Chapter 5

‘Pretending to Be Something I’m Not in Pursuit of Green, Rectangular Pieces of Paper’

The art of the autodidact is very simple; learn what you want, when you want, and never feel as though you have to learn anything you don’t want to because that in itself has the potential to kill your desire to learn altogether. In my experience I have found that when I study solely towards subjects that are of interest to me, then I am able to more easily retain the information I soak up, which is a no-brainer I’m sure. It’s more fun this way, and a lot more ground can be covered as of course when we love the learning process we get through so much so quickly. One must never be ashamed of their ignorance either, for we are all ignorant about not just some things, but most things, and this of course includes even the most educated of people, and this may be humbling or emboldening for one to realise. One cannot refrain at this point from invoking a quote attributed to Aristotle: ‘The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.’

A lack of curiosity is a much bigger sin in my opinion. Some people show no interest at all in History or Science, which I can just about get my head around, but then there are those those who are so insular that they may never even experience the urge to question, much less explore, a culture outside their own; something I personally find upsetting, as I can’t help but feel that such people, despite their indifference, are missing out. That being said, this is a great way for me to practise not becoming mired in a solipsistic worldview, as maybe the people I’m irrationally frustrated with for not being into all the things that I’m into would feel the same if I didn’t show the slightest interest in what they’re into. Sometimes we have to make a real effort to understand new concepts or things we may instinctively or automatically denounce. I happen to be wholly uneducated in the field of ‘plumbing’. Does this make me less of a human? Does this make me deficient in some respect, deserving of criticism or perhaps even disabled? I’m sure if, by some fluke of fate, I were to find myself at a little get-together which consisted of exclusively plumbers I’d be tempted to go as far as to describe myself as ‘plumbically challenged’. I wouldn’t know of anything they’d be talking about for a start, and I’d be hindered further by my manual ineptitude and total disinterest in the subject, as the last thing I feel I was born to do, is plumb. I may well look as though I’m ‘slow’ in this context given my relative ignorance, but it would really just boil down to me being somewhere I didn’t want to be, having to make conversation to people with whom I have nothing in common. Luckily though, I would be able to leave whenever I felt like it.

Imagine how many children feel like this at school? Do they have the choice to opt out if they want to? Of course, there is homeschooling, but some parents feel they are incapable of educating their children by themselves, and for others, due to work constraints, it is too impractical. So what options do we have for children who don’t fit the system and can’t access their potential in ‘the conventional way’ but have latent talents that reside within them, fertile and ready, just waiting to be tapped into? I know I was lucky to have come across a person like Felicity, and I wish everyone who experiences the world like I do could have that opportunity also. One thing I realised though, is that I may have had around me many human angels who held me up in times of adversity, but in the end, I had to do it myself, as I knew I couldn’t be wrapped in cotton wool forever, and had I stayed at ‘NatureKids’ for too long then I would’ve surely become institutionalised. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and one must be prepared for it. I learned to trust in my inner compass to get me where I needed to be and to steer me clear of places to which my temperament would not lend itself. I then realised how when I was at ‘school’, and later at ‘work’, my inner compass was always going nuts, which I mistakenly believed meant there was something wrong with me, when really it was only the environment that was wrong for me.

I can remember a time when I was travelling around the United States and a lovely couple in Portland, Oregon kindly hosted me for a couple of nights. The woman happened to have a diagnosis of ‘ADHD’ and I told her that I did too. I came downstairs one morning to ask her if I could do some laundry. That was all I wanted to know, yet three hours later I was still there in the same spot. The two of us had enjoyed, and lost ourselves entirely in, the most scintillating and discursive conversation where we must have chewed over no less than 15 topics at awesome speed with utmost ardour. At the end, she said something to me which I can’t remember verbatim, but it was something she put across thus:

‘Wow, you can really tell you have ADHD by how you are able to keep up with a conversation that bounces from one subject to another at such a rapid pace.’ After a brief moment of cogitation, I replied:

‘Isn’t it interesting how when people like you or I are at school, we are the ones who supposedly have a “disorder”? If there happened to be someone present for our conversation who happened to be “neurotypical”, would they really struggle to keep up? And if so would that make them the “disabled” ones, just like we are in certain situations?’

As it turns out, PDA-related problems don’t stop at school. In fact, for me they got much worse when I thought I’d give ‘work’ (cringe…shudder…) a shot. Euuurgh, if there’s one thing I cannot stand it’s that infernal word used in that context. Well, that might be a lie actually, as ‘money’ isn’t too far behind, and then of course we have ‘labels’ and ‘normal’. These concepts hold such little meaning for me. I promise you that you’ll have a clearer understanding of why this is by the end of this chapter, sensitive reader.

***

Apathetic, uncouth, disrespectful, oversensitive, arrogant, selfish and vain. Just a few words I’ve heard people older than me use to describe the millennial generation. I think it would be a rather lofty claim to say that these traits are exclusively millennial, but might we possess them more abundantly than people of other generations? I believe most of it is down to perception. I have been on the receiving end of many of these linguistic bullets in the past, and more often than not when I’ve been at, what one might call, ‘work’, where there seems to be a preponderance of ‘arrogance’ bullets fired at me. Do I really believe I’m superior to other people? Well, you only have my word for it, but no, I don’t. Though I can see why some people may assume this at times. The reality is that most of the time at school, and virtually all of the time at work, I couldn’t have felt more alienated, incompetent and inferior. What I have found is that many people, particularly employers, perceive my behaviour as arrogant when really I’m just refusing to engage in something, or with someone, I don’t chime with. What my employers didn’t realise is that most of my days at work are spent in survival mode, whereby all of my energy is used to protect myself from any oncoming fire and to parry the insane impulses I get. My mood is volatile. Some days I’m not as vocal or as sociable as I am on other days, which may be more noticeable in an overall animated personality. This doesn’t mean I’m being rude or cold, it means I’m probably processing a lot, and quite possibly overwhelmed, therefore time and space are needed for me to recharge my batteries. That being said, I really don’t expect any establishment to keep up with all of these stipulations. It’s no wonder really why so many people like myself struggle to hold down jobs. We’re just wired up differently, and, thereby, unable to cope with the sensory minefield that is the workplace like ‘neurotypicals’ are.

In the workplace, one is expected to uphold a certain ethic. So here we can immediately see how someone like myself will incur a problem, because if something doesn’t feel right to me then I find it nearly impossible to do it. ‘Can you change the light bulb?’ or ‘Can you be polite to customers?’ could be like someone asking me to murder several family members before taking a bullet myself. There are so many things I need to be mindful of when I get a normal job so as to not lose my mind. Being in a busy place filled with gaggles of people, bright lights and maddening noises (and I’m not just talking loud noises such as drills, doors slamming and fire alarms which would annoy most anyone. I’m talking about noises that most people wouldn’t pay the slightest attention to: the weak, lethargic whirring of the heater or air conditioning coming on, the scuffles and squeaks of rubber shoes bouncing and dragging along the floor, people, who may have a cold, wheezing or clearing a tickle in their throat; believing they’re doing so on the sly, but, little do they know, are actually assaulting my eardrums. As crazy as this sounds, I take genuine offence to such noises as if they are brilliantly formed insults designed to crush my will to live), is enough to throw me at the best of times, but when I actually have to ‘work’ (do something for someone else) it makes me want to die.

Imagine if, for the rest of your life, you were forced to work as a toilet cleaner but you were only allowed to use your tongue? Well that’s a little how I sometimes feel when I am faced with working the simplest and most mundane of jobs. I am not only pouring my efforts into doing a job properly like everyone else is, but I am simultaneously battling to keep a hold of my sanity. I have to adopt the ways, which seem so unnatural to me, of a species with whom I do not identify. Triggers are scattered around everywhere in the workplace and in the privacy of my inner world I have to be like a ninja swiftly dodging these triggers. Even small chores for other people outside of the workplace have been ridiculously difficult for me in the past. When I was 14 at Felicity’s, I would occasionally be asked if I could sweep the floor after lunch to which I’d reply, ‘NOPE! I’m allergic to sweeping, Felicity!’ There are many more little demands (spoken and unspoken) like this which other people would fail to notice, yet for me they are forms of harassment and violation.

Let’s use being a shop assistant as an example. I swear every time I apply for said job I am invariably confronted with something like this on an ad in a shop window or on the internet: ‘We are a business who pride ourselves on our high standards, professional attitude and exceptional customer service skills. Do YOU feel you have what it takes to be part of our brilliant team?’ … Ummm, f*** off? So that’s the first hurdle I have to listlessly flop over. Then I am, for reasons beyond the realms of human understanding, expected to fall in love with every person who walks through the door in the most contrived, toadying and bollock-wrenching way imaginable. The process of falling in love, and the people with whom we naturally click, is largely beyond our control; it certainly cannot be switched on and off at will. I have no doubt in my mind that there are among us human males and females of such exquisite and almost ineffable beauty and grace that one would find it hard not to either lick them or genuflect before their majestic presence as they amble towards us. I do find it hard not to lick such people as it happens, but if I were to do such a thing at ‘work’, I’d be told off for it… ‘Be yourself,’ they say, ‘be kind and loving,’ they say, ‘it will be fine,’ they say… But there are also among us some right jumped up c***s. If my employers think for one moment that I will show the grumbling windbags of the world infinite compassion after they strut in like they own the goddamn place and treat everyone else like crap then they have another thing coming. What always baffles me is how the nature of most jobs is to essentially be another person, and whenever I stick to my principles and refuse to be fake it’s somehow seen as a crime? The customer is always right my anal cord.

