Lincoln's Inn Fields On Saturday Afternoon

Saturday afternoons have recently become a permanent fixture in my diary. This is when I run my weekly peer support group sessions in central London. I've been using a relatively quiet and comfortable space for the purpose at City Lit, an adult education college. When I arrived at the venue yesterday and walked up to the automatic glass doors they didn't open. City Lit was closed. My intended first port of call on arrival had been the desperate use of the loo. Compounding this urinary urgency was the immediate realisation that my cohort of peer group attendees would be arriving shortly with nowhere to be accommodated.

A newbie was the first to arrive. As it turns out she knew no English; our entire communication was conducted via Google translate on her mobile accompanied with a heavier-than-usual reliance on non-verbal communication. She shared some personal information for which I won't go into any detail to preserve confidentiality, suffice to simply say that she recently had to come to a foreign country, where she knew nobody, didn't speak the language and felt isolated. She had found my peer support group online and she was now standing right in front of me, her fixated gaze seeking solace.

One by one, the other attendees started to materialise, a mixture of regulars and first-timers. One such of the latter seemed hesitant and expressionless. I immediately sensed that they were not of the type who are naturally comfortable with new people or in groups. Whilst trying to welcome everybody as they arrived, I made several attempts to engage with my cautious newcomer. I wanted to make her feel included and to try and allay any social anxieties she may have had at least to some extent so that she would feel a little bit more comfortable within the group.

The warm and sunny weather helped Lincoln's Inn Fields, the local park, to quickly make its way onto the radar as a good enough alternative from which we could run the day's session. We neatly placed ourselves in a circle on the grass on arrival and commenced proceedings with a short introduction of the session, mainly for the benefit of newcomers, followed by briefly introducing ourselves to each other. At this point we would normally start to share our own personal stories for which we would find peer feedback useful in helping us with our thoughts and feelings. 

The session did not unfold quite as expected. The social anxiety may have been too much for our hesitant member; she got up and left, followed not long after by our non-English speaking friend. Following on from this, the sharing and feedback was superseded by a wider conversation, itself meaningful and engaging, but not quite the level of peer support intended. Perhaps the environment wasn't quite right; there were groups of people scattered around everywhere, noisily drinking and laughing; there were two barbeques on the go with smoke everywhere; children playing football and screaming, with joy I think; a woman throwing a big stick which her Golden Retriever would diligently run and fetch for her. 

We just went with the flow and had a pleasant afternoon! Our discussion was deep enough and fostered a connection through shared experience. There was a therapeutic element to the session. Maybe it can still count as peer support! But perhaps not so for the two participants that prematurely disbanded. I thought about them afterwards and puzzled as to what else I or anyone else could have done to help them feel more at ease. I was overshadowed by a feeling of guilt; a sense of failure. I questioned the very essence of my ability to even be running a peer support group. Perhaps there was nothing further that could have been done; maybe my peer support group just wasn't right for them. It must be of use to some people though as they do come back!

There's a fine line between lame attempts to console myself and true reality of a situation. I like to believe my intentions are worthy; I want to help as many other people as possible and perhaps must learn to accept that I just can't help everyone. It is not my responsibility to do so and equally I probably ought to be aware that I do have a responsibility to help myself, something which I often forget. There was a lot to reflect on but in the meantime I really needed to find a toilet.

I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish

I started something, I started something
Typical me, typical me, typical me, typical me
Typical me, typical me, typical me
I started something and now I'm not too sure

~ The Smiths, 1987

All of a sudden I'd decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. I enrolled for a film production diploma, spent weeks researching cameras and equipment, bought all the required and relatively expensive kit, spent a good few weeks working out how it all worked, put together some production schedules, started the process of assembling a small guerrilla crew and put out casting calls for actors. Everything seemed to be coming together. I was so excited at the potential results that all my efforts and dedication would bring! Then, just as suddenly as my decision to embark on this exciting newfound journey as a filmmaker, I stopped everything I was doing in connection with it. I cancelled all that I had in the pipeline. I put the camera and the other equipment back in the boxes which have been sitting on shelves gathering dust ever since.

