The People That I Have Loved

This post is all about m’past relationships and the impact manic depression had on them but first…

Since I’m relegated to camera phone status now, it means I have to post obnoxious, grainy Myspace “pix” of my stomach like every other dedicated camwhore in the world.

Here you go!

I’m actually feeling alright about my body today, which is such a rarity, hence my taking that photo.  Although looking at it, that feeling is disappating. This morning, I weighed 8st 6lbs, meaning that I’ve now lost over four stone since January.  I am only just starting to see it.  I still have terrible hair.  I’m trying to grow it, and in the meantime it exists in that hairstyle netherworld of unmanagable rubbishness.

People ask me, “If you know you have BDD (body dysmorphic disorder, facked fans), then surely you know you look alright?”  No, it’s not that.  I accepted that I had BDD when I was being treated for it, but what I accepted what that the anxiety and freaking-out about my appearance was disportionate and abnormal.  I’ll never flick my hair back from my face and think, “Damn, I’m beautiful”.  Most people never will.

I expect I’ll always see myself as some sort of melted crayon monster.  I’m just attempting to extricate myself from the rituals I’ve used for years, not cutting my face up anymore, attempting to co-exist with myself and attempting to not cancel social engagements, be reclusive or suffer from panic attacks in the street because of my hideousness.  It doesn’t really matter that I’ll never think I’m passable.  The only thing that matters is living my life regardless of it.  So that’s why I accept that I have BDD.  And I’m always okay with photos of me (well, as long as I vet them), because they’re part of my and other’s lives, which is why they’ll appear in this post.

Today I’ve been rather nostalgic.  It’s the autumn, it’s the season for lovers.  I passed a procession of swaddled couples beaming into each others’ ruddy faces.  And I’ve been thinking about the people that I have loved in the past.

It’s not easy being with me.  My mentalism means that I can be difficult to cope with, and it’s had a dab hand in wrecking a few of my relationships and a lot of my friendships. Psychosis especially alters the perception someone may have of you, and altered it has. Even my relationship with Rob, whom I know you all see as saintly and endlessly patient, ended for six months last year because of it all.   But there was love and life before Rob.  I’m always a little hesitant to talk about the exes.  I fear being Googled, then being garotted.  It’s also problematic due to my incredibly patchy memory.

But for the purposes of this post.  Well.

A hastily complied complete history of my significant failed relationships and the lovely people involved in them.

Aged 14/15 at which time I looked like this:

Above:  That’s Andrew and the very first day I met him!  I actually stopped him in the street because I liked his t-shirt.  We became good friends, and he eventually went on to marry one of my best friends (who I introduced him to), Tracie.

Robert. Ah.  Robert.  Or Vornstar, as I called him often.

Robert was my first love, at the ripe old age of fourteen.  It was quite an adult love, as I was quite an adult fourteen year old. He’s the most “dramatic” out of all of my relationships, so, he gets a bit more space.  Maybe this, written in 2006 (on the subject of “first loves”) can explain.

The first “boyfriend” I ever had was called Conor “Kissylips” Cushnan. We stayed friends until I was eight. I was his girlfriend because I let him play with my toys. I still wish all love was like that. We used to hold hands in the back of his mum’s car. This was when I lived in Twinbrook, and he would stay in his grandad’s house. When his grandad died, I didn’t see him anymore. He was my first kiss. I still count him as my first kiss, really. We kissed in the street when we were four.

My dad caught us and dragged me home to yell at me. Then my sisters starting calling him Kissylips. They sang at us when we went past on our pedal cars.

The first relationship I had was with a boy called Robert. And although I was crazy at the time, I remember a lot of it. First proper boyfriend and all that. He’s from Streatham and we were penpals. He came to Belfast to meet me, all grins and smiles and eyeliner. He had his teddy with him- Freddy- who is the model for Agent Hector, my teddy dog. Robert got me Hector from a man in Castle Court who was selling car insurance. Hector and Freddy were becoming best friends.

We used to sit on cold benches in Belfast city centre and make up stories about them, and their foe, Skip Grannymugger. Freddy had a little squeaker and make-up, a pierced ear and a lot of mottled, loved fur. On our first meeting, Robert squeaked him at me with a shy smile. He introduced Freddy before he introduced himself. For months on the phone, he had squeaked Freddy when I was sad. And for months afterwards, when I was sad, I had Freddy lying on my left hand side, his tiny arms around me, making me happy again.

