And when you think like that, each day is just a gift if you survive.
Many people will tell you that Tape Deck Heart is not the best Frank Turner album. And I’d agree with that statement. However, there’s a time and a place for it, and this is that time and place. Losing Days would play through a pair of £19.99 headphones as I ran through a car park in the Dunkirk area of Nottingham, three times a week, for UVB therapy at the hospital.
I’ve suffered with skin complaints since I was about three months old. Nobody’s quite sure why, but allergies and eczema and asthma seem to run in my family, and as well as being a recessive gene in human form, I’m also a walking itchy wheeze.
That would make a great Tinder bio.
Anyway, in my late teens, my eczema flared up big style, to the point that I was referred to a dermatologist, who then sent me for UVB therapy. In short, I’d stand, stark naked, in an upright sunbed, three times a week, in the hope that it would improve my skin. And it did. My mental health, though? It was in tatters. I’d moved away from home for the first time, I was uncomfortable in my own skin, I was anxious and nervous and self-conscious, and for the first time in my life, I was struggling academically, not to mention the fact that I was struggling to deal with the deaths of both my grandmothers, which I’d managed to bottle up for a while, but it was starting to fizz over.
I can remember writing, at one very low point, shortly after my nineteenth birthday, that I didn’t see myself reaching the age of twenty. That I honestly thought I’d be dead by then. I wasn’t sure how it would happen, but I was convinced it would.
By the time this goes up, I will have turned twenty-six.
This time of the year always has me feeling a bit melancholy, and maybe it’s because we’re getting close to the shortest day of the year, and sunlight isn’t exactly in abundance at the moment, or maybe it’s because I’m reflecting on the year that’s gone by, and I’m wondering quite what I’ve actually managed to achieve this year. You’ll have noticed, if you even read this thing, that in recent years, the only thing that goes up on this blog is what I call the New Year, New Me post, in which I try not to make it sound like a New Year, New Me Facebook post, but it inevitably always comes out sounding like one.
Well, seeing as we’re coming to the end of the decade, let’s bring this up a level.
Let’s have a look back at the decade.
Now, I was talking to someone about this the other day, who claimed that this was a stupid idea. I was only sixteen at the start of 2010, after all. How can you analyse what you’ve achieved as a person, when, ten years ago, you were basically still a child?
It’s a good point.
But I’m also doing this to see how I’ve grown. How have I got from who I was then, to who I am now, and what things have shaped me?
I’m not going to do a year-by-year analysis. For a start, I can’t remember everything that happened, and secondly, it’s going to be incredibly dull. Nobody wants to hear, in great detail, how hard it is to be a teenager. We’ve all been there.
Let’s just give you an example of who I was.
In January 2010, I was sixteen, in Year Eleven at school, and about to take my GCSEs. I weighed about 50kg soaking wet, hadn’t grown into my nose, and looked like either a very feminine boy with long, long hair, or a girl who just never bothered with any kind of self-care whatsoever.
Let’s just say that I was unfortunate-looking.
I was also incredibly nervous. The sort of person who would jump at anything, who was constantly on edge. School was torture. I was on high alert at all times.
By January 2015, I’d gained about fifteen kilos in weight, in addition to a complex about my background and my upbringing, and a crippling sense of self-doubt, as well as a nice dose of anxiety and depression, just to top it off. I’d also lived in one country quite successfully, and I was about to start living in another. The light at the end of the tunnel was growing larger.
I’m writing this in December 2019. I’m now a good twenty kilos above my weight ten years ago. I’m three years out of university. And yes, I still live at home, and no, I still can’t drive, but this isn’t about the negatives.
This year, I turned it the fuck around.
When I last wrote on this blog, I was pretty low.
I was in a job that was a step up from my last one, that’s true. But it wasn’t great. In fact, it only got worse. It reminded me why I hated working in call centres, and it made me loathe myself. My colleagues didn’t help; they only really made it worse.
And then it dawned on me that I’ve spent the last decade being quite unhappy.
