The Mirror World of Melody Black

AUTHOR’S NOTE

‘You have a choice about what you put into the public domain.’ That’s what Dr Barbara tells Abby quite early on in this novel, and usually I’d agree with her, or at least share her implicit concerns. I’m basically quite a private person. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, and, as a rule, I find writing as someone else more fun, more comfortable, and often much easier than writing as myself. But I’m also aware that there are certain subjects in fiction that are almost guaranteed to provoke curiosity regarding the relationship between an author’s work and an author’s life. Mental illness, I suspect, is one such subject. Put more simply, I can’t imagine publishing this book without being asked at some point – more likely many points – to talk about my own experience of mental illness.

So I’ve decided to talk about it here, as briefly as I can without leaving out any of the relevant details.

Back in January 2009, I went nuts. Not Abby nuts – I wasn’t on a psychiatric ward and I didn’t want to kill myself – but her story certainly has its roots in my own. If you were to reduce our experiences to a list of symptoms (depression, insomnia, hypomania), then the two of us have a lot in common. And, like Abby, I can mark the precise moment when it started; or, to be more accurate, I can tell you the short-term trigger.

It was New Year’s Eve 2008. I stayed up for the best part of three days. I took half a dozen ecstasy pills, and God knows how much speed. Unsurprisingly, this was followed by a pretty awful comedown, and by 5 January I was feeling extremely depressed. It wasn’t the first time; I’d been depressed off and on since my late teens, and I think the weeks leading up to New Year hadn’t been great either. But what was different this time was that it led, very swiftly, to a long period of hypomania. I went to sleep sad and anxious, and I woke up feeling good almost beyond description. At the same time, my thoughts were moving so fast I could barely keep up with them. It was as if my brain had gone into overdrive and was processing ten times more information, but with no conscious effort on my part.

For the next week, I didn’t sleep for more than three or four hours a night, because suddenly that was all the sleep I needed. I kept waking up at two or three in the morning with a head bursting with ideas and so much energy I didn’t know what to do with it. Then, at some point, I decided I was going to walk around the coast of Great Britain. Here’s a letter I wrote about it on 13 January:

Dear Sir or Madam,

This may be a strange request, but here goes.

For some time now my girlfriend and I have been planning to walk around the coast. Unfortunately, we are quite broke – a situation that I’d imagine is not uncommon in those who entertain dreams of walking around the coast. Consequently, we’re looking for corporate sponsorship.

The coast of Great Britain is approximately 5,000 miles long. Based on the assumption that we can walk 25 miles per day every day, I should think the entire walk will take 200 days, or just under 7 months. Where there is no direct coastal path or beach, we will keep as close to the coast as physically possible.

As to how much this will cost, that’s harder to estimate. Obviously, we’ll be camping a lot of the time, but wherever possible we will stay in B&Bs or hostels. Added to this, there is of course the cost of basic equipment and food supplies for 7 months. I might be underestimating, but I think we can probably do it for around £12–15K – and of course, costs could be significantly lower if we find that people are willing to help out with free meals, beds etc. en route. Any money we secure over and above our basic costs will go to charity.

If we are successful in securing the necessary funds, we hope to set off on Saturday March 21st (the vernal equinox) in order to maximise the amount of daylight available to us. Upon completing the walk, I plan to write a book (provisionally entitled Walking Round the Coast).

Just so there are no misapprehensions, I want to make it clear that we are not seasoned walkers (I doubt I’ve ever walked for more than two hours in one go). And neither of us has ever done or attempted anything like this before. But we are very determined. I assure you that should we secure enough funding we will complete the walk.

I don’t know if you might see this as good PR or free advertising or anything like that. Possibly you think this whole idea is completely insane. However, any help you might be able to provide would be sincerely, sincerely appreciated.

Yours faithfully,

Gavin Extence.

I don’t think this letter requires much in the way of explanation, but there are perhaps a few points worth noting.

