Ideas

The unexpected twists and turns of life have been good to me this week – very good, in fact. Two weeks after starting work in Notting Hill, I still have a job. Unbelievable, really. Even more unbelievably, I seem to be settling into the job. I appear to be performing well in my new role. It looks like I’m getting recognition for the hard work I’ve been doing – at the end of the day I was called into an empty room by the boss, who asked me if I would like to accept more hours and a permanent role, starting from next week. There was me thinking she was going to break the bad news to me that my services were no longer required. “Thanks very much, sling your hook,” she could have said, but she didn’t. She actually went as far as to tell me that I had impressed her over the past fortnight, that I was turning out to be a valued member of ‘the team’. I was left utterly speechless – I could barely thank her. I’m still thinking somewhere that she must have made a mistake, or that it’s all a big joke, and when I get in on Monday they’ll drop the pretence. Surely they can’t really think I’m that good at my job? No way have I really lasted to this point without revealing myself as an incapable fraud?

My ability to do the job isn’t exactly what I’m questioning at the moment; my personal relationships with ‘the team’ are another matter. I’m quickly realising the extent to which I secretly believe that everyone there hates me. When someone says something nice, shares a joke with me, offers to make me a cup of tea, inside I think they must be doing it to make fun of me. In much the same way I used to believe that people in AA were taking the piss every time they invited me to coffee/initiated a conversation with me/asked for my number. What’s to like about me? I’ve seen so much evidence to prove that I am likeable over the years, yet I still find myself asking that question. I guess I always thought of work as the final taboo in my life, and everyone who I was to come across in the work environment would be so normal, so much better than me that it would be impossible to impress them, let alone make friends with any of them.

Anyway, now that I am quite likely to still have a job in three months from now, all kinds of ideas and opportunities are presenting themselves to me. As soon as I walked out of work today I switched my phone on to find a voicemail message from a good friend in the fellowship, asking if I’m looking for a place to live because he has a free room available in his flat from next month. The rent’s reasonable; it’s in a great part of town; I’ve thought about it all evening, and I think I could manage the cost. God, I think I could actually do it. I could leave home, move to the centre of London, to the place where I should always have been! It would be a dream come true, especially with a friend from the rooms. A few weeks ago I couldn’t even think about such a marvellous possibility.

Suddenly everything is happening, everything is changing, really quickly. I asked God to change my life, and guess what, God is answering. The Artist’s Way says that all you have to do is ask: I guess Julia Cameron is right on that score. If I hadn’t been through the hardship of unemployment for a year and a half, I wouldn’t be appreciating this rapid improvement in fortunes as much as I am right now. I’m finally beginning to live an adult life. I’m considering my capabilities, thinking about what I can do and what I can’t do; I’m making plans and decisions, all on my own. I didn’t need a job to give me an identity, I needed it for independence, and that elusive thing is finally appearing, years after I began to think that I deserved it.

I tried independence eight years ago, and of course I fucked it up. I was far too young. In a way I could still be too young, but that’s not important now. My time is now. It’s here: God is giving me a chance, and I have to take it. I might never get another one.

Tonight’s SAA meeting was the icing on the week’s cake. Since the summer this meeting has grown at an incredible rate: from just two regular members two months ago it has gone to eight or nine regulars. It’s like group therapy. We all know each other, we all sit round in a circle and we share the truth. The real truth, not the censored truth that might be deemed appropriate for other fellowships. We talk about the fickled, fake gay scene, the shame involved with growing up gay in a straight world; the terror of intimacy, the horrors of drunken shagging, the appeal of oblivion and the price we’ve all paid for it. We always go for coffee afterwards. It’s turning into a little family. It’s certainly my favourite point of the week now. I will always look forward to it. God, it’s what I need. I can share about anything there, not just sex addiction. For two years I’ve looked for a meeting like that. Now more than ever, it’s the sort of thing that’s vital to my recovery.

Everything is going so well in my life right now, I can’t fucking believe it. Thank God I got sober two and a half years ago! I wouldn’t be here now if I were still drinking, that’s for sure. I might have gone for the interview and got this job, but I wouldn’t have lasted more than a few days. As it stands, I’ve now managed to last longer in this job than I did in all but one of the jobs I had pre-recovery. If I were still drinking I definitely wouldn’t have a safe place to go every Friday night, where I can talk about how I really feel and be appreciated and understood by people who’ve been there too. A place where there is no judgment, no cruising, no attitude. Some of the men who go to this meeting are very physically attractive, of course, but that doesn’t really bother me. I don’t need any of them to complete me. I like them as friends, nothing more. To be able to say that, and mean it, is just incredible.

After a period of about twenty four hours’ panic, I feel myself returning to a state of much needed calmness. The panic was brought on my first inevitable mistake in my new job. I went and put something up on the website that wasn’t supposed to be there (won’t go into the boring details of which kind of things are meant to be on the website and which aren’t) – got an e-mail late last night telling me about the mistake and asking me to spend some more time learning the system with the company’s resident expert, the fearsomely pretty Scandinavian, Kat, who I haven’t really spoken to before. Kat is not just fearsomely pretty, she is fearsome in general, and I wasn’t looking forward to our imminent sit-down. She might be incredibly put out by the prospect of having to give up her time to help me, when she has so many other things to be getting on with. I couldn’t know for sure, I just got the impression that she would be put out. On the way to work this morning I was so sure that I had a massive telling off waiting for me – trying not to think about it didn’t work. Telling myself that they must understand I’m still relatively new and not an expert in the job didn’t work either. Panic built inside, time began to drag in that awful way that it does whenever things are getting on top of me. Delays on the underground caused me to arrive at work five minutes late, which made everything a hundred times worse. When I entered the office, no one was talking to me. Normally there is at least a warm ‘hello’ from Melanie waiting for me. Today she simply smiled and got on with her far more important work. I sat down and developed a horrific rejection complex, thinking that at any moment someone was sure to approach me and sack me for being such an idiot.