In the daylight of the bus station, Robert went to take my hand- I pulled it away. And I still remember how hurt he looked. We went into town and I bumped into some friends. One was called Erin who’d heard all about him. She gave me a kiss and started cooing- “Oh, give Robbie a kiss!” And I was too shy. I kissed his forehead; he went for my lips. I pulled him away and felt so, so nervous, so watched and awkward that the only place I could think of going into was HMV. We sat down on the floor in there and started reading magazines. I leafed through Smash Hits and commented on how pretty Lisa Scott-Lee was. Some things never change, really. He was having a look at the NME. But not really looking. I tried very hard to concentrate. But he was staring at me, smiling, looking confused, looking awed. I couldn’t stop clearing my throat and couldn’t say a word to him. I babbled and chattered until eventually the man came and said they were closing.

Then we left, into the streets, trying to find the bus stop to Malcolm’s house. On the bus, some blokes starting catcalling Robert, “Queer, fag, freak” and he almost lost his temper. Then they started on me and he did lose his temper. And I sort of really loved him from then on. We were going to get into a lot of trouble in Malcolm’s area- Ballysillan- in the next few months.

In Malcolm’s area, Robert was an English queer (Robert was a Mansun fan, all fur coats, red hair dye and unapologetic make-up, and he was Asian-looking, so asking for it, according to them. In my area- Poleglass- they thought he was more fascinating than threatening and used to come down to my house to talk to him because he had a “funny accent”).

Malcolm was my best friend then, and had been for a while. Much, much older than me- twenty-three, and Robert was eighteen at the time. Malcolm’s house was legendarily revolting. As we stepped inside, I looked at Robert’s face and saw him wrinkle up his nose at the smell of cat litter and rotting books. Rene, Malcolm’s mum, made us dinner. I was shaking the whole time, this whole thing being new to me. Above all else, I thought Robert was beautiful. He had liquid brown eyes, loved the Manics and that type of boy wasn’t known to me in Belfast, and if they were, they didn’t want to talk to me.

He was intelligent and hilarious and I shook in his presence. We went up to Rene’s room and just sat on the bed and talked. He went to change his top and did it quite unashamedly in front of me, and I was impressed. But so very, very shy. We didn’t kiss for quite a long time. It was awkward at first- my hands wouldn’t stop trembling- but then we did, and it was lovely, and my first proper, proper kiss with a boy I actually liked. He stayed for a few days. My parents were quite keen to meet him because I’d run up the phone bill so horrendously talking to him.

As penpals do, I had initially lied to him about my age- saying I was sixteen, instead of fourteen. But when I was fourteen, I wasn’t much different anyway. He eventually found out, and was okay with it, after I panicked and freaked. By fourteen, my parents sort of trusted me with boys and that.I’d known Robert for quite a while so they felt they knew him, too. My mum and dad on occasion had taken the phone and said hello to him. My mum on meeting ordered him to eat. He was extremely thin. My dad was quite amused by how he looked (”As if Malcolm wasn’t bad enough”) but soon they were talking. My dad offered him a can of beer which Robert drank and sat next to me on the sofa. He was in a daze, he said later, wondering how on earth he’d ended up on a sofa in West Belfast talking to my dad. But there he was. And my dad asked him, very baldly, “Do you love her?” And Robert replied, very frankly, “Yes, I do”. And that was that settled.

For a while it was all lovely. We did silly things and talked constantly. We looked amazing together. He eventually moved to Belfast and we’d spend our time watching crap TV, sitting on benches in Belfast with his zebra print coat wrapped around me and a mobile phone, making calls to the public phone box opposite, talking nicely to whoever answered, “How was your day, you look lovely” etc. We made up stories and he’d meet me after school, swing me around in front of everyone and shout that he loved me. In Boots, I’d be sneaking make-up on in my school uniform and he’d creep up behind me and whisper that I was beautiful without it. When he was planning to move out of Malcolm’s, he was giving me “Seaneen’s wall” in his flat so I could paint it how I wanted and feel at home there. We used to buy cheapo about to be chucked out food from Tescos and sit in the fountain and eat it. And we walked in town and introduced ourselves to everyone.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?  Idyllic, what a love.  Well, the love was there.  But of course, it went catrastrophically wrong, and it’s rather hard to express how without sounding like a crooked teenager.

In short, I was mad.  Absolutely stark raving insane.  It was true, blind madness.  I’ve mentioned before that I had “early onset” bipolar disorder.  I became ill when I was around twelve, and was properly, dreadfully, no insight whatsoever ill until my early twenties.

