How To Deal With Ordinary Pain

Without having to get twatted all the time

When people used to tell me they were feeling low, I’d often offer to lend them my VHS copy of The Jolly Boys Outing. As you’ll know, this is the Only Fools And Horses 1989 Christmas Special where Del Boy and the lads go to on a day-trip to the seaside only to accidentally blow up their coach and get stranded for the night in Margate. It is fucking hilarious. It features so many vintage Trotter antics, I defy anyone not to cheer up just a little bit after watching it.

There was a time in my life where I thought a quick dose of Jolly Boys’ was a cure all for emotional struggles in all their forms.

But is The Jolly Boys’ Outing enough to combat all the accumulated pain, suffering, insecurity, worry and disappointment that life throws at us every day in its subtle, underhand way? No. Nothing is that funny. Not even the bit where Rodney gets arrested for accidentally kicking a football at a policeman.

Life can be tough for everyone in an often undetectable way.

You don’t really understand or acknowledge the little bits of ordinary pain and what they can do to you. You think that the little problems and concerns that interfere with your mood on a daily basis - money worries, work worries, relationship problems, petty rows and resentments, unkind remarks, small disappointments and regrets - aren’t really enough of a big deal to spend time reflecting on.

But these small things still manage to give you a small throb of sadness. Too often, we all choose to bury them with the fleeting joy provided by drink, drugs, sex, shopping or, in my case, epic 1980’s Christmas specials.

None of those distractions are necessarily bad in themselves. But it’s good to recognise if you are using them as a means of painting-over darker emotions. Because if you don’t learn to confront those emotions head-on they will lurk around inside you forever and never stop causing you sadness.

I started getting twatted with my mates when I was 12.

First it was drink in the park, then it was weed in people’s bedrooms and then, as we stumbled towards adulthood, it was coke and pills in toilet cubicles. We all assumed that when we hit our thirties, had kids and settled down, we would just automatically knock it all on the head and start living like grown ups. SPOILER ALERT: that didn’t happen.

Why would it have done? By then, using drugs and drink to cope with bad feelings was all I knew. Emotionally speaking, I had remained frozen in time as a twelve year old. The exact point at which I transitioned from care-free kid into confused, raging adolescent was the point at which I worked out how to quickly switch off any contemplation of my feelings.

Belittled by your old man? Get twatted. Rejected by that girl you like? Get twatted. Fallen out with your mates? Get twatted. Mugged on the last tube home? Get twatted. Shat your pants in a drama lesson after eating some dodgy curried mince your mum made the night before (yes, this actually happened)? Get twatted. I anaesthetised myself from every moment of pain, shame, discomfort and embarrassment that ever happened. Those little anaesthetics helped soften my symptoms in the short term but did nothing to heal me or help me become a stronger, more resilient person.

But how are you supposed to have developed that strength and resilience if you started getting twatted at the age of twelve, just when your training in how to cope should have begun?

I got properly depressed for the first time when I was 36.

This was the point when, for a mixture of reasons I will probably write about some other time, all the little issues that I had neglected to confront or deal with for the past three decades bubbled up at once, forming together into an army that launched a blitzkrieg on my brain. I was sent spinning into a three month period of non-stop worry and fear. My nut was all over the fucking gaff. And when it eventually passed (it always passes eventually) I was so scared of it ever coming back again that I started to drink more heavily than ever. At the first tiny sign of sadness I would be on the run from the Black Dog, staving it off with as much booze and drugs as I could.

It was ironic that the very thing that had made me so vulnerable to depression, so incapable of dealing with sadness, was what I used to help me fight it. It’s like finding you’re allergic to peanuts and thinking that boshing a jumbo barrel of KP’s is the cure.

The truth is, I never acknowledged I was sad.

Ever. I saw myself as the most happy-go-lucky dickhead you could ever meet. And most people who knew me would have probably said the same. The truth was, I was simply better than most at suppressing little bits of sadness. But they got me in the end. All those tiny bits of sadness ganged up and kicked my head in. The cunts.

Once I turned 40, got some help and gave up getting twatted for good, I had to learn how to fight these demons without any help from anyone or anything. I had to take on ordinary day to day pain, recognise it for what it was, and find ways to defend myself without running (like a frightened twelve year old) to the comforting arms of drink, drugs or classic eighties sitcoms.

The good news is, most of you won’t have to give up all that fun stuff in order to cope with pain and sadness. All you have to really do is start acknowledging it exists. It doesn’t have to be dramatic or self-pitying. You don’t have to have had the world’s worst life in order to justify your sadness. You don’t even have to be sad on a regular basis. You just have to admit to yourself that sadness is a normal part of life, you sometimes feel it like anyone else and you’re going to find a way of dealing with it rather than just burying your head in the sand.

Think. Talk. Go for a nice walk. And if you really can’t resist it, sure, stick on Jolly Boys’ Outing. It’s almost always showing on UK Gold. It is funny, yes. Just don’t think it’s a solution to anything.

The Reset podcast is coming soon.

You can hear a little trailer here. I will be discussing the same issues as I write about in this newsletter but with interesting guests who have been through the same challenges. Episode one is an interview with Shaun Ryder from the Happy Mondays. Tell your friends to subscribe to this to get both the newsletter and podcast sent direct to their inbox every week. Cheers!

Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@ChairtySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/