The wait to find out where I'd be going and what I'd be doing was nerve-racking. The sheer joy I felt when the news finally came was immeasurable. I had been accepted by my first choice of university to do the degree I wanted. My dream of a career as a mathematician and physicist was now swinging full steam ahead. I spent much of my time excitedly mapping out which modules I would be taking. Particle physics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, complex numbers, game theory, group theory, and more; there was much to entice me! I was thrilled with the fascination and enthrallment all of this would bring. I had an unquenchable thirst to learn and discover as much as possible and fulfil my vision as an eminent scholar! It didn't last; I gave up, did very badly and got nowhere. 

There are many other pivotal moments throughout my life that tell the same story. I could tell you about the job I'd been wanting to get for years, the jubilation on finally getting it and the subsequent complete loss of interest shortly after starting; the time I started another degree with the usual manic enthusiasm only to find that it faltered within the first few weeks leading me to withdraw; the period during lockdown where I developed a sudden and incredible desire to become a fine artist, spending weeks meticulously researching, learning and buying materials only to once again find the canvas of my enthusiasm torn to shreds; the time I realised I was destined to be a musician, the effort I put into music and songwriting and the endless search to find the perfect guitar. I bought an absolutely beautiful Fender stratocaster in a burgandy matte finish and maplewood neck only to find, shortly after, that the music just stopped for me.

During a conversation with a bunch of like-minded folk a few years ago, I outlined this perennial start-stop affliction that had overshadowed my life. In each case, I explained, I get a sudden urge to start something. Then, I devote all my time and energy to it, thoroughly and meticulously researching my new interest in every conceivable detail. I am always convinced it's something I really want to do and go all in with boundless enthusiasm and excitement. And in every single case, it all comes tumbling down barely before it's taken off. One of the group remarked, "hmm ... there's something going on for you there", to which the others nodded in agreement! 

The room was dark, cold, silent. The curtains drawn. I'd been lying on my bed for hours. I had been trying to figure out what was going on for me. I have a  vague recollection of feverishly wondering why my life was the way it was. An endless array of start-stops making it feel empty, cold, distant. At the time I lacked the capacity for any particularly revealing insight and the burden of my existentialist questioning remained heavy and challenging. I then made a decision: there was no point in trying to achieve anything because my efforts, my very identity, anything I ever did, was never acknowledged and, if it was, it wasn't good enough anyway. I was overwhelmed. I cried, and I cried and I cried. It was a life-changing moment: I resolved myself to a life of failure without even realising. I was seven.

The butterfly effect is "the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state" (Wikipedia). The moment of decision I experienced, a critical determinant of how my future would unfold, was incredibly profound. I am able to trace back the really big decisions throughout my life, and the very path my entire life has taken, to one innocent flicker of thought I had one night in the room of my childhood. It was the moment my soul died. It was my butterfly moment.

I still have the Fender. It's leaning against the shelves with the storage boxes of film equipment, thickly coated with the dust of the life I never had.

The Black Cloud That Is Depression

In just the past twenty-four hours I've: had a truly connected conversation on the telephone with someone who attended my peer support group not that long ago; attended a singing class; managed to get myself out of my flat and go for a walk in lovely weather; bought some beautiful olive bread; received some great news about a friend of mine who has been short-listed for an award for which she was nominated by me; did a good deed for two strangers when I was out. It would be odd if, in light of all of this, you did not believe that I was enjoying a happy and fulfilling life. The harsh reality, however, is that I feel the weight of an oppressive heavy black cloud right in front of me which doesn't seem to be going anywhere fast. This cloud has a name, the true scale and intensity of which many don't fully understand unless they've experienced it themselves: depression.

A few weeks ago I was at an evening games night. This was a social event at a coffee shop where there were people playing some games, having a drink and just generally having a good time. There were some familiar faces at the tables scattered around the room and the bar area. I went and sat with some folk who I was acquainted with who were playing Jenga. I joined in and stayed with them until the end. I enthusiastically engaged with everyone, joking around and generally immersed myself in the fun and banter that filled the air. At the end of the evening, as I stepped out of the premises, I was met by my friend with whom I was all too familiar: the burgeoning nimbostratus in all its grandeur!

Last week I was having coffee with another newly acquired friend in-the-making from my peer support group. She bravely disclosed to me that she'd suffered from a condition that she referred to as "hidden" or "smiling" depression. She explained that this is where the sufferer endures the symptoms of depression internally but puts on a brave face to the outside world. The smiles seen by others on the outside mask the turmoil taking place on the inside. The games night fun exhibited was no more than a facade for the dark clouds gathering. 