This may be prevalent in other PDAers too, but I can only speak for myself: sometimes I have urges to override and overthrow, not because I want to be in charge but because I want everyone to be on an equal level. At school I would often implement mutiny and rend a class to shreds due to my allergic reaction to the teacher’s authority. It would be my way of pushing down their heads and saying, ‘Go on. Down you go. There’s a good fella. We’re all equal here,’ like how water will always level itself out. One time I was not so unbending in my tendency to destroy was in Brockwood during Louise’s English class, and this was because she had no air of superiority whatsoever, therefore, I had no reason to equalise the set-up. I’m sure most of us are aware of how some managers can be dictatorial and complacent assholes. There seems to be (at least in my experience) a more prominent line of distinction between a manager and an employer than there is between a teacher and a student, and for this reason, the equalisation process can be much more agonising at ‘work’ than it is at ‘school’.

That opening was a little longer than I had intended it to be, so let us pull up our sleeves and get to ‘work’ then, shall we?

***

Now I’m not going to expatiate on every single job I’ve ever had because there are too many of them and it would take far too much time. The last thing I want to do is bore you, my lovely reader. I will, however, with brevity yet density, talk about the ones that stand out among the pile.

The first proper job I had was when, at 16 years old, I worked as a ‘model’ for a clothing company – let’s call it Huckleton. The inverted commas being the focal part of that sentence, as the word ‘model’ had been hijacked and abused out of its very meaning by the company. What they really meant was ‘shop assistant’, though this doesn’t quite contain the sheer ostentation that ‘model’ does. Huckleton is distinguished by its Californian, beachy and surfer dude ‘vibe’.

I was scouted by Huckleton while shopping there with my mother one day in the summer of 2009. After entering one of the changing rooms to try something on, a manager approached my mother and asked her, ‘Was that your son? Is he looking for a job? Because he has the look we’re looking for!’ How very flattering. I was, as we say in the UK, ‘chuffed’, although attending the group interview was enough to arrest my tumescent ego. This congregation of about 20 people was comprised of those, like myself, who were ‘fortunate’ enough to have been blessed with the anatomy that lends itself to commercialism, along with the applicants: mere hapless mortals who had not been scouted yet felt ballsy enough to try their luck at becoming part of this exclusive club.

We were asked individually to define ‘diversity’. I can remember one girl, bless her heart, suffered the excruciating ignominy of not knowing what the word meant. I really felt for her. One could easily tell she had been scouted though, as she still got the job. This is more or less how I deduced who had been scouted and who hadn’t, because if they had been then they were getting the job and that was that. It didn’t matter how abysmal their answer to the diversity question was, and it didn’t matter how little they contributed to the interview thereafter, they had the job the moment they were sighted by the prowling manager. The applicants, on the other hand, weren’t necessarily automatically out of the contest because they hadn’t been approached, but put it this way, it would’ve helped them greatly to pass the interview if they happened to embody the ‘Huckleton look’. The utter cheek of a business so steeped in shallowness as to only recruit those who they thought were good looking enough, and to then ask their applicants, most of whom would not get the job, how they would define diversity is irony of an inconceivable magnitude. This was one ‘exclusive club’ I did not feel in the least bit fortunate or proud to be a part of. I thought the interview was surplus to requirement, and I would have castrated myself to hear Huckleton’s explicit admission that they were only interested in people based on their looks, notwithstanding the boundless unprofessionalism that would’ve brought them into disrepute. I think it’s obvious at this point that I didn’t really like it all that much. Still, I was two years shy of adulthood, and according to gentle folk older than I, namely my father, it was high time to start making my own money and to begin contemplating on what my ‘career’ was going to be, whatever the hell that meant…

I have always been monetarily challenged, and for as far back as I can remember, the very concept of money has been anathema to me. I don’t know what it’s all about. Whenever I am forced to think about money at length it makes me carsick, and whenever I look at the world and everyone indefatigably engaged in the rat race, I feel sad and despondent. Why this is I’m not too sure. Being from a wealthy and patrilineally conservative family, I always felt it was my destiny to one day degentrify myself beyond recognition by perhaps living alone and naked in some remote cave subsisting on nuts and fruits. I hated being known as the ‘rich kid’ which I was so often referred to as in my childhood, mostly because I knew it was all bulls***. Opulence and prosperity may provide a sense of comfort that people of lower social standing may lack and long for, but it cannot be, in any case, a means for attaining long-term, or true happiness. Granted, some people could definitely do with having a great deal more money so that they needn’t worry about feeding their children or paying their bills on time, but I’m talking about how at the other end of the scale, the lifestyle so many would kill for really isn’t as rosy and exhilarating as one might presume. I am saying this because I’ve been there myself. I know what it’s like to have more than one needs. I’ve seen what having excess money does to some people, in the way it can insidiously divest one of substance and sense. Allow me to restate: I am not in any way pronouncing that the first world whimpers of the spoilt and rich should have priority over people in the less developed world whose lives are ravaged by war, corruption and poverty, I am merely disabusing people of the lie that the rich are among the happiest and most functional life forms on the planet.

Do you want to know who the happiest people are that I have ever met? I travelled to Kenya once when I was 16 for my mother’s birthday. For a week we stayed right in the heart of the Maasai Mara, a vast national reserve contiguous with the Serengeti in Tanzania. While exploring one day we came across a small tribe. Now, these people had nothing, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing bar the clothes on their backs and their small huts which were, for the record, made entirely out of cow dung. I’m talking as primitive as it gets. I scanned my horizons and couldn’t see any water sources for miles and wondered how the hell they all managed to stay alive. I noticed how one boy wasn’t wearing any trousers or underwear and wondered if he had any more clothes at all, and after contorting my body in a most compromising position so that I could fit through one of the tiny entrances to their huts, I took in a hearty whiff and wondered how on earth they could bear the perpetual pungent odour of cow faeces. I wondered all of this, of course, with my Western mind. After a quick nuance in perspective, I looked around again to see something a little different: everyone was smiling sweetly, dancing joyfully, playing mirthfully and replete with unconditional love for every soul in the village. These people knew nothing of iPhones, Xboxes or anything else to do with modern technology; they derived enjoyment, simply, from each other’s splendid company, from their sharp imaginations that were unvitiated by trash TV and social media, or from leading an active lifestyle of hard work and running around on the planes. I wondered how the children of the tribe would react if they were witness to the things some Western children do, such as throw a tantrum after their parents refuse to buy them another toy at a department store, and they could only dream of, much less comprehend, the relative luxury of having to acquiesce to their mother’s homemade fish pie and boiled runner beans for dinner, with the knowledge they would be scarfing down a greasy Big Mac and fries had they been in Dad’s care.

I have never felt so moved by a group of people in all my life as I did when I met the tribe of the Maasai Mara. I can remember thinking, ‘So this is the secret to a happy life?’ Granted, these people were probably at a higher fatality risk than ‘civilised’ folk due to the extreme weather conditions and the multitude of predators that were lurking nearby, but they still, nonetheless, had more heart and love for life than anyone I had ever met, and probably will meet. On a final note, as a person who once consciously decided to adopt a life of minimalism, and having progressed through this fine art for a number of years now, I have been delighted to discover, in a bit of an ironic twist, that the less I have, the richer I am.

On my first day at Huckleton I arrived for my shift at 8am on the dot. I have always been quite punctual, and expect others to be as well. My manager that day arrived five minutes late which I was furious about.

‘How very dare he?!’ I spluttered to my mother on the phone who exhorted me not to say anything to him. It pains me to say that I went against my mother’s wishes and gave the manager a jolly good piece of my mind when he finally arrived. Not a great start; from him I mean.

I kind of did my own thing during my brief stint at Huckleton. I tried to take the rules into my own hands to the delight of many customers but to the annoyance of my managers. There was only ever one person allowed in the changing room at a time, an absurd law which I strove to nullify by letting as many people share a single changing room as possible. There were a couple of tills at the back of the store which were never used even on the busiest of days. I could not get my head around why this was. It would p*** me off having to deal with the innumerable impatient and needy customers, who would often complain about the long wait time in the queue that was always sloppily coiled around the store like a bewildered anaconda, and knowing that there were two perfectly good tills at the back just sitting there doing f*** all. On a particularly busy day I flounced up to one of the managers and practically ordered them to open the tills and they curiously did as I said with confused haste. I really don’t get why they couldn’t just open them in the first place, there seemed to be no logical reason. Sigh, the mind boggles.

This one time I was accosted by a frumpy middle-aged woman who proceeded to rant to me about how terrible she thought Huckleton was due to the fact she couldn’t find any clothes that suited her.

‘Well, this shop is for teenagers,’ I told her. Outraged at my response, the woman grassed me up to my manager who was most displeased with me. Apparently honesty is not appreciated in the workplace.

