Last night my friend sent me a message to ask how the next blog is coming along because he was looking forward to reading it…and then said…

“no pressure”

I’ve toyed with the idea of blogging for years and when I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go, I had no idea how well or how badly it could go down. 

Last weekend after writing all about life on a psychiatric ward I said thank you to my parents-in-law for all their support with this venture.  I am massively grateful to them for their acceptance and for never being embarrassed by the fact their daughter-in-law airs her dirty laundry on the internet for all to see.  I know many other people would be thinking if I was to share anything in public then they would rather it be make-up tips on YouTube.

I’ve always felt like a really boring person who hasn’t achieved much or seen much.  I have said this countless times about people thinking I was a peculiar child, an alternative teenager and just plain weird as an adult (and you can take Bernard out of this equation, he does not get credit for any part of this blog) but this isn’t the space for pity because I’m not feeling sorry for myself right now. 

I keep pointing out that I’m weird, but the question is…

“Why?”

What’s your definition of weird?  How do you measure it?  Who even decides what is acceptable behaviour in the world and what isn’t?  Well I can’t answer any of those questions, but I can tell you a little bit about me and maybe by the end of this piece, you can tell me what you think.

When I was a child I was given a packet of jelly babies but where most people would eat them, I didn’t; I played with them.  I mean come on, they have arms, legs and a face, they’re practically people so I treated them the same way I would my dolls. 

To me that’s common sense, it’s up to you what you make of it.  This is the whole point of this piece; its about opinion, its about how we interpret the behaviour of others and how we categorise it.  To me those jelly babies were no longer just a packet of sweets, they were people they were characters, but it was the people around me who decided if tucking them into a Sylvanian Families bed in their imaginary house was weird or not.

Growing up we had a dog, Stavros.  I remember taking him for walks with my mum and brother, there was a field at the back of our house that was a dumping ground for old bikes and broken wood and one particular day I found an abandoned Christmas tree.  On the spot, I adopted this tree and I named him “Presents”.  At the end of every walk I would hide this tree in a safe place so that on my return we would be reunited.  I have no idea how long I kept this going but it was a considerable amount of time and I do remember the day we took the dog for a walk and Presents was gone.  I searched high and low for that dead, flaky, old Christmas tree and I was devastated when I came to realise that Presents was no more.  Now I’m not 100% sure that what I’ve written here is the absolute truth but this is what I remember and as I write this I am cringing so badly I can feel my spine clicking.  I imagine my family were mortified to have a child and a sibling who had an attachment to a dead tree but at the end of the day I wasn’t hurting anyone.  The only person who was hurt by Presents’ disappearance was me. 

I had an imaginary friend, Rupert.  I told people he was based on Rupert the Bear, but what my family never knew was the Rupert in my head wasn’t a bear at all.  He was a boy who was the same age as me, a boy who understood me and liked playing house with jelly babies. 

I convinced everyone around me that Rupert the bear was my imaginary friend because that way I would appear less weird because the bear was an existing character created by a real person and that made having an imaginary friend much more acceptable.  Doing it this way meant that I could keep my version of Rupert private; I wouldn’t get frowned upon because I was just a creative child who liked Rupert the Bear, but on the flip side I was doing myself an injustice.  By dulling down my imaginary friend to keep him safe made me feel…

“People will think I am the worst storyteller.  I can’t even make up my own imaginary friend…”

…but having that secrecy and privacy with my friend Rupert fuelled my imagination and when I look back on my creative life since that time, I really do believe that it gave me the ability to create the characters I’ve written into so many of my stories over the years.  Is that weird?  Or is it clever?

I think anyone who has known me for any amount of time would say that I have a complex mind (again, nothing to do with Bernard).  It’s easy to say I’m an “over thinker” but I think that puts a negative spin on it and over thinking is not necessarily a bad thing.  Neither is curiosity.

I think I’ve used this before but it’s a good example so just go with it…

When Americans hail a taxi in the street they shout…

“TAXI!”

…yet in conversation they call them cabs.  Why not just shout…

“CAB!”

When people kiss why do we close our eyes?  Surely we like the person we’re kissing so why don’t we open our eyes to look at them?

Why do we rely on magazines and the media to tell us what we should be wearing?  It’s all very well picking out oversized shoulder pad boyfriend jackets, folk inspired coats and fringing on bags but who gave who the power to say that’s what we should be wearing.  And if it is what we should be wearing, then why are there so many different styles of clothing for the non-fashionistas to wear?

Who convinced the world that One Direction were the best boyband to grace the X-Factor – because they didn’t even win.

Who came up with the idea that weddings need to have a theme and a colour scheme because I made a point that my half of my wedding was not going to follow that pattern.  I had knitted flowers and multi-coloured chair covers.  Everyone had a knitted buttonhole as they entered the room.  I sent my bridesmaids down the aisle first and all four of them had different dresses of their own choice because every single one of them is a completely different person with different personalities and to put them in the same dress would be asking them to change just for me.  One of my bridesmaids has tattoos and she asked me if I wanted her to cover them for the photos.   I said…

“No, because it would be like telling you to cover part of your soul.”

