GETTING US BACK TO WORK.

OR HOW I WISH I HADN’T BOUGHT INTO THAT VISION: A DIFFERENT VERSION OF SUCCESS.

In a substack post a few weeks ago I said I would write an article about people like me who work. The Government and previous governments have repeatedly said that people with a mental illness need to work, we need supported, upskilled and if not that; sanctioned and pressured until we have no other option but to work. I have worked through most of my adult life and wonder if maybe I have subscribed to this notion without knowing it.

It was the whole point of being at the boarding school I went to: to get a good job, to be a success, to have status, to do your duty, pull your weight, strive, succeed, do good, succeed, succeed.

It was also the same, though in contrast, from some members of my family when, in my early adulthood, I couldn’t work. Then I was a benefit scrounger and lazy; not quite the dream people had of me. It is slightly confusing to me that I would have bought so wholeheartedly into this vision.

I said the opposite; though in the days of Thatcher it was ‘Coal not dole’, and ‘Gie us a job’ from Boys from the Blackstuff. But I was one of the ones on the dole and determined not to be ashamed because of it. Though I must have been.

Once I started working properly, I took it extremely seriously. My job was a vocation and cause and though I thought I was a socialist I had no concept of workers rights or a healthy workplace, or work/life balance.

I worked when I had to and when I didn’t have to. I worked in the evenings and on the weekends but was so ignorant about such things that I didn’t know I might be entitled to time back if I worked over my hours. In fact, I was so ignorant of workplace practice that I didn’t even record my hours. I was trying to change the world and I was getting paid for it and it was the first job of its kind in Scotland so it had to work out, as it would be a reflection of what our community could achieve.

I worked the day my wife went into labour and was admitted to hospital with the prospect of a long, long, labour. Somehow, to both of us, it seemed perfectly normal for me to prioritise a National conference we were running, than spending hours in hospital but I think it was more luck than design that meant I returned to my wife some hours before they finally decided to induce her. In those days I am not sure we even had any paternity leave at all; I think I maybe took a few days off.

I worked when I was exhausted from taking my son round the streets in his pram at eleven at night and at three in the morning and five in the morning to settle him back to sleep and I am ashamed to admit I was one of those men who, because they were playing a part in the feeding, the nappy changing and washing, the cuddling, the getting up early when our children got up but also spending a long exhausting day at work. I would get home and sometimes I would think my wife had it easy. All she had to do was look after our son in the day time, while I would come home and do the cooking or the whatever. It took a lot of patience on her behalf to help me understand that those hours alone were not free carefree time but times of utter exhaustion.

I worked with little sleep and lots and lots and lots of anxiety until I cracked up and became psychotic and was admitted to hospital for a few months and as soon as was conceivably possible I went back to work again, to work till I cracked up and then to work again and so on.

It was then, over thirty years ago, that my friends told me that I could easily get disability benefits and that these were generous at the time. It didn’t occur to me to do that at all.

I carried on working and by then I had a diagnosis of schizophrenia which is not quite the career path a middle-class boarding school pupil was envisaged to take; actually quite the opposite.

By then I had no contact at all with anyone from the past; those rich, rich, young men; some inheriting country estates, some large working farms, some family businesses and others jobs in the city; though I was never quite sure what those were.

I remember once, on one of the, once in a decade trips, to London, I bumped into an old school acquaintance who encouraged me into a pub with his friends where I revisited, with a horrid shock, the culture of my past. Loud, suited people, drinking expensive drinks with other loud suited people; jostling, doing the stereotyped braying and speaking with the stereotyped accent I had almost forgotten about.

I couldn’t believe it and was relieved when I was back in Scotland, where the people I knew and worked with had accents nothing like that; dressed nothing like that and mainly had no work.

I was slightly oblivious to the impression I would have made; a thin posh, well spoken man on housing schemes working with people who he assumed were his peers, trying to change the world.

And in the way of thin, posh, driven well-spoken men, I got to meet the Queen a few times and other royalty and ministers of this and that and though, by then they seemed alien to me; far from the community I identified with, by and by I was given awards and an MBE and still I worked and tried to change the world and succeed and make everything all alright again.

Still I worked, I now think to prove I could succeed; that I wasn’t a failure that it didn’t matter I had deliberately failed my degree at university, that I had value even if it was of a different sort to what I had been brought up to believe I should have.

Or maybe I didn’t. I was talking with a friend recently about the joy and the optimism and comradeship of such days. Maybe it was not a career; maybe it was a community, maybe it was belonging, maybe that was the obsession.

Sometimes my wife would get angry with me and say I gave so much to work that I had nothing much left for her and our son and maybe she was right.

And then my marriage collapsed for many reasons and I found myself living alone and like before, I continued to work right up until hours before I was sectioned and then I would go back to work only days after being released from hospital.

Because I was alone and lonely, I could work in the evenings and I could work weekends and I would be available on my phone at any hour of the day.

Then one day I fell in love again and I left the work that had been my obsession and which even I knew had really made some sort of a difference. I went to Argyll where Wendy and her children lived and I started a part time job in Edinburgh at a much lower wage, with much less responsibility.

