Let us talk, you and I, a little while. Let us talk about depression. Actually, no, let us talk about one of the root causes of my depression: Loneliness.
At time of writing, I am twenty seven years old. I live with a friend, although he's not here much. We've lived in the flat for coming up for three months now. Before that, I lived with my mother, and we never crossed paths much either. We both worked full time and we each had our things that we liked to do. So it's fair to say I spend a lot of time on my own. It sometimes strikes me as odd how much time other people spend with their friends. Ashley, for instance, that most famous non-girlfriend of recent times (she thinks I'm too old for her) seems to be hanging out with her friends all the time. Even when I was at school, I never hung out with my friends that much. Blades came over for tea once a week, we usually had a night out once a week and then every so often we would have a party at someone's (usually Gilli's or Emma's) house. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we all went out as a group of friends to the pictures or whatever (me and Blades alone went a few more times) and I can't really remember us just hanging out outside of school. How did I therefore spend my time? Well, I must have spent a lot of it writing, altough I can't remember coming in from school and sitting down to write. I remember spending most of my study leave for my GCSE's writing the first draft of 'The Trouble With Girls'. That was when I first had my electric typewriter. I still have the draft lying around somewhere, seventy some pages crammed full of tiny type. I hadn't at that point learned about double spacing or even leaving acceptable margins. It was more an exercise in getting as many words down on each page.
I did spend a lot of time watching movies. I know when me and Sarah were going out I was at the height of my film buff phase - I was all about Scorsese and Coppola. It's from this period of my life that movies like Taxi Driver and Short Cuts stem from. It's also from this period that my first bout of depression stems from.
While me and Sarah were going out, I was writing the original screenplay that eventually formed the basis for my novel 'Various Artists'. At its heart, it is a novel about trying to find yourself and maybe finding that the person you're interested in isn't the best person for you. It's about suffocating relationships. It's also probably the funniest thing I've written, but even then it ends with a suicide. Gordy, having been dumped by Sophie, finds that he can't cope without her and in a bout of madness, ends his own life. And this is the novel I was writing when I was going out with Sarah. If you want to get analystical about it, the Mary-Sue of the novel for me is Will, who goes out on his first date, enters into a relationship and then kinda freaks out and feels like it's not for him. That was me and Sarah. I had my first date with Sarah and we go and see There's Something About Mary. Will goes and sees Star Wars at the old revival theatre. Stuff happens. It's probablynot exaggerating the point to say I had my sexual awakening in that cinema (the cinema, incidentally, the old Warner Village, is no longer there). I'd only first kissed a girl a few weeks previously. Sarah and I had known each other for a little under a week, we'd met on the Monday and she'd asked me out on the Friday, although our 'date' had been established as far back as Tuesday. We'd first kissed, a hot, passionate, groping kiss (a kiss that led Louise Russell to comment that it was disgusting) on the Friday. I recall that I asked her if, now that we were going out, I could kiss her.
She liked me. A lot. She would probably deny it now but she really liked me. For my part, I really wanted to like her back. And I did like her. But at heart, I was a horny seventeen year old boy and I let my hormones get the better of me. The main point I always look back on when considering our break up (which is something I do far more than I should for an event that's now almost ten years gone) the main reason we broke up was because she said 'I love you,' and I couldn't say it back. At the time I wasn't sure if I did love her. All I knew is that I was in love with someone, unfortunately for Sarah and for me, it wasn't her.
No, there was another girl, one who shall remain nameless, but a girl who I was in love with. I told her so at the New Year's party following mine and sarah's break-up. She shot me down. I was drunk. I might have said some stupid things. I can't remember. I can't even remember how she shot me down. I can't imagine she was cruel about it. But it did lead to a bout of suicidal depression that lasted for thebest part of six months. I had already been on the brink following my break up with Sarah (and my subsequent rejection by a girl who I got off with at a party at Gilli's but who then avoided me), but following New Year, I was convinced that I was incapable of love. So there I was, heading towards my A-Levels at a rate of knots with no clue as to what I was going to do with my life and I was questioning my entire reason for living. Because what is the point of livng if you're never going to make a connection with anyone?
