Everyone loves to feel unique, and special. People who believe in conspiracy theories are much more likely to perceive themselves as unique, more so than others, and the internet and content creators looking to exploit your vulnerability know this about you very well. There’s an ad going around for a new app, it plays an audio of someone yelling: STOP SCREAMING! And if you heard “Stop screaming”, it means you probably have buried trauma that only this app can help you uncover. What were you meant to hear? “The world is good and I am healthily developed”? No, you heard what was there.

The reels and Tik-Toks that have Four Signs You Are Neurodivergent! or, Put A Finger Down If You’ve Experienced These (quite normal) Things! are there to prey on your need to feel that your nagging sense of unease and ennui make you especially pained, in more agony than most. That’s why people comment: as evidence, to have their name attached to the proof of their pain. That’s why the most annoying person you know cannot stop reposting these memes. That’s why they’re annoying: they’re you.

In rehab, I noticed we all carried the same egotistical drive to have our unique pain validated as worse than that of everybody else. I was terrible about it, I almost wanted a round of applause after reading my life story in group, I wanted hugs and congratulations on all that I had lived through, I wanted the group to stop seeing me as that weird person that they didn’t like, and start seeing me as a victim who needed their discretions overlooked - you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses, would you?. And I see it over and over, as we live in a world so relentlessly unstable and downtrodden. Our budgets are getting tighter even though we are earning more. We might have another pandemic. We might go to war. A lot of us have had trauma in childhoods, ranging from unexpected divorce to interfamilial childhood torture, and the whole spectrum inbetween. The fact that we are surrounded by other sufferers makes our pain feel small and meaningless, which then means our pain can never be healed. So when we see a meme offering proof in our day-to-day lives that we have earned the right to ache loudly, we put our name on it and call it our own.

The criteria are always very vague. You take rejection badly. Well, find me someone who takes it well. It’s like cold-reading for engagement, and we fall for it every time. And what I really want to talk about, is how institutionalised we have made ourselves, now that we insist — often with no medical intervention or advice whatsoever — that everything we do is because of a diagnosis we have given ourselves. Or maybe we even have a diagnosis: take me, for example, a diagnosed manic depressive. I also have up and down days that have nothing to do with my disorder and everything to do with the core of who I am. An artistic temperament, part of the fact I’m creative. I am an empathetic person I hope, but it’s not evidence of trauma and codependence: it’s a naturally occurring human response to seeing another person in pain.

We should be allowed to talk about our symptoms, and I strongly encourage anyone to do so if that helps, but we are at risk of sharing misinformation, and delaying real treatment for people who may be in crisis. They don’t need a Tik Tok from us telling them that they’ve got PTSD because they have nightmares sometimes. That the reason they get depressed is probably because they’re autistic. After all, who the hell do we think we are? Sure, psychiatry leaves a lot to be desired, but how on earth do we geniunely believe we can get an accurate read on ourselves objectively? How do we think we, as untrained spectators, believe we can diagnose someone else after only seeing a snippet of their best or even worst behaviours?

The dichotomy here is we are also completely unaccepting of mental illness. Look at the concept of the lolcow, normally a conventionally unattractive, obviously mentally ill person. If you want to see how people really feel about mental illness, you needn’t look any further than the ongoing dramas with people who are usually caught in some kind of delusion, and may even have a diagnosis. Our lack of patience. Our immediate judgement. Considering how nuanced we want the discussion to be when it comes to ourselves, the applause and unwavering attention we expect from others as we glide through our many pathologies with grace, we have no time whatsoever for anyone else with the same issues, or maybe even worse ones.