The work was simple. One just had to ‘stand around and look good’. Now, how hard can that really be? I knew it would take a total bumbling clod to mess up such a straightforward duty, but I still managed to do so with an admirable bent. I, on more than one occasion, invited some friends to come and see me during my shifts who would usually be blind drunk and would wreak havoc within the store. I would go outside the shopping centre building with them on my break for a few cheeky swigs of vodka before finishing off my shift rather merry. The worst thing I ever did was give away clothes for free. I was rubbish at working on the tills; it was like giving a monkey a computer and expecting it to hack into the White House overnight, which, mind you, would have been more likely than me figuring out how to work that infuriating contraption. So, this woman approached me with a good six or seven items of clothing one not so very special afternoon. I removed the tags and handed the clothes back to her without thinking to bloody charge her. She stared at me quizzically and probably thought that I was joking around as I stared back at her with a s***-eating grin slapped on my face. My sincerity became apparent to her when I uttered the devastatingly cringe-worthy tagline, ‘Thank you for shopping at Huckleton, be sure to check us out on Twitter!’ She tentatively backed away from me before turning around and shuffling out of the store for her life.

I spent three months in total trifling wilfully away at Huckleton. Apart from the expected insubordination, I always found the environment rather insufferable. It was gloomily dark in there, and the stench of shampoo, perfume and deodorant polluted the atmosphere along with the humdrum and bland chart music that noisily farted from the speakers. To me the experience of working at Huckleton was like being forced to attend an unlit nightclub in a coal mine.

I could always sense the managers getting irritated and impatient with me whenever I failed to do certain jobs, or failed to process and follow instructions, correctly; this made me feel awful. I felt even worse when they began to realise just how hard I found some of the work and would consequently patronise me by treating me like an incompetent child and making special allowances for me; this was very humiliating.

I handed in my notice one day because I felt like it.

***

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but I once enlisted in Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s armed forces. I cannot say I was impelled to do so by a staunch and fiery sense of nationalism, neither was this on account of the worthlessness, fear, desperation and other emotional ailments I was harbouring at the time. Well, to say that the latter wasn’t at all instrumental in forming my decision would not be entirely true, as my stark paucity of academic qualifications was bugging me, and I knew that in the army one could take the exams they may have failed (or failed to take) at school.

The overall spirit among my family and contemporaries was one of ambivalence, in which incredulity marginally prevailed. I tried keeping a track of ‘What the f***?!’ reactions I got before quickly running out of fingers. I am not delusional by any means. I knew why the thought of someone like myself voluntarily signing up to be transmogrified into a conservative killing machine was a difficult pill for people to swallow, but, as with everything else, I wasn’t exactly doing this for conventional reasons. To be completely honest, I still don’t know to this day what my true reasons were for enlisting. When I think about it, I may have been subconsciously seeking out some form of structure or discipline, both of which my life was woefully devoid of following my expulsion from Brockwood, and I did like the idea of becoming super fit, but mostly I welcomed in the challenge, and my goodness was it an arduous challenge that left me, on numerous occasions, lachrymose. One thing I did know, however, was that my time in the army would be transient. A quick and easy job: ‘get in there, get what you need, and be out in time for lunch’ I’d tell myself. I planned to do all the training and leave after obtaining enough qualifications so that I could then go on to do something I really wanted to do. At any rate, I joined up when I was 16 with pride and gusto.

I attended a series of interviews and sat through a number of tests at a career’s office in Wembley, London. After scoring a high mark on an intelligence test I was advised in my final interview, by one of the senior officers, to ‘find a career more suited to someone of my education.’ Or words to that effect. I struggled to explain my convoluted backstory to him. In the end I just had to blag it.

‘You do realise you’re going to be trained to kill the enemy, don’t you?’ he asked with an uncertainty one would seldom associate with a tough and virile soldier.

‘Ummm, yes. I do realise that.’

‘And are you going to be okay with that?’

‘Yup…’ I bleated. He just didn’t buy it. No one in the army did, come to think of it, and I suppose my family and friends were the same. I, as always, continued to ‘follow my heart’, even though I could see it was taking me into very strange and unchartered territory.

As I loomed through the main hallway at the Army Training Regiment of Winchester, my eyes roved around the room at the boorish and brutish lads who were accumulating in droves. Being a flamboyant Bohemian, slender in build with a rather fey and pretty face (though I say so myself) made me stick out like a sore thumb. I really didn’t do myself any justice either by turning up with my guitar.

‘What the f*** is that?!’ my platoon Sergeant growled before making me charge after my tearful parents to give them the guitar to take back to London.

One would expect that an army barracks has got to be up there as one of the worst possible places for a person with PDA, ever. I wouldn’t argue with this. The collective mentality of the whole organisation is built on the injunction, ‘Do as you are told, when you are told to do it, to the best of your ability’ and if that isn’t the most provocative sentence for someone with my type of brain, then I don’t know what is. So why was I able to get through nine months of army training without incident? Well, quite simply, because I wanted to do it. For many months I was unaffected by the flurry of demands that pelted me in the face, and because I was in total control I didn’t really perceive many of these as ‘demands’. It was my decision to join the army therefore it was my decision to place myself on the receiving end of expletive-laden verbal onslaughts. I was prepared to be a little more submissive if it meant achieving my goals, a tactic I call inverted control; allowing others to dominate to keep control of the situation. I should also say that most of the time I would do things before I was asked to do them as a way of forestalling triggers. I would clean my locker, iron my uniform and polish my boots obsessively in the evenings so I would always have an immaculate turnout during kit inspections. Because the Sergeants and Corporals would never ‘pick me up’ (as they liked to say) for, say, having creased trousers or a dusty beret, they rarely had a reason to punish me individually. Of course the whole platoon would be punished as a unit, but to tell you the truth, I kind of enjoyed the group punishments (or ‘beastings’) as I was one of the fittest lads, so for me it was just a nice extra workout, plus an opportunity to show off my useful cardiovascular abilities.

I was awarded ‘the best soldier award’ for displaying an all-round level of competence after completing the first part of training. Because of this, the other lads, whether it was out of bitterness or not, began to tease me by calling me an ‘ass kiss’. I didn’t really mind this to be honest, as I was a little preoccupied with myself and my achievements as well. My behaviour had been mysteriously displaced from its usual trajectory and was doing stuff I didn’t recognise. The other recruits would muck around with one another in the evening and would occasionally sneak out for a drink at the bar on camp. I would never join them. My evenings would be spent alone and in silence mostly ironing and cleaning, but I’d sometimes go for runs and walks. I had given up drinking and smoking completely and abstained from junk food of any kind. This Yogi-like asceticism, which did not lend itself to a military environment, was my way of staying in control. PDA had not vanished, it’d just found another way of expressing itself. I surprised myself at how obedient and respectful I was being to authority and how my need to be funny and interesting was almost non-existent with the other recruits. Where I was indisputably an extrovert on the outside, I had now become an introvert inside a military base.

It’s strange. My motivation levels were kept high by avoiding my body and mind’s demands for me to drop out. I loved discovering these new sides to myself that I never knew existed by persevering towards the unprecedented frontiers of mental and physical endurance. In one particularly gruelling exercise, we were kept awake for five nights straight digging trenches. I did not shower or sleep once, and every so often the instructors would put us through a kind of mock ambush whereby we’d be under enemy fire at ridiculous o’clock in the morning and would have to decamp, run a mile or so, wait until the coast was clear and then start digging another trench from scratch. By the third day I was hallucinating from sleep deprivation and couldn’t see my skin under the swathes of mud it was caked in. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so disgusting in all my life. As well as thinking ‘Harry, what in the sweet name of f*** are you doing to yourself?’ I was concurrently urging myself on. Part of me wanted to feel worse. I just had to see how much I could take.

I continued to morph into this reticent and, admittedly, more sycophantic person whom I did not like, and the bulk of my happiness was expunged in the process.

During the second phase of my training in Catterick, North Yorkshire, around the time I was probably at my lowest, I began to get bullied by not any of the recruits but one of the instructors. This puts one in a very invidious position because in the army, you do as you’re told. If I stood up to Corporal Cartwright, it would mean jeopardising my place on the course and potentially running the risk of being kicked out of the army altogether. So, to put it simply, I was stuffed. All I could do was put up with, what seemed to be, his disturbing obsession with me. I can remember his chilling stare; it wasn’t even that it was malicious, he was genuinely fascinated. That’s what creeped me out the most. He’d keep me in his office for hours in the evening and manipulate me into doing embarrassing things in front of the other recruits. To his credit, I sometimes think that he could see me in a way other military personnel couldn’t; that he could see how much of myself I was hiding, and how I was fighting to stay in control and not let my true self ‘leak’, and all the while I feel he was trying to trip me up whenever he had an opportunity to.

I don’t recall when exactly, but at some point, around the time my parents split up, I realised that I really didn’t want to be in the army anymore but I just couldn’t bring myself to drop out. I carried on in a lacklustre yet tenacious fashion and scraped the completion of my training by the skin of my teeth. My heart was now set on getting the f*** out of there as quickly as possible, so I started to devise a plan to discharge myself. In my favour, I was 17 years old, so my parents had the power to remove their signature from my contract if I so wished. But before that happened, I had a meltdown that was long overdue.