I had a drag queen perform at my wedding; she was beautiful but over 50% of my guests left the room because they didn’t approve.  I thrust my friend into the limelight and asked her to do a reading, she said…

“What should I read?”

I said…

“Whatever you want, make something up…”

And she wrote the most beautiful speech I could have asked for.

For my witness to sign the certificate I didn’t ask any of my bridesmaids, I asked a male friend (by the book it’s always a female) who I’ve known for twenty years and I wanted him to be part of my day. 

All of this might seem weird, but is it?  That day I wanted everyone who had given up their time to see me get married to enjoy the day.  I wanted them to feel relaxed and look around them and think…

“Yep, this is definitely Kat, and Matt, but mostly Kat”

Who does it hurt not to play by the rules?

At primary school a teacher told us the story of Mary and Joseph and the birth of Jesus.  I remember being horrified that Mary was having a child by another man and I wanted to know why Joseph wasn’t really ticked off with his wife for cheating on him and then spinning this tall tale that she had been chosen to have a special baby with an invisible man.  I could see she was completely dumbfounded by my question and I do kind of feel sorry for her because what on earth do you say to an eight year old kid when no one knows the answer?  But you can’t tell these stories and expect everyone to just accept them; not when some of them are so incredibly spectacular.

On holiday in Greece one year, I stood in the sea and willed it to part for me like it had for Moses; I would stare intensely at rocks searching for ten new commandments so I would be famous.  I wanted to be a nun because I liked the outfit and I would prance around the house in my dad’s dressing gown because it was black, I would wear a white pillow case over my head and I’d pretend I was married to God because from a really young age I never saw a future with a man because I was too strange. 

At secondary school when we had to start thinking about our future and our careers I remember going to the careers room; which was a tiny old thing buried in the basement of the school and I would always whisper because it felt like a library.  There was a book like a catalogue with a list of careers for us to choose from and I remember saying to the careers officer…

“I don’t need the book, I already know what I want to be; I want to be a psychiatrist.”

Ironic really isn’t it?  That about 6 years after this I found myself sitting in front of a psychiatrist instead of actually being one.

Prior to this I wanted to be a podiatrist so in year 10 I did a week of my work experience following around a podiatrist.  I saw an unbelievable amount of feet.  They were crooked, bony, crusty and a few of them whiffed a bit, but it didn’t matter, because I didn’t plan on looking after the feet of the average Joe, nah, my sights were set on the guys in the bands I loved.

I self-medicated with their music.  I read whatever I wanted into the lyrics of their songs and I convinced myself that because they were standing on stage an awful lot, they would require help to look after their feet. 

I dreamt that they would take me on tour with them as their personal podiatrist and I didn’t for one single second think that this wasn’t possible. My friends laughed, my family smiled through gritted teeth at another one of my hair brained ideas but I just wanted to make a difference, why was that so hard to accept?

In 2002 I did my first Edinburgh Fringe Festival, man I love that place, I loved it so much I did two more of them.  During my first one I’d written a play and I walked around the city with a copy of it in my bag.  I watched play after play after play and I was totally transfixed with the atmosphere in the city and I somehow told myself that a director would find me and find my play and want to cast it, direct it and make it soar above all of the hundreds of plays that had taken months and years to perfect, but mine would be so well received because of its powerful message and it would win the prestigious Fringe 1^st award. 

Well it’s obvious that didn’t happen because I was too shy to show it to anyone.  I was surrounded by talented people who were beautiful and gifted and I was just a box office assistant who got star struck when Alan Davies walked in with Paul Merton and bought tickets for a drag show whose best asset was the micro pig she brought on stage at the end; but truthfully?  That was the best job I’ve ever had. For the first time ever people didn’t think I was strange and if they did they didn’t mind.

As I’ve got older and next year I will be the dreaded 40, I can look at myself and I think…

“Yep, I can see why people think I’m weird.”

You can blame the bipolar but I was strange long before Bernard came along, I mean look at me; I’ve given my mental illness a name!  I refer to my stoma as her and she!  I give inanimate objects personalities and last year the most exciting thing about getting house insurance was getting a limited edition Meerkat toy that I won’t share with any of my nieces or nephews (sorry guys).

When a child names their favourite toy we think it’s cute.  My niece has names for all of her toys and I guarantee if they weren’t named we would find that strange; but, as far as I’m aware as we grow older we we’re never told at any point to stop doing that?  So if you don’t name the plants in your garden or the bike that you ride to work every day, then maybe it’s you who’s the weird one; have you ever thought about it that way?

Life should not be dictated by the clothes we wear and we should be allowed to ask questions regardless of it raising an eyebrow over every religious belief we’ve had since the dawn of time because everyone wants the world to make sense somehow – even if it means challenging something sacred. 