This feeling continued for a good couple of hours until Kat finally found the time to sit with me and explain everything I needed to know. It’s no one’s fault that I didn’t know everything before. There’s so much to know, it’s natural that it should take time for every single thing to find its way into my pool of knowledge. Kat didn’t seem angry with me this afternoon, just happy to clear things up and answer all my questions. When we were done I can’t describe the feeling of relief. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go home this evening feeling OK without having had that conversation with her. It was obviously the latest in a series of tests that I have to go through this week. Having passed yet another ‘test’ at work, I guess I feel like things are back on track. It’s still only been a week and there are bound to be more things that I haven’t yet picked up which will be necessary to know at some point. I wish I could jump to three months down the line; I keep thinking about what it would be like if I manage to still have this job by the end of February. How amazing I’ll feel, knowing I’ve lasted in what is quite a tough job for longer than any job I’ve had before. I’ll be able to buy that laptop, book that holiday, eat in that fancy restaurant without having to rely on friends to pay for me. I appreciate that material riches are not to be the sole purpose of my life: all the personal/spiritual benefits that I gain from working for a living are sure to be equally rewarding. Right now I can’t quite imagine what all the spiritual benefits might be…it’s hard to see past the laptop and the holiday! I suppose just knowing that I’ve kept the job will be reward enough. Knowing I’ve lasted a whole week is pretty incredible, to be honest.

At the end of today Melanie finally stopped what she was doing to talk to me, asking how my ‘learning session’ with Kat had gone. I answered that it had gone really well – an honest answer – and then Melanie mentioned that she thought I had been real quiet all afternoon. I knew what she was talking about – I had been especially quiet, at least until the moment when I’d finished speaking with Kat. When I arrived today I honestly thought I was going to be sacked, and I guess that made it pretty impossible for me to be the talkative person that I’d been developing into earlier in the week. When I’m stressed I retreat into my protective shell, it’s what I’ve always done. Melanie doesn’t know that about me: I wish I could explain it to her, but I haven’t yet found a way of opening up in such a way at work. I still don’t know my colleagues well enough to allow myself to be so vulnerable. Maybe I won’t get to know them better until I actually let down some of that guard…

I can’t stop myself from fretting about how I’m going to ‘open up’ at work. It’s becoming ever clearer that things won’t really feel OK until I have allowed people to get to know who I really am. It’s easy for people like Melanie to show who they really are from the very beginning: she’s the kind of person where what you see is what you get. Me, I wasn’t born with the ability to be myself from day one in any environment. There always has to be this defrosting process: very slowly, the more I know about a place, the more baby steps I’m able to take to let my guard down. At the moment, I could only be 20% defrosted. I’ve only actually spoken to the four people in my team; outside that team there are around twenty other people in the office, none of whom I’ve even introduced myself to yet. I have no idea how or if progress will ever be made on that score.

This is why I wish I could just skip to three months or a year down the line. By then I know things will be better: things always improve with time. But I can’t just skip through the next three months! If I keep thinking about it I’ll just be wishing my life away, and I did so much of that in the past it made me miserable. I can’t wish my life away any more. I have to accept that I am right where I’m supposed to be. I should be thanking God for these constant tests: they’re building my character, slowly but surely.

Time moves on, things change always, and it is all, all of it, all right. I still have a job, exactly a week after I started. Didn’t expect that, but it happened. The fear continues, wrapping itself around my midriff every day like a tight, murderous straitjacket. The time comes to leave home and every single day I don’t want to leave. That fear is the past; with every minute that passes of me not giving in, it loosens a little around me. I keep going to work, and I keep getting better. Today was…OK. Found myself settling more into the work, which is endless but intelligent. Conversations developed tentatively; people who were scary last week weren’t so terrifying; I opened my mouth and out came words that reminded everyone including myself that I am normal. I’m starting to hope that I will keep this job. It is far from exciting work, but it can provide me with opportunities. Chances to progress, learn, achieve. I can go on holidays next year, buy things I need, move into my own place, all if I keep this job that found me quite by accident.

Everything hangs on me keeping this job. Frightening as that is I feel quite OK about it tonight. I’m finding the concept of going into work every single day increasingly less frightening, and because of that I think anything could be possible. At the moment I need anything to be possible. The hardship involved with living at home gets harder to justify. I had to spend Saturday night pacifying my mother’s latest temperamental outburst; she has these every now and then, not very often any more, but when it’s there it’s almost intolerable. A neighbour above us had dared to play their music loud after the 9pm watershed and mum was walking around screaming at the ceiling, literally howling. It was disturbing. I went into 4 year old mode and weakly begged her to stop, like I did those times when I really was four and she lost it in a similar way.

Her tempestuous tempers don’t last. After five minutes or an hour she is always calm once more, as if nothing has happened. On Saturday, for the first time I pursued the conversation with her about how it’s unfair what she does sometimes. I can’t let her get away with abusing the environment in that way any more. When it happens I’m really the one being abused. Because nobody else is listening to her – the neighbours certainly aren’t – so I end up taking the brunt of the verbal violence. I asked her to consider what she was doing, quite forcefully because after twenty-seven years of trying to ignore it I felt it really needed to be resolved there and then. Her response, as expected, was to tell me to shut up. Well, I tried.

Things will be better when I don’t live here. They were better when I lived in Norwich for three years. When I was far away with my independence, I wasn’t so affected by the violent fluctuations in her mood state. This is why me having a job is so important. If I can support myself, if I can get out and get on my own two feet again, it doesn’t matter what she says or doesn’t say to me.

