Opening the Door

I usually have a plan for my blog. Some notes, key points or a very scruffy spider diagram on a piece of scrap paper.
I haven’t this month.

I just wanted to open the laptop and start typing, because I haven’t felt like doing that for a while.

So I don’t know where this is going to take us. I don’t know which doors I’m going to open or what I’m going to find when I have a better look inside the parts of my brain that, sometimes, I keep locked away. With a Do Not Enter sign attached to the door.
I feel ready to do some exploring, and I appreciate you reading this and joining me.

Before we dive into this, I want to address a potential elephant in the room.

AI. Specifically, ChatGPT.

Before I upload my blogs, I run them through ChatGPT, with very specific instructions not to alter my words or improve the blog in terms of its content. I use this ‘tool’ to correct any spelling or grammar issues that may have slipped past my own interrogation of my work.

I would be mortified if a sneaky ‘there’ instead of ‘their’ snuck in, or a ‘would of’ instead of a ‘would have’. I’d struggle to sleep tonight if an error of that magnitude were to break through my own defences.

So, ChatGPT is the proverbial 12th man. The blog’s very own watcher on the wall, ensuring that I don’t inflict any of those unforgivable grammatical headbutts on my unsuspecting readers.

It can actually create more work for me, though.
Once any tidying up has been administered, I then have to run it through my own filter, and I usually have to remove several of those long hyphens.

You know the ones.

It’s not an underscore. Nor is it a hyphen. I don’t even know how to create one on a keyboard, but they recklessly insert themselves into my original piece of writing, which would then give everyone the impression that the whole thing has been secretly created by AI.

Surreptitiously, you might say. A word that I have Googled to make sure it is the right one to use.

They are actually called em dashes. And they drive me insane.

Not that anyone else would really notice. Not that anyone else would really care.

But when your brain works the way mine does, they are an absolute nightmare.

Overthinking and worrying have plagued me for as long as I can remember. Even when I was a child. I can vividly remember incidents from my childhood where the enjoyment of what I was doing was essentially paralysed by my inability to be in the moment. At best, the enjoyment was restricted in some way. The happiness that I could see playing out in front of me was, for me, somehow out of reach.

Overthinking and worrying were very much the leading men in my brain at my weekly networking meeting last week. In the days before the meeting, I’d reached out to the chapter president to discuss an idea I had. Rather than my weekly 60-second pitch about WLV Plumbing & Heating, I wanted to introduce a video instead.

The video was a suicide awareness video. It may be worth you giving it a watch before we proceed…

World Suicide Prevention Day was two days after the meeting, and I felt that, for one week, rather than focusing on bogs and boilers, it was the right thing to do to shine a light on mental health instead.

To encourage some new conversations. To hopefully make people more comfortable opening up and asking for help.
And to encourage people to recognise changes in those around them, where they might be able to help signpost somebody towards the right support.

As the video started to play, I started to crumble internally. That irony isn’t lost on me. What I was promoting outwardly was in total conflict with how I was feeling inwardly. I immediately started to question whether I had made a huge mistake. I thought I had made a total misjudgement, and that a business networking meeting was not the time or place to be diving into the subject of mental ill health.

In short, I thought I had destroyed what had, until that point, been a very upbeat and positive meeting. This might sound strange, but as I sat there while the video played, I could feel physical pain. My whole body tightened up. I started to feed those negative thoughts.

I didn’t have to wait long for those scraps to turn up. In fact, by the end of the meeting, the white wolf was essentially at an all-you-can-eat buffet, with member after member standing up and acknowledging the video, adding to the message around the importance of talking about suicide, depression and anxiety, particularly when it comes to men.

In the UK, men continue to account for the vast majority of suicide deaths. Male suicide remains an enormous and devastating issue.

Members of the group stood up and shared their own experiences. Many of us have lost friends and loved ones.
I had no idea how many people in that room had been directly affected. The strength shown by those wonderfully supportive people, as difficult as some of it was to hear, was incredibly moving and powerful.

It gives me hope. It gives me encouragement. It makes me want to do more.

I’ve lost friends, male and female, to suicide. I think about them every day.

Not just because I miss them, but because I regularly experience those dark thoughts myself and, unfortunately, project visions of ending my own life.