After enjoying a relaxing couple of weeks at home, I was stationed at a grim and dilapidated barracks in Chepstow, South Wales. My attitude was quite foul and rotten at this point as I was aching to leave and couldn’t have cared less about the army. My PDA symptoms were recrudescing at increasing speed. I didn’t even try to make friends at Chepstow, I became blunt in the way I spoke to the higher ranks and would either fail to adhere to timings or skive off lectures and training completely. The only positive thing that I drew from my time at this god-awful place was passing my driving test.

The whole regiment was to deploy on a three-day loaded march across Dartmoor in Devon, and when I was given my personal instructions I decided to run away and hide in the grass at the back of the barracks for a couple of hours. As I lay there, my sadness lifted, a peculiar little smile spread across my face and I whispered to myself, ‘I’m back.’ The long and enervating role play spell had ended. I exulted alone for a while before strolling back to my accommodation block with this new-found confidence.

After being scolded by an angry Sergeant Major for omitting my duties, I was summoned to the platoon office where a Corporal handed me a packing list.

‘These are all the things you’ll need for the loaded march,’ the Corporal said. ‘You have ten minutes to get your s*** together. Go!’

I snatched the list from him and tore it to shreds, kicked a bunch of random objects in his office, removed my shirt and beret, then burst outside and screamed to high heavens. Hordes of officers began to appear after obviously hearing the commotion, so I legged it and they ran after me. They eventually caught me and at least four of them had to pin me down. I wasn’t only back, I was back and crazier than ever! This was probably the most cathartic meltdown I’ve ever had; it was rather nice to release all of those bottled up emotions I’d been suppressing for the past year. I did break my hand after punching a brick wall which was a bit of a downer. It hurt like mad. The knuckle of my baby finger on my right hand is still slightly deformed to this day. Whenever I look at it and get reminded of this loopy incident, it always makes me chuckle.

The greatest thing to come out of this meltdown was that it elucidated my insanity to the barracks. An unhinged soldier was the last thing that the army needed on the battlefield. After a plea from my mother to release me, I was finally discharged from the army in early October 2010. The sweet smell of freedom made me jig with joy. I felt like I’d been released from prison, and in a way, I had been. I certainly wept like a newly freed man. The world was once again my oyster, and I could do with it whatever I wanted. Where to begin? Where to begin?! Come on then, world. Let’s see what you’ve got for me…

Failing Miserably to be Like the Humans and Punishing Myself Accordingly

After a knotty adjustment back into civilian life, I got myself a job at a place called ‘Clown Town’ which was a filthy and insalubrious play arena full of slides, climbing apparatuses and ball pools. I was testing the waters here. I didn’t want the job, and when I applied I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. It was, more than anything, a way to pass the time. I don’t operate in the same way other people do, if I don’t want to do something, then I can’t bring myself to do it. I have no concept of ‘just do this for now and see how it goes, you never know, you might end up liking it.’ Yuck! If I truly want to do something I am willing to move mountains for it. Needless to say, I walked off Clown Town after a measly three or four shifts. This was finalised after having to pick up a used diaper off one of the tables after a birthday party.

My time during this interlude was not merely restricted to dead-end jobs and dejection. I was still well into my fitness and signed up to do an intensive beach lifeguard course in Cornwall, and a pool lifeguard course in North London. After successfully obtaining both qualifications, I applied to be a lifeguard at a leisure centre in Central London. This went well at first, but my enthusiasm soon waned after getting back into drugs and alcohol. A few local friends and I would meet up on the weekends and plunge into an abyss of nihilistic hedonism. We’d rock up at pubs and cause mayhem which would invariably get us either barred or kicked out. We’d snort cocaine along with amphetamine, maraud the streets, vandalise property, and would often top the night off by getting into my car at around 3 or 4am (by which time we’d all be wasted), hot boxing it after lighting up a joint, whack on classical music (for some strange reason), and would then go for a little drunken drive around the streets. I’d like to point out that no one was ever hurt during this feat of unalloyed insanity.

While discontentedly yet inescapably entangled in a life of self-destruction, having to commute into the city to be a lifeguard (one who guards the lives of people), was beginning to seem a little ironic as I clearly wasn’t looking after my own. I was in no way, shape or form the right man for the job. One morning after a frightfully debauched affair, I woke up to find myself spooning a tree after spending the night on the street in a residential area a few miles away from my home. Another morning I was awoken in my car rather abruptly by a loud banging. I opened my eyes to find a man knocking on the car window. The man explained to me that it was market day and that I had parked my car in the spot he wished to set up his stand. After poking my head out the window to see the hordes of people rushing around my car who were busy setting up their market stands, I fully grasped just how inconveniently I was parked. Even though I was drunk and delirious, I still decided to drive home. Mother answered the door to me upon my arrival:

‘Harry, you’re absolutely p***ed out your head! Please tell me you didn’t drive home?!’

‘…I’m going to bed,’ I announced.

‘But you have work in an hour…’

‘Meh. They’ll figure it out.’ I treated pretty much everything with levity during this rudderless period. I was turning up to my job less and less until I eventually stopped going altogether. I remember feeling as though I had lost touch and sight with reality. I was a selfish and irascible mass of flesh governed by instinct and greed, leaving naught but chaos in my wake. I stumbled with every step I took, and everything I touched seemed to fall to pieces before my very eyes.

I didn’t have a job for a long time after leaving the leisure centre, and, in retrospect, I think this was probably a good thing. I was far from employable, but more to the point I was in serious need of help. I went through a stage of self-harming and making myself throw up after meals. From what I’ve seen over the years, young people begin to flirt with these rituals, on average, between the ages of 11 and 14. It continues to bemuse me why I hadn’t commenced ritualistic penance until after I was 18. What was I waiting for? Perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that I have more of an extrovert personality type and usually express myself in a rather explosive and animated way. At this point in my life, I had become withdrawn and diffident thus internalising my melancholy. Slicing my arm up was a plaintive echo of my shredded interior.

The bulimia was inevitable. I was showing signs of body dysmorphia not long after I started swimming at the age of 11. I was a chubby boy who worked hard and got lean, but I was never satisfied with myself and my appearance. I became obsessed with my reflection and would squander a lot of time in front of mirrors looking for blemishes that weren’t there. My mother suffered from an eating disorder when she was younger and always feared certain patterns in her life would one day be reborn in her children.

I’m not sure if any of my family caught on to my self-punishing habits. Nobody seemed to notice even though I didn’t make any concerted efforts to conceal the evidence. I walked around with fresh cuts on my arms and used the bathroom a hell of a lot more than usual, especially after eating.

I even considered putting an end to it all one day. I was sat in my bedroom closet, unclad and vulnerable. My bedroom at the time was in the attic, so the closet was quite capacious. It was densely dark, and I sat dolefully underneath my clothes rail while twiddling a leather belt between my thumb and forefinger. I wondered how quick and painless suicide by asphyxiation would be. Was my time on Earth really coming to an end? ‘Why don’t I have a few glugs of whiskey and then wrap this belt tightly around my neck until every drop of life has been squeezed from me?’ I thought. I knew I didn’t want to be alive anymore. I was sick of not being able to do life. I am not attempting to coax the violins from their cases here, but death really was the preferable option. Still, I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to go through with it.

I came to my senses and put the belt down, then left the closet. I was shaken after this little episode, I had scared myself in a way I hadn’t before. I began to feel there was no escape from my inner Loki and that there probably never would be. I cut my arms a few times then drew some deeply disturbing images over my bedroom walls. Because I wasn’t fully in my vessel, I have a real tough time trying to remember what it was exactly I drew and so do my family as the walls were repainted very soon afterwards. I can remember but two things: a bunch of grapes, and ‘HELP ME’ written in bold. Not long after desecrating my walls, I packed a bag and went for a drive.

I ended up in a field opposite the house Felicity had lived in when I first met her, my happiest place. My panic-stricken mother, grandmother and Felicity all caught up with me eventually after following a clue that was part of the unbridled expression splatted over my bedroom walls. I was urged, and almost beseeched, to go home with either my mother or Felicity, but I said no because I wanted to do something for me, something lovely. They all went home after I promised Felicity that I would drive straight to hers in the morning. I opened the rooftop window of my car and wallowed under a magnificently spangled dark purple dome. I slept so peacefully. This was among the most blissful and tranquil nights of my life.

I spent five months at Felicity’s slowly getting myself together again. I stopped smoking, drinking and taking drugs, got avidly into yoga and meditation, and religiously attended a few self-improvement courses in London. I was on a roll. Where before I was spiralling deeper and deeper into a pit of misery, I was now trying to see just how good and healthy I could be. I think, at the time, a lot of my family and friends believed I was on some kind of dotty quest for enlightenment, and that these new and purer habits may have been a sign of cross-addiction from my old and seedy ones. Maybe I was on a quest, and maybe I was looking for something new to fill the rapacious black hole in me, but one thing was for certain, I was taking better care of myself than I had ever done in my entire life.

It wasn’t all sun salutes and quinoa. I wanted to be free from all forms of tyranny and even resorted to smashing my phone to smithereens one day as a sort of zealous protest against consumerism. Despite the righteousness of my cause, I was at first a little bored without my phone; however, this is what precipitated me to pick up my bass guitar again for the first time in almost a year. I practised solidly for hours upon hours upon hours. Inside one of my guitar cases I came across a magazine that had probably been stuck to the inside of the front pocket for years. The advertisement on the cover caught my eye, which read ‘The Brighton Institute of Modern Music, Award Winning Music College’. I flicked through the magazine and read the ‘BIMM’ prospectus enclosed within. I decided right there and then that I would perfect my bass playing to a tee and book an audition. But before this happened, I was given yet another, and final, diagnosis.