Kids should be allowed to have imaginary friends and not be judged, that imaginary friend is salvation, they’re company, they’re a loyal companion.  That fictionalised creation is a sign of creative intelligence and you’ll never know why they’ve been created because you will never hear them speak.

When I did my speaker training Richard McCann called me quirky.  I’d never been called that before. I guess it’s a more acceptable term for weird and I say in all of my presentations that I embrace my quirky side and I am not shy of being a bit strange these days because I have never tried to change, so I ask myself, why change the term?

Throughout my teens when I thought it was a bad thing to be different and weird was something no one should ever flaunt, I would wonder what was it about me that made me stand out from other kids?  Why didn’t I just eat the jelly babies?  Why didn’t I break the branches off the dead Christmas tree and throw them for the dog to fetch?

Perhaps it’s because…

• I wanted to be a nun because I liked the outfit.

• I practically plagiarized my imaginary friend to keep my imagination safe.

• I wanted to be a podiatrist so I could perve on the feet of singers.

• And I thought if the sea could part of Moses, then the sea could part for me.

That’s just the beginning.  This is just a taster of who I used to be and who I still and I am not hurt if people think I’m a weirdo because does it really matter?  Does it not make me who I am and prove that I am not defined by Bernard because most of this happened before Bernard ever made an appearance.

I will hold my hand up right now and I will say I am thankful for my over thinking, overactive and over imaginative imagination because if there is one thing that’s for certain…

…that, is what makes me weird…

Dedicated to my parents-in-law, for being proud of me when they don’t have to.

*All names have been changed where needed*

Ever heard that saying…

“What doesn’t kill you, can only make you stronger.”

Sometimes I think the people who say this are the ones who have never had anything in their lives that has set out to potentially kill them.

Those words, are they supposed to be comforting? Are they intended to give us hope?  Hope that maybe the bad days are behind us and now we can look forward to a peaceful and tranquil life?  Or are they words we use when there’s nothing else to say and we just want to make someone feel better?   

I bet you think I’m talking about Covid, but in the words of Alanis Morrisette that would be…

Today I’m writing about something I don’t usually get the chance to talk about, even in 99% of my presentations I don’t get the chance to go into any detail about it so maybe it’s time.

What am I on about? 

Well, when you don’t look after your mental illness, when you haven’t learned that making small adjustments to your everyday living can lessen the chances of a fully-fledged Bipolar episode; then the result – for me – is a strongly advised stay in a psychiatric ward…six times over.

When I do my presentations I have a limited time to tell my story. There are certain things people want me to address so I pick out the bits that are relevant for that group.  I always touch on my hospital admissions but I never really get the chance to go in to any detail about them, my audience knows I’ve been in hospital and they know how many times but they don’t know anything else about it.

In 2019 I got the chance to go up to Dundee and speak to a group of students studying Psychology and training to be psychiatric nurses at Abertay University.  It was my dream gig!  It was one of the top five on my “speaking bucket list”.  This was my chance to tell them the truth and hope that part of my story would promote change in the field they were going into.  I wanted them to right the wrongs that had been done to so many people I know and change the system because they were in the perfect position to do this.  So when I was asked to speak for an hour to an hour and half and told to include absolutely everything…

• Childhood
• Adulthood
• Bernard the Bipolar brain
• Treatment
• Hospital
• Discrimination
• The present
• The future

I went full pelt into it and sugar coated nothing!  I talked for 1 hour and 17 minutes and the video of that presentation is used as part of the course material in the psychology lectures.  The section about hospital is used a separate part of the course material and students are told beforehand that what they are about to watch is raw and can be upsetting.

I never, in a million years, ever thought my story would have a disclaimer; now all seriousness aside for a minute, it is kind of cool; I felt like one of those warning alerts that flashes across the screen a documentary starts…

But I guess this is part of my point.  I don’t get the chance to talk about it so people end up thinking that my mental illness isn’t really that bad and because I am who I am and I’m “high functioning”, then I’m probably only a little bit Bipolar as opposed to being a lot bipolar. Or…

“Like Stacey on Eastenders but not as bad.”

I love that line because whoever says is has never seen me in a fully fledged Bipolar episode. It just makes the feel better to think this way.

When I tell people that I’ve been on a psychiatric ward they assume one of two things… it’s like Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

or Sandra Bullock in 28 Days. 

Well, it’s neither.  What I had wasn’t the worst, but it was far from the best.

This morning I was hoovering when I came up with the idea of writing this piece and I briefly wondered, is this what people want to read?  Should I even be writing this now that I work in a psychiatric rehab unit twenty seconds walk away from the place where I was a patient?  Should I post this on the internet for all to see?  What if someone I work with reads it? 

My answer to those questions? What I’m about to write is the truth.  It happened and there’s no changing that.  I created this blog as a space for people to read the bits I don’t get a chance to talk about in my presentations.  I wanted to show others that I have worked damn hard to become who I am, I wanted people realise that appearances can be deceptive and just because a person is high functioning, it doesn’t mean they’ve always been that way.