However it is sad to think of her being here alone, with no one hearing her. When I’m away she doesn’t have a person to talk to, to lay stuff on…that’s why the outbursts happen. All the time she is just storing feelings up, very painful feelings I’m sure, and they all have to come out at some point. I wish she had a place to go like I do. She has the disease, whatever it is, like I do. I don’t know how to help her. She doesn’t drink, I don’t think AA would be the right place for her. Maybe Al-Anon. But I can’t picture that working either. She’s never shared in an adult way in her life. It’s all vitriolic bile; very, very angry, with a profound lack of insight. I see the disease in so many people in the world outside AA, and with most people it hardly bothers me any more, but when it’s my own mother, it is heartbreaking. I mean, what am I supposed to do? I’m too emotionally involved to try and therapize her. There are no friends, no relatives. Nothing. She is where I was a long time ago. As with every question that doesn’t have an answer, I can only pray on this. God helped me – I’d really like he/she/it to help mum as well!

Well, so far I’ve survived three days on the job. I am by no means comforted or encouraged by that. I am experiencing levels of anxiety more intense than any I have had to endure in sobriety. I’ve managed to turn up for work on time three days in a row, I’ve picked up the important basics of my role and what I need to do, but I haven’t exactly made friends and I’m almost as anxious today as I was on Tuesday. Of course I was prepared for it to still be difficult by the end of the first week. I’ve never worked for a living in sobriety; I’ve never worked in the world of retail promotions at all; I’ve never had to wear shirts and ties and smart shoes to work before. There is an awful lot to get used to – I shouldn’t have to worry about endearing myself to my colleagues at the same time, but I am worried about it because the boss keeps bringing it up. My boss, Melanie, is a loud, vivacious, lovely, scary woman who likes to have a loud, vivacious, lovely, scary team around her. I am never going to be loud, vivacious or scary; I might be lovely sometimes, but under the circumstances all I’ve been able to do is say ‘hello’ to people and get on with my work silently. Melanie was kind enough to pull me off the helpdesk last week and bring me upstairs to the IT/admin role that I seem more suited to, and all week she’s sat next to me, giving me the support I need, encouraging me to be more talkative, to bring myself into the team more. The trouble is that I don’t know if I really want to be ‘part of the team’. I’m not in this job through choice: I’m doing it because I have to make a living. I’m not working with these people because I like them. I don’t know any of them. I’ll probably get to know them as time goes on, but for now they’re all a bit intimidating; they’ve obviously all worked there for much longer than me, so they know the job a lot better than me, and they know each other a lot better than they know me. The world I find myself in at work is on the edge of sales, a world I never, ever saw myself in. My role doesn’t directly involve any sales, but my colleagues are essentially all sales people, selling the company and what it does to retailers in the United Kingdom who might be interested in what we have to offer. They’re all on the phone practically all day, speaking in that confident, assured, glitzy way that all sales people do, while I support them by completing all the admin tasks they’ve asked me to do. If I’m not doing my job properly then they can’t do theirs, therefore I am really in sales too. And I don’t like it.

I can do the job, there’s no doubt about that. It’s all the stuff surrounding it that I’m going to struggle with. The social side of things is the main challenge. I already said that my colleagues intimidate me: that’s because they’re all better looking and better dressed than me, and I’m sure they’re much cleverer than me too. I’m supposed to be fitting in with them, but how can I when I only have two good shirts, one pair of good trousers and one pair of nice shoes from which the colour is quickly fading? It’s not just the exterior facts that are bothering me, it’s the personalities as well. I’m in an office with about fifteen people, only two of whom are women, none of whom seem to be gay (apart from me). I hate making the gay thing an issue – it’s years since I’ve even had to think about it – but of course it’s an issue in an environment as important as the workplace. I don’t really know any of my colleagues yet, so it’s hard to say whether homophobia is going to be a problem. In this day and age it shouldn’t be. But you just don’t know.

I can think of so many reasons why this job isn’t going to work out, hardly any why it might just work. I’m gay, I’m shy, I’m sensitive, I have an anxiety disorder, I’m not a sales person, I don’t understand much of the language that my colleagues in the sales world use. The only thing I can think of in my favour is that I know how to use a computer – the only thing I need to know for my job. I wish I could just be happy with that and forget about all the other stuff. Fretting about all those peripheral issues is only going to make my job harder, I know. It would be nice to be able to go into work and chat with people, have a laugh sometimes, though. I get the impression on the whole that their way of having fun usually involves going to the pub at the end of the day. Again, I knew this would probably be the case: in AA I’ve heard so many people complain about their colleagues’ refusal to budge from the pub as the only way of socialising. Some of them will probably be going out tonight, it’s Friday after all. I doubt I’ll be invited, I mean no one’s even had a conversation with me yet. Why the hell am I so sad about that? I don’t even like going to the pub.

I’ve experienced the same sadness in AA, when people have gone to restaurants and coffee shops without me. It’s not about where they go, it’s about being invited or not invited. If I was offered the chance to sit in the pub with my new colleagues I’d take it, mostly because I know it would be a good way of getting to know them, without the pressures of the workplace distracting us. If I could manage to fit in and make friends in AA, surely I can do it here. The trouble is, work’s not really like AA. My colleagues aren’t invested in my well being; it’s no skin off their noses if I fail in the long run. In AA people want to see you do well. I don’t know if the same can quite be said for a bunch of people in the world of retail promotions.

I haven’t forgotten how hard it was to settle into AA two years ago, make friends, feel at ease in those rooms. Most of the evidence suggests that this is my problem, and nothing to do with the environment that I happen to be in. Whether I’m at work, in an AA meeting or wherever, I tend to feel anxious in the beginning. It’s just the way I am. I wish I was more encouraged by that knowledge right now. If I knew what the future held, I might be able to relax. Unfortunately I can’t know what the future holds. I can’t know whether I will be still in this job next year or not. All I can do is try to keep the job, one day at a time, and that’s fucking hard. I’d hate to lose this job for being ‘too quiet’ – for one thing I can’t afford to go back to unemployment. But if I do end up losing the job I don’t know if it would be such a terrible thing. Maybe I’m just not cut out for it. But then another part of me knows I have to be cut out for it. Why else would God have put the opportunity in front of me?