I didn’t know how much travelling it would take to get to and from Edinburgh so, for the first six months, when I had to be in Edinburgh every day I was working, I travelled. Initially starting at five in the morning to get the first train to get the first bus to Edinburgh; a surreal experience of sleeping suited men and immigrants having earnest conversations in languages I didn’t understand on the phone; with around it all, a sense of utter exhaustion . I left the house before the children woke and got home when they were already in bed or about to be.

Initially I flourished but as usual I carried on working way above my contracted hours with a job that, though part time, covered the whole of Scotland.

Finally, my boss intervened. Made it impossible for me to tally up these extra hours anymore and started a remote partnership with Wendy to persuade me that what was increasingly becoming, what Wendy called ‘voluntary work’, was unhelpful to me or the organisation or my family.

And now?

I am disillusioned by work. It didn’t change the world, or not in the way I had hoped. Instead it became a cause that was an obsession which, if I had paused for a moment I would know would never succeed: A world where we are loved and treated with kindness, where suffering does not happen; which, in essence, was what we were seeking. How ludicrous and maybe how lovely.

Part time work suits me.

In my part time free time I still do voluntary work with stuff like this writing and some paid work but I like it.

However, I also pay more attention to my family. I now get disability benefits. I walk the dog, feed the rabbits, read, write and watch the telly. I spend a lot of time doing very little and feel very, very, guilty when I do that.

I never did feel I succeeded or had status. My peers from my schooldays are probably now thinking of retiring to big houses with big pensions and big gardens and have probably carried on speaking to each other at dinner parties and so on for all their lives.

They probably sent their children to the same boarding schools they went to and know the directors of the art galleries and theatres that I find alien and intimidating.

I am writing from my sofa bed in the kitchen and dread the thought that I might have to retire one day because I doubt I have an adequate pension to sustain us.

I also think to myself; this surge, to do, to succeed, to make different. To work and do my duty! What rubbish. A better kinder world doesn’t happen if you don’t live a life that is also kinder and better in the way you speak out for.

When I think of the vision the public have of people with a mental illness like me and which I was brought up to have too; I wonder if maybe; despite my praise of and wonder at my community, I was ashamed of it and wanted to prove I could still succeed and work despite illness. That maybe I was trying to prove I was not really how some people see people like me.

Sometimes I think I would have done far, far, better if I had signed on for those disability benefits all those decades ago and sought a quieter kinder life, with no expectation of reward or accolade. Where I just lived; learnt how to make friends, learnt how to just be, without self- recrimination and instead learnt to accept that I really did have schizophrenia and it really was disabling, however much, even today, I still try to ignore that aspect of it.

With my part time job, I still seek approval. Two days ago I was telling some of my story to mental health officers; the people who end up sectioning me. Now I think of it, I put so much of myself into things like this; speaking out about what happens when you try to die and what happens when you are in front of a tribunal and what it is you want and what it is you fear from people such as them and it went well and the people were lovely and my evaluation was one hundred percent excellent and the comments in the feedback wonderful. But when I got home, though I said I was in a good mood and I really was in a good mood; I was also quiet and humourless and I went to lie down just for five minutes which turned into two hours and then I got up for whisky and then I went back to sleep again.

Occasionally people from the family would come into the kitchen, where I was and make funny comments and I liked that. But I do not need to do this. I do not need to prove again and again that I am a good person and that I can entertain people and make them laugh when, for most of the time, this social connection is way, way, beyond me.

I haven’t learnt to live in a part time job way. I haven’t learnt to live quietly. I feel guilty when I do little, which I do a lot. I do not know how to enjoy myself to be honest. I remember Wendy and me talking about that film, Oppenheimer and how much we hated it. Lots of men engaged in a cause and mission, unable to live at all, just the cause, the job, the mission and somehow lives that were not lived; not really.

Wendy is teaching me about living; I am a slow learner. Even when I retire I am hoping I will have enough time to write and maybe make a second career from it.

I love a Saturday where I wander upstairs to snuggle into Wendy, to watch the Saturday kitchen on the telly, to walk at Dumbarton rock with the dog as I did today in the frost and the mist but despite that my body thrums with the wish to do. Even now, now that Wendy is out in Glasgow with Louie for a birthday thing, I am writing. If I had sense I would be reading or watching a film or even watching the sort of telly that irritates me, or maybe I would be talking to Dash the dog or day dreaming of family adventures.

It is a mystery to me, I feel tense writing this. It would be good to just stop. Not to seek approval, not to hope I have something to look back on with pride and instead to know that real pride comes from what Wendy is doing: a hotel room with a takeaway meal, face packs, telly, and silliness, with a cat café to look forward to in the morning after breakfast, while James will be happy at his Dad’s. he will be gaming just now, delighted it is the weekend just as his dad is.

Dash is at the bottom of my bed, I can feel the weight of his head on my feet. That is what it is all about, as will be the kiss Wendy gives me when she comes back tomorrow and Dash goes wild with excitement at seeing her.

Our Government would probably point to me as an example of the value of work for people like me but I regret it. I could have been kinder and nicer and given so much more if, over thirty years ago, I had signed on for benefits and settled for a quiet life with my family and the friends around me.

Our value is not measured in the work we do but more in how we live and how we treat and love those around us. I hope in my remaining years, I learn this lesson in my heart and not on this page.

To read more about my life do have a look at my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Best to do go to Amazon I am afraid.