The dark parts of my story are not to everyone’s taste and if you’d rather not read about them that’s absolutely fine, I am not offended.  If you don’t want to know what goes on behind the locked door of an acute psychiatric ward, then you’d better close your browser now because just like the blog I did about poo, this is not for the faint hearted.  This is the truth; so fasten your seatbelts because I’m about to rip the plaster right off that wound!

I’m not going to write about the lead up to any of my admissions, in fact I’m not even going to write about them chronologically because it doesn’t matter what order they occurred; after that first admission, they all look exactly the same.

*Disclaimer – I am only referring to the hospital where I was an inpatient and therefore I cannot speak for any other or service*

When you walk through the door of a psychiatric ward it is like walking into a prison, the only difference is; you’ve done nothing wrong. 

Why is it like a prison?  Because the door is locked.  You can’t get in without being buzzed in and you most certainly can’t get out. 

When the door locks behind you everything you once knew about yourself disappears.  You are no longer a mother, brother, sister or friend.  Whatever job you did on the outside world is irrelevant because regardless of you being a teacher or a lawyer or a shop assistant, it doesn’t matter, between the walls of that ward you are no longer a person, you are one thing and one thing only…an inpatient. 

Contrary to popular belief hospital is not a holiday camp.  It’s not fun and it’s not relaxing.  When I was admitted because my Bipolar high was out of control I would ask the nursing staff what was I supposed to do now?  They said…

“…rest.”

But how do you rest when you don’t feel like you need to? 

On the acute ward I was on I was stripped of everything that was a comfort to me.  I had no mobile phone so any contact with my friends and family was done in the allotted visiting times of 1-2pm, 4-5pm and 6-7:30pm when my mum came to see and brought my phone. 

I was a pro at clock watching, I would sit and watch that seconds hand go round and round until it hit the number I needed because visiting hours were like drugs! It was a hit that numbed the pain of seclusion just for a few minutes.

Everything I knew about home was gone.  In the morning I had to let my hair dry naturally because I wasn’t allowed my hairdryer.  I would ask the staff to borrow the ward hairdryer but it depended on whether they liked me enough to loan it to me.  I am not joking, there were countless times when I would ask to use I and they would say “its broken” but twenty minutes later I would hear someone else two rooms away drying their hair with the alleged “broken” dryer. 

I had no need for my keys anymore because the ward was my home. Even something as simple as a duvet is one of the most painful things to be without.  When its December and you’re sleeping under a window with a crack in it and one of the nurses thinks the five blankets you’re trying to hide under is one blanket too many, it hurts like hell to have someone take two of them away. 

If you like a hot beverage like tea or coffee and you’re used to getting up to make one whenever you feel the need then trust me, the reality of not having a kettle at your beck and call is torture because you have to wait for the drinks trolly to come out at the allotted times and if you miss it?  Well you’ll just have to wait until the next one and that could be two hours away.

When I was admitted nothing was ever explained.  Imagine when you go on holiday and you check in to your hotel and they give you a map and they say…

“This is the dining room, breakfast is at this time, the 24 hour bar is here.  You’re full board so lunch is served by the pool at this time and the restaurant is open at this time for your evening meal.  We also have room service available.  Enjoy your stay.”

No-one ever told me what time breakfast was, sometimes they’d ring a bell to wake you up, or an angry support worker would bang on every door or sometimes a patient who never slept would charge up and down the corridors shouting…

“BREAKFAST! BREAKFAST!”

God I hated her!  Her middle name should have been Foghorn!

I was never told why the door was locked.  I thought because I was a voluntary patient I would be able to come and go as I pleased but I couldn’t and I’d ask the staff why they were treating me like prisoner.  I hadn’t been sectioned so why were they treating me like I was.  You know what?  I never got an answer, because I was viewed the same as everyone else, it didn’t matter that I hadn’t been sectioned, the door was locked to stop the mentally ill from leaving and I was mentally ill.

Technically the responsibility to explain how the ward works is down to the staff, as you’d expect.  But in reality it’s the patients who tell the new patients about the do’s and don’ts of psychiatric ward life.

Believe it or not every single person on the ward is different.  We might all have been pigeonholed as the same but in all six admissions I met an array of characters.  It’s incredible how you become a tight knit group, there is no difference between you and you make the strongest of bonds with people who you would probably never meet on the outside world.

I met so many amazing people but there are a select few who so many year later I still remember.  I remember them because despite their illnesses and their life choices, they reminded me that people are still people.

I made friends with Nancy* who was a heroin addicted prostitute, she’d been raped and all four of her children had been taken away.  On the outside world it would be so easy to say that someone like Nancy didn’t deserve to have children and that a prostitute can’t be raped because selling themselves is their occupation.  On the inside of a psychiatric ward you come to realise that not everything is as clear cut as we think it is. 

