The Princess and Her Pills

If an earthquake is shallow enough it sometimes produces this big sonic boom before the rumbling begins. This happened the other week and woke me up from a dream I was having that I was back in the UK. Everyone was standing in the streets in a sinister half-light, staring at the sky. I was grabbing and shaking people but they wouldn’t respond. Anyway, the bang woke me up. Then the morning chorus, then the old-timey train that runs through San José with an offensively loud horn and then remembering that we’re in a pandemic. So I got out of bed. I’ve otherwise been sleeping like a baby here.

I hate the feeling of running on no sleep, walking in bright daylight when your limbs feel weak and flail like one of those windsock guys. Every time someone equates staying up very late and waking up at noon with insomnia, I want to push my thumb very firmly into their throat. Just enough so they’d choke slightly.

After an unholy stretch of insomnia, my doctor prescribed me Seroquel alongside an SSRI to knock me out at night. Seroquel are giant Hindenburg-shaped pills that act like tranquiliser darts. She gave one of those smile-grimaces before turning away and updating my record with “MAJOR DEPRESSIVE EPISODE”. I don’t find talking about medication particularly enlightening or helpful. But I have to say I did have a pang of annoyance that this was my Black Dog. I thought it’d be more running down sweeping hillsides in a Victorian gown in the rain and weeping. Not the inanity of taking pills and watching Eurotrash until 7 am.

What I did find enlightening, however, was the interaction of antidepressants with literally any other substance. Every time I’d get on it I’d think: “Woah there, you’re telling me these incredibly strong medications I’m taking will have an adverse effect on my rampant partying?! Who could’ve predicted this!!!” Don’t get me wrong, I have blacked out many times before but blackouts topped up with mood stabilisers are frightening. You lose days not hours. After one too many of those, I decided to French-exit the party.

Chemical crutches have always been a fixture of my life. My family, after a long day of being underpaid, were fond of liberating out-of-date benzodiazepines, that would otherwise have been incinerated, from the hospital wards as reparations. Booze was always a big one too. The only enduring story of my grandmother I remember is that she fell down the stairs in our house after sinking a bottle of vodka and somehow it was everyone else's fault. 

She moved to a care home in Margate when I was little and this was jokingly brought up during one visit. Afterwards, we sat there in silence. Each of those visits we’d deaden how bleak it was by going to this bookshop and getting a bag of hot mini doughnuts. On the car journey back, I’d think about how flat and grey the seafront was. That particular time, though, I remember getting this cool exquisite corpse book and being able to disappear into it. When we got home, I sat in bed with my Dad as he made up a funny story about a princess, drawing the characters as he told it on this pink paper, also swiped from the hospital ward. The princess had a long, conical hat like one of the illustrations in my cool new book.

That memory hit me in the chest when I found out he had collapsed and fallen badly. I wrongly assumed he was pissed up but it was his heart and I felt awful. We’d not been speaking after a bitter row and a wave of guilt came in the form of those snapshots of warmth with him. But, rather than talking to him, I rifled around for a Xanax I knew was hidden in my makeup case that I’d pointedly “forgotten” to throw out. Each time I told myself I couldn’t get obliterated it got much worse before it got better. 

Around 2011 and I was slotting in neatly to a demand that was emerging for hard-partying, ethnically-ambiguous and deeply insecure women wearing American Apparel. I played up to it. Think Loaded-era ladette vibes of keeping up with the boys but more mentally unstable. I’d also started making more industry contacts and been picked up for screen tests. I’ve thought about how, if I wanted to, I could blow the doors open on the many creeps that’d encourage you to show a bit more tit and ‘loosen up’ before going on camera.

By the time I’d got the hang of this obnoxious exoskeleton I’d built for myself I was working at VICE. It wouldn’t be fair to say that one place amplified my behaviour because my partying had already become out-of-pocket, but it definitely didn’t help. It was a company with very young staff, doing work far beyond their experience and management greedy for everything to grow as fast as possible. From the moment I set foot in that office, my proverbial stock went down, very much like being lured into a cult and forgotten about as soon as you joined.

I found the treadmill of chasing ‘likes’ and viral content exhausting. I wasn't good at it and it felt awful. But I knew this so desperately tried to make in-roads into video production. Even then you were on high alert of ideas being snatched away from you and handed to someone else for “the good of the company”. At that time the very specific sneering, ceaselessly cynical VICE brand also opened you up to a shitload of abuse. I have no idea if male editors had the same but I was regularly on the receiving end of odious, pigtail-pulling messages. It was hard not to absorb it all and become a dickhead yourself.

