CHAPTER 17

THE TIP OF A RATHER LOVELY ICEBERG

On 3rd September 2015, hundreds of people took to the streets to walk a mile in each other’s shoes. There was no raging against the machine – just a bunch of folk walking and talking about mental health issues and what that meant from their perspective, in five different towns and cities.

This – we hoped – was going to be a distillation of what is fabulous about Walk a Mile and the people I’d met so far around the UK. It was a simple message really: that people are interested and interesting. That folk, when put in the same social space, are very quick to rejoice in their similarities and put their perceived differences to one side. This isn’t rocket science.

At the end of the day, my face ached because I’d been smiling so much.

My role for the day had been made so incredibly simple by the wonderful, hardworking Eleanor from SeeMe and the rest of their dedicated team. My role? It was pretty much to ponce about, chatting, shaking hands and hugging folk. It’s a hard job, but someone’s gotta do it.

People I’d never met before came up to me with smiles that suggested we were long lost friends. They could have been any one of the following kinds of folk:

Figure 1: Walk a Mile Participants.

But their only difference on the day was whether they had a green smiley face on their shirt, or a red one.

We started with a simple question: ‘What brings you here today?’And it all just bowled along from there.

As well as the lovely buzz of the event evolving around me, some of my highlights were seeing the lovely Teen and Stewart, along with a few other friends I’d made along the way. They’d all continued to support me in a variety of ways as I trundled around Scotland.

I chatted to a woman who saw her spell in prison as a positive experience, because that’s where she’d first received her diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and, as a result, had started therapy to help manage it. She’d brought her social worker along for the ride.

This same social worker spoke to me about her own struggle with depression – much to the surprise of the woman who’d invited her. Clearly we have more similarities than differences – you just have to scratch the surface.

Earlier, I’d walked with Jamie Hepburn, the Scottish Minister for sport, health improvement, and mental health. It was a situation similar to those ‘what would you do with three wishes?’ scenarios. The one where your third wish is invariably, ‘I’ll have three more wishes, please.’ We sorted that out very early on – Jamie agreed to meet with me at a later date to talk more about all things mental health.

I liked his trusting disposition – right from the start he agreed for our conversation to be broadcast to the world using the periscope app on my phone. That, for me, was a pretty good place to start.

I ended the day talking with a woman who wasn’t wearing one of our t-shirts. It turned out she’d just popped out to buy some hummus.

She’s seen our merry band wandering down the Royal Mile, liked the cut of our collective jibs, and joined in.

That’s the Walk a Mile way.

We appeared on BBC Radio Scotland, Scottish television, and in the Edinburgh News. We’d really managed to make a noise about mental health.

But this was just the tip of an increasingly growing, rather lovely iceberg. An iceberg that includes you lot.