[9] Dinosaurs
With all this going on I was conscious that I was missing work. I had all the official papers from all the right doctors, but I felt like I was letting people down. Not the horrible HR guy who kept sending me emails telling me I wasn’t entitled to this or that, but other people in my team and, in particular, my boss.
A few weeks went by and the whole funky-eye thing partially
cleared itself, in the sense that I could now see again, but I still couldn’t
quite believe what I was seeing. It was like I was daydreaming the whole time,
as if my brain had removed me from society somehow in case I couldn’t handle it;
which I suppose I couldn’t. I was still having what turned out to be panic
attacks, including the violent shaking and shuddering first experienced when I
was shipped off to my Dad’s for two weeks. And I was still terrified of
everything; people, places, noises, dark rooms… absolutely everything put the
fear of God in to me. I had no idea if this was as bad as it would get, or if
it was only the beginning, but I kept telling myself that this was the bottom
of the trough and at least the bottom of that trough was level from here. It
was pretty bad, I thought, but at least this is the bottom of the trough. Or so
I kept telling myself.
I thought I should probably meet with my boss to give him an
update. I had been fairly removed from everything to do with work and I wanted
to show him that I wasn’t dead, or completely shot to pieces.
We met in the downstairs conference room, just through those
posh glass doors I had bundled out of a few weeks earlier in complete certainty
that I would die any minute. I chose the conference room because I couldn’t
face going upstairs, walking through the bull-pen style office, and sitting in
his office with colleagues ogling and whispering outside. They would still ogle
and whisper – people always do - but at least I wouldn’t be able to see them
from the conference room.
My boss, we’ll call him John, settled in to one of the
chairs, smiled, and started chatting away in his friendly manner. But something
struck me as different today. John was, at heart, a sales guy. The kind of
sales guy who says all the right things at all the right times to make you buy
all the right things, and for the first time, I felt like I was being spoken to
like a customer. His salesy complements and smooth demeanour were plucked from
the ‘Relationship Building 101’ chapter of any one of the sales manuals which
littered his office, and I got the feeling I always get when talking to a salesman;
like I was being caressed and cajoled under false pretences in order that I buy
something I didn’t really need for a price I couldn’t really afford.
He asked how I was and I told him the truth; I was having a
bad time of it, but I liked my job and wanted to come back as soon as possible.
‘I know what you’re going through’, John said.
I was interested to see how he knew this.
‘Countless times I would sit up in the middle of the night
on the phone to my son at University. He would be crying down the phone. He
would have a panic attack two or three times a week’.
Interesting, I thought. Seems similar. Perhaps he does
understand.
‘No reason for it; or no reason we could find’.
I looked in to his eyes as he was explaining this, and as he
continued I saw something in him change. Any hope of him understanding and
sympathising was snuffed out quicker than it had appeared.
‘I couldn’t understand how he could be so sad. I told him to
pull himself together’.
In his eyes I could see disappointment. Sadness.
John talked about his son, the panic attacks, and everything
else, and I could see he was angry about all of it happening. He was ashamed of
his son. How could his son be this
pathetic? How could his son – a
member of his family, intended to carry on the family name – be so useless and
so shameful? Why couldn’t his son just pull himself together?
As he spoke, his disdain for his son – and now for me -
became more evident. To him, stress, anxiety, and mental health was a wholly
imaginary term dreamt up by lily-livered, left-leaning, liberal creative types
to explain their lack of confidence or testicular fortitude. This type of thing
didn’t affect real men; there’s no way it could be in any way debilitating to
anyone but the most pathetic of individuals, and the fact that both his son,
and his recently hired, oft-championed new superstar were affected must have
indicated a failing on his part.
His son had let him down. Now I had let him down. And he was
angry about that.
Only once before had I seen this kind of anger before, only
once had I seen someone struggling to come to terms with something they fully
failed to understand, and something they believed was utterly wrong; when a
closet homophobe discovered their eldest child was gay. In the face of dinosaurs
like John, the sheer size and monstrosity of the mountain mental health
campaigners must climb is unbelievable.
I didn’t know much about my situation; the panic, the fear,
the anxiety were all things I would have to learn about over the coming months.
But from that moment I did know that I was finished in that job with that
company.
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