We would watch Coronation Street together, we’d drink tea and we swapped life stories.  I remember she once said…

“When we get out of here we should go for a night out.”

I remember thinking there was no way that would ever happen because her idea of a night out and my idea of a night out were probably very different. 

At the time Coronation Street had an impending rape storyline and as it played out on the screen I looked at Nancy and I asked her if she was okay?  She covered her face and cried.  The staff knew what she’d been through and they knew what we were watching but no one took the initiative to turn it off when they had for other patients.  I remember putting my palm out for her and she held on to it until scene had finished.

Nancy was an inpatient for two weeks, she never showered, she never combed her hair and she had hardly any teeth, the teeth she had left were black and rotted but every single morning when I walked into the lounge she would stand and she would hug me and ask me if I’d slept.

Justin* was on a methadone programme trying to get a grip on his Schizophrenia.  The voices in his head were always worse in the morning and as soon as he woke up he would walk up and down the corridor banging his head with his hand trying to get them to stop.

He was six years older than me and he would ask me what it was like to have a job because he’d only ever been on benefits and when his voices calmed down he showed me how to roll a cigarette because I’d never smoked one.

One morning I woke with crippling anxiety.  I was completely detached from reality, I hadn’t slept in days or eaten a meal and I was confused about where I was.  I managed to get dressed and I went into the lounge. I sat at one of the tables in the adjoined kitchen and cried looking out at the people in the room.  I recognised them but I couldn’t work out why or who they were.  All I could feel was my racing heart, the bile in my mouth and my shaking hands.

Justin walked past the table and said…

“Morning Kat.”

And when I didn’t reply he did a double take.  He knew something was wrong and without any hesitation he gave me a hug.  All I could do was cry and I kept saying…

“I don’t know where I am.  I don’t know where I am…”

He waved at one of the other patients and they shot off to get a nurse, even though I’d already been ignored by countless other members of staff just minutes before.  It should have been their job to help but instead a nurse stood over me like the grim reaper and just said…

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I can’t do anything if you don’t tell me what you’re crying about.”

Anyone who has anxiety of any kind will tell you when you’re in that moment and everything around you is so overpowering, the last thing you can do is tell someone how you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it.

He stood over me for less than thirty seconds before he said…

“Go to your room and stop crying in the kitchen.”

When he walked away it was Justin who sat with me.  He rolled his entire days’ worth of cigarettes and told me about his girlfriend.  He told me one day, when he was off the drugs they were going to buy a house because one day he would have a job, just like me.

He spent the rest of the day checking on me.  He was no professional, he had no qualifications and he had more than enough of his own stuff to be getting on with, but he still knew how to communicate with another human being who needed support.

There are patients who help others and there are patients who wreak havoc when they don’t their own way.

Jane* was one of those.  On the surface you could tell she’d lived a tortured life both of her own making and no fault of her own.  It was 2011 and she had a Walkman.  She was allowed one hours leave from the ward a day and one day it was raining so she saved 20 minutes of it for later in the day when it was less wet.  She decided she wanted to take this 20 minutes when visiting hours were finished and for whatever reason the nursing staff saw necessary, she was denied exit from the ward.

Jane was livid and I can understand why, because when you have nothing and the one thing you do have is taken away the only thing you can do is respond like a hurricane so everyone knows just how ticked off you really are.

I kid you not, Jane put her headphones over her ears and switched on that Walkman and for six whole hours she walked up and down the ward shouting, screaming, dancing and making herself known.  Was it funny? No, it was flippin awful!  Did she make a point? Absolutely.  Did it do her any good?  Not at all.

I remember Doreen was in her 70s, consumed by depression.  She didn’t wash, change her clothes or go to the toilet so she constantly soiled herself.  She was given adult nappies but her illness prevented her from understanding how to wear them.

One Saturday afternoon and there was a group of us watching American Idol in the lounge with a care worker who picked the comfiest armchair and a foot stool with the best view of the TV while the rest us sat around the sides.

Enter Doreen, fully clothed including the coat she hadn’t taken off in four days.  She was covered in poo, it was in her nails, on her hands, up her sleeves and on her trousers.  All she wanted was to ask the care worker how to put the nappy on.

“Please can you show me…”

Well this went down like a lead balloon.  The care worker looked at Doreen holding a nappy in her poo covered hands and yelled…

“DON’T BE STUPID! GET AWAY! DON’T BE SO THICK YOU STUPID WOMAN. GO AWAY! YOU’RE DISGUSTING!”

The care worker dragged her away and 20 seconds later she sat back in her armchair watching American Idol.

It was myself and another patient who tried to help Doreen figure out how to put the nappy on.  We tried to make a complaint but you learn very quickly when you’re an inpatient on an acute psychiatric ward that your word counts for nothing.

In hospital there are those who probably don’t need to be there and those who have been in so many times they might as well stay there.  There are people who are the crutch for others and then are the people who just slip through the net.