When I dissect all the things that, on the face of it, should make me feel good, but do the total opposite, I begin to see why. I don't have many friends and feel lonely. I go along to social events to meet new people. There were several people at the games night, and one in particular, who I wanted to connect with. I did indulge in the fun going on but the reality is that social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) formed an impenetrable barrier between myself and others. I didn't connect with anyone and I ended up leaving at the end of the night empty-handed. A sense of failure of opportunity, a mourning and regret of unforged connections, a frustration of being encumbered with anxiety and OCD: these were storm clouds that were brewing.

The conversation with a newly acquired friend where I felt so connected should again, on the face of it, be a source of ensuing joy and enrichment. We spent almost two hours on the 'phone last night. We spoke about our lives, things that have happened to us and how we feel about so many things. We were on the same wavelength on absolutely everything! Our personalities matched on every conceivable psychometric barometer, from Myers-Briggs to attachment styles. We were a mirror image of each other! Our reflective empathy clearly demonstrated a fully tuned-in synchronisation of our emotional antennae. 

On dissection, things start to unravel. Since the call I've been afflicted with thoughts that I'm not good enough for this absolutely lovely individual to waste their time with, that I might not turn out to be as good a friend as she'd expected, that I may have said something during the call that wasn't accurate or honest, that she may get bored with me, that I might do or say something that might hurt her, that I might lose her as a friend, that she may never want to talk to me ever again. Anxiety around maintaining a newly found and meaningful friendship and fear of loss, rejection, abandonment and grief have manifested themselves without hesitation, straight off the bat: yet another cloud of agony and despair.

The weather forecast for the foreseeable future is that it will be overcast with some downpours of rain and occasional thunderstorms. There is still hope though: there will be intermittent sunny spells and maybe, some time in the future, the black clouds of depression may dissipate into the ether.

No Time Like The Present

“No time like the present, a thousand unforeseen circumstances may interrupt you at a future time” - a proverb from 1562, according to Google search results! I often think about time, temporarily accepting its parallel and uniform correlation with space and life within it, and very likely will do until someone else comes up with an alternative metaphysical hypothesis. If we accept time as the infinite and unwavering linear continuum that it appears to be then there will always be a past and future as distinct from the given moment of the present. We can think of our life as running along and occupying a segment of this infinite timeline.

Sometimes I get stuck. I do so on some past point on the timeline of my life. I then often find it difficult, sometimes debilitatingly so, to shift back to the present moment. People may offer words of sympathy like "don't worry, it's happened; it's in the past". Just about everyone I know has, to some extent, worried about things they have experienced in the past: "If only he, she, they, I, had thought, seen, behaved, done things differently, everything could have been so much better"; "If this, that, the other, had, hadn't happened, then this, that, the other could have happened". I spend a lot of time with my thoughts and feelings stuck in such black holes from which I struggle to break free.

Over the past three days or so I've been stuck on another segment of my timeline: the future. I recently experienced some difficulties with someone which have remained unresolved in my own mind. In seeking a resolution I have been thinking hard about different scenarios that might play out during my next encounter with the individual concerned. The thoughts are involuntary; I don't want to spend twenty-four hours a day thinking about a distressing situation and experiencing the anxiety that comes with it. But, despite being aware of this, the intrusive thoughts are stubborn. They won't shift or, if they do, it's not long before they're back with a vengeance. I find myself visualising an endless permutation of possible future scenarios: non-stop little daydreams that essentially form a continal video playback on loop mode; my mind has its own little YouTube built in. 

In a previous life as an actor I was an ardent devotee of something called Meisner technique. This teaches us to allow our full attention on what is happening right here and now, with others who are present, in the immediate surroundings. It means living moment-to-moment. Dwelling on past misfortunes and injustices or trying to visualise and unilaterally resolve potential future altercations and interactions, all of which are the product of anxiety induced thoughts, takes us away from living moment-to-moment. If we're somewhere else, we cannot engage with the here-and-now. If this is our default modus operandi it means that whenever we find ourselves on any future point on our timeline, we'll still be wallowing in the past or worrying about the future; we still won't be in the present.