I just want to know what’s going to happen! Two years of recovery should have taught me to apply the ‘one day at a time’ principle to everything, yet when it comes to working, obviously I have no idea how to stay in the moment. I don’t know how to let go of this anxiety. Every time I try to, my head just comes up with a million reasons why I need to keep worrying. I’m driving myself mad, torturing myself, and I can’t stop. It’s Friday; in seven hours from now the week will be over and I’ll have the entire weekend ahead of me with nothing planned. No work, no more stress until Monday. Seven meager hours feel like seven years at the moment. The last time I experienced time dragging by like this was at school.

Yesterday was, quite possibly, the strangest day of my life. In the morning there was a rushed exchange of e-mails between myself and London Metropolitan University, where I hoped to find someone who could write a couple of lines confirming for my new employers that I was once a student there. Positive response was not instantly forthcoming, but once I’d made it known that I had been unemployed since graduating, they seemed to realise that their assistance would keep me from bumping up their graduate unemployment rates. I finally got the head of Psychology to agree to be a referee, even though she never met me and probably hasn’t a clue what to write. With that sorted, I was once again free to worry about the actual job that I had taken on. After training last week I have a fair idea of what the company actually does, but the details of my job specifically are still reasonably vague, partly because it’s a new job that no one’s done before. The job description makes it sound easy, but I’m sure it isn’t going to be, otherwise they wouldn’t be offering to pay me as much as they are. So in spite of their obvious eagerness to employ me, I haven’t a clue whether I can actually do the job or not. I don’t know who I’m going to be working with; I got the impression last week that it was a fairly quiet, serious kind of office, and I just have this impression of people who work in offices as being cold, unhelpful and far more clever than me.

I didn’t have much time to think about these things yesterday, unfortunately, as in the afternoon I had to return to Highbury Magistrates Court to testify against Ben, the mentally unwell individual who attacked my sponsor outside a meeting last year. The hearing has been postponed so many times that by now my memory of it is unhelpfully hazy, and none of us really wanted to go through with the hearing by this point, but I think if my sponsor had just dropped the case, there might have been a risk of Ben getting off scot free without any order to get the help that he desperately needs.

We got to court at 1.30 yesterday afternoon to find the place almost empty. Apparently everyone was still on their lunch break. Part of me was hoping that the whole thing would be called off again like before – I really didn’t want to be spending my last day of freedom in that place – but another part of me just wanted to get it over with. It’s been a year of waiting, wondering, not knowing. By yesterday the case was most certainly something that could not be put off any longer.

My sponsor was the first to be called to the witness stand. The prosecution simply asked him to explain clearly what happened; defense then did their best to pick holes in his story. Up next was me. Within seconds of reading out the oath I was shaking. All of a sudden I seemed to realise where I was, what I was doing. Ben was sitting on the other side of the room, looking alone and lost, and I felt terrible for him. There was no way around what I was about to do to him. In telling the truth of what happened I was to smear his character, make him out to be a villain, because he was one that night. Now, however, he is just a lonely, depressed individual who doesn’t deserve to be where he is.

I stumbled over my words and the judges kept asking me to speak up, which was embarrassing. When the defense started on me, I knew I had no hope. It became clear that they wanted to portray my sponsor as the bad guy, the intimidating one who came in and picked a fight with poor Ben. Apparently, Ben only kicked and punched and threw coffee at us in self defense. I found myself unable to disagree with the argument, even though I knew in my head that it was not right. I was only on the stand for a few minutes at most, which is probably a good thing, though as soon as I got back to my seat I began to wish I could go back and tell my story again.

Next up was Ben himself. He looked a state on the stand: upset, shaky, hardly sure where he was. His story was rambling and inconclusive and he couldn’t answer a question with a simple, straight answer. When it was all over, the judges went out and took about twenty minutes to debate their verdict. When they came back, they explained in far too many words that while they felt sympathy for Ben’s mental condition, they didn’t believe that he had acted in self defense. They found my evidence and that of my sponsor wholly credible, and they believed that what happened was down to a heating of tempers, caused by Ben’s ongoing disruptive and abusive behaviour at the time.

Ben was given a conditional discharge on the grounds that he has been receiving treatment since the time of the incident (I didn’t know this). If he commits any further offences in the next twelve months he will return to court to be sentenced for this as well as any future offence. He was also required to pay £100 in court fees – when he tearfully explained why he could not afford to pay it all in one go, I nearly collapsed in shame. How could I do this to him? We shouldn’t be here. This should have been sorted out months ago with an honest, open, face to face discussion. Not on opposite sides of a court room.

I will probably never see Ben again. I don’t doubt that this is the best thing for both of us, I just wish…I don’t even know what I wish. He’s getting help, he’s not coming to meetings and causing disruption any more, so I suppose everything really has worked out well.

Outside the court there were sad farewells to be exchanged with my former sponsor, who is leaving the country to return to his home, California, for good today. He lost his job in London a couple of months ago and I think he never really intended to stay here permanently, in any case. It would have been nice to have a longer goodbye chat with him, but it was cold and we both wanted to get home. I’m sure I’ll see him again – his long term partner still lives here and I imagine that we’ve become close enough friends through all of this not to lose touch. We have been through a lot together. He took me through the twelve steps – I can’t forget that. Though there was a time earlier this year when there was a great distance between us, I think that’s over now.