As we misread studies and report back to social media, as we use words like psychotic, delusional, narcissistic, codependent, bipolar and schizo to mean completely the wrong things, we are causing ourselves and others real harm. Some of us have those diagnoses, the ones you see as relatable content. We need to remember the cores of ourselves, and not diagnose them. Separate the art (the sublime self) from the artist (the despicable mental illness). I understand the need to medicalise, the need to put a name to a feeling that won’t shape itself into anything you can understand, and I do understand that a lot of us were raised by a generation who were taught that parenting had to be punitive and authoritative, and that’s why so many of us have childhood trauma. I can accept that diagnosis becoming more available now that overlooked minorities and groups are finally getting the help they need. But I’m sorry. I cannot accept the hubris of not only self-diagnosing, but making that fantasy not only yours, but everyone else’s reality. My suffering is not your content. The worst thing we can ever hear: there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re free to go.

You’d think I’d be used to it by now. I don’t even know how many episodes I’ve had… no, let me word that differently. I don’t know how many long periods of stability I’ve enjoyed. I let myself think all the bad things: my illness is eccentricity, my illness makes me dangerous, my illness pisses people off, my illness will murder me. But what happens when you let yourself think the good things? Like: my gift will create genius works in my name, my gift will solve the evils of the world, my gift will make me millions and my gift, as me, must be worshiped. That, dear reader, is a manic episode.

Manic and hypomanic episodes have a fine line between them, the main differentiating factor being complete delirium and psychosis. Mania is when you have lost touch with reality, can no longer function on any level whatsoever, when your behaviour has shifted from risky to utterly bizarre. I have been manic and unable to form coherent sentences as my thoughts were quicker than my mouth, and I have been manic and committed crimes (of varying severity). Hypomania is kind of what I get as a medicated person. It’s like my illness has been slightly muted, just enough to save my friends from the worst of it, but not enough to save me. There’s no cure for this illness and the treatment leaves a lot to be desired.

Recently, I was in a spring-time hypomania. Pyschiatrists call this the Manic Month of May, as they get quite used to their bipolar patients suddenly perking up very much, and coming into their offices chirruping and chatting, brightly dressed and with flowery, rapid speech. It’s harmless, until it isn’t. Mine started as it usually does — the sun came out one day and brought that smell with it, what is it? Kind of the opposite of petrichor. Something a bit more musty and floral, and there’s the cool edge of the air that seems to round it off. You breathe it in and you know, it consumes you — I am about to become manic. I’d better do all I can to stop it because I know how badly this can go if I am not careful. [Narrator: But they were not careful].

Look, can you blame me? The will to become stable and healthy disappears at a rapid pace when you’re on the way up. Suddenly you find you no longer need to sleep, your creativity comes out of you like a running tap, it’s literally unstoppable, money doesn’t technically exist so you feel free in spending it in a way you wouldn’t normally, and your friends all think you’re the best person they’ve ever met and that’s why you have to call them and text them and voice note them all the time, they’d be grateful, and whilst we’re on it, what’s the use in eating? it’s such a time-killer, why would you eat when you’re busy gathering experiences that will nourish you better than any food ever could, and you’re finally writing that novel and it’s genius, and you’re writing that new book of poetry and it’s breathtaking, and you’re hot as fuck and you dress exceptionally well and now you’re a lover of all things and are loved by all things…
Say yes to the meds when you know they will stop that feeling. I fucking dare you.

So for a little while, I abandoned the meds. Who needs them? Chemicals and shit? Weird, that. I wanted to exist in what was clearly my natural state as a shamanic seer of visions and giver of art. I was kind of stupefied that this was even a conversation my mental health team wanted to have. They prescribed the sleeping pill zopiclone (as a treat), and I said fuck no. Why would I force myself to do something I don’t need to do? That tired-but-wired feeling you get in early hypomania that feels distinctly unpleasant and urges you to seek help eventually gives way to an ever cascading feeling of invincibility, i.e pure adrenaline that your body is pumping out as an emergency, because you are without food or rest and you have gone into survival mode.