1) The third sentence is an outright lie: my girlfriend and I hadn’t been planning to walk around the coast for some time. I’d sprung the idea on her a few days earlier, but I didn’t want my corporate sponsors to know this.

2) I couldn’t see any reason why people wouldn’t want to pay me £15,000 to stay in B&Bs for seven months, and even if I couldn’t raise the money before I set out, I didn’t think this would be a problem. I had this overwhelming sense that I could walk into any hotel, B&B or private residence in the country, explain what I was doing, and be certain of a free bed for the night.

3) I was feeling extremely persuasive at the time. I’d already half persuaded my girlfriend to come with me, although, in hindsight, I’m sure a large part of this was her trying to buy some time to rein me in. (Originally, I told her that I was going to set off in three weeks, rather than two months, and even that was beginning to seem an unnecessary delay.) But beyond this, I think that there must also have been something quite infectious about my mood at the time. I was so effusive, so self-confident all of a sudden. I had myself completely convinced that walking around the coast was the sole purpose of my life at this point. ‘If I don’t walk round the coast,’ I told my girlfriend, ‘I know it’s something I’ll always regret.’

This was the first of many odd conversations I had with friends and family, although they didn’t seem that odd at the time. I remember, in particular, a talk I had with my mum just after I’d told her what I was planning. She asked me what I was going to do for food; I replied that I was going to eat mainly bananas – because they were cheap, portable, and I’d read an article somewhere that said they were packed full of slow-release energy. I wasn’t joking, and I think if my mum had realized this at the time – I mean, really understood the extent to which I thought ten bananas a day was a sensible diet – she’d have dragged me to the doctor without a moment’s hesitation.

Instead, most of my family thought I was just being a bit eccentric, and suspected, I’m sure, that this out-of-the-blue coast plan would die a very quick death.

In actual fact, it died quite a slow death. There was a part of me that knew right from the beginning that my brain was not operating in the way it usually did. I knew I was manic – how could I not? But, like Abby, my big fear at this point was that if I told anyone how I felt, they’d want to make it stop, and I had no intention of letting this happen.

So I spent a lot of time suppressing the weirder ideas I was getting, and then, very slowly – it took weeks and weeks – my thoughts started to slow down. My mood dipped, dropped, and then plummeted. I became depressed for a couple of months, then got better, then better than better, then much worse again. This went on for the best part of eighteen months, until, in January 2011, I started keeping a mood diary – as I still felt I needed to collect some ‘objective’ proof that something was seriously wrong with me. I rated my mood three times a day – morning, afternoon and evening – giving myself marks out of ten. After a month, my average score was something like 3.1. At this point I went to my GP and was put on Prozac, which I’ve been taking pretty much ever since.

Abby has a diagnosis of type two bipolar disorder. I don’t have this diagnosis; but I suspect that’s because I’ve never told a doctor what I’ve now set down in these pages. I’ve only ever talked about the depression, because this is what felt awful and debilitating.

Of course, the whole thing is complicated by the drugs, too. But I can tell you that I’ve since had a couple of hypomanic episodes – not as serious as the first, but identical symptoms – that had nothing to do with drugs. I haven’t taken anything illegal for a very long time now. I came to the conclusion that I need to be very careful when it comes to anything that’s likely to affect my mood. I take my low dose of Prozac every day and this seems to be enough to keep me happy; and if my mood starts to slide too far either way, I know the things I need to do to help myself (exercise, healthy diet, plenty of rest, meditation, extra time spent with my children and cat). My wife looks after me as well; she has become very good at spotting the early warning signs.

In short, I think that I’ve been very lucky. Whatever my problems, I know they are relatively mild in the wider context of mental illness. There are many thousands of people, like Abby, who have been through highs and lows far more dangerous and damaging than my own.

In the past year, I’ve only been mildly manic a couple of times, and one of these followed on from rereading the section of this book that deals with Abby’s mania (chapters 9–14). It took me several hours and lots of sleep to feel calm again. But it also made me hopeful that I might have written something close to what I intended to write: something truthful.