So, both of our lives are changing completely today. He’s moving to the other side of the world; I’m starting my first proper, adult job. What a way to end our old lives, in court. Coming home from Highbury Magistrates wasn’t quite the end of my day yesterday. In the evening I received a surprise call from a friend, Jan, who had two tickets to see Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in the West End. He told me it was a treat, to celebrate my new job. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d been dying to see Priscilla for months, ever since they erected that giant glittering stiletto outside the Palace Theatre on Cambridge Circus. Going to see shows such as this was part of the dream that I envisaged around starting work, having money again. I didn’t think I’d be living the dream quite so soon, though.

The show was, of course, incredible. Priscilla is one of my all time favourite movies, and the stage production doesn’t let the movie fans down. If anything it is bigger, brighter, bolder and more fabulous than the film in many ways. I suppose it has to be – the quieter parts of the film just wouldn’t work on stage. Glitter, pink feathers and confetti flew everywhere; well known classic pop songs were belted out with twirling, kicking dance routines. Everything was camp times a million. I loved it. At several points the worries about starting work today tried to intrude on my enjoyment; I quickly forced them out, telling myself to stay in the moment. That’s where all the fear comes from, not staying in the moment.

When the show was over I couldn’t believe that was it. I wanted to go back and live through it all again. I didn’t want the fun to end. But now it has ended. First thing this morning I woke up with that all too familiar jolt of fear. I knew that the day was finally here, that there was no escaping responsibility any more.

In three hours from now I have to go to work for the first time in years. Though I’ve survived so many frightening things in recovery already, I can’t convince myself that this isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. If I could take to the stand and give evidence in court against an old friend yesterday, surely I can go to Notting Hill and complete a few slightly complicated administrative tasks as part of my brand new role? No. My head cannot believe that I am ready for this.

The hardest thing, as I said before, is the fact that I won’t be able to leave once I’ve got there. I’ve told the job centre about this new job now, so if I end up resigning, I won’t get any more benefits. I have to go along today, tomorrow and every single day for the foreseeable future and I have to see it through. Logic and reason keep butting into my thoughts, telling me that it’s not being sent to Afghanistan, it’s not being banged up in prison for five years – it’s just a job. But it isn’t just a job! It’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to me and I can’t afford to screw it up!

Before sitting down to write this I spent about half an hour crying my eyes out on the sofa. This is just like leaving home all over again; going to school for the first time; leaving the safety and comfort of the only home I’ve ever known to step out into the real world. I experienced the exact same emotions the day I left for University in 2001, the day I started secondary school in 1994, and the day I started primary school in 1987. Despite the years that have passed, the feelings haven’t changed. I know this is wrong, I shouldn’t be feeling that fear any more, but I never got over it, I never learnt whatever I needed to learn to deal with growing up. In the most significant and memorable dream I ever had, I was forced to go back to school to rearrange some tables in a large hallway. At first all my old school ‘friends’ were there, pointing and laughing at me, not helping at all. After a while I was on my own in the hallway, and the tables just kept multiplying, growing and growing in number until there were hundreds in front of me and I didn’t know what to do. Today, I face that challenge. I’ve run away from it all my life. I can’t run any more. I can cry, I can plead, I can panic, but I can’t run away. Mum isn’t here to hold my hand now. Is God going to take care of me? He took care of me when I went to school, left home for University, and when I stopped drinking and joined AA. All those major turning points in my life were huge, terrifying, and I survived them with God’s help. Why can’t I trust in God today? How could I think that He would abandon me now, when I need Him the most? This is it, then. This is where my faith really gets tested. By the end of the day, I’ll know the answers to all the questions. I’ll know what the rest of my life is going to be like.

I am so scared right now I could weep. I’m due to be starting work in two days’ time, and one of the names that I gave my new employers as a reference, a former lecturer who supervised my final year Psychology dissertation, is refusing to write me a reference because she is on maternity leave at the moment.

This is the very last thing I need to happen. My new boss wants proper references covering the last three years. Three years ago I was at London Metropolitan University, and the only person who might remember me from that time is not going to help me. Because of this I don’t know if I will be able to start my new job or not. Just fucking brilliant.

I’ve searched the London Met website for other staff from my time who I might once have had a conversation with, but practically all of them have left since then. So basically this one woman who is on maternity leave is the only person who could help me. My future might depend on her. It kills me that it has all come down to this. My career is on the line because I never spoke to the other lecturers, because I kept myself to myself for three years, got on with my work and never asked for help. If only I’d been more visible, if only I’d known how to form relationships with people outside the small drinking circle that I immersed myself in outside lectures – but I didn’t. I was never the type of student to hang around with academics in the hope of bettering myself. That’s the sort of thing clever people do. I never believed I was that clever.

Of course I could be panicking unnecessarily. I do have a tendency to catastrophize the smallest things. Maybe there’ll be a kind professor who doesn’t mind writing references for former students he or she never knew. That’s the kind of person I really need. I can’t believe for one minute that God will be good enough to put that kind of person in my path. I’m starting to think that God wants me to fall at this hurdle, that it was never God’s intention for me to work, that it was a waste of time me going through all that training last week because I am meant to be unemployed forever. I’m clearly not cut out for the world of work, so why should I care that I can’t get a reference from my former tutor?

This time last week I was terrified that I could be on the verge of re-entering the world of work; now I’m terrified that I might never work again. In this world you NEED references for any job – not even the manager of a McDonalds would employ someone without proof that they’ve worked before. I can easily provide references from the past year, thanks to all the voluntary work that I’ve sweated over at London Friend, but it’s the murky past, pre-recovery, that I cannot account for. If the new job didn’t need evidence covering the last three years it would be all right, I would be sailing into this new role, but it was never to be that easy. Oh fuck, what am I going to do?