So many people on the ward self-harmed.  I saw people do it.  I saw a man slice his wrists in a corridor and then stagger through it dazed and bleeding because he didn’t know what to do.  He was told he was silly. When I self-harmed I was told I was intelligent enough to know better, but mental illness doesn’t choose people according to their intelligence.  Trapped in a moment of internal devastation, mental illness doesn’t tell you the consequences of your actions, it simply tells you what it needs you to do. 

Wayne* came on the ward a week before I was about to be discharged.  He was the same age as me and even though we’d both lead completely different lives he had one of the kindest hearts I’d ever encountered in any of my six admissions.  His depression was debilitating and always caused him to spiral into destruction, but one thing about Wayne was when he was admitted into hospital he knew it was the last chance saloon and all his focus went into getting better.

He had a girlfriend and she was the only thing he ever talked about.  The thought of her kept him going and gave him a sense of purpose, a reason to get better.  He was hopelessly in love her and all he wanted to do was see her.  The only problem was, she didn’t want to see him. 

I had 24 hours leave coming up and that morning the two of us drank tea together and he said…

“Kat, she’s coming.  My girlfriend, she’s coming to see me today.”

He was so happy and when I left for my leave with my overnight bag, he smiled and he waved and I said…

“You can tell me all about it tomorrow.”

The following day I went back to the ward and I couldn’t find him.  When I asked the other patients who were now my friends, where he was someone said.

“His girlfriend came to see him and she dumped him.”

Wayne was devastated.  The staff knew what had happened.  They were aware of the situation, they’d seen him sob when she left and yet when he wanted to go to the shop they never asked him what he was going to buy.  No one asked him if he wanted to have a chat first, so Wayne bought a bottle of anti-freeze, he drank the bottle and ended up in intensive care.  By the time I got back to the ward, he was dead.

What I remember most about the patients in hospital are their acts of human kindness.  Their tender hugs even though they hadn’t washed, their toothless smiles and their innocence in a world that is far from forgiving.   

Now don’t get me wrong, as an inpatient I myself am no angel.  I can be difficult, head strong and non-compliant. I hold my hand over my heart and I can honestly say that I have been that person the staff roll their eyes at.  I have been problematic, stroppy and rude. 

At the time I thought it was justified.  I believed it was the right way to behave because there was something I wanted and I needed to have it and whatever I was, it was the most important thing in the world and the staff should get it for me right there and right then…even if the thing I wanted was just a calendar so I could see what day of the week it is.

Hospital has an effect on you.  It is traumatic and it’s isolating because when you go back to your normal life how do you explain to people where you’ve been when they’re too afraid to ask because you should just forget about it and move on.

How do you tell people you can’t look at the lights in their houses because they look like UFO’s and when you were in hospital you thought there were cameras hidden in the bulbs and the aliens were watching you.

How do you tell people you can’t eat food like corned beef hash because it smells like the food in hospital and it brings back the same nauseating feeling you had when you thought you were being poisoned by the staff but you had to force feed yourself because otherwise you’ll be sectioned for being non-compliant.

How do you stand in front of a crowd of people and tell your story and still think to yourself…

“…you have no idea how bad this actually was…”

…because you still don’t have enough time to tell them everything that really happened.

The reality of it all is, there aren’t enough minutes to tell the whole truth of six psychiatric admissions and what I’ve written is still only a snippet. There will never be a presentation long enough with an audience willing enough to listen because the truth is never ending.  Not only that, but despite being the root cause of every single admission, Bernard will never allow me to spill the tea on all everything I went through, why?  Because some of it is just too painful and sometimes the painful bits need to be taken away so that you can move on.

After all….

What doesn’t kill you, can only make you stronger…

Dedicated to the inpatients who kept my head above the water when I was drowning…2003-2011

For years I believed you could only truly be a writer if your work was published.  Whether you spend ten minutes on a poem or dedicate ten years to writing that one novel everyone is supposed to have within them – the work only pays off if the end result is on a shelf in Waterstones.

The minute I learned how to use the alphabet I knew I wanted to be a writer.  All the way through primary school I was writing stories taken from the characters I was reading about in the books I loved.  I was the funky kid in The Babysitters Club, I was just like Jo in Little Women, I was Kat instead of Katie in What Katie Did and I wanted to be Darrell in the Mallory Towers books because boarding school looked so much more exciting than the school I was at.

High school was a mine field of actions and emotions and it was at this point that I realised just how different I was from the other kids. My life at home was different, I didn’t understand myself, I didn’t understand the world and I read a hell of a lot of Point Horror books.  I was inspired by the writers who could incorporate the lives of kids at college with romance and at the same time make stalking and the supernatural cool.

At the age of eleven I stopped writing about fluffy clouds and rainbows and making everything in the world appear pretty and I brought out the big guns and I wrote my first novel, The College Fears.  Was it as bad as it sounds? Oh yes, it was terrible, but I dedicated my life to that story and I wholeheartedly believed that I was going to be discovered and thrown into the writing limelight and I would be the next big thing before I turned thirteen!

