Trials & Tribulations

January 2021

It feels surreal, a year after the first murmerings of a new disease emerging in the Far East, and almost ten months since being placed under the first UK lockdown, to be going through it again. I don't want to get into the epic incompetence and staggeringly poor decisions taken by the UK Government over the last year. They have been many, but hopefully with a mass vaccination programme underway there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

Yet it has allowed time for reflection – with genuine time and space away from work and social obligations – and the ability to take stock of everything. Personally, that's been quite difficult, as there's plenty to tackle. But I think from the ashes of the last twelve months, there may be plenty to take from it.

Prior to Covid, the last decade of my life felt like a steadily accelerating car; a journey becoming evermore frantic, with bumps in the road each hitting harder than the last. Stopping to understand why it was happening wasn't a priority – not when I had to keep the car on the road.

Lockdowns and periods of furlough changed that. The car suddenly slowed right down, and it became pretty clear it was in bad shape. If my life were indeed a car, it would be best described as the condition in which I sold my god-forsaken and cursed Nissan Qashqai: barely in one piece. Awful cars, by the way: avoid.

Anyway, I've spent just over four years in my current job. The lines between work and personal life have become steadily more blurred in that time. In the aftermath of some pretty hefty upheaval in 2017 (both at work, and in my personal life) and then a prolonged process of rebuilding personally in 2019, the ability to throw myself into a job was welcomed. I took on more and more, working into the evenings almost daily, travelling as often as I could, taking on complex projects that I knew would deliver good results for the business. Great stuff, right?

And yet creeping up behind me all that time was that old familiar devil – burnout. Sometimes it's only when you stop that you realise just how much stress you've accumulated and how much you've overstretched. Like my Qashqai, it was only when you got to over 80mph that the whole thing started pulsating, just reminding you that it could fall apart at any time.

When you take a step back and realise that you have a feeling of dread every time you pick up your phone because your work inbox is effectively a public complaints deposit box from people quick to anger when they don't get their own way, it's probably time to take stock. For the record, plenty of people excel at customer service. I am not one of them.

The truth is I'd been working long days, ordering Chinese and drinking too much. I played football and went to the gym, ostensibly to be healthy, but in reality to counterbalance the damage the rest of my lifestyle was doing.

I've just gone two weeks into Dry January without any trouble – which privately has been quite reassuring, as I presume this rules out actual alcoholism – but it has reinforced that alcohol has been required in order to numb the stress of work as well as longer term anxieties (and guilts).

So, when that all stops because your industry is forced to shut, taking a few weeks off work in a world where there's just not that much you can do, other than surprisingly therapeutic painting projects around the house, does offer some space on how to move forward.

What next?

I'm not a huge believer in New Year's Resolutions. They feel like revolutions, where the eventual downfall and disaster that befalls them is baked into their very essence from the beginning. But I am a believer in granular, effective change. I believe if you can reach a full understanding of why you drink too much, why you don't take enough care and pride in your everyday life, in your social connections, that you can take corrective action. Without that understanding, you treat the symptom and not the problem.

So part of the last few weeks has been delving into why I've ended up at this point, and why I feel the way I do.

Is it as straightforward as working too hard? Not setting myself limits? I think that's oversimplistic.

I think there are two primary factors that have caused the burnout.

Firstly, I care far too much about what I do. I have very high standards when it comes to my work – if something isn't done right, it shouldn't be done at all. When you work for a company where resource is at a premium, that can make everything very challenging. After all, if you have a huge set of tasks to clear with a hard-set deadline, and you cannot delegate that to anyone with a similar skillset, what other option do you have than to work more, and harder, to get it done well.

In a company where the culture is based around over-performance, that can become quite unhealthy quite quickly. At Costa (and I suspect many other similar chains) they have a saying: "It's just coffee and cake." At the end of the day, no matter what happened, it's just some coffee and cake. That's probably quite a healthy reflection to end the working day with. There are more important things in life.

The second cause of the burnout is the absence (until recently) of other areas of my life to focus on has led me to channel all my energies into my job. Many men joke about partners nagging, or complaining, but often they hold a mirror up to things we cannot see by ourselves. Being open-minded to such possibilities has allowed me to see that there are areas of my life that weren't up to scratch, that were right in front of me, that I should be channeling my energy into.