What goes up, must come down, yadda yadda. I crashed, and acquiesced to the treatment, because the other options such as hospital or prison didn’t seem too great, and in the midst of that mania, the shining, essential thought: If I don’t do this for myself I should at least do this for my children, because that’s the root of it, even in the grandiosity of mania, I was able to admit to myself that I do not care what happens to me and will put myself in danger out of self-loathing. Yum. I cried for a few days once the meds took hold of me again. Why would they do this to me? What did I ever do to them for them to steal my happiness? I could feel the energy leave my body with the exhale of that spring air that brought the episode in the first place. My muscles tightened and tensed with the stress of exhaustion, and my speech slowed along with my thoughts. It’s like being in a car as it slowly brakes. You can feel it. It’s a physical feeling of vague ego-death. Just the tip of ego-death.

I was hypomanic for about six weeks, just like I was last year. I am currently in an adrenalised state of fear that the oncoming depression will be too unbearable (no platitudes please: it will come). The transition from hypomania to stability or even depression is a very bumpy ride and is not linear. For days you will be unable to move. Your impeccably clean house will start to show signs of neglect. The dishes in the sink are laughing at you. The voice you sometimes hear calls you a failure. Then, a good day — a ray through the striated sky. You feel you’ve beat this thing. Then maybe another day of high energy, maybe you’re on the way up again, and then you wake up and the world is a fucking stranger and so are you. You don’t bathe, you don’t clean your teeth, you don’t change your bedding, you spend money on takeouts and taxis and anything that might fix you. This is not an easy ride, and it will happen over and over until I die.

I have debt now, I have a group of disappointed friends and some have even disappeared completely (save for a cursory, “Hey, sorry I haven’t been in touch in a while!” Read: “Hello, you’ve become too intense again and we are not that close”). I have harsh truths to face. Whenever I describe my episodes, I never say, “I once thought my life was a film”, I say, “My life was once a film”. As these episodes are happening they swallow and become my reality, so whilst I know they are not real, I have to admit that reality is subjective and that was mine. In my most recent episode (I didn’t become psychotic, or did I? How would I know?), I simply believed I was amazing at everything and had a vastly over-inflated sense of what I was capable of and who the fuck I am. Imagine that being your reality, imagine really thinking and feeling and living that. Imagine crashing down to earth and having to rapidly adjust to the new reality, that you are merely average — no, worse — you are a crazy person and you’ve fucked it all up again.

My energy is low and my body hurts. My thoughts are slow and cloudy and I am letting myself and my home go. I am not having dark thoughts because I am not having thoughts with any depth of feeling; my thoughts are flat and plain, and pertain only to the most basic of tasks, the most primitive of feelings.

Nobody really talks in much detail about this feeling, and I do pride myself on two things: 1. The best lipstick game in the industry and 2: The loudest most correct opinions. [Narrator: You’re fooling nobody with this shit]. And I know I have friends who follow this substack and I hope people read it and understand this process I go through. I am proud of the work I produced in the hypomania this time around, 15,000 words of a very decent novel, several poems and the framework for a big new project, things I can really use and work with, things that will help stable me out. For that I must be grateful but ask: is it worth it? Really?

Right now, I say no. Ask me next spring.

I’ve lived in and out of addiction all of my life, it’s like a stubborn personality trait that wants to take the fore. Do I want to be a good writer? An engaging broadcaster? A kind friend, a nurturing mother? Yes, but above all, it seems I want to be an addict. And let me be clear on this: I don’t like it either.

I was recently at a meeting at my kids’ school, talking about attendance. My eldest has a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, my youngest has suspected ADHD, and sometimes there are days off because of meltdowns, or their anxieties, days where it would be traumatic to force them through heaving sobs to pop their school jumper on and spend all day with people. It’s not a huge problem; we are not addicted to giving the kids time off of school. But the school seem to forget quite easily that attendance and neurodivergence don’t always go hand in hand. The pastoral lead told me recently that new research has “proven” (immediately skeptical) that even half a day off of primary school can lead to consequences in high school. I asked her what she knew about the subjects of the study she referenced. I can safely assume they were neurotypical. I do not think that it’s cool to keep your kids off school for no reason, but I understand that people have different needs. Now, let me talk about AA.