Aged fourteen as I was then, you’re not “ill”.  You’re vindictive, evil, mental, horrible, all the playground things that people say.   I inhabited a twilight world of delusion and mania.  I was deeply psychotic, in the true sense of the word.  I had absolutely no idea what was real and what wasn’t real.   I didn’t know what was what, things I had written became true, things that were true became dreams.

Looking back, it’s patently obvious, tragically so, that I was manic depressive and really quite ill.  But that’s not how anyone else saw it- they couldn’t, and I couldn’t. I wish I had known.  I wish I had said, “Please, I’m not well.  Bear with me, I’m still the same person” and maybe salvaged something of my family and friendship life.  Ah well.  Retrospect is a bitch, and thankfully at least my family understand now that I was seriously ill at the time.  It destroyed the relationship.  He was quite mad, too, in terms of having a temper as hot as hell, and the two weren’t a good mix.  We had screaming matches in the middle of the street.

He didn’t trust me, which was understandable since he had no clue of what was true and what wasn’t (sadly, I had no clue either).  It ended extremely badly, with me broken hearted (and I broke his, too) and desperate and with half of Belfast clambering onto the fire, including my family, and Malcolm who was a reprehensible cunt, which, by the end, meant I could barely leave the house.  He shaved his head and I had met him in the bus station when we broke up- which almost killed me, going back there- to return Freddy and to get some stuff. I could hardly look at him, his appearance was shocking. His head was bald and his gauntness was frightening. I left quickly, wandering through the streets crying until I settled on a bench and put my head in my hands. And when I looked up, he was sitting next to me.  I got astonishingly vicious e-mails from his new girlfriend (straight after one of my best friends committed suicide, too), random people came up and hit me.  Even when he moved back to England it carried on.  I ended up leaving the country eventually, too.  It was awfully childish, all of it.

But at the time it was horrible.  We were pretty awful to each other.  He was angry and violent. I was nuts.  And I, in my youth, thought of him as my “soulmate”, although I no longer believe in such facile crap.  I absolutely loved him and did throughout all the mess.

Most people would assume I dislike him, due to the disasterous end to our dalliance.  I’m actually very defensive of him (although I am sure he is not at all defensive of me, in fact, I’m quite sure he’s been saying a lot of bad things about me) as my abiding memories of him are the good stuff, not the bad.  Still, I am fond of him because he was my first.  I think everybody, almost without exception, has complex and enduring feelings for their first love.  Even if, as is in my case, it went terribly wrong, what we’re left with is the feeling, the seed of remembering, one glorious summer, and so on.   He was integral in my becoming who I did- emotionally, culturally, intellectually.  The mix tapes he made for me (ah, sweet teenage love, when a mixtape is all that we demand, not roses, nor gold, nor sex) pretty much formed the foundation of my music taste.  And he kicked off my near on fetish for English accents.

I saw him in 2003, which I barely remember as I was so nervous I could hardly speak.  He’s happy, though, which is wonderful.  He’s very grown up, now, with a stepson (who he is absolutely in thrall of) and a girlfriend.

Being 15 in my wig

!

Above:  me, Richey and Tracie

and me, Richey, Andrew and Tracie

Next after Robert was Richey.

Another R.  That was a pointless relationship, truth be told. I was still mental and for the duration suffering from crippling panic attacks and manic insomnia.  We didn’t even really like each other, let alone love.  He told me at the end that he wasn’t in love with me, and though it hurt at the time, after a short while I didn’t care.  He also carried on the tradition of cracking onto my siblings.

Then Andrew, a tall punk.  That didn’t last long, either.  He was from Newcastle, a seasoned Geordie. He was lovely, very funny and lay in my sister’s bedroom wearing wimmen’s clothes. He got his head kicked in in my street.  That was a laugh, me jumping on people’s backs trying to pull them off (arf!), smashing people in the nose.  It was because of the way he looked, joy.  We broke up, he shagged my friend, the rest is barely remembered history.

Karl followed, the second, “I actually love you” relationship after Robert.  Karl was a tall, Super Nintendo loving geek.  I was a short, Super Nintendo loving geek.  Our relationship was charmingly teenage (I was sixteen), and it was wonderful, it was the first time I had ever acted my age.  I wasn’t well- depression, then, mostly, talking openly of wanting to hang myself- but he dealt with it very well.