So, this should be simple, right? Work sensibly, and be more healthy in other areas of my life? Simples.

Not so fast. This all sounds suspiciously like a New Year's Resolution.

Neither of those two issues are traits I was born with. Through school and my undergraduate, I tried to get the best possible results with the least possible effort. While I was hardly the Prom King at either, I was a social person with multiple friendship circles. So how did I go from there, to where I've found myself the past few years? If I don't understand the journey from A to B then I stand little hope of changing it for good.

Tempus Fugit

A lot of people describe heading off to university as one of the most challenging periods of their lives. Making new friends, taking on new challenges, losing the network of support that's been there for you since you were born.

For me, the process of leaving university was far more challenging. Graduating in 2012 ruled out a return to Northern Ireland, and at the time a move to London to become a purveyor of bullshit in the City – the expected noble fate of any Durham graduate – did not appeal either.

So I decided to stay. In part, that decision was initially made in part to stay close to my then-girlfriend who was staying for another year. What I hadn't expected was this sudden sense of loss, as many of your friends who were as synonymous with the environment as the buildings themselves, disappeared. With social circles gone, and no degree to work towards, I took it upon myself to get a job.

While Northern Ireland was dire, the North East wasn't much better, and endless applications didn't bear much fruit. Eventually, I got offered a job at Costa Coffee – simply because I went there everyday (at different times) – so they eventually awkwardly asked if I had a job. I politely confirmed I did not. They asked if I would like one, I suspect out of pity. I accepted, and became a trainee barista.

It was actually a great job, but I wish I hadn't taken it. I formed a new social circle, including a new friend. I'm not sure a word exists to describe the type of friendship it was, but I will settle for dysfunctional. It was intensely good at times, but when it was bad, she and I were at each others throats. To this day, I've never met anyone quite like them – and I hope I never do again.

Anyway, things changed quickly, and I ended up living with them for a horrific six months after my flatmate very cunningly replaced me with their now-wife. No hard feelings, it was very smoothly done! After spending a year renting the spare room of a lovely woman with many cats, and hopping between a few jobs, I bought my own place. Then started another new job. Looking back, a lot happened in just three or four years.

I continued to work, relationships came and went, until in 2017 everything came crashing down. I won't go into details – this isn't the place – but it left me very badly and profoundly damaged. I was left with a pretty nasty cocktail of primary emotions: anger, regret, guilt, loss and fear. I lost a staggering amount of weight in a short space of time, was rendered barely functional by anxiety, and had to rebuild my life from ground zero.

Except I never did. I just kept going. By this stage I was in my current job, so I threw myself in to distract from the turmoil elsewhere. I continued on in an ultimately-doomed relationship which should have ended in 2017. I replaced lost friends with introversion and alcohol.

Introversion, by the way, is neither a fault nor a weakness. It's a perfectly natural and normal way of existing. A lot of pressure is placed on people to behave in a certain way in their lives, and it's not necessarily right. I suspect my brain was crying out for a period of genuine introversion, reflection and recovery – but I wasn't letting it happen.

It wasn't until 2020 that I finally gave my mind what it needed – a period of reflection and rebuilding. With the outbreak of Sars-Cov-2 and at the time the first lockdown was announced in March, my girlfriend and I were still living separately. We had never lived together, and had only been together for a few months. Faced with the prospect of both being housebound alone, we moved in together.

There's probably a great many people out there for whom that seems totally normal. Not for me. Living in a house I'd bought out from my ex-fiancee, and really only finding my feet by myself again, moving in together would have sent out massive alarm bells in my anxiety. Yet, because of Covid, I was remarkably open to the idea.

Then a curious thing happened. It actually worked. It worked great. I didn't have anxiety, I wasn't sat arguing with someone about petty things, and I was – wait for it – happy.  So much so that she moved in for good in November. We've even been redecorating. Or rather, decorating, since it wasn't really decorated in the first place. The excuse I will take to my grave is that due to my colour-blindness, I'm fairly conservative when it comes to colour choice. Begrudgingly I have to admit, so far, it's a huge improvement.