If it works for you, I’m not here to yuck your yum. All recovery is valid and important, and I don’t care how you got there, I’m just glad you’re there and hope you stay there. But I think there’s a deep insidiousness in the recovery community, that if you don’t go to AA or NA, you’re not that serious about recovery, or you will inevitably fail, or you just don’t care enough about your loved ones to give this a college try. But what if you did go down the path of the fellowship, and it made you worse? What if you’re mentally ill? Autistic? What if sitting in an uncanny room where the social script is entirely flipped upside down, for an hour and a half, is excruciatingly painful for you? I find it very hard to code-switch at times. Work Me and Real Me, and then Mum Me and then Friend Me. I need the social situation very clearly spelling out, or I will inevitably make a fool of myself by not understanding the implied rule of the situation. Friendships I’ve misread, relationships I’ve screwed up — luckily my core friend group are patient with me, and have similar issues, and when I ask them, “What’s the rule of the situation here? What do I say or do?”, I am understood. But sitting in a room of people I don’t know, all sat in a circle, telling me their deepest secrets, and I am not able to respond or react, always knocked me sideways. It’s too surreal, to quote Danny Dyer: “It still freaks my nut out to this day”.

I wasn’t understood very well in my local AA groups. It was deeply implied that my schizoaffective disorder was in fact a symptom of my alcoholism, and once I put the bottle down, I’d be cured. I was told I couldn’t say I was clean, because I was taking prescription medications (Methadone is fine, but antipsychotics - donkeys - are a no no). I live in a small town, and maybe the AA group was the symptom of the small-town cause; I was different. I act weird. I don’t look right. I dress funny. I don’t fit in. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I am a Jew. The only Jew in the room. The one who doesn’t go to church with everyone else. The one who didn’t need to find Jesus. I was never invited to the dinners, I was never welcomed as a friend. The social rules were completely inverted: people swearing to their Higher Power that if you’re struggling, all you have to do is pick up the phone and call them. They never answered. I wonder if they identified that as a defect - an egoism, a saviour complex, to be seen as someone who is great in a crisis, but to never follow through. To want the praise, to not do the work. I found that a lot, and I wasn’t a fan of it.

I did admire a few people in my local groups. The ones who were quietly living, who were working to find their peace or had already found it, perhaps they were the ones who were really working the steps and I’d been misled to believe that AA is bullshit because of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. There were people who had broken through some really heavy shit and lived all kinds of lives, and had quietly found recovery, and humility. I wanted to be like them so much, and I still think of them.

I ended up in a recovery home after I came out of prison, and that was very AA centric. I wasn’t seen to be recovering and my place in the home was under threat because I did not attend AA. I mean, I had made a documentary about recovery and was talking about that in the media, and spent every week speaking to prisoners about the importance of recovery, I was remaining sober and praying to my own Higher Power, I was connecting to my faith community and spending every day seeing my children, I was repairing the relationships I had broken with my addiction - which was not a disease, it was a choice I made when I was overwhelmed and did not have the tools to cope - but none of this mattered. I wasn’t attending AA, and therefore I wasn’t recovering. I was living with people actively using, and I had been clean and sober for over a year at this point. But they were serious about their recovery and I was not.

I am writing this, because I hope somebody googles “is it okay to recover without AA” just like I have in the past. I want to say: absolutely. You don’t have to work a list written by an evangelical Christian, you don’t have to sit in a room and engage in a competition of competitive misery, you don’t have to go to the gym for five hours a day and relentlessly talk about how brilliant you are for not smoking crack any more. You can quietly live. Because when do you live? At what point do you just get on with it? I was told I would have to attend AA every week at least twice for the rest of my life. And here’s how I thought about it:

When you’re mentally ill and struggling, well-meaning and helpful people will caringly compare your mental illness to a physical one, with diabetes somehow being the favourite comparison. “Your antipsychotics are just like insulin, if you were diabetic you wouldn’t feel shame about needing your medicine”. I mean it sucks that we have to compare to physical illness to make it real, but the sentiment is caring and sincere and I appreciate it when it happens. So let me try something similar. Imagine you get the flu really bad, maybe it gets so bad it turns into pneumonia, let’s say. You end up in hospital and your lungs are fucked. You are desperately ill and you wonder if you’ll make it, but you do. You go on a long, slow process of recovery to get back to health. You attend appointments, as you should, you do physio if you need it, you take steroids, all of it, you do what you need to do to recover. Are you then always in recovery from the flu? Terrified it will strike again? Do people tell you, if you don’t prophylactically attend a support group every week for the rest of your life, you will get the flu again and this time it will kill you? When I word it like that, doesn’t that sound like kind of a horrific thing to say to someone? You get your flu jabs every year to stop it happening again. If your friend has the flu, you do not go to their home. You take better care of yourself than before, you exercise and stay hydrated and eat well and you look at your children and feel so grateful and blessed that you are still here, because you nearly weren’t. They don’t need to know you nearly died of the flu. You don’t need to talk about the flu for the rest of your life. It’s not who you are. You’re not the person who had the flu forever. You get sick, you go through recovery, and then you are recovered. You get out there and live. And hey, maybe you’ll get it again in the future and that would be awful, let’s hope you don’t. But it’s different now. Your immune system wasn’t strong before because you didn’t know how to take care of yourself, but after such a close brush with death, you have learned. And if you get a slight cough, the whole world doesn’t need to tell you that you’re probably going to die.

A huge part of recovery is learning who you are, and finding peace within that. A huge part of addiction is running away from that which we find unacceptable, there is shame at the core of every addict. But you cannot be encouraged to replace that void with a persona, it has to be the authentic you. When can the authentic you come out, if you’ve adopted a new personality, the personality of the inspiring recovering addict? And there’s a difference, you can be an inspiring recovering addict without setting out to do so. You don’t have to turn into the person sitting next to you who can only introduce themselves as an addict.

Hi I’m Scout and I’m an alcoholic. Hi I’m Scout and I’m an addict. Hi I’m Scout and I’m addicted to smack. Hi I’m Scout and honestly who gives a shit. Some things about me that are very important: I love my children, I love my friends, I love Elliott Smith, and I’m a pretty good cook. My addictions are the least interesting things about me, and me forgetting them is not complacency, it’s not a symptom of impending relapse. It’s safety. It’s the safety of not constantly being told that if I don’t join a group and dedicate myself to it, I face certain death.

Drew went through a period of bleak mental health issues along with recovering from an addiction he’d kept secret from us, his viewers (as if we had any right to know!), and this album is about the pain, the recovery, the pain of the recovery. You get all your feelings back all of a sudden, and there’s rage: of course I was an addict! Check out all these fucking mad feelings I’m now burdened with?! All these memories! This rampant mental illness! At least when I was using I had some control over it!. At least that’s the recognition I get from this album: no, recovery isn’t a sunshine-rainbows-lollipops process. It’s brutal, and it hits so many parts of you so precisely and sharply, parts you didn’t know were there, because they developed whilst you were drinking; the pain in the background waiting for you to arrive.

For some of us, the pain will never end. Drew may be one of those people. He has disappeared from the public eye, having made brief reference on instagram to a hospice for mental illness: I wondered about this end-stage melancholy, I wondered, not if I’d experienced it, but for how long I’d been experiencing it for. When it will end. I google his name quite a bit, along with people I knew in the madness of addiction who are still in the madness: I’m checking to see if there are any police reports or obituaries, just as my friends did when I disappeared and wound up in prison. Some of us lend ourselves to a panicked google-search. We live like that and we don’t like it either. For Drew, I worry the clue was always in the name of the album. I just want him to be okay, his second channel is one I return to when I’ve been bundled onto the psych ward but am allowed my laptop (some hospitals take your charger and only let you charge at the nurses station, others will wind the cord up and then secure it with cable ties, and other hospitals will just assess your suicide risk and figure it out from there). He just seemed to understand. And this isn’t some parasocial nightmare, folks, I don’t feel in any way like I know him personally, or that he owes us any kind of explanation: but I realise, listening to this album, that Drew is an artist. How painful a thing to make a decision from such a young age to live with your heart so raw and public.