Felicity received a phone call one afternoon from the speech and language therapist, Margo Sharp, who diagnosed me with Asperger’s back in 2007. The two of them confabulated for hours. I recall going to bed late that night and they were still immersed in conversation. The next morning, Felicity shared some very profound and revelatory news with me. Unsurprisingly, I turned out to be the chief theme of the phone call. Felicity had told Margo practically everything I’d been up to since I last saw her at 14, and because I’d been through so much, this took up the majority of the conversation. Margo eventually dropped ‘PDA’, or ‘Pathological Demand Avoidance syndrome’ into the conversation. To Felicity and me, Margo’s words were like dropped pearls, as from that fateful moment, everything in my life, and I mean f***ing everything, started to make sense. The reason why I couldn’t do school and couldn’t just go to work had at long last been revealed to me from a psychiatric standpoint that I could relate to. Unlike my other diagnoses, and despite my hatred of labels, PDA actually felt…right, I suppose. After being offered a place at BIMM after passing my audition with flying colours, Margo Sharp gave me an official diagnosis of PDA.

So, the day finally came for me to bid my friends and family farewell and set sail on my voyage to the liberal Mecca that is Brighton town. Felicity drove me to my new house which I shared with six other students, and Dad made his own way there to help with the moving process. Saying goodbye to Felicity was emotional for me. I gave her a hug and a kiss and thanked her earnestly for helping me with my move to Brighton, and most of all, for selflessly saving my life once again.

‘Do you think I’ll be okay now, Felicity?’ I asked.

‘Well, we’ll just have to wait and see, Harry, won’t we? No one can ever be too sure with you.’ I smiled and waved to her as she drove down the road and disappeared from my life once again. As I opened the front door and strolled into my new life of autonomy, I couldn’t help but reflect on everything I’d been through and marvelled at how far I had come. I was thrilled to be studying towards a degree in one of my most cherished passions, and I was over the moon to be in Brighton, and, above all, felt like I deserved to be there. Surely this was it, the making of me. Nothing whatever could derail me now. I was apotropaic, invincible even. Someone just try and stop me from–

‘Hey mate, would you like a beer?’ asked one of my housemates.

‘Yeah, go on then.’

***

Well that didn’t take long, did it? All it took was one measly offer from someone I hadn’t met before to decisively put an end to my stretch of sobriety, which I was fairly confident I would maintain for the rest of my life. There wasn’t a tincture of peer pressure here. It was like throwing a ball off a cliff for a dog who is too witless to realise he is plummeting to his own demise as he bounds off after the ball. I haven’t had a vanilla life by any means: I’ve climbed mountains, undergone military training, hitchhiked around North America in winter without a long-term plan or a penny to my name, and have done countless other things that require a certain amount of derring-do and mettle, but one of the things I find hardest of all is moderation; behind only doing as I’m told. Moderation is a mission I am yet to accomplish, but saying that, a mission I have no interest in accomplishing. The extremity, or hunger, resides within me, and it’s up to me where and how I apply it.

I try not to overuse words like ‘addict’ or ‘alcoholic’ as they are heavy, negative words. To brand oneself with restrictive labels is to ultimately restrict oneself altogether. A label can never truly define us; it is, if anything, a ‘sub’ identity. Don’t get me wrong, I have boundless sympathy for people ensnared by booze and narcotics, and I’m not in any way belittling their plight, it’s just the ‘addict’ label of which I am a trifle wary. I’m sure many of my behaviours could be characterised as ‘addictive’ or suggestive of alcoholism, especially when my days of debauchery were in full swing. When I have a single sip of an alcoholic beverage, I am like a shark tasting blood. I will gulp staggering quantities of the naughty water until I black out, and then I’ll have lashings more while I am on autopilot, and more still before waking up the following morning dressed as Elvis Presley, groggy and senile, scrunched in a foetal position with my face in a kebab; with a gaping hole surrounded by grass stains on the seat of my trousers.

I am now sitting here writing this book as a clean and sober man. I haven’t touched the stuff in two years, and this includes the copious pills I used to pop and the heaps of powders I used to inhale. I never tell myself not to do a particular thing, or to never do that particular thing again, because of course I will naturally defy my own self-imposed injunctions. For now, I am just a person who hasn’t had a drink or taken most kinds of drugs for two years, and that is all. I have, admittedly, had a couple of psychedelic trips (literally no more than two) since I decided to knock it all on the head, thus suspending my sobriety for a miniscule spell, but this was for no reason other than to give those staid and stubborn aspects of my sense of self a good ole pulverising, not because I felt I had to, but because I wanted to, as I feel it’s healthy to do that now and again (not the hallucinogens per se but to transcend beyond the shackles of one’s subjective experience).

I was powerless over various substances that held sway over several parts of my life for years. Aside from mischievous antics such as climbing over bars to pour my own drinks, collecting traffic cones and road signs or antagonising bouncers outside nightclubs, I would engage in more worrying behaviours such as drinking heavily alone in my room, drink driving, panicking or raging if I ran out of drink or narcotics and there wasn’t any nearby, vandalism, and (perhaps most worrying of all) passing out on the street in the wee hours.

I like to try and understand why certain patterns of behaviour exist before summarising them. Take alcohol, for example. I knew I was drinking so much because I didn’t feel ‘connected’ to anything. I could have tried going cold turkey, but that wouldn’t have addressed the root of the problem, and the underlying absence of connection would have continued to emanate its hollow cry. Going cold turkey can be useful as a first step so long as one listens and responds to what their mind and body are yearning for. I quickly realised that I was spending too much time with people who weren’t touching my heart, and spending too much time doing things I didn’t particularly want to be doing, in places I didn’t particularly like being in. Being drunk was a fantastic solution as it alleviated the overall discord between the mise-en-scene and myself and supplied a ‘faux’ or ‘quasi’ sense of connection. When I remedied all of the above, that is to say, found a way to truly connect with the world, I found that my need to drink myself silly had lessened. That extreme hunger, which is a stable and enduring part of my nature, will never go away, but when I am ‘connected’ I can apply it to more purposeful things. When that hunger is channelled during times of disconnection, it becomes addiction. When I am connected, however, it is simply an impetus (or a positive driving force).

There is a body of opinion who are loyal to the conviction that ‘addiction’ is at best, a babyish excuse people make when refusing to take responsibility for their own actions, or at worst, non-existent. Now, even though I believe this view to be nothing more than a fallacy, I can actually see where those who hold such a view are coming from. Addiction is complex. What could possibly drive an individual to repeatedly engage in such self-destructive behaviours? Is the constant pain and misery they inflict on themselves and their loved ones during their dogged and, above all, selfish pursuit of gratification really worth it, much less justifiable? What is going on here? As far as addiction and alcoholism are concerned, there is little point in endeavouring to ascertain the presence of some kind of malignant grue that wreaks havoc from within the brain, but it can, however, actually feel as though there exists such a creature at times. ‘It’s just a matter of willpower!’ is something I so often hear, and during the first few stages it is, somewhat.

Nowadays, if I happen to be around carousing folk at, say, a party (which would be unlikely given my fickle relationship with humanity, but work with me), then forgoing even a tiny drop is of no trouble to me whatever. I may feel tempted, which can sometimes be the case, but at this point, that is to say ‘pre-sip’, the mental strength I employ is enough to deter me from having any alcohol at all. When I do have a sip, however, it is a totally different story. So, I may plump for one drink rather than getting slaughtered on many, which seems reasonable. I may decide this because, ‘Hey, everyone else is doing it. One won’t hurt, surely?’ And then, as soon as the alcohol starts circulating in my system, I will begin to feel ‘tempted’ to have another drink. As I said before, a little mental strength, or willpower, is all that’s required to kill this temptation. However, these temptations become stronger and stronger but don’t worry, reader, the temptation doesn’t win, as it is something I can subdue again and again. Then things get weird. Where at first I emerged victorious from my various battles with temptation, ‘addiction’ (whatever that may be) begins to corrupt my mind in other ways. My thoughts and feelings, at this point, are altered. I begin to long for another drink in a way I didn’t before when it was just temptation. I managed to successfully resist temptation, hitherto, because there was a part of me that plainly did not want another drink, but then, all of a sudden, I do want one. That valiant horseman of resistance remains but is gradually being engulfed by this swelling desire. He will try his damndest to ward off this ever-growing desire until he eventually succumbs to it and dies on his feet. My mind will turn against me and play tricks on me, and intrusive thoughts begin to rush in and graffiti my moral framework: ‘Hey Harry, what’s really so bad about having another one? Maybe some good can come of it?’ I will continue to justify it to myself in this way, until not a scintilla of moral scruple remains. At this point, my menacing thoughts and burgeoning anxiety have deluded a part of me into believing that having that second drink is now a matter of life and death. This is emotional and psychological dehydration; that second drink represents the first drops of liquid after a long and arduous crawl through the Atacama Desert. By the time I actually reach for a glass or a bottle, every single part of me is compelled to do so, lest I perish. Nothing in the world is more important than having that second drink. Addiction didn’t drag me here against my will and take control of my hands as they reached for the bottle, or my mouth as it opened to receive the malefic elixir. I started off by not wanting to drink, then I began to feel tempted which I was able to repress despite the ever-increasing intensity, but following the brutal war of attrition whereby my mind was insidiously bastardised, my thoughts, my principles, and a lot of my character, had changed. In the end, I am not resisting any temptation. I’m not even giving in to it. I drink because I choose to, but it’s the creepy and sinister process by which I arrive at this choice that in part makes addiction the disease that it is.