If we're not in the here-and-now, here, and now, then we can't appreciate or authentically engage with it. If I'm in conversation with someone, but I am not with them, but in my own mind somewhere else on my timeline in a state of preoccupation, my lack of presence does us all a disservice. I might as well lump together all those moments of disconnected absence, shove them into a large bin bag, and chuck them out of the window of existential angst that I've created for myself.  By the way, it works both ways, not that you needed me to tell you that! I'd like to refine the proverb; I think I'd now like it to read: "no time like the present to live in the present, (moment-to-moment)" - proverb, 2023! In theory, at least, it sounds great; unfortunately though, my mind's YouTube seems to be resuming from pause; more work is clearly needed on the stop button.

When Empathy Isn't Enough

This is a tough revelation to make: I've been afflicted with an ignorance of empathy throughout my life. Perhaps I've been selfish and prioritised my own needs above those of others. Perhaps there was a need, maybe even on an unconscious level, to maintain an emotional blindness towards the feelings of others. Perhaps I did not know what empathy was or failed to appreciate its significance in connection with life, whether human, animal or plant. 

To say I've spent my life an emotional wreck would be an understatement; it's been more akin to a sinking ship, broken, gasping to stay above water in an ocean violently unsettled by stormy weather. My emotions have been continuously bubbling and boiling away very much in the vein exclaimed by the three witches in Macbeth, who chant "double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble". That, right there, is what's been going on inside. This leads me to an inconceivable state of being as it raises the question: what is the reconciliation that links the paradoxical coexistence of a bubbling cauldron of emotion and a lack of empathy?

On realising that there was a critical missing piece in the jigsaw of the human connections in my life, the meandering path I have staggered along trying to desperately fill in missing parts of the picture led me to a discovery: empathy. The dictionary defines empathy as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another". 

Appreciating and whole heartedly embracing empathy and its power to bridge the gap in human connection, I've been making real efforts to encorporate the "vicarious experiencing" of the feelings of others in my day-to-day interactions. I've been trying to see things from the point of view of those I engage with, to feel what they feel and to reflect this back.

Misunderstandings, conflict and anger have somewhat diminished. Alas, they have not been eliminated. I have discovered that, with some people, empathy isn't enough. There needs to be a genuine desire for people to want to connect. If one party has no interest, because perhaps they choose to be driven by negative emotions stirred by a dislike of another, or they don't believe the connection meets their needs, then bucketloads of empathy may still not be enough; possibly nothing will. A new paradox is spawned: simultaneous coexistence of that bubbling cauldron and a bucketload of empathy. Just when I'd found one piece of the jigsaw I've lost another.

Finding Your People

At a recent Talk & Listen session one of the attendees, who I shall call Julie, shared with the group that she missed having a close knit circle of friends. She explained that when she was living abroad for the past two years, she'd found people that she really connected with and with whom she shared her life with. She said that she felt there was a bond between them, that they had fabulous times together and that she felt she could talk to them about anything. She described that, since she'd been back in England from around six months ago, she'd not found such people that she could connect with on the same level. This lack of friends made her feel miserable. She just wanted to "find her people" as she put it. 

A number of listeners took it in turns to offer some feedback. They acknowledged her feeling of sadness of not being able to see and spend time with her old friends and her frustration in not having found the friends that she needed since returning to this country. Someone reflected back the feeling of loneliness that Julie had expressed. This is the third time during the past couple of weeks that I have heard people talk about feeling lonely. I am generally hearing this more and more. This could be because I am coming across more people that are feeling this way, or it could be because people are somehow more inclined to expressely open up to some of their vulnerabilities. 

I have begun to question what it means when someone says they feel lonely. I myself feel this way and so I can empathise with the feelings invoked by circumstances giving rise to them. But what are the circumstances? I have concluded that it cannot simply be not having people around us. I have heard people say that they are surrounded by people, such as work colleagues, family members, people at a party and other gatherings, but they still feel lonely. I've heard words used such as isolated, dejected, unaccepted, unappreciated, invisible. So loneliness is not a symptom of not having people around us. It is a symptom of not having people in our lives that we feel connected to.

In order to connect I think we need to be authentic. To be authentic means taking risks. We need to open up to vulnerability, embrace who we are and not expend energy in trying to be who we are not. We just need to be ourselves and be able to say we are good enough. If we put on a mask to present a false version of ourselves in order to attract people with the aim of making friends, then the resulting friendships will be based on foundations that will quickly and easily crumble as soon as the real version of ourselves begins to emerge. Authenticity is what allows us to be accepted for who we really are. It brings empathy into the connections we establish with others. It allows us to "find our people".