next step and when you need to simply hold back and wait for the tempestuous breezes of my creative enthusiasms and/or despairs to roll on by.

If any of that applies to you then please do raise your hand  or whisper in my ear and we can have a chat over coffee and cake, or wine and chocolate, or both of the above. My hope is that we'll find a way to work and play together 'in a spirit of mutual ambition' and that you'll get tangible benefits from working with me but that the promise of future ££ will not be the reason you want to embark on this unknown adventure. In the first instance I might be paying you in art / ideas / poetry / stories but that would hopefully be a short-term measure while we find our feet and wait for the music to start happening.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from anyone who wants to disruptively explore pay-what-you-wish, copyleft and self-publishing as methods of creative expression. If you have any questions then plonk them in the comments box below or give me a holler on twitter and I'll try to give a sensible answer :)

The Pay It Forward Art Fandango

The lovely Corinna Spencer recently gifted me a small, but perfectly formed, piece of artwork as part of a pay it forward art fandango that she was participating in. Here is the piece she sent me ... it was hard to take a photo of it without capturing anything too revealing < blushes >



So now it's my turn to pay it forward. If you'd like me to send you a piece of artwork then leave a comment below or give me a shout on that there twitter. The first five people to holler will get a small something sent to them, completely gratis. The only catch is that you then have to send five people a piece of art/doodle/scrawl/whatever.

If you like the idea of getting art from me for free but feel lightheaded at the thought of having to send out some art yourself then there is another way ... ... ... < wait for it > .... ... ... yes, that's right, you can Give Blood, Get Art instead. Let the art rush commence!

Hand-drawing a Library of Creative Inspiration

A while back I set up an Amazon affiliate shop widget thingy that (in theory) makes me a few pennies when someone clicks through to buy any of the books I've included in it. I say 'in theory' because so far I haven't made a single penny. Even so the whole 'making money from simply curating a collection of books that have inspired me' things leaves me feeling a bit icky and uneasy.

So I dreamt up a personal art project that disperses my own sense of ickiness about making unearned money ... I'm planning to hand-draw the front cover of each of the treasured books I own and share the reasons why I cherish it.

First up is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg which I bought in 1999 from a bookstall at the Womad Festival when I was slightly under the influence of hot spiced cider. It was the first Natalie Goldberg book I bought and it's now dog-eared and travel-worn. Every now and then I misplace it at the bottom of a bag or a box and it seems to always resurface just at the moment when I've given up on ever finding it again. It was also the first book published by Shambhala that I bought. Over the years I've come to treat the Shambhala logo on a book as a sign that I should go ahead and buy the book I'm leafing through in a bookshop - they've become the gold standard of zen books for me :)

The opening paragraph will probably be enough for you to recognise whether Natalie's words speaks to your life story. It certainly was for me:

"I was a goody-two-shoes all through school. I wanted my teachers to like me. I learned commas, colons, semicolons. I wrote compositions with clear sentences that were dull and boring. Nowhere was there an original thought or genuine feeling. I was eager to give the teachers what I thought they wanted."

The overall message of Writing Down the Bones is *Sit down to write. Keep your hand moving.* If you sometimes find yourself frozen to the spot by perfectionism and procrastination then you'll find Natalie's words as comforting and inspiring as I did. What Natalie writes about is a lifelong journey of making "a choice for beauty, kind consideration [mostly for ourself], and clear truth." Mindful choices made with our feet on the ground and in the knowledge that "we are not running after beauty with fear at our backs."

Carrying a campfire within me

Even though it's been nearly a month since I headed to deepest Hampshire for Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain Festival, I still don't quite have the words to tell you what I experienced there. So for now ....

.... Wrap this woollen shawl around your shoulders. I finished knitting it as I sat listening to the bands perform and the speakers speak. The yarn was soaked through with the words I heard and I knitted them into the very fabric of it ....

.... Hold this rough ball of stone tightly in your hand. I found this small spherical rock just by the entrance to the Woodland Stage as I quietly slipped into a session where an animist priestess held a space for us for to unravel and reveal our true motives and share deeply intimate stories ....

.... Listen to the fearless feral choir and wonder what the world would be like if we all had opportunities to test the full range of our voices along with a congregration of strangers, who would quickly become friends, in a spirit of trusting solidarity and communal courage ....
The Inaugural Performance of the Uncivilisation Feral Choir

.... Words are on their way in the form of stories and poems but for now here are the words I've been catching as they swirl around my head:


It's great to know that a date has already been set for next year's Uncivilisation I'm already looking forward to the long journey to hope and then back home.