Even if a person, of adamantine might, were to successfully command their volition and not reach for a bottle of booze or for a rolled-up fiver from which they will snort some kind of powder, then they would still be beset by the torrent of obsessive thoughts in their mind and the stinging anxiety in their chest. It’s not as simple as just curbing one’s behaviour.

I think the main reason I am so averse to labels like ‘addict’, or other labels for that matter, is because of how they can bring one’s progress or growth to a complete halt. I will proceed, in the least narcissistic way possible, to use myself as an analogy: I have long hair, and some days I wear it in a man-bun while other days I let it all hang loose. I like to imagine that the hairband represents the environment, while my hair represents the symptoms, and together, as a synthesis, the man-bun represents the label (PDA, ADHD, and addict). A label only exists so long as the environment is holding the symptoms in place, much like how the man-bun only exists so long as the hairband is holding my hair in place. I am able to let my hair down whenever I want and this will lend my image a whole new character. The man-bun will cease to be, but this won’t in anyway diminish the person I am. It’s the same with labels. A label is only necessary and relevant within a certain environment; at school, at work, or in any other place that is not ideal for the person who is lumbered with the label. There are certain environments wherein I’ll need a man-bun more than others. When I go for a run, for example, in order to prevent my lustrous locks from bouncing all over the place and going in my eyes, I can tie my hair back and keep it out my face completely. Say I am at school (a hairband), I will be in an environment that will bring out certain symptoms (a hairband holding my hair in place), and therefore a label may be required to make sense of these symptoms collectively (a hairband holding my hair in place to make, say, a man-bun). The person doing the labelling may be oblivious to the fact that it’s the very environment which is holding these symptoms in place.

When I am having profound conversations with other weirdoes, however, my label disappears (the hairband is removed and my hair falls into another position) because I have now moved into my natural habitat; therefore, I simply become a person expressing himself in the way he feels most competent, in an environment he feels most comfortable. The appearance of hair is contingent on how the hairband styles it. The label becomes redundant when we move into our natural habitat because there won’t be any problems, at least none of any consequence. We are free to be ourselves; an opportunity everyday life seldom grants us. As soon as the slightest upheaval occurs, be it some dunderhead interrupting a profound conversation with profoundly insipid questions, then I would, in this case, have been removed from my natural habitat, and I may begin to identify with my label of PDA once again. So, when I was diagnosed with PDA, my initial reaction was: ‘Great! Here’s a perfectly sound explanation for why I am the way I am.’ But instead of stopping there and allowing society to define me, effectively keeping the man-bun in place, the next step was for me to have a look at how and why certain PDA symptoms were manifesting, and to find a way to transcend them. If you are reading this and you are having recurrent problems at school then I ask you, do you really need to be in school? Is it causing more harm than good? If school really is causing you more harm than good then (and excuse me for what might be construed as a demand here) get the f*** out of there!

A label serves as a concise, comprehensive definition of a collection of symptoms; it merely constitutes a fragment of our lives and who we are. I am more than just my man-bun (which I believe is dashing, though others disagree), there is, after all, an entire human being underneath it.

Brighton, in a nutshell, was a hearty reintroduction to dissolution, though this time of a much greater intensity. Apart from the sordid misadventures, I, for my first year at least, did quite well at Music College. I wanted to be there for a start, which made it somewhat easier to conform, and I achieved quite a high mark for my end of year exam. My drinking and drug taking eventually got the better of me though, and my second year was more or less a total disaster. One of the music teachers said to a friend of mine, ‘Harry’s passion is just gone.’ And indeed, it was. One thing I always thought was a bit strange was how my attendance was actually really good but my behaviour was egregious. I would even turn up to the college early sometimes which must have made me look a very keen bean. Especially to the teachers who, upon their arrival, would see me outside with a twinkle in my eye and my guitar and notebook at the ready, only to see me go mad on entering the classroom and ruining the lesson, not only for myself but for the other students as well. My attendance soon petered out over time though, and my behaviour was becoming ever more destructive. I turned up to a live performance exam high on ketamine, and got every tenant on the upper two floors of my apartment building blacklisted when, on my 20th birthday, I broadcasted an invitation to my party that went viral. Needless to say, legions of people turned up and the place got trashed. At one point I was engaged in a debilitating love triangle with two beautiful and effervescent girls, one of whom was my girlfriend and another by whom I was subsequently smitten. This led to many tiffs, triggers and tears. Oh, and I also lost three jobs.

One of which was nightclub promoting. It wasn’t a demanding job by any means, but, nonetheless, I couldn’t help but undermine its very nature. I had to dress up smart and patrol the circumambient streets armed with leaflets. The employees were required to put on this horrendous, brown-nosing act in an attempt to coax people into the nightclub. The dressing up smart bit I didn’t mind, but all the rest I shamelessly disregarded. I mainly saw this job as an opportunity to meet women on the sly and off the sly, and the small handful of times I successfully buttonholed an innocent passerby or two, or if they were to approach me to talk to me about the club I was promoting for, I would be more likely to advise them against going to my club (which, for the record, I disliked) and tell them to find someplace better. The manager kept a kind of score sheet with all of the promoters’ names on it so that they could keep track of how many people we were bringing in. A star would represent one person; next to my name (which, starting with ‘T’, would always be at or near the bottom) there would be a pitiful two or three stars, whereas the other names, towering over mine in both acclaim and on the page, would have an ensuing 30 to 40 stars. The facetiousness I incorporated into this job didn’t exactly sit well with the managers who eventually and judiciously stopped giving me shifts one day, and while all of this was going on, my drug use was becoming more problematic.

Where cocaine was my drug of choice in my late teens, I had now fallen in love with MDMA and roistered in the euphoria it induced. I suppose I loved the warm embrace of it; ’twas like being fisted by an angel on a rainy day. One strange night after consuming more alcohol and MDMA than my mind could possibly filter, I returned home from a nightclub with my housemates and got into a spot of mischief. I removed some of my clothing, took someone’s butter out the fridge, opened the lid and urinated inside it, closed the lid again and put the p***-soaked butter back in the fridge. A few of my friends were in the downstairs living room and I randomly slapped one of them round the face, totally unprovoked. I passed out not long afterwards.

The next day the dreaded comedown descended on me. In a manic attempt to extricate myself from seething anguish, I seized a metallic ruler from my drawers. It was a peculiar choice of weaponry for what I was about to do, but still, it had razor sharp edges so I knew it was going to do the job. I started hacking away at my left arm on a one-way trajectory from the top of my shoulder to my radial artery. Each strike of the blade left a trail of deep, red fissures which coughed and spluttered until my arm looked like a red fondue. I slashed my arm 13 times in total before stopping and blithely ambling into the kitchen where my housemates were congregating. Everyone’s hearts stopped when they saw the state of my arm.

‘WHAT THE F*** HAVE YOU DONE TO YOURSELF, HARRY?!’ one of them screamed.

‘What?’ I grunted.

‘LOOK AT YOUR ARM!’

The pain and confusion I harboured were masked by a veneer of jocundity. Though my outward behaviour was questionable, I don’t think many of my friends quite gauged the extent of what I was really grappling with, though I’m sure a few suspected it. I dropped out of BIMM when I was writing my very last essay for the year.

‘All we have to do is a few thousand words, mate, and that is it,’ a friend consoled. As much as I appreciated his encouragement, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The qualification, of which I would be awarded by BIMM, just didn’t matter to me. I can remember being in school as a younger boy and feeling a similar way during exam time, that whole feeling of: well so f***ing what if I do this (exam) or not? It’s not as though it’s an indication of my potential or a testament to my intelligence.

I didn’t complete my essay and I didn’t show up to any of the exams I was meant to sit. I avoided the demand. Goodbye BIMM.

***

Even though I had put BIMM behind me, I stayed in Brighton nonetheless as I had a few other commitments I wasn’t quite ready to relinquish. Just before I left, I joined a band with a few mates who lived in my apartment building who were looking for a bass player. Don’t get me wrong, I love jamming with other musicians, but the whole musician lifestyle I found wasn’t really for me. Whenever we’d play gigs, I would always perform halfheartedly, which confused me a great deal because I assumed that anyone who loved music as much as I did would leap at the chance to express their musicality to hundreds, if not thousands. Not long after I first took up the bass, I told myself that I would one day be a world-famous musician, but once I had experienced being on stage, and after getting a taste for the lifestyle, particularly after recording an EP which turned out to be one of the dullest and most excruciating days of my life, it dawned on me that music was a far better therapy for me than it was a career. I was a bit disappointed as well, for I had put in so much practice and hard work over the years and now felt as though it had all been in vain. I knew I wanted a stage, I knew I had a lot to share with people, but I also knew that it wasn’t going to be through the medium of music. Being the bass player/backing singer felt subordinate to what I was supposed to be doing. The only problem was, what I was supposed to be doing had not yet been revealed to me.