That the anxiety that started in high school had spilled out into my adult life. That it had controlled me to the point that I was scared of speaking out, scared of being honest, scared of standing up for myself. I was still sixteen, still with the ‘keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, and they’ll leave you alone’ sort of attitude.
At sixteen, in a pretty rough high school in the north of the West Midlands, that might work, up to a point. At twenty-five, working in a bank, it doesn’t. The people giving you aggro are like the bullies at school, but older, and they just come at you ten times worse, because they’ve learned that they can.
I decided that enough was enough.
What happened was that a colleague of mine put her notice in. She was unhappy, and we all knew it.
“Life’s too short to be unhappy, Em.” She’d said. “If you’re not happy, do something about it.”
So I did what I’ve said I’d do for the last two and a bit years.
I switched my status on the phone to ‘Personal Break’, walked as far down the drive as I could until I got mobile signal, and I applied for coding bootcamp.
It took me a few months to get the day off for an interview, and when I did, I was so nervous that I fluffed it. Or so I thought.
The interviewer was a really friendly guy from a town about 15 miles from where I grew up. We chatted about growing up in Staffordshire and Shropshire, and studying similar subjects at university, and what made me want to do the bootcamp. After the test, he told me that I hadn’t passed, but that all I needed was another week or so of practice, and I’d walk back in and smash it.
I remember going home feeling strangely positive about having essentially failed an interview.
The next day in work was horrific.
Without going into detail, I’d had an email from my boss calling me an embarrassment, a liability, and, what hurt the most, a disappointment, copying in a few of my teammates for good measure.
I cried all weekend. I told my mum that I was going to resign. Just like that. No worrying about it.
And so I did.
My boss told me she expected it. In fact, if I hadn’t resigned, she’d have put me on an improvement plan that would have, by her admission, been impossible to pass. It was for the best, she said.
I worked my notice, and I went back to the bootcamp. I even went to a drop-in session the day before, terrified that I wouldn’t be good enough. The same interviewer was there, and he took one look at my code, and laughed.
“You’re more than ready. See you tomorrow, yeah?”
I got in.
And it wasn’t easy. There were times that I doubted myself. Times that I cried. Times that I was so angry I felt like I was going to be sick.
And then there were times that I was so proud that I felt my heart would burst.
The night of my graduation, I found myself in a bar in the Northern Quarter in Manchester, drinking with the same admissions tutor who’d taken me through the entry challenge. It was early in the morning, and I’d had far too many drinks, and I thought it was a good idea to thank him for giving me that second chance.
“No.” He said. “Don’t thank me. That was all you.”
My heart could have burst.
Then I had to find a job.
That was tough.
I doubted myself. I considered going back into call centres. My friends and family told me I was mad. You didn’t spend all that money on retraining to go back to being unhappy. Patience. Keep trying. Something will come up.
And something did.
I started my job six weeks ago. Yes, it’s tough, but I’m enjoying it. For the first time in my working life, I didn’t spend Christmas dreading work. I looked forward to going back.
My three-years-younger, two-years-younger, one-year-younger self would have said that that wasn’t possible. Nobody likes their job. It’s just about tolerating the bubbling resentment of everything you do.
I turned it around.
How do you go from being scared of your own shadow to incredibly confident in a year?
You take a leap of faith. And a leap of faith is an understatement.
This felt like throwing myself to the lions.
It’s given me the confidence to believe in myself. To trust myself. To do what’s right.
This year hasn’t been one hundred per cent perfect. I’ve had to make some difficult decisions. I’ve upset and hurt people. I’ve lost two very close friends, simply because I put my happiness at the front of everything. It’s been tough to put near on twenty years, in one case, and near on ten, in another, of friendship behind me. It’s been very hard indeed.
But I’ve come to realise that I’m happier for it.
And that’s what this decade has taught me.
Strength.
Self-belief.
The importance of happiness.
And that’s what I’m taking into the next decade.
That scared, almost suicidal young adult? She’s gone. Not dead. Just gone away, regained strength, and come back fighting for what she wants.
So far, I think it’s working.
What will the next decade bring?
I have no idea.
Let’s see.
thehungrypunk 