I should be so happy tonight. I should be on cloud 9. I’ve spent the day with my dad, who seems happier to see me with every meeting. We met in Covent Garden and spent three hours chatting over coffee. At no point did the conversation dry up or get awkward, like it would have done a few years ago. We seem to have worked out how to get along: we know each other’s comfort zones, the things that can be talked about and the things that should be avoided. I’ll never get him to open up about his feelings towards me. But I guess the fact that he’s willing to spend time with me, after all our history, all the acrimony, anguish and heartache we went through, is all the evidence I need about how he feels. Before tonight’s goodbyes he gave me a Christmas card, thinking he might not see me again before the end of the year, and inside there was a £50 note, a sort of early birthday/Christmas present. The most he’s ever given me, without any asking or hinting from me. I guess, unbelievable as it is, he must love me in his own way. All my life, until the last year or so, I lived in the shadow of his rejection. Now I suppose we are like any normal father and son. Not that I need money from him to show that he actually cares about me – his presence in my life says it all.

I should be fucking joyous tonight, but coming home to this e-mail from my former lecturer, explaining why in very few words she won’t write me a reference, has brought me crashing down. The dark thoughts that were going through my mind earlier in the week are now back, and they’re not going away. Drinking, drugging, suicide, I want to do it all tonight. I’d really rather not be here if I have to go to the job centre to start signing on again. How dare God get my hopes up for this job, only to dash them all in one horrible, mean gesture. How dare He?

Who the hell am I to question God’s motives? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, food on the table, clothes on my back and a bed to sleep in. That is what I would say if I were feeling more sane tonight, anyway. I’m not sane, and I’m not remotely grateful for any of the things I happen to have. I’ve been stuck in this rut my entire fucking life, I want to get out of it. Why am I not allowed to get a job, move on and make a place for myself in the world? Why should I accept unemployment as the content and purpose of my life?

Oh, how deliciously ironic it is that I am bemoaning unemployment now, after all the time and energy I spent desperately trying to avoid work. How humorous God is!

What am I going to do? AA would tell me that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle…right now I’m quite sure that there isn’t much more I can take.

Previous Post

My facebook status, when I next update it, should read something like this: ‘Josh is at peace with life and the world’. I’ve just finished two days of training for my new job – two days of intense, laborious training in which I was required to learn everything there is to know about the company that I am to start working for next week. And there is a lot to know about it. There were about eight other people on the training course to begin with; by the end of it only five of us were left. I couldn’t believe that I was one of those five at the end. Me! The one who always walks out of job situations as soon as they get tough!

The company is an exceptionally busy, fast-moving company but, over all, full of nice people. I was surprised by this as similar places where I’ve worked in the past have been full of bland, robotic people that all address you by your surname and look at you with the same dead expression. Here, colleagues all seem to be on good terms. And the working hours are not bad.

The reason why my facebook status update should read that I am at peace with the world is because of something wholly unexpected that happened this afternoon, just before the end of the official training. I was plucked from the group and taken to one of the trainers’ offices, where she explained to me that one of the other divisions in the company, website development, are looking for a person to fill an admin role. Would I be interested?

I was of course very interested, not just because it would mean I don’t have to deal with actual people on the phone all day, like I would in the helpdesk role that I originally applied for. I was promptly introduced to the head of the development team, a loud, scary lady with a BIG personality and even bigger bosom who told me all about the admin role and the reasons why she thought I would be perfect for it. To be ‘chosen’ in this way was such a shock that I can hardly remember most of what we spoke about now; the main thing that sticks out in my memory is the bit where she told me she liked me because I had done two degrees at University, both completely irrelevant to any vocation in the real world. She didn’t say this in a derogatory or arrogant way: she really meant it as a compliment, implying that she liked me for doing something so different to the norm, i.e. going to University twice to learn about subjects I actually found interesting. I got the impression that she had done the same thing herself.

So, my two degrees get to be useful after all! There was a time, not too long ago, when I thought I’d never, ever use my degree in a career. Not that I was horrified or upset by this – I’ve always been glad that I got to study Psychology on top of Philosophy. I won’t exactly be using my psychological or philosophical qualifications in this new role, but it’s nice to know that my unique ‘experience’ is after all appreciated by someone.

The turn of events is just so unexpected, so unusual, I can’t feel any nerves about entering the world of work at the moment. How often does someone apply for one job in an organisation, get spotted and promoted to another, better position on the spot? Maybe it happens all the time, I really don’t know. Everyone concerned was complimentary about my abilities during training. And the best thing is, I’ve been able to choose my hours. I will be working part time to begin with, five hours per day Monday to Friday, to allow me to ease in to the organisation. Having been unemployed for so long, I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with being thrown in at the deep end of full time employment straight away. I don’t mind that I won’t get paid so much as everyone else. It’s not like I have family responsibilities or anything, I’m just getting on my feet.

This morning on my way into work I felt those usual nerves. It was probably worse than ever, as I knew that now I was really on the verge of proper work, and this was the moment I had been dreading all year. Though I hated unemployment, that old, sick part of me still would have loved to avoid work altogether. You get used to being at home every day. If I’m honest, not counting the odd hours I had to go into University, I’ve probably been  living the lifestyle of an unemployed person for the best part of ten years. It is great to be able to choose your own schedule, to do what you want with your days, to not be accountable or responsible to anyone except yourself. I only threw myself into the job search this year because I had to, because of all the debts I still have to pay off and the fact that I now have the jobcentre on my back.

I won’t say I can’t wait to start work next week, but at least my new employer has proved herself to have a personality, and at least I know I’m liked there. I have no real idea what the work is going to entail – needless to say I’ve never been involved with website development before – but apparently I’m going to get on the job training. The child in me is scared I’m just going to arrive there and be expected to get on with things by myself immediately. Of course that won’t happen, but until I’m actually there and getting the training I need, I can’t be 100% certain in my heart.