The College Fears was the culmination of a group of kids embarking on a brand-new journey at university, discovering new friendships and being completely independent, no family, no ties to their past, just the freedom to be who they wanted to be.

In 1993 I was beginning to realise that my mind was a messed-up circuit board where nothing was connected the way it should be.  I struggled with body image and the perception of who I wanted to be compared to who I really was.  I couldn’t make sense of anything so I threw all that I had into that one story.  I gave my characters the biggest egos, the worst luck in love, I made them beautiful on the outside but hideous within.  I made them tactile, I gave them eating disorders, I made them appear a whole lot older than they actually were.  They were everything I wasn’t but everything I wanted to be.

When I finished my first novel I was proud.  I felt I had achieved something big.  Who else had spent every night, every weekend thrashing out words and sentences?  I would send myself to sleep at night by creating conversations between my characters.  When I did this I wasn’t in my own head anymore, I was somewhere else, with other people; I was every single character I had created and I was the bees knees! In the real world I was anything but cool but in my head I was a successful writer, wise beyond her years with an advanced and complicated rare talent.

In 1994 I started to write my second novel.  I called it Life.  It was about a girl who went to university and she was addicted to suicide.  She’d tried to kill herself thirteen times in five years.  That poor girl, I gave her hell in that story.  I gave her misery and self-loathing, I gave her scars and an internal battle that she could never make sense of and never shake off.  But I also made her beautiful.  I made her appealing to boys, I made her intelligent and successful.  I made her popular and I gave her a singing voice any X-Factor contestant would crawl across hot coals to have come out of their oesophagus.  But hell, that poor girl was tortured, she was miserable.

When I look back at my early writing I can tell you straight off why my stories were written the way they were.  I was miserable and tortured and struggling but every word I wrote was a release from all of that.  On a blank piece of paper I could be whoever I wanted to be, I could do whatever the hell I liked and no one could stop me.  That’s the power of the written word, you can dress it up and dress it down and it doesn’t matter what the end product looks like because you can call it art!

As the years went by I swam in writing circles with real writers who were published and successful and they saw the world from angles that I never even knew were possible.  I loved those people, I still love those people with all of my heart and even though I didn’t fully fit in; I was accepted as a human being and when I was with those people, listening to them read, watching them sign their work I would sit in awe and think,

“That, is what I want. That is who I want to be.”

They taught me everything I needed to know at that time, how to be a critic, how to deliver your best work, how to get a backbone because the writing world was just as tough as the real one. 

I once wrote a screenplay about a man whose entire family hated the fact that he was a writer. I was sixteen and obsessed with the book Trainspotting and by the end of watching the film I already believed Danny Boyle was going to direct my masterpiece with Robert Carlyle cast as the lead role.  I pictured myself at the BAFTAs, the Oscars, I’d pick out a dress from Hello magazine and when I went to bed at night, I’d fall asleep to the sound of my acceptance speech for Best Screenplay.

Growing up I kept a diary.  It was the usual angsty teenage…

“I hate the world but I love this boy in my English class…”

…kind of stuff and my brother would joke about breaking into the locked tin I kept it in and reading all my deepest darkest secrets but really, my real secrets, my true diary was in the stories I wrote.

I confessed my undying love for the kid in Year 10 English by aging him and making him rescue a girl with no true friends in her life.  I took out my anger on the bullies that wouldn’t give me a break by creating a twenty-something year old character called Doug Fairchild and I made every other word a hideous swear word. I made him a violent moron with a conscience that didn’t make an appearance until the last page of the book.  I killed off pointless adult figures because in fiction it was so easy to do.  I gave girls eating disorders because it was easier to carry off than doing it myself.  I made my characters stars!  I made them humble singers, guitar geniuses, famous, adventurous and admirable and I full on believed that every story, every character, every single page I covered with my barely legible handwriting was going to be printed!  It was going to be real!  As far as I was concerned, every written word that fell from my pen to the page, made me a true writer in every sense of the word.

But it’s like public speaking.  In the eyes of the world unless you’re charging a fee to be heard, you’re not really a speaker.  Unless your work is printed, you’re not really a writer.

Last year in lockdown I had time on my hands and a room in my house that was a disaster zone.  I was spending hours editing a novel that I wrote twenty years ago and my mind was consumed by the ridiculous amount of notebooks that were littered with ideas, plots and synopsis. 

(Bear in mind this was smack bang in the middle of a massively prolonged and never-ending Bipolar episode so I had a lot of energy and an incredibly obsessive imagination)

At the time I couldn’t read books.  I tried everything from Jilly Cooper to Bret Easton Ellis and everything in between but the only thing I wanted to read was my own work.  My overactive Bernard the Bipolar brain convinced me the best thing to do with my furloughed time was to build myself a library.  

It took me three whole days.  I lifted, I carried, I sorted and I got a chance to look at 38 years of an unstoppable imagination that I never gave enough credit. 