Those thoughts are terrifying, but at times, rather than appearing as disturbing, intrusive thoughts, they appear as though they have already happened.

Like I’m watching myself act on them.

I don’t know how much detail I should go into, so please skip over the next paragraph if you need to. It is very dark.

I often see my body hanging as the noose tightens and I start to slip away in the middle of a quiet forest. I see the look on a lorry driver’s face as I instinctively launch myself in front of their fast-moving cab when things have simply got too much.

These kinds of thoughts haunt me. And when I’m going through a particularly bad time, they are relentless. I’ve just come through one.

I’ve been struggling with the fact that I’m about to turn 40. In fact, if you are reading this on our website, I will now be 40.
You see, I had never truly imagined what life would look like after 40. It always seemed so far away.

Growing up, I put a lot of pressure on myself to reach certain milestones. The one I thought about the most was becoming a father.

That was always a pre-40 thing in my head, though. So much has happened over the past decade. Not only did I become a father to two beautiful children, I became a husband. I became a business owner. I became a vegan (sorry!). I broke my back.
But through it all, I didn’t really consider that my 30s were flying by.

So much change. So different from my first three decades of existence.

When I realised that 40 was upon me, I started thinking about all the friendships that have started to drift away. About how little I see my family compared with previously. About how I’m so consumed by trying to create the best life I can for my little family unit, working long hours and taking on extra commitments, that sometimes I’m not a very present father or husband.

Even when I’m present, I’m not present. I’m there, but I may as well not be.

This kind of thinking made me feel like I was slipping down an insurmountable hill in deep mud. As much as I tried to climb, the only direction I travelled was downwards.

After a few weeks of that, I was at my lowest, exhausted from putting on a brave face and trying not to show just how vulnerable I was.

I needed to somehow find a way to get back up that hill and not allow for any possibility of those premonitions play out.

There is a line in the video that resonates with me. Deeply.

“The broken dad passing on his brokenness to his kids.”

The fear of exactly that fuelled those dark thoughts. The thought of my kids being better off without me. The sad acceptance that my mental ill health would somehow infect them.

Those thoughts also prevented me from addressing this publicly. They stopped me from opening up and sharing my own experiences, through fear that my kids would one day find out the truth about me, and that somehow it would cause them to inherit mental health problems of their own. I see how wrong I was now.

After seeing the outpouring of love, support and understanding from the members of the networking group, I see more clearly than ever just how important talking about depression and mental ill health can be.

Shining a light on those monsters and, ultimately, making them less scary.

I don’t mean to imply that I have all the answers or that I am in any way qualified to give advice. But there are some very supportive, highly qualified and incredibly intelligent people out there who can help.

I see it as my duty… my responsibility… to signpost people towards those individuals and organisations.

Amazing therapists like my friend Dave from The Awakening of Death, based in Sedgley.

Incredible organisations like Andy’s Man Club, Tough Enough To Care and Mind.

Following the meeting, I received a phone call from my friend Jas. Jas, fellow member Martin and I will be getting our heads together. We may even need to use a spider diagram. We’re hoping to organise and take part in a fundraising challenge to support a mental health charity.

Without sharing that video last week, that conversation may never have happened.

And I think that is probably where I want to leave this.

I started writing this with no plan. I said at the beginning that I was going to open some of those doors in my brain that I normally keep locked. I think, somewhere along the way, I have.

It has been uncomfortable. At times, it has been painful.
But perhaps that is the point. Because keeping those doors locked has never made what is behind them disappear.

Talking about it doesn’t magically fix everything either. I know that. But opening the door allows some light in. It allows other people in. And sometimes, one person being prepared to say something out loud gives somebody else permission to do the same.

I don’t know exactly what 40 is going to look like. I don’t know whether I’ll ever stop overthinking. I don’t know whether the always hungry black wolf will ever stop appearing when I’m at my most vulnerable.

But I do know that I don’t want fear to stop me from talking anymore. If sharing that video led to one conversation that might not otherwise have happened, then it mattered.

And if writing this does the same thing for just one person, then opening one of those doors was worth it.

Maybe this blog didn’t need a plan after all.

Maybe it just needed an open door.