When I was completely feared up this morning on my way to Notting Hill I used a technique to calm myself which I’ve entirely learnt about through AA. I started to re-parent myself, which means I took my scared inner child by the hand and walked him to work, comforting and soothing him all the way. “It’s going to be all right, you’ll be fine, you can do this.” At first it sounds so silly and weird, but it really works. In the arena of work I never grew up from that terrified little nine year old boy, so for years I just kept being terrified. The only way I knew how to deal with the terror before was to run away. Thank God I didn’t run away today – I was sorely tempted to not turn up. If I had done what I normally do, I would never have been headhunted in the way that I was and chosen for the much better website development job upstairs.

I’ve experienced all manner of dark thoughts this week, not just about running away and not turning up to work. I’ve thought about drinking, drugging, jumping in front of the traffic and ending it all. Things that I guess any alcoholic would think in a situation as petrifying as mine. At the end of it all, I just cannot believe I’ve got to this point. I have a job; I don’t have to go to the bloody job centre to sign on any more; I don’t have to live on £7 a day any more! Obviously there’s a whole lot of hard work still to do. I still have to learn the ropes of my new job, settle in, see if I’m really cut out for this business or not.  But, right now, I feel OK about it all, and I didn’t expect to feel that way.

Change

Here’s a poem I wrote yesterday whilst sitting on a bench in Hyde Park, anxiously pondering the imminent change in my situation. It is called, simply, Change:

So sad I can’t enter the Serpentine
Can’t hum the tune to my favourite song
Fears grow
Tears build to a crescendo
Like pressure in a pipe valve
Now I have a job

“Go,” they said, “live your wildest dreams”

There is no recess in the recession
But it is where I’ve been, what I’ve known
Knowledge grows
Ideas form
I am not a child now

Weeping words cannot save me
Into the world I must break
Faith grows
Nourished by
Words from my favourite song
“Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world”

While I may have been feeling fairly positive about the situation this morning, that is not quite the case this evening. I’ve spent the day trying to run away from my feelings of deep apprehension and doubt; a long walk around Hyde Park didn’t do the trick; sharing about it at my old home group didn’t really help either. Tonight I attended the Hyde Park Crescent newcomer’s meeting for the first time in months, having just finished the literature commitment at the other meeting which has been my home group all this year. I had every intention of sharing tonight, and I knew I could only talk about my fears concerning starting work, even though it’s a newcomer’s meeting and there has always been a tacit agreement that you share positively for the newcomer. I needed to share honestly and openly and part of me thought the newcomers might need to hear some of this stuff.

When I got to the meeting I was almost in tears. All day my emotions had been up and down like a yoyo. One minute I’d be glad to finally have a job and the chance to pay off my debts; the next I’d be dreading what’s to come like a little boy dreading his first day at school. As soon as I’d managed to convince myself that everything was bound to be all right, doubt would swoop back in and drown the positive feelings out. Practically everyone in the fellowship knows I’ve got a job now – news always travels fast in AA – and there was the expected barrage of congratulations and well wishes. Before the meeting I couldn’t tell anyone how I really felt about the impending transformation in my life. Only when all the newcomers had shared and us old-timers were allowed to speak could I put my hand up and spew the toxic rot that had been clogging up my being all day.

Unfortunately in the middle of my share one of the newcomers at the back of the room seemed to burst into tears and ran dramatically outside, making a lot of noise on the way. I immediately felt awful and tried to swing my words round to a positive angle, but I couldn’t. A big part of me knows that honesty is the only policy that works in recovery. I’m more scared than I have ever been in my life right now: I have to talk about this. There isn’t anywhere else I can get it out of my system.

There are many reasons why I am so scared today. In therapy earlier this year I learnt how to sift through the myriad of problems that inevitably swirl around my head in circumstances such as these, in order to get to the core of what I am really feeling. The main reason I’m scared is that I am convinced I will screw this job up, like nearly every job I ever had in my life. I’m terrified of looking a fool, of making mistakes and being told off – of, worst of all, being laughed at. In reality I’m unlikely to end up looking a fool if I do everything I’m told and use the brain that I know I’ve got – but if by some misfortune I happen to make a mistake and find myself being reprimanded by a superior in the organization, what would be so terrible about that? What’s the worst that could happen? I could lose my job, but that isn’t the worst thing in my mind, because I could still claim benefits from the government in that improbable eventuality.  It’s the being reprimanded bit that I find the most horrifying. Being shouted at, made to feel small, stupid and unworthy were all things that happened to me from time to time at school. I hated the feelings those experiences brought up in me so much. But why? What is it about being told off that causes me to feel as if the ground is being pulled from underneath my feet?

It’s the idea that I’m hated which really gets under my skin. The idea that I’ve done something bad and I’m going to be punished, and ultimately rejected and abandoned. That’s why I felt so terrible tonight when that poor person ran out of the room in tears during my share – I felt as if I was solely responsible for their pain, and that any minute I would be pulled up by my hair and humiliated in front of everyone for committing the crime of scaring a newcomer. That sort of thing never happens in AA – I know it doesn’t – but in the part of my head that has nothing to do with reality, the childish part of me, this is exactly the eventuality that I fear all the time.

At the end of the meeting I was prepared to run off and cry, when a dear friend, Eleanor, stopped me to impart some useful words of wisdom. “Don’t worry about starting work next week, Josh. You will be absolutely fine. You will go to work and you will impress them all. You will find that it is the perfect job for you, as if it was tailor made for you! This time next week you’ll come back here and you will share about how ridiculous it was to be so scared. Trust me.”

Dearest, loveliest Eleanor. How I wish I could believe you!