As the company ballooned in popularity, the level of depravity that became accepted went from being because of its edgelord roots to a need to blow off steam. I rarely socialised with anyone from work besides office drinks raging out of control. Which also happened to be essential to your career. Serious conversations about your future happened in cramped toilet cubicles while waiting for your share of the gram. So my perception of what was ‘okay’ was warped long after I left.

One infamous Christmas party I went to, an executive gave me a wrap of cocaine and a crisp £50 note to go and fetch him a pack of cigarettes like an obedient dog. At the time I was impressed. Had I known that bottles of Jägermeister would be our end of year bonus I would’ve spat at him. You’d hear stories of staff overdosing or being quietly placed in rehab and be kind of enamoured by the drama of it all. Which is a complicated concept to explain now without having to scream “these were DIFFERENT TIMES!”

There were many occasions where I knew I’d gone too far. I remember getting home as the sun came up, undressing and just staring at myself topless in the mirror. There was a baggy of something, I’m not even sure what, stuck to my boob with sweat where I’d been hiding it in my bra. It was the kind of nudity where you’re very aware of the sack of bones and blood you inhabit and how you’re destroying it. A sleep and a Dominos pizza later, however, and I chalked it up to a bad comedown and was back on it the next weekend.

When I was finally fired I had to be escorted out of the office to stop me sprinting back to my laptop to send a “Viva la revolución!” email. So I just kinda floated to a pub. It’s funny; of all the times I turned up at that office absolutely steaming I, instead, got culled for doing some mild socialism. By the time people came to commiserate I was openly and awkwardly choking back tears. But I wasn’t as upset about the firing as I was about the prospect of having to reintegrate into polite society. How do you go from the Last Days of Rome to a solitary pint at 5 pm?

I will caveat this next part by saying I know anonymous meetings have saved people's lives, but they were not right for me. I started speaking to an old hook-up in the hopes of getting some insight into meetings. It turns out it was all he could talk about, it enveloped his entire personality. A constant stream of energy drinks and cigarettes interspersed with talking about how revolting a turn off it is when women are wasted. Later on, he chastised me for Tweeting about attending a meeting. Not from a moral high ground but more that I wasn’t allowed to take part in the new club he’d found. He was absolutely correct that, by way of them being anonymous, I shouldn’t have done that. But then I also thought about him and what a cruel person he’d been. How revolting a turn off it is when men take advantage of women who can barely stand and then proceed to have no self-awareness of it.

I carried on going, infrequently and reluctantly, but I found the all or nothing of it worked against me. When I would fall I did so spectacularly. Then I made the mistake of giving my number to someone I met at a meeting. Within about a week of friendly but innocuous texts, I received a picture of his penis and that’s when I knew I needed to take a different route. One problem at a time, y’know? Though they are inexorably twisted together, tackling an equally tumultuous relationship with men was a whole other Pandora’s box I didn’t want to crack open just yet.

So I carried on alone and discovered people would still ask me if I was on something when I was being sweaty and chaotic all by myself. I’ve enjoyed getting reacquainted with people I thought had dropped off the radar but had in fact also stopped treating their body like a dumpster. But I’ve not enjoyed other friends' flippancy towards a process they feel should be a straight line and never is. 

Moving away has provided a certain amount of anonymity for me to start some hard work away from pitying looks. If there was ever a better time to go completely off the rails again it would be now: jobless in a new country and feeling useless in quarantine. But it’s been serene. 

I’m approaching two years drug free. I don’t smoke, apart from a short-lived fondness for “aromatherapy vapes”. I don’t stay up past sunrise listening to people talk about obscure Italo Disco. I do have the occasional glass of sangria with my neighbours but it’s followed by a four-hour nap rather than waking up in a strange flat. I exercise when I can be bothered, Skype my therapist and frequently acknowledge that I escaped relatively unscathed. I mean, psychologically fucked but otherwise healthy. The steepest battle has been nursing my wounded pride. I get shame-flashbacks at my behaviour and it’s been a bitter pill (lol, pills!) to swallow that I was in such a state people from my past may not want anything to do with me.

The only thing I can compare it to is when you have a crush on someone and one day it just evaporates. They become a goblin overnight and you wonder what you ever saw in them. I know this is fragile and I know this could all change, of course, but for the time being, I’m grateful for some peace while the rest of the world seems to be losing its head