I have an unusual life situation.
I’m 49 years old and live in a council flat in north London. I held down jobs when I was young but have not worked since the age of 25. I have a long record of mental illness and have been admitted to psychiatric wards in the past.
Since the age of 31 I’ve been trying to learn how to write poetry. After floundering initially, the standard of my writing has improved dramatically. I’m now happy with the quality of my stuff and am confident enough to approach publishers. A couple of my poems have been published in local magazines for the Somers Town area where I live. I’ve read at poetry events a handful of times. I plan to enter the Poetry London Pamphlet Competition soon with a short collection of short poems I’ve put together. I’ll see how it does.
I exist in an odd niche in society. Diagnosed with a very serious mental condition I receive quite generous benefits. Sometimes people with more conventional life paths resent people like me for getting paid for not doing anything. Although often it seems they are more than happy to pour scorn on the mentally ill. I’ve been in hospitals, day hospitals, day centres, the back of ambulances and just wandered around living on moonbeams and miracles at different times and in different contexts.
The interior of my flat once looked like the inside of a skip. Now it looks halfway decent. I manage to feed and clothe and keep myself washed almost totally consistently these days. I have some brilliant friends and a supportive family. Not everything is bad. Some things in life are very bad. Nasty arguments and confusing situations from the past go around in my head almost non-stop. It can become so intense I start shouting and hitting myself. I can become chronically depressed and have restless nights. I am under the care of my local community mental health team.
I feel like the way I’ve re-established self-care routines and am gradually sorting out my living space could be a base to build from. I could make advances in other areas and start making a life I want to live in. The bad feelings I have locked inside me can make me despair. I sometimes fear that things won’t get better in any real way. That I’ll be perpetually stuck, misunderstood and misrepresented. In the past I just kept going out of sheer bloody mindedness. A two-finger salute to people who tried to drag me down when I was young. Maybe the way I’ve built up a competency in creative writing could be the beginning of a vocation. People will see who I am and I can leave something good behind me which marked my existence.
More to come…
Ben Preston 