I hope Drew is okay. I hope I am okay. I hope you are okay. I’m not sure where I’m going with this so I’ll stop here. I’m going to go and listen to the album for the millionth time and I will go on finding ways to shoehorn it into everything I do for that’s art too - sharing art. Giving it away, thereby multiplying the magic of it. Give me away please, and make me magic too. As Drew sings in the song Collapse:

Life is gonna tear you apart. No more excuses — collapse with your art.

Do you ever worry that you’ll never be a homeowner? There’s a simple footbridge to this restaurant and the converted barn next door, oh! A darling little cockleshell in a ramekin of hay. Quite gauche of the table-setter to leave - checks - her business card. I used to live there. Look, there, where her… I guess cockleshell and hay shop is. Do you ever worry that if you were murdered, your legacy would go with you? I fawn over your art, you fawn over mine, a threesome over supper between you, me, and the art we have made, the elephant in the room but he’s a 21 year old twink who loves our work and is our work and is prettier than our works put together and that’s why we love him as hard as we do; his friendly idolaters all grasping from their routs as he rattles his bracelets and makes love to barons, having no idea of his own devastated thrall, sound familiar? It does to me3. Oh stop being so modest, that’s not very sexy of you. Admit yourself to yourself. We tell him we like his vibe but let’s face it: the footbridge will weaken if we carry him with us any longer. A couple you want to sleep with settling on what to have for their mains and puddings, and the saint says to the saviour, “What the handsome fuck is your gorgeous problem tonight?”4.

I think about my heirs, my beautiful heirs, the legends they’ll become on their tricycles cavorting over plains and dunes at moderate speeds like they’ve never seen a war and never will do (in the past we’ve both agreed that after you have kids, you’re mainly praying as war prophylaxis). Three forkfuls into the patatas bravas. Red oil as fine and slick as me, am I supposed to pretend I didn’t see or hear it? I want to take you home and take your plausible deniability off. Look me in the eyes and deny the indelible. Grumpy boy. Stern boy. Frowning, frightened, silly boy. Outside, the busker is being arrested for copyright infringement; this part of town is so cool, the policeman is the lawyer cousin of the Gallagher brothers. The barometer is striking three times for humid. Go, go, go.

Dustbins in the dead of night. Gandering to your car over our familiar old minefield of ambivalent confessions. Buckle up, see the peacock standing on your bonnet looking proud of himself; you’re a dazzle of plumes, no you’re a dazzle of plumes. Sticky evening. Lots of mirages. With your key in the ignition I think now’s the time to tell you that you’re mentioned in my psychiatric records more than my mother is. Run the peacock down then, and let me take his place. Let’s bury him and say the prayer that blesses him for having watched me please you on my knees as he dies (I would like for me to be pleasing you on my knees as he dies). Turn right, then left, your want versus mine, unlawfully blue and you are the same, on your bonnet; on the peacock’s doughy makeshift grave of leaves and other dirts; by the river up and down; those gardenias really suit your hair, you must’ve accidentally caught them when I was losing my favourite garment, you were losing your mirror again, when I lost my balance, when I lost my favourite5 —

And now I wish that there were three of you (in order of importance): one who wants to rest his head in my lap; another who wants to kiss the one who rests his head in my lap; and the third who is most hated by the other two of you, who hastily dresses and says he’s got somewhere to be, buries himself by the peacock, and covers himself with mulch as the three of us make love on his grave, enjoying the feeling of freshly dug earth slightly moving beneath us as we come6.