Following a drug scare, I finally disembarked from the merry-go-round of narcotics. My friends and I, on New Year’s Eve, attended an illegal rave in London and purchased a wretched little bag of dust for an irresistible bargain of ten pounds. None of us actually knew what it was, which should’ve been the first sign not to buy nor take it, but we nevertheless proceeded to hoover it up all cosy in our nosies. We had a faint suspicion it might have been mephedrone, but none of us knew for certain. The only thing we did know was how intense, surreal and ‘fizzy’ this substance was as a high. Everyone else seemed to shrug it off after coming down from it, but I was affected very badly for a long time. Needless to say, it left my sinuses chronically inflamed and I had a horrible case of derealisation, whereby I felt as if nothing was real and that I was outside my body. My head was addled. Had I not been so frightened by this little incident then I don’t think I would have found a good enough incentive to stop, and I really was showing no signs of slowing down, let alone stopping. So, despite how bleak and depressing that period was for me, I am partly very grateful that it happened because I dread to think what was looming around the corner had I continued to swirl into the abyss.

When I eventually quit the band, I returned to my home county of Hertfordshire where I hopped around from place to place for a bit before striking gold. I wasn’t getting along with my parents too well at the time so staying with either of them was out of the question, but Felicity was kind enough to put me up for a few nights, then I crashed at a friend’s house for a night, and finally, after this tedious spell of precarious living, I gained a foothold at a sheltered housing association in St. Albans where I stayed for a total of six weeks. One may turn their nose up at this, but it was actually a very illuminating experience. I was living with homeless people, drug addicts, ex-prostitutes, you name it. People whom many would regard as the underlay of society (namely those of my bourgeois past, many of whom I’m sure would have blanched at the sight my new milieu), but I was grateful to be among human beings that had really lived and had innumerable stories to recount.

Having three diagnoses seemed to really work in my favour during my time at the shelter. I was given a social worker, a beneficent gentleman that specialised in Asperger’s, who kindly helped me find my own place to live. This took longer than I wanted it to take, but after a painful yet patient few weeks, the most ideal thing that could’ve possibly happened to someone in my situation, happened.

After a tireless search, my social worker came across a block of flats in Great Ashby which were part of a housing association that provided accommodation for people with learning difficulties. This was a bit ticklish as one might presume, as I did not, in any way, shape, or form, come across as a person who had anything remotely wrong with them whatsoever. The scepticism during my interview was palpable. Had I not possessed three separate diagnoses, then I guarantee I would not have been offered a place to live on the basis that I struck the managers as such a sharp and able young man. As much as I bitch about my labels, I gotta hand it to them here; they got me a beautiful flat to reside in.

***

I must say, living independently was unspeakably blissful. I got myself a job as someone’s personal assistant in Essex. This man (whose anonymity and job description I’m respectfully preserving) required an extra pair of hands to help him with emails, phone calls and other administrative implications. I was also required to drive him around the country, which, I am proud to say, made me an official chauffeur. Not sure why some labels I’ll happily wear while others I scornfully shun? I guess ‘chauffeur’ has something a little exotic about it. At any rate, I considered this one of the finest perks of that job.

Everything seemed to be going well at first and the guy even told me I was the hardest worker he’d ever employed, something I had definitely not heard before. Alas, this period of conscientiousness soon came to an end, and after a couple of months I was soon back to my old tricks. I once decided to give myself the day off. This wasn’t exactly premeditated; that is to say, I didn’t plan to skive off a few days in advance, and it also wasn’t as though I woke up one morning feeling particularly insouciant and thought I’d give it a miss. Halfway through a work day, while I was being watched by my boss in Tokyo on a camera that was installed in the office, I walked out because I felt like it. I’d actually made the effort to come into work that morning, but after a few hours I was like, ‘f*** this. I’m out.’

This boss was forever complaining about my rotten attitude towards him and his clients with whom I had to liaise. He fired me one day following a heated row we had in the car. I was distraught and begged him to give me another chance. Strangely enough, he did. I didn’t exactly like working for him, I just didn’t want to leave on his terms. I quit a week later after he asked me to build him a website. Sorry, but no.

***

After walking out on this job, I spent the next year not doing an awful lot bar helping out at Felicity’s and giving a few guitar lessons here and there. I had a fair amount of free time which meant that I was often a bit bored, but this boredom gave rise to a renewed love for writing. I would write many poems and stories of an evening, and I even began formulating the first draft of this book. The real game changer was when I developed an impassioned romance via FaceTime (a medium consonant with our modern age) with a friend I’d made in Brighton who had moved to the United States in late 2013. Mabel was a frisky maverick of cascading amethyst hair, spellbinding chocolate eyes and sun-kissed velvety skin adorned in a tapestry of ink. The two of us would enjoy daily video calls and it wasn’t long before I decided to join her in the United States; a country I had been inexplicably drawn to for as long as I can remember.

I handed in my notice to the housing association and a couple of weeks later moved back in with my mother, who now lived in Canterbury. Over the course of the summer months, most of my time was spent writing my book and trying to get as fit as I could through running and yoga. All of this was in preparation for my new life. Then, in September 2015, I packed my bags and flew across the Atlantic.

Mabel and I lived in New Jersey at her grandmother’s for a good part of a year before we got in the car one day and drove off. We had no idea where we were going, but we were able to refrain from worrying about the destination while we were sat beatifically, soaking in the aesthetic landscape of rural America as we cruised on through it. After a tour of the South, the Rockies and the West, we ended up in Southern California where we decided to settle. We were living in our car at first which put a huge strain on our relationship, but we soon enough found a way of making money and an apartment in Orange County.

Six months later Mabel and I parted. Our bond was beautiful and dynamic, though tempestuous. It started out so lovely, but, as with all things, it sadly, came to an end. Needless to say, the demons of the mind got the better of us.

After much melancholy reflection, I decided to become a nomadic minimalist. I threw away most of my belongings, stuffed the few clothes I had left inside a camping backpack I had bought, attached a ukulele to it and embarked on an odyssey. I bought a bus ticket one day and endured a long and gloomy ride from California all the way to Montana. I then hitchhiked along the North frontier and into Canada at one point before being spat back out into the US in Niagara Falls, New York State. I did this in February not long after my 24th birthday, so the bitterly icy conditions proved to be taxing. One night when I was moving through Minnesota, I was on the side of the freeway in a snowstorm. The visibility was poor as it was pitch black, not many cars were driving past, and I thought to myself, ‘this could be my last night on Earth’. Thankfully, someone eventually picked me up and drove me to a nearby service station where I spent the night in a motel.

Another dodgy incident was when I was in New York State, not long after I emerged from Niagara Falls in Canada. Someone I hitched a ride with had accidentally dropped me off at a service station for Westbound traffic when I needed to be heading East. The problem with this was that the service station for Eastbound traffic was 13 miles away. Undaunted, I set off on foot. I didn’t realise what a stupid idea this was until I was about halfway through the journey plodding along on an old country road with sore feet, an empty tummy and withering enthusiasm. Just to top it off, there was also a power cut that night. There weren’t many houses since I was deep in the country, but the few farm houses I did pass were candlelit which made me feel like I had been transported back to the 1700s. I remember feeling really angry at the infrequent cars that whizzed by me with my outstretched thumb and trembling lips that were tenuously mouthing ‘please, please, please, please’. Did those f***ers not have any empathy at all? Imagine seeing someone stranded in the middle of nowhere on a cold, dark night? When I was eventually salvaged by a heart-bearing human after my dunning seven-mile night hike, I was driven to the highly sophisticated Denny’s diner which was located at the service station I was on a mission to get to. My saviour also dined with me. She originally intended to leave me after dinner as she thought I’d be able to easily hitch a ride from there, but after a very pleasant meal and conversation she invited me to come and stay at her and her boyfriend’s place. She then made, quite possibly, the most generous offer I had ever heard.

‘So, where is it you’re trying to get to again?’

‘Vermont.’

‘Oh wow, that’s about a six-hour drive from here.’

‘I know. It sucks.’

‘I’m going to drive you the whole way.’

‘…Excuse me?’

‘Yep. We’ll be leaving in three days though because I have work.’

She must have got tired of my relentless thank yous after a while, and, for the record, I am still not done. Liah, if you’re reading this right now, thank you once again! I was at a bit of a loss during those three days but I was in no position to complain. On the second day, however, I had the most fantastic idea. I took myself down to the river, whipped out my phone and started recording a video of myself talking about PDA. This was only ever meant to be an experiment to pass the time, but I thought I’d upload it to YouTube anyway. I wasn’t expecting much of a response if I’m being honest, but I watched in amazement as the views rose exponentially and oodles of followers came pouring in. Before I knew it, I had built up quite the following and was posting videos on a regular basis covering a wide range of topics, though all were related to PDA. It was while this was going on when it first dawned on me how PDA, and all of my labels for that matter, seemed to disappear when talking to people about stuff, because that was me moving into my natural habitat. That ‘wow…’ reaction I always craved as a little boy, and how I’d resort to such extreme lunacy to go about obtaining it, was still happening. People were still looking at me and saying ‘Wow…’, that hadn’t changed. What had changed was the method by which I could obtain it. I now didn’t just have silliness to call upon as a viable method, but I also had the luxury of being able to talk to people about stuff. This sublimation may seem drastic, but it is actually very subtle. My mucking about and acting the clown at school was exactly the same as me making videos and talking about stuff; the only difference was that I had now found and fallen into alignment with my ‘thing’. In other words, I now felt that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, or perhaps, born to do, and I now know that I had been trying to get there all along. Mucking around and being silly is but one facet of that visceral thirst to share something greater.

