What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?
If I were to give a title to the hardest chapter of my life, it would probably be The Years of Not Belonging.
The first part came when I was eight. Children do not always understand what is happening around them, but they understand instability. My parents’ marriage was coming apart. The separation and divorce stretched over several years and coincided almost exactly with my being sent away to boarding school. Looking back, it is difficult to disentangle one from the other. Was the loneliness caused by family breakdown or by being separated from home at such a young age? At the time, I simply accepted both as the normal order of things. There was plenty to distract me at prep: school – for most of the time it was a wonderland for boys: woods, games, so much to learn and do and people to play with all day and night for weeks on end.
Memory is selective. I can still recall moments of happiness from those years, but they stand out because of the backdrop against which they occurred.
Public school did not go so well; I began to detest it within a year of arrival and got out after three.
The next hard years arrived after university. Getting to Oxford was an incredible high! I had done what I was supposed to do. I had worked hard, accumulated the qualifications that were meant to act as a key to adulthood. Yet when I entered the world of offices and graduate careers, I felt something I could not then explain: a profound sense of misfit. Everyone else appeared to understand the rules. They could tolerate the routines, the hierarchies, the repetition. I could not.
There is a photograph somewhere of me from that period, living in a small back bedroom in Lewisham. I had gone from being an Oxbridge graduate with expectations of a professional career to signing on and working as a hospital porter on a cancer ward. I do not say that with shame. In many ways it was one of the most valuable jobs I ever did. But at the time it felt as though I had wandered off the map everyone else was using.
Then there was heartbreak. The ending of my first truly serious relationship. Four years together, followed by the slow and painful realisation that I’d fcked up. What strikes me now is not the pain itself but how completely I indulged it. I did not resist it. I seemed almost determined to experience every last ounce of it. And of course write about it. By 1985 I was a decade into keeping a daily diary.
Getting into TV and making it last gave me fifteen productive years: some broadcast, many commercial training and promotional videos and films, for all the leading production companies in London – including for 18 months through my own product on company? I worked as a best boy on a feature film in France, as an extra, and tried to get various series and scripts produced.
The answer arrived slowly rather than all at once. An ADHD diagnosis in 2001 explained much that had previously looked like personal failure. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy helped me challenge assumptions I had carried for decades. Exercise provided structure and steadiness. More recently, sobriety has brought a level of clarity I wish I had discovered earlier. I was also married with children and wanted more than anything for this to endure – it has. I’ve been with the same person since 1990.
What I understand now, at sixty-four, is that I was never designed for a life organised around a single role. I am happiest when my days contain variety: writing, editing, coaching swimmers, teaching, printmaking, council work, sailing, surveying trees… Moving between them feels less like distraction than balance. One activity replenishes what another consumes. When several pay I have a salary: at one time I juggled four paid jobs/activities.
The hard years were not wasted years, although they often felt that way while I was living them. They were years spent trying to discover the shape of a life that fitted. The suffering came largely from believing I should be someone else.
What got me through was not resilience in the heroic sense. It was curiosity. The stubborn refusal to stop asking why. Why do I feel different? Why do some things come easily and others seem impossible? Why does one life fit and another not? I’ve gained three Masters Degrees and a Cert. ED in education along the way! oh, and a senior club coach certification (swimming)!
I am still asking questions. The difference is that they no longer feel like accusations. They feel like a conversation with myself that has been going on for more than half a century. The hard times have given my life contrast and character.
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