And so I've really stumbled into a good situation, more by accident than by design. Covid-19 – to some extent – took the choice out of the matter. Whilst I'm not advocating you conspire to let your inaction force you into action (you hear that, Boris?), it has allowed a great thing to happen in this particular instance. I've known for two years that I want to be with this person, I spent an entire year waiting and wooing (badly), but I'm quite certain I would still have found a way to f*** it up under normal circumstances. Once the choice was taken away, we made it work.

Don't get me wrong, it's also worked because it's a good thing and it's meant to work – and it would always have worked had I been this open-minded to things. The question is, would I have been that open-minded? Would I have let it work?

What it has allowed me to realise – in a kind of Damascean Epiphany – is that there are alternatives to how we choose to live. We all are blessed with free will, but how free are we, really? If you find yourself shackled by anxiety, worry or irrational fears, you aren't really living freely at all.

That's really been quite transformative. The entire lens through which I've viewed the world for the last decade – clouded by my own issues and damage – is nonsense. Living in fear, or with guilt, because of things that happened in the past doesn't atone for the past – it only restricts your future.

And what of the things for which you're trying to atone? Do they hang over you forever? Anyone who has met me for more than fifteen minutes is probably aware that Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld is a kind of modern-day Jesus, to me. In his lyrics, he says "The best thing you can do is show them that you're here; the best thing you can do is show them that you're so happy."

I couldn't agree more. I think you need to seek that happiness, and in doing so, creating that happiness is the only way to atone for the past. Maybe that's selfish, but sometimes you need a little selfishness here and there.

Moving On

I would certainly like to see my thirties in a more favourable light than my twenties, despite the best efforts of the Conservative government.

Again, the world can seem like an incredibly depressing place if you view yourself as static and immovable, with the world operating around you. Whilst that can be a very useful way of analysing life and the world, it's also dangerous in terms of leaving you so inflexible as to be vulnerable to the damage around you.

Perhaps it's a mode of thinking that derives from left-wing thinking – that kind of activist spirit that led me to marching outside St. James's Park in Newcastle in December 2010 when Chris Hughton got the boot; the idea that anyone can change the course of the world around them because they can stand for something and achieve something. The world is changeable, you are not.

Flip that on its head, and instead view the world as immovable. You can't change anything that happens outside of your control be it a government, a pandemic, or the actions of a person. All that you can control is yourself. Suddenly, the methods of changing your own circumstances for your own benefit become much more readily apparent. Am I pissed off we left the EU? Grab an Irish passport and move to Dublin. Do I hate right-wing governments? Pack my bags and move to Finland. Hell, if I even just hate the scenery in Middlesbrough, there's nothing stopping myself and my girlfriend from upping and leaving and relocating to the Cotswolds if we tried hard enough.

That kind of thinking is incredibly liberating. All through the last ten years I've doubted every choice I've made because what if it was wrong? What if something bad happened? What would people think of me when they found out?

These are all preconceived notions. Some are fatalism, some are driven by anxiety, and some are driven by my upbringing where what people locally thought of you was quite important.

But they are all preconceptions that should be challenged, and 2020 probably challenged every preconception I had. Sure, I can work all day to make the IT infrastructure of a gym chain better. But if the entire industry is shut down by government decree, there isn't much I can do about it. Sure, I could worry about what moving my girlfriend in might be like, but the world can suddenly make it a necessity rather than a what-if.

I understand how I got from A in 2015 to B today. I understand it was neither healthy nor happy. Yet without understanding why it happened, how it happened and coming to terms with how to move past it, I can't free myself from it.

I can't bring the pandemic to an end, no matter how often I retweet James O'Brien. I can't cause the Conservatives to lose the next election, no matter how much Brexit damages the country. What I can do is change how much these things effect me, personally. And that's incredibly liberating.

And so it will be possible – I think – to make my thirties far more fulfilling than my twenties, and certainly filled with better memories. I recognise that I need to stop fatalising everything, worrying about everything, and if something genuinely is bad? Just change it, whether it be my job, my house or any other aspect of my life.

Making new friends is a doddle when you're genuine. Living healthily is a doddle if you're not stricken by negative emotions that you need to numb out with fast food and alcohol. Most importantly, the past cannot be changed, but I can.

2020 might not be anyone's best year ever, but I hope – sincerely – that it will be the beginning of better years for me personally.

After all, it's just coffee and cake.