My travels eventually brought me to New York City where I turned up with no plan and barely any money to my name, and by barely any money I mean I had a grand total of $60. For three days I held on by the skin of my teeth as I trawled for a foothold, and as luck would have it, I came across a family in need of a full-time live-in caregiver for their disabled son. The son, who was 15 years old, had severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, and was confined to a wheelchair. His disabilities rendered him totally reliant on those around him. He was, nonetheless, a delightful and charismatic soul with a terrific sense of humour. He exuded a warmth that made me feel perfectly at ease around him, which was very relieving because I was a little intimidated by this job at first as I’d never worked with a person in his condition before. My duties were to get him out of bed in the mornings, feed him, dress him, get him ready for school, bathe him in the evenings and put him to bed. Challenging work, but he loved my company. It was a shame that the fact this was now my working environment meant that I wasn’t going to be in his life for very long. This job lasted for about a week. I was fired after having a row with the boy’s mother. My sacking transpired thusly: after a long weekend in Maryland, the boy, his mother and I drove back to New York together. There was a weekly schedule for myself, and the other caregivers who also lived in the apartment with us though tended to jobs of a different nature to mine, such as housework and tutoring. The mother made one thing perfectly clear to me when I first met her: I would only be working four days a week and I would be left alone on my days off. Conversely, that evening the mother convened a meeting and informed us on a few schedule changes she had made. Now when she first read them out, none of us noticed any changes at all, so we asked her to repeat herself which, incidentally, made her a little testy. After I grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down what she said, I noticed that she hadn’t made any changes, apart from giving me an extra day’s work.

‘Didn’t you tell me earlier that my days off are my time to relax and work towards my personal projects?’ I inquired. ‘And why didn’t you just approach me and ask me if I was willing to work an extra day? Was it really necessary to fabricate an excuse and be so sneaky about it?’

‘Is that manipulative?’ she asked, with an annoying grin on her face.

‘Well, yeah.’ Now when people pose a question like this, they should know that they are either going to get a yes or no answer and should prepare themselves accordingly, not commit the fatal mistake of assuming everyone is going to tell them exactly what they want to hear. So, when she replied with, ‘What?!’ I knew immediately that I was dealing with someone who really wasn’t used to not getting what they wanted. The next day after a squabble, I was asked to pack my bags and leave under the nauseating pretext of, ‘Harry, this job seems to be making you stressed. I’m not sure working with our son is right for you.’ What she really meant to say was: ‘Harry I don’t like that you’ve exposed me for the lying, manipulative, sneaky control freak that I am. Please leave so I can continue: 1) bossing people around who are more subservient than you, and: 2) getting my own way all the time. You are a huge threat to my position as the family autocrat, and it would be very upsetting for me, and me only, if I were to be deposed. Thank you.’

I called my mother up to inform her of my sudden vicissitude.

‘Can’t you ever hold your tongue, Harry?’ she asked wearily.

‘No, Mother, I cannot. And I don’t want to either. Someone needs to call people out on their bulls***.’ I knew then, after being let go from that job, that if I am to work for someone else, I can either do it their way and become depressed, or do it my way and get fired.

After a fairly demanding few weeks of hardcore vagabonding, I soon wound up back in Southern California. My time here was slightly richer in novelty and excitement than it had been in previous places. I started off by living and working in some meditation centre in LA near the coast. This was lots of fun, but there were cultish overtones. The place was owned and run by a nice young couple on paper, but was actually being commanded by a scraggy and charismatic homeless man who had wangled his way into the business with his guile and (to some people) ‘persuasive’ agenda. He would claim to be channelling his deceased brother and, at times, Jesus, and would make wild predictions about how imminent earthquakes and floods would wipe out 95% of the human race, and it would then be up to the people associated with the meditation centre to bring about a new world order. Of course I did not for one minute believe in any of this drivel, I just found the experience of living in what appeared to be a developing cult too exciting to pass up. I had a field day at that place as I secretly analysed everyone collectively and individually. Like me, the old man lived in the building. I called him the spiritual Fagin. The two of us would go dumpster diving at night through affluent neighbourhoods as that was where all of the unopened bags of food were. I would also accompany him on his night job which was cleaning a yoga studio in Santa Monica. I wouldn’t clean, of course, I’d take the stage and sing songs with a guitar and improvise little skits. We did develop quite a close friendship if I’m being honest. I did not respect his crafty and manipulative ways but he was very talented and did have a big heart despite his obvious demons. I realised one day how I was living in absolute opulence, yet I had no income and no expenditure. All of the food we ate was brought in by me and the spiritual Fagin, and I was working for my keep.

I was given the boot one day for not being obedient enough and asking too many questions; which was going to happen sooner or later. In fact, many of my friends were surprised I hadn’t left sooner. I did have a lovely time at that meditation centre; there was much I didn’t agree with, but I couldn’t help myself. My fascination with human behaviour got the better of me.

A lovely family from Hollywood found me on YouTube and offered me a place to stay after telling me how much my content had helped them. I got myself a job at a vegan restaurant in Venice as a host. I loved this job. A record-breaking three months had passed before running into a single problem. I had stacks of fun with the customers. All my job really entailed was standing at my booth waiting for people to come in, and when they would I’d burst into life and greet them with charm and grace before escorting them to their table. A local friend told me that I’d be better off serving at the restaurant as I’d make more money that way. I told him that that was the most preposterous thing anyone had ever said to me. I could be myself as a host, minimal demands were placed on me and I never had to do any manual labour or perform any other task that had the power to extrude me from my comfort zone. All I had to do was be me and get paid for it. I still got the ‘wow…’ factor from people, just as I did in my videos. This was a job where I did not have to leave my natural habitat. The only time I’d bristle was when I’d be confronted with privileged and entitled yuppies.

Ninety per cent of the customers were deliciously easy. If the restaurant was busy, as it was most of the time, then the customer would have little choice in regards to where they’d sit and would have to make do with whatever seating was left. Nine times out of ten though, they would be perfectly happy to sit wherever I put them. The other 10%, however, weren’t half as cooperative. There were four booths in that restaurant, and two outside tables with beautiful Wiccan chairs. Now these are, hands down, the most popular tables in that restaurant. Everyone, I’m sure, would like to sit at these tables; however, one can’t just turn up to the restaurant and expect to be given one as no more than their due. One must either meet the criteria or at least earn it in some way. Occasionally, if it was quiet, I’d let smaller parties sit at said tables so long as I knew there wasn’t going to be a stampede of customers any time soon. So, just to recap, most people were happy to sit wherever I put them, but some were a little bit sassier and more audacious. One person came in and asked:

‘Can I sit here?’ Gesturing to the empty booth.

‘How many are in your party?’

‘Just me and a friend.’

‘Sorry, only parties of three or more are allowed to sit at the booths.’

‘Oh, come on! Can’t you just let us sit there this once?’

‘Nope.’

‘But I’m a regular, so make an exception?’

‘I don’t care who you are.’

‘But I have a bad back?’

‘We can stand here and discuss your maladies all day. I will not, under any circumstances, give you a booth unless you can demonstrate to me a good reason as to why you should be allowed to sit there over everyone else.’

‘… Can you get me a manager please?’ I was ruthless, and would get myself into pickles like this all the effing time. What annoyed me most about it was how when the manager would intervene they’d always give in to the customer by letting them sit where they pleased. I gained a reputation for being overly precious about the – ahem – my booths and everyone found this rather amusing. I felt so alive behind my pulpit as I brought about humility by vanquishing snobbery and self-importance. In order to prevent me from having stand-offs with the customers, the managers had to institute a system whereby they would take over from me every time a pampered prune walked through the door. This was a bit annoying, but I was, admittedly, getting carried away. It was a business after all, whatever that means…

I noticed, when interacting with the customers, how words can be used as either weeds or seeds. Now, I have an allergy to small talk, and this has nothing to do with the fact that I dislike it. I am just, as I said, severely allergic.

‘Hello, how are you?’ AAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHH! This is a weed! This is a lacerating example from the societal script we all unthinkingly recite day in day out. No one ever f***ing means it. ‘Oh, but it’s just what people say.’ I don’t give a monkey’s! It is a phrase that has been denuded of all meaning, sense and sanity. I urge you, dear reader, to observe people when they robotically utter this question, and notice how no one really thinks about what they’re asking. People even say it as they are rushing past one another. ‘Hey! How’s it going?’ And then we must suffer the inevitable response of equal tedium: ‘Good, you?!’ Get. A new. C***ing. Word. What is it with people and the word ‘good’? The English language is a cosmic and bountiful masterpiece, and if your lucky mind has been furnished with it then don’t stand there and tell me that ‘good’ is the best you can do. It almost