Where is my mind?

A year ago I wrote a blog about mental health. Before you continue: don’t be concerned, it wasn’t a cry for help. And neither is this.

It ended on a cliffhanger, with me ready to start a new course of counselling. Ok, as cliffhangers go, it’s not exactly the Empire Strikes Back. But nothing ever is.

After waiting months, with my mental health firmly in the bin, the NHS finally provided me with a counsellor. They somehow managed to assign me to the guinness world record soft speaker who provided services out of a shoebox in the back of a charity shop, with drug dealers happily operating in plain sight. After one session, where she advised me to eat my vegetables, I decided it was probably time to go private.

Trust the process

Counselling is a talking therapy. That means you talk, they listen. And this somehow helps you deal with whatever is making you feel the way you do.

Frustratingly, anytime I spoke to people about it they couldn’t articulate what it was that helped. Just that they felt better afterwards. This was completely unacceptable to me. Just tell me how the rabbit got in the fuckin’ hat already!

I’m no Masked Magician (what a time to be alive), but from my experience counselling sessions break into 3 consecutive stages…

Stage 1: What’s the story

Maybe you know what the problem is, and maybe not (I didn’t). In this stage you effectively tell your life story. This can be quite daunting if, like me, you have no story to tell. They don’t tend to write biographies about 36 year old men who have been buying the same pair of trainers for nearly 20 years (Adidas sambas never go out of style – I’ll be seen as a visionary in time). 

However, despite having nothing to say I somehow managed to fill hours and hours. This was partially down to my counsellor’s impressive jedi mind trick, where she would leave these big gaps after I finished speaking which I then felt the need to fill.

Overall I really didn’t enjoy this stage. Sometimes I’d come out filled with anxiety, feeling worse than when I went in. Plus I couldn’t get over this nagging feeling that it was all bullshit – like what am I paying this person for? They mostly just sit there silently. Anyone could do that!

Stage 2: Man in the mirror

Time to separate the story from the storyteller.

During the middle sessions my counsellor started to ask more questions and gently prod me to go into more details on certain things we had already discussed. It was still mostly me speaking, but now she would interject with a thought or two every so often. Sometimes she would say something that was so mind blowing I would be thinking it over for days. Other times, what she said was plainly obvious, but - here is the kicker – not to me, until that very moment.

This is something I had heard from a friend about counselling - that it opens your eyes/mind to seeing and reflecting on things which, to someone not living your life, might seem obvious.

There is an important point to remember here - as strange as this will sound, you are not the best critic of your own life. In fact, you haven’t even seen the whole picture to judge for yourself.

Stage 3: Mind the gap

I found that in our final sessions, with my counsellor’s help, I was starting to figure out some things to use in my life going forward. Not things for dealing with stress or anxiety in the moment, but long-term plans to move from the fucked up person I was to the slightly less fucked up person I aspired to be.

This is probably my greatest take away from the sessions: counselling really is for everyone. How else could you possibly figure out these things about yourself?

Maybe that one depends on your cultural background. Irish people are talkers. We consistently use 20 words when 5 will do (sure just look at this blog for god sake). But we’re still not very open to speaking about ourselves. It begs the question: are the Americans just more attuned to their mental health needs? or is their country so fucked up they all need therapy?

The unborn identity

Behaviour change is a hard fought, long-term battle. And while I can accept I am not my thoughts and feelings at any one given time, it’s hard to think of myself as anything else.

There is a phrase I love using - ‘now in a minute’. When I have used it outside of the homeland I get the odd incredulous response ‘are you going to do it now, or in a minute’? But there is no need for that. Now in a minute is a powerful expression. No, I’m not going to do it immediately. But it is a promise, a solid declaration or assurance if you will. It’ll get done. Now go away.

On some level I feel like my subconscious has been reassuring me with these declarations for decades. Yeah, any minute now.

New player has entered the game

Even when you figure out what the problem is and what needs to change it still takes some trial and error to see actual progress. Unfortunately this isn’t She’s All That, and to become the person you want to be takes more than removing your glasses, walking down the stairs and realising you were a hottie all along.

Two changes quickly became apparent during the sessions.

The first - that I needed to start planning time for myself. A life filled solely with work, childcare and other responsibilities is not a life at all. If I don’t plan and take this time I end up going through the motions, not being present and just being a spectator in my own existence. Over time I have adjusted this to be more specific: this time must be significant (a ten minute walk won’t suffice), this time must be spent alone (people are draining), and absolutely no life admin allowed (that’s just another form of work).

The second – that I needed to start a journal to have a simple system of recording progress towards my goals, where I could highlight successes and failures to get an accurate picture of what was happening. The reason for this is I have a sneaky all or nothing type brain, and it likes to tell me lies. For example, say I plan to go to the gym 3 times in a week. If I missed the first day but made the other 2 I wouldn’t think ‘well 2 out of 3 isn’t bad, that’s 66%’. No, I’d think ‘You said you’d do 3 and you didn’t, that’s not 66%, its 0%. You failed dickhead’ (my brain is also a notorious potty mouth). What’s worse, once I missed the first day I wouldn’t even bother doing the other 2. What’s the point I would think – I’ve already lost.