He was absolutely hilarious (still is!), sweet, clever, generally wonderful and remains one of my most favourite of people.  His family liked me, too, which was great.  His granny used to give me Euro, in the same way my granny would.  A tenner for buying “sweets”.  I’d spent it on cigarettes and newspapers at Connolly Street.  We spent our time playing computer games, kissing, making animated gifs, writing stuff for the internet and wandering around Dublin, where he lived.

Karl’s introduction to my family included having to hide out in my house because a Loyalist (or possibly not, I can’t remember) parliamilitary group were after my cousin’s boyfriend.  We couldn’t leave the house and we all thought we were going to be murdered.  My family, particularly my brother adored him.  He was heartbroken when we broke up.  So was I, but living too far apart took its toll.  I still absolutely love Karl and he too is happy, having been with his girlfriend for a couple of years now.

This is us!

And again!

There was a long gap after Karl, in which I nursed my heart, after which followed Jonathan.

I met Jonathan purely through chance.  At a Mansun gig in Belfast, I ran into a Mancunian called Dominque.  I, being a portly comedy fan was interested in her friend, Jonathan, a stand up comedian.  He lived in London, however, but we e-mailed each other.

I’d already had a long history of Buggering Off to the Mainland.  When I was going out with Richey, who was Welsh, I used to save my lunch money and fuck off on the overnight ferry to Holyhead.  Then I used to go to Manchester to meet up with the Megazine lot.  So it followed that I then pissed off to London to meet Jonathan.

Poor Jonathan.  Jonathan, like Robert, had the pleasure of knowing me when I was stark raving mad.

I’d been to the doctor a little while before.  The long depression during which I knew Karl turned into a very long manic episode in which I knew Jonathan.  I was diagnosed “mood disordered” (polite term for manic depression, only I didn’t know that) and given Carbamazepine.  I took it, sort of, but it made me drunk and I kept falling over.

So I went to London completely sky high, having not eaten or slept for a week.  I was staying with my friend Patrick, who I got into a load of trouble due to my manic behaviour.  And when I met Jonathan, I was psychotic.

It started off nice, we had a drink in the pub.  He’d had a job interview that day and was looking devilishly handsome in a suit.

Things started to go weird.  I thought I’d had a past life in London and was convinced I knew where we were.  I assaulted passersby, jumped on tables, etc etc.  On the tube home, I thought Jonathan was Ian Curtis from Joy Division.  Yep.  Then I thought my friends (aforementioned Manchester friends) were dead and started accusing people of killing them.  Yep.

Still, for some reason Jonathan liked me.  Well, I kind of talked him into liking me. We fell in love and I fucked off to London to live with him.  My parents and family were not best pleased- I was seventeen, he was twenty seven!  But everything worked out fine, I’m still here.

I was mental for the duration, which was two years.  I was proper mental up until last year sometime.  I wasn’t bad mental, though, which meant no flipping out or insane jealousy or anything like that.  I was just mental-mental, manic depressive mental, not bitchy, horrible mental.

But we had good times.  We shared two flats together, one in Essex and one in East London.  We shared a lot of interests, both mental comedy fans, for one.   We even ended up on children’s television together!  Our relationship was good, but it fizzled out, as relationships do.  We were at odds:  I was very social and revelling in making new friends, and he was shy.  But I have a lot to thank him for, without his love, support and help I’d be back in Belfast.  His life is much better without me.  He’s living the dandy life of a bachelor.

23, a week ago!

After Jonathan, I moved to Crouch End.  And then I met Rob.

Rob and I drifted in the same circles (shorthand for “The Stay Beautiful Clique”, Simon’s club, which we all met at) and talked online.  We had a mutual online crush on each other, and flirted mildly from afar. I finally ran into him at Stay Beautiful, got very drunk and pretty much walked up and kissed him.  And that’s how that one started…

Yeah.

So, that’s all my significant relationships!  There’s so much more I could say about them, but I won’t.  You might have noticed that few of them began in Belfast.  I hated Belfast and especially Belfast accents.

A salute for the fallen, who I dallied with or had crushes on:

They Also Served (the ones that I remember…)

Ian, my Yorkshireman who made me like Sigur Ros

Brendan, another Irish one, who was more mental than I was

Damien, from Belfast who looks like the wee vicar one from Pop Idol

Jenny, a gorgeous woman who I habitually slept with in Belfast

David, who I had a massive crush on for ages, but who is married

Darren, my friend in Manchester

and then there’s people I’ve slept with in London, but I’ll stop there as I’m sure they don’t want to be named and shamed (there’s only three, aside from Rob.  In almost six years!)