Creative Writing and Personal Perspectives
The Strongest Fingertips In The World
My name is Jim although I've been called by many other names, not always nice ones at times I must admit, but for the purpose of relating my story to you I'll stick to the one given to me by my father.
My life until I became unwell was quite ordinary, I grew up the son of a hard working miner an honest and respected man in our community. I was a schoolboy in the fifties and early sixties and did quite well. I left school in 1966 on a Friday and started my first job two days later.
As a youth in the flower power era I lived life to the full, as it was a very exciting time to grow up in. I eventually married in the early seventies and settled down to go on to have three children. Since I was a boy all I ever wanted to do was drive big trucks the bigger the better, this I did and over the years considered myself a professional and experienced driver. If it had wheels on it, I could drive it. I even managed to gain a locomotive license along the way. But pride cometh before a fall.
At 3.00am on Saturday 14th May 1988 my life changed terribly and irreversibly in a split second. Coming back home from England on the A74 I was involved in a terrible fatal road smash in which one of the occupants of the other vehicle died. but to be honest two people died that night, although I survived physically, Jim the confident professional died there too. Can you imagine standing in the middle of the road and watching the life drain out of another human being and know that its your fault this person, a young woman who had never done me any harm was breathing her last breath.
The police charged me at the scene which was the normal course of action in a fatal accident, but I was already dead inside and wanted to be punished even more than I could punish myself. My wife and family didn't deserve to have someone as bad as me in their lives, as far as I was concerned my life was over but I just wasn't dead.
My life was just an existence for the next seven months until the court case came to trial. I shut myself away in my room cutting myself off from all who cared for me. I so wanted them to put me in jail and throw away the key. After looking at all the facts the judge said I had done no wrong and had no case to answer, that I was entirely blameless, and for an hour I was elated and my spirits were lifted. Many other truck drivers had came forward as witnesses, and outside the court they all said it wasn't my fault and I couldn't have avoided it. After a lot of coaxing i was persuaded to go and have a drink with them to let it sink in. But my euphoria was short lived.
The trial had been held on the 21st of December 1988 and as we sat down in the small pub the television screen filled with terrible pictures, you see an airplane had crashed down on the town of Lockerbie twenty miles from where we were sitting, and hundreds of people were dead.
At that instant together with the plane crash and what I'd just been through I plunged into a huge black hole somewhere inside my mind and for the next five years found it impossible and didn't have the will power to climb back out of it. To this day I have little memory of those terrible years which thinking of it now was probably a Godsend.
Do you know what its like to really hate yourself? My father always said you can take everything away from a man and he'll survive but take away his pride and your left with nothing.
I struggled for the next few months trying to convince myself I would be OK, everyone else could see my grip on reality was slipping away. I didn't wash or even comb my hair because that would mean looking in the bathroom mirror and as far as I was concerned that evil figure was looking back at me.
My wife took me to see a doctor or so I thought, but it was a psychiatrist and the next day I was in a locked ward and they had taken all the curtains and mirrors out the room in case I attempted suicide. On medication the following months were just a blur, which I have very little memory of. Although my wife was quite severely disabled she never missed a day in visiting me, even though in total she had to use six buses and walk nearly a mile on two walking sticks to do so.
After a few months they sent me home, not because I was well but if I stayed there any longer would have become institutionalized. When my wife tried to take me out on her visits I would tremble and shake so bad it was impossible for me to leave the grounds. The original diagnosis was post traumatic stress syndrome but that was changed after a while to manic depression with suicidal tendencies. And for the next few years I would disappear into these black holes in my mind and sometimes believed I would never get back out again.
I wanted to work so I was sent to an industrial psychologist only to be informed that I would probably never work again. Everything was in place to tip me over the edge after that and for the next few years I had to be watched closely and indeed there were a few suicide attempts. As I said, dead just not physically, and its only now fifteen years or so later I realize it was only my wife's love for me and the hard work she and others did to keep me alive that I'm here now, and for a long time I believed anything bad that happened to me was meant as a punishment because you see I was still alive.
So the next time you hear on the radio or read in the papers that there's been an accident between a truck and some other vehicle and people died, but the truck driver escaped uninjured I'm here to show that just isn't the case because like me they will be hanging on by their finger tips.
In a way I defied the psychologists’ prediction in that I did recover, well, recover enough to lead a relatively normal life. So the question must be asked, was it because of the doctors or in spite of the doctors. You see I decided I'd had enough of the drugs and group sessions so I stopped taking or attending them. I don't advocate this route for anyone else but for me it worked.
You see I looked around me at all the other patients and none of either, the doctors or the patients talked about recovering, just treating and continued care for the foreseeable future. Although still hanging by my finger tips metaphorically speaking these finger tips were becoming stronger.
Along the way to my recovery there were many hurdles and I would still go onto deep black moods. But the difference now was was letting other people help me and I didn't want to go down onto that black hole again. Although over the past nine or ten years I've looked over the edge many times I've always managed to stop myself falling in. The down side of mental illness is that they treat you, but not your loved ones and as I've found out my illness has effected my family as much as me.
My son who is the youngest although a man and a trucker himself now cannot remember his dad without mental illness, and as a direct effect of my illness and seeing his dad acting strangely at times now suffers from anorexia and his two older sisters suffer from depression. This I see as being casualties of my illness also.
At present I work with mental health charities looking after the patients rights, and trying to make services better for them than it was for me. I am also a voluntary advocacy worker and with my life experiences hopefully help other people to turn their life around.
When working with these groups and relating parts of my story to them the realization that I had also been ill and in some cases more so than them, hopefully assists their own efforts on the road to recovery.
The moral of this story is this. You can and in most cases will recover, it all depends on how much you want to. You won't be the same person you were before becoming unwell but, you can recover and you will be older and wiser for it and maybe, just maybe you can also help someone else do the same.
Jim
This was an article I did for a magazine within the National Health Service. As I say to know me you'd have to walk a mile in my shoes
Sometimes Its Tough Being a Man
Why is it so tough being a man. As a boy I was taught that as a man you should never cry for that is a sign of weakness.
When I was small if I got into a fight and had the audacity to go into the house crying because the local bully had picked on me, my father would smack my ear for crying, and send me back out to face up to the bully and dare not come home till I'd thrashed him, or died in the attempt.
I dare say as my father was from tough mining stock it made good sense to him. In time you learned to defend yourself and nobody tries to take liberties with you without knowing the consequences that followed. This is how I grew up and the idiots and "hard-men” leave me alone.
But, and there is a big but, the outcome of my training for manhood has left me with the inability to cry, I don't see it as a weakness in other men and I respect any man who can show emotion in tears, I only wish it was me.
My mother and father have passed away some fifteen years or so but I never shed a tear at either of their funerals and indeed to date I still haven't. The unfortunate thing is that the emotion of tears has been replaced over many years by the emotion of anger which can cause serious problems for me and for my loved ones. Unfortunately I had no patience with my son when he would cry for whatever reason so I suspect that my son sees his father as quite cold hearted and dare I say scary at times. He is now a man himself and we do not have a close relationship which I now deeply regret. I know that he knows that if I had to I would take a bullet for him, but at the same time we are not close, because that would mean we would need to show our emotions to each other and I think we've both buried them too deep to be able to bring them out.
Tonight I just came from the hospital where my best friend for over fifty years is lying dying and I feel the anger of my youth and don't know how to handle it or what to do. Andy and me have had an awful lot of laughs and an awful lot of hardships over those fifty years and we've seen each other at our best and at our worst in these years.
I sit here tonight at a very low ebb and I am dreading the next few
weeks, you see when I'm standing at the graveside lowering my friend and the only real brother I've known into the ground, I will still not shed a tear for others to see. It will be tearing me part inside but everyone including his own family will see me as cold or even uncaring. If only they knew that I will be crying inside for many years to come.
The moral of this story is this.
We should cherish our children and let them develop their own emotions but be there to support them and never never be judgmental as they will learn their values from you and that can and will affect their lives for years to come.
Jim