I looked at the two novels I wrote back in the 90’s and the reams of short stories and countless other novels I had forgotten I’d ever written because they were the backing singers to something bigger.  I picked up the tattered notebooks I used to carry with me before mobile phones had memos.  I relived the memories of where those initial ideas came from and for the first time, instead of giving myself a hard time over what should have been and my lack of effort to get my work published, I actually shrugged my shoulders and I thought,

“This not about being published.  This is how I stayed alive.”

Standing on the shelves in my “office” are notebooks and folders that contain my own version of therapy.  I have hundreds of stories and pieces that contained my sadness and exposed my madness.  I have countless pages that are just daft scenarios I created simply to exercise my imagination.  They were childish expressions of a life I wanted but one I knew I would never live. 

So does it really matter that I’m not on a shelf in Waterstones?  Does it matter that the only eyes that will ever see my work are my own?  It might be a shame with some things but trust me, most of that stuff should probably never have left the pen in the first place.  I am not always consistent, I may not be very good.  I’m probably lazy and sometimes I have far too many ideas I want to write and these days I hardly ever finish the stories I start. 

I once had a vision of a life full of artsy friends and intelligent conversation and cultured weekends but really?  Let’s be honest now, I’m a kid from Bolton who got a raw deal and the only escape I had was to dream of a life where I wasn’t me and the most gratifying part of it was that I could make the lives of others miserable without hurting anyone real.

I am not what I thought I would become.  I haven’t grown into the writer I longed to be but now, when I look at my shelves I don’t see failure; I actually see someone who achieved something because I have more than just a couple of books, I have many books; I have my very own library.

Being a writer is not about being in print.  Being a writer is about having an imagination, its about putting the alphabet together, it’s about sentences, setting a scene, creating characters and becoming so immersed in something that it takes away the pain of what’s really going on in the world and making it that little bit easier to live with. 

When people tell me…

“I didn’t know what to get you, so I just got you a notebook.”

How is that not the most perfect present?  For Christmas Matt bought me a Paperchase voucher.  The other day he asked me what I’d bought and I said…

“A shit tonne of pens.”

…because being a writer is about enjoyment, it’s about opening a new notebook and trying not to cross out any words so your first page looks perfect.  It’s about clicking your new rollerball pen and setting it to work or flicking off that weird gluey ball at the tip of a fresh gel pen and watching the ink slide across the paper.  Writing is about working all day and riding the bus home reading what you wrote the night before.  It’s about sitting on the floor by the fire when is flippin freezing outside and writing about somewhere hot.  It’s about shoving a bunch of characters in a coffee shop with no social distancing rules, no masks and no Covid app asking you to track and trace where you’ve been; they can just drink coffee and if you’re really creative they can have a party without the rule of six!

I have never pretended to be something I am not.  My fiction is dreadful. I know it is!  With my hand on my heart I declare it now that I am no J.K Rowling and I wouldn’t want to be.  I am not Shakespeare, heck, I couldn’t handle the public attention.  I don’t know the difference between a novel and a novella, I barely know the difference between a noun and a verb and the worst part of it all?  Doing a degree in English literature has completely ruined my love for literature!  Now I can’t open a book without trying to see where the Oedipus Complex fits in to a Mills and Boon or if the concept of the Menage a Trois fits in with a teen fiction book I picked up in a charity shop. 

In the last two years I have educated myself on my writing.  My writing isn’t about publication…

(Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to turn Penguin away if they come knocking at my door…)

…it’s about survival, it’s about escapism, it always has been.  I’ve learnt that I can do whatever the hell I want with words because it doesn’t matter, they’re mine and I take ownership of everything that doesn’t make sense because at the time of writing it, I knew exactly what I meant. 

Sometimes the best advice has come from a character of my own creation and maybe this is the only way I can learn to take my own advice? 

Being Bipolar sucks.  Sometimes having a stoma is really annoying, but the worst thing that could ever happen to me is my imagination being taken away.  How would I keep myself entertained?  What would I spend my money on?  WHSmith’s would go out of business if it wasn’t for me buying Pukka pads and gel pens.  My friends and family would have to think of something else to buy me, God help them with that one.  What would I do with the shelves in my office? I’d have to read books again.  What would I do on holiday? Part of my whole holiday experience is tramping round the shops looking for cool notebooks with lines in them.

I’ve taught myself that a finished story doesn’t have to be finished.  You can resurrect your characters and give them a makeover. You can backtrack, move forward, there doesn’t have to be a realistic timeline because its all fiction, time doesn’t exist.

I don’t care that I’m not in print.  My terrible fiction gives me air, it’s my release, it’s a distraction from a world that everyone wants to get away from.  It’s not real life and that’s the beauty of being a writer, that ability to transport yourself from one place to another without leaving your house.

That’s writing…

…that’s the writer in me.

Dedicated to Milly. I wasn’t sure I could pull a blog off without you, but now that it’s written, this is for you. Be a good girl xx