And in the months since finishing my counselling sessions a third change has now come into focus…

The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems

I like to drink and so does almost everyone I know.

It’s not surprising given we all grew up in the lad and ladette culture of the 90s and 2000s. It was a time when drinking went from a pleasant social lubricant to a professional sport. And elite athletes were everywhere you looked.

I never thought of my drinking as a problem. Most likely because I could look around and see lots of people behaving in the exact same way.

Then along came a little thing called COVID-19.

Lockdowns were hellish. Juggling work and childcare, not seeing anyone and not going anywhere. Not to mention the dreaded zoom quizzes. If the virus couldn’t take your life, then your social life would have to do. It was enough to drive anyone to drink.

My drinking went from an occasional glass of wine with dinner and few beers down the pub to a glass of wine with every dinner and enough beers to sustain a pub. All or nothing had morphed into alcohol or nothing.  

Weekdays weren’t great, but weekends were when I really kicked into gear. My Saturday night staple became staying up till 4 or 5am, drinking alone, falling further and further into the YouTube vortex. Strangely, I never even felt that drunk. My tolerance was through the roof and I’d evolved into a very neat drunk. After these binges all the evidence of excess would be cleaned away. It would be left to future Niall to investigate and digest the volumes consumed by looking in the recycling bin and deciphering from the washed glasses, like a shit hungover Sherlock Holmes:

• 3 bottles of wine. Were any of those in there before last night?

• Cans of gin and tonic? Where did I even find those?

• The fancy whiskey glass is out. Shit. Late night free pouring maniac. Best check how much of the bottle has gone later.

These binges would have a knock-on effect into my week, ruining my sleep, appetite and desire to do much of anything.

To one extent, I can see my actions as selfish. How weak and patethic that I had to turn to the bottle when all that was being asked of us was to stay home. The generations before us fought wars for god sake. On the other hand, best not to forget us drinkers are fighting a war too. Admittedly, it’s a strange sort of war. The weapons get more finely crafted and deadly (IPAs and jager bombs, respectively), yet all the wounds remain self-inflicted, or cases of friendly fire.

Lockdowns gave a false impression of us all doing the same things and behaving in the same ways. But that’s just not true. Last year a friend told me, over drinks, that he never drinks at home. When I asked what he did during the lockdowns, he said he just didn’t drink at all for months on end. My jaw was on the floor.

Which, finally, brings me to my third change – to become the kind of drinker I want to be. To do this I now have many more non-drinking days (cutting out the glass of wine that turns into finishing the bottle), having a reasonable bedtime every night (consumption levels while sleeping are generally low), while giving myself allowances for special occasions (I’m no saint).

You might be wondering why I don’t just quit entirely. I mean, do I need to drink? No. But do I need to make the world feel more acceptable to me with the limited tools I have? Absolutely.

I’m never going to stop drinking. I have committed to alcohol and it to me. But, like all good relationships, boundaries must be drawn and abuse must not be tolerated.

No safety or surprise, the end

Eventually my counselling sessions came to a natural conclusion.

I pictured a Good Will Hunting experience – with Robin Williams repeating “it’s not your fault”, while we embraced in his glorious beard. But that didn’t happen. Firstly, she didn’t hug me. Secondly, had she done, there was no facial hair to snuggle into anyway. She simply said I could contact her anytime. We said goodbye and I walked to the bus stop. On the bus home there was a guy sitting behind me talking loudly on his phone, jovially calling his friends a ‘pack of cunts’. I wondered if ‘pack’ was the right terminology for a group of cunts. But then ‘murder’ of crows always sounded wrong to me too.

Life in the niall

Talking to someone definitely helped.

These days, more often than not, I feel ok. Occasionally I wonder if I spend too much of my time and energy acting like I’m ok, and wondering if other people are doing the same thing. I do a good act, maybe they are too?

I have also come to think, possibly naively, that there was nothing wrong with me to begin with. Instead, my ups and downs were a perfectly appropriate response to a perfectly messed up world.

There is this thought experiment I hear Obama subscribes to: if you had to pick anytime to be born, when would it be? You have no choice over who you will be - male/female/gay/straight/rich/poor/whatever, or where you will be born. He asserts you would pick right now. Now is the best time to be alive. In some ways I can see it – you wouldn’t pick 50 years ago and you definitely wouldn’t pick 200 years ago (they didn’t even have dial-up ffs). We have lots of hard won rights and access to things like healthcare are widespread. But that answer just intuitively doesn’t feel right: maybe things aren’t getting worse, but they certainly aren’t getting better quick enough.

For instance, the fact that I could pay to get help when so many other people will be similarly struggling, but are unable to afford the costly private medical bills, is so fundamentally fucked up it makes me want to scream.

In the months since my counselling ended I have tried to put into practice the things I’ve learned. It’s not always easy. From time to time I have had a blip and ended up back in the hole, but thankfully I seem to crawl out of it easier these days.

My drinking has also vastly reduced. In fact, in April I completed a 50km race in just under 8 hours. That night, a Saturday, I didn’t drink any alcohol. And slept like a baby.