Love is a mutual dependence that two people share. It's an emotional connection that overrides any sort of rational thought. And as they say, no man is an island. Because what do men (or women) do when left to stew in their own juices? Well, I don't know for sure, and I'm pretty confident that it'll be different for everyone but I'm willing to bet that going nuts is high on the list. It's the reason why you see so many old people with cats, because, deep down, everyone's shit-scared of being lonely. There comes a point when you'll reach out and grab hold of anyone or anything you can just so you're not alone.
So how did I get here? Okay. Deep breath. After me and sarah split up, I went to university, had a completely miserable first year as my parents split up, fell in love with a girl named Isabella, asked her out the beginning of my second year, found out she had a boyfriend and then spent most of the second year depressed, buoyedonly by my friendship with Neil and Sue, two of the lecturers at uni. He's a huge Doctor Who fan, so we got along well. Most of my third year was spent in a blissful limbo, neither majorly happy or sad. I had a brief crush on a girl named Kat in one of my practical modules but I doubt she was even aware I existed. All through my time at university I never really connected with anyone. Sure, I'm still friends with John-Paul and Neil on Facebook, but Gilli and Blades are still really close friends with people they went to university with. Maybe it's a side-effect of moving away to go to university, but again, like at 6th Form, I spent much of my time at university by myself. At this point I was fairly sure that I was a solitary person by nature and that I was forever destined to be alone.
Now, that's a pretty sweeping statement for a twenty one year old to make, but even now, six years down the line, it's still holding true.
In my final year at uni, I started working at Global, developed several crushes on both staff and customers, none of which came to anything. I then started working at Mills and, within a few months of Andrea starting, she'd set me up with Alison. Irony is something I appreciate, and so I can laugh (bitterly, true, but still laugh) at the fact that me and Alison split up because I told her that I loved her. Did I? That's a question I don't know the answer to. I know why I said it. I said it because I had spent so long alone (before meeting Alison, it had been three and a half years since I had even kissed anyone, let alone had anything approaching a relationship) that I wanter her desperately. I wanted to be with her. I wanted not to be alone anymore. And she ran away. She didn't even have the common decency to dump me to my face. She sent a text, while I was on holiday (those bonus points just keeping mounting up - not only did she dump me, but she did it by text AND I was on holiday at the time, so she managed to spoil that as well, for good measure - I broke my tooth the following day and haven't been back down to Oxford since...). So me, Blades, Amy and Amy's boyfriend Ali ended up getting shitfaced (well, I got shitfaced - I can't remember how drunk the others were) and bemaoning my shitty life. Amy espoused the opinion that if she was going to do something like that, then she wasn't worth being with. Now, with the benefit of a year and some change of hindsight, I can agree, especially given that although the reason she gave for splitting up with me was that she thought I wanted something serious and she didn't in the June, not three months after we had broken up she was engaged and moving in with someone whoshe barely even knew. The thing of it is, I'm probably best off out of it. Coming to know the kind of person she is while unafflicted with my feelings for her... well, let's just say that it never would have worked out.
But it does leave me on my own again. It's something that's come to the forefront very strongly these past few weeks. I don't know what it is, whether it's the fact that I haven't been to the pub in the past couple of months on a Tuesday night or what, but I feel so very alone and every attempt I make to try and get out there is met with failure. I repeatedly try and make a date with Ashley and she just as repeatedly rebuffs me, I ask Bryony if she fancies going to see a movie and she's got a previous engagement, Clare and Richie always seem to be at work or off doing their own thing (and to be perfectly honest, I'm sick of being the third wheel in their relationship) and Emma and Haz are so set in their own routine that anything that isn't work or sleep has to be negotiated within an inch of its life and I'm sick of having to make appointments to see people who claim to be my friends. I want to be able just to give people a ring and hang out. That's not too much to ask, is it?
I'm really getting too old for this shit.
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