In the midst of all this abject terror and violent self pity, there is a miniscule glimmer of what I am very reluctant to call ‘hope’. Hope that perhaps, actually, I am wrong and the job I’m due to start in a week’s time will be totally fine. All the experiences I’ve feared in recovery have turned out to be a hundred fold better than I could have predicted. Look at my creative retreat in the North last month – look how petrified I was in the days and weeks leading up to that! Of course my head is replying to these ideas with the fact that all of that was different. Nothing I’ve been through in recovery is quite the same as starting full time work. Yes, I was close to wetting myself the day I arrived at Lumb Bank and had to meet fifteen perfect strangers who I was going to be living with for a week. But I can’t convince myself that that is the same thing, even though it is.

While Eleanor was pep-talking me a few other members of the meeting tried to approach me with similar words of encouragement and advice, but before they could open their mouths I was running off, as fast as I could, desperate not to let anyone see me cry. I wanted to cry, so much, but like so many times before, I was too repulsed by the thought of making myself even more vulnerable to try it. So in running away, I once again deprived myself of the opportunity to get any of the support that I really needed. For two years I have secretly complained about the lack of support that I perceive myself to be getting from people in the fellowship – yet on the rare occasions when it is right there for the taking, I abandon it willingly in favour of isolation. This time next week I’m going to need a lot of support, more than I’ve ever needed – I’m probably going to have to pick up the phone and call someone at least once. Dear God, I don’t want to fucking do that! I want to see myself through this alone, mainly because in the end, I will be on my own. I’m going to have to learn to take on the responsibility by myself eventually, why not start learning now?

It’s just that kind of attitude which sends people to relapse in AA, you know. “I need to do this by myself, I can’t rely on other people to look after me.” Tonight, for possibly the first time in ages, the thought of having a drink crossed my mind momentarily. “If it all goes wrong next week, I could always have a drink and forget about it.” This thought was the one that brought me the closest to tears. It would be insane to throw my sobriety away over a job – if I can’t deal with starting work then how the hell would I deal with something really major like what Earl is going through right now? This is how fucking insane I am. If I carry on feeling the way I felt today, I’m either going to make myself sick or lose my mind. I have to get over this phobia of work, I really do. If I can’t stop myself from believing that everything is going to go tits up then it probably is going to go tits up at some point – it could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, right now I’m attempting to imagine things going right next week. A harder challenge I’ve never faced. Actually picturing myself still in the job after three months is like trying to picture myself on the moon. In spite of the initial difficulty in imagining success, little by little the process is chipping away at my anxiety, and those moments of feeling OK are beginning to come back. Very slowly, of course. I don’t know if by this time next week I’ll be any better at thinking positive thoughts, but I have to keep trying. If I don’t try then I’ll just go mad and that will be the end of any future I might have had.

So, I had the interview yesterday. And…unbelievably…I got the job! The interview went remarkably well, really. The lady I spoke to was really nice and I didn’t feel as nervous as I might have done. I was able to answer all the questions about the previous telephone work I’d done, as well as sell my IT skills. Training starts on Thursday for two days, then from next week I will be a full timer on £9 an hour. Can I wait til then? Yes, I can probably wait. In fact, the longer my last week of freedom lasts, the better I’ll probably feel. I need to work, but of course I don’t want to work. I’ve been used to a lifetime of dependence on my mother, of not needing to look after myself. Now that’s all about to change, and my inner child doesn’t like it. It feels like starting school again, just as I knew it would. Going to the interview yesterday I felt like that five year old again, not a clue what was ahead of me, sad because my mother wasn’t there to hold my hand. I never completely got past that stage in my development, that point where I metaphorically let go of my mother’s hand and run out into the world on my own. I’ve always kept behind, as close to mum as possible, even when I lived in Norwich for three years. All the time I complained about my continuing dependence on her, resenting myself and her for allowing this toxic co-dependency to live on years after it should have ended, but really I liked it, because it was safe. It was what I knew.

Now it’s all changing and I can’t stop the progress. I have to become independent now; I have to branch out on my own; I have to work. It possibly helps that I feel better about this job than I would most ordinary office jobs. I’ll be in a call centre, dealing with customer queries for this company that designs employee discount schemes for other companies. Attached to its discount schemes are a number of lifestyle initiatives, such as cycling to work, which it advertises and tries to promote in the population. There’s something I could make a difference in, something I could really get into, feel confident about. Maybe I’ll like this job. Who knows?

The first few weeks will be hard, that’s for sure. Having not worked in a paid capacity for years, it will take a lot of getting used to. Obviously, I’ve known it would be like this for a long time. I’m walking into this with my eyes open. I need to be prepared for some very hard work because I can’t afford to walk out after a week like I always did before. I have to stick at this, not least because I won’t get any government benefits again if I resign. That’s the scariest thing about it, not being able to walk out. Physically I could walk out if it all gets too much, of course I could, but economically and spiritually, I can’t. I’ll have to work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life and I really have no idea what it’s going to do to me.

The hope is that it will change me into a better person. A stronger person, a more confident person. Being able to get up whenever I want and do nothing if I want for the past sixteen months has hardly made me confident. I’ve never been more anxious in my life than I was at times during unemployment – having a job is unlikely to be that bad. Best of all, I’ll be able to afford things again. Clothes, food, theatre tickets, holidays…things I’ve only dreamed of spending on this year. Not too long ago I believed I would never be able to go to the theatre or have a holiday again. Now I might be able to live my dream of flying to New York in 2010 after all………….wildest dreams, and all that.

On Sunday night I was so nervous about the interview I shared about it in a SLAA meeting that I don’t really know. I needed to get things off my chest. I shared with deep honesty, and afterwards the release of tension was physically noticeable. I literally felt like I had just let out a huge breath that I’d been holding in for hours. Everyone laughed as I talked about hating the job centre; they all understood. After the meeting because I felt particularly anorexic I didn’t stop for long to let anyone follow up on my share, I simply walked out of the room as I always do. Which made me a bit sad, but at least I’d found the courage to share about what was really going on for me.