TURNING SIXTY
That happened to me nearly two weeks ago and I am still angry about it. I am no where near ready to be sixty! I resent it, I stamp on it, I try to look away from it or hide it or just plain ignore it but I cannot.
I have no intention of celebrating old age in the sense of pink hair and rattling the railings and I have no intention of celebrating it in some sort of spiritual gaining of wisdom and tolerance way.
Ten years ago, well slightly longer than that, I announced that I had just fallen out of adolescence and into adulthood and I both did and didn’t mean it. What I did mean was that I had woken up to life. What I was less certain was that I was a genuine adult. Someone must have written articles about us spoilt souls who really have never gained the gravitas and responsibility to feel like one of the grown ups and I doubt they are complimentary but while I remain immature I will allow myself the freedom to rant just a little.
I would definitely say that around a decade ago life began with a rush that initially did wonders for my self-esteem. I had left my wife and for the first time in two decades started to make friends in my own right. For many reasons, some of which I am writing about just now up here at Moniack Mhor, the idea of me having my own friends in my marriage was frowned on.
Is that right? Yes I think so!
I would have had to submit candidates for approval and they would have had to be men and they would have had to have had nothing to do with the world of mental health I worked in. Because of my past I can struggle with male friendship; I find it frightening and threatening, (Nothing against you men; just a bit of the dreary past!) and I must admit in recent months, I have made tentative connections with the male world but for the most part I avoid that and certainly did when I was married.
When I moved out; some female work colleagues who were really good friends instead of colleagues, introduced me to a whole rich circle of people. I found it tremendously exciting: Saturdays when we gathered at the Links Café in Nairn, evenings eating meals in each other’s houses; camping trips with different families.
However after a time, partly because of the pain of my separation and the absence of my son, I was whisked into a world where death was a close companion and I had to be guarded from it by nurses, who on the whole, were kind to me.
When I came out of hospital my spirit was delicate. I lacked confidence but often paused in delight when I realised I was still alive; that I could walk by the river with the gulls, herons and the occasional kingfisher, walk on East Beach in a gale with the sand swishing about my feet and still had friends with children and dogs I could visit if I wished. It was like waking up and after the dark last decade of marriage was like freedom and joy and possibility.
I was often very lonely and often very sad and turned to my community psychiatric nurse when I felt hated or for that matter encountered a part of daily living I hadn’t had to do till then. Some of those things were very basic things, getting an aerial put on the roof, buying my own clothes, setting up a bank account, getting a mortgage.
I found out I could do them and that they weren’t too hard to do, if they were, then someone like Jen would help, maybe by setting up my first proper mobile phone account or pointing out a pair of trousers I might like in a charity shop. I repaid in some ways perhaps, by being a baby sitter or occasionally a confidant or a dog walker and then somehow and I don’t know to this day how, I made my very own friends: not through work and not through people introducing me. No one, it seemed to me took pity on me, instead I found myself in the midst of artists and writers such as Maggie, Anita, Lesley, Cynthia and often their partners too.
For me that was what coming out of adolescence meant and what becoming an adult meant too. People seemed to like me despite my inarticulacy and awkwardness, they welcomed me into their company not as a slightly reluctantly accepted other half of a couple but as me on my own, in my own right.
Then I met Wendy which is a whole other story but, in short with her, I learnt about respect and equality. I learnt about being loved by someone I was not frightened of physically or emotionally and who definitely wasn’t frightened of me. I learnt about laughter and sex and being rude and crude and not doing the ‘right thing’ or thinking the ‘right thoughts’ and that changed my life. That helped me wake up and become almost me for the first time in nearly fifty years.
So now that I am sixty? Too right I am cross! I do not want to get more and more unfit and begin that slow physical decline that unfortunately I have already embarked upon and I do not want to learn to be old or think about retirement or settle to some half attempt at life in the twilight as somehow I seem to think I am now expected to do.
I want to wake up. I would like to learn to swear. I would like to interrupt people when I have things to say. I would like to tease people. I would like to think of all the things I really want to do rather than the things people say are the mark of a life well lived.
I have been responsible in a very irresponsible way for too many decades now. I want to leap into the future and learn to love the life I have been given.
No, no, no! That is just a bit of silly inspire speak!
I think I am a devil and destroying the world (That is what schizophrenia sometimes is!) and thinking that is not subject to grand leaps of enthusiasm for life, or at least not in my book.
I want to dip a toe carefully into tomorrow and to return home from Moniack Mhor with my love for Wendy in my mind and my heart, and my wonder that that is possible even though I am rapidly getting older and older.
I just don’t want it to be over yet because these last few years have been wonderful and I had stopped thinking of wonderful.
(Photographs: Wendy and Graham in Bucharest; Moniack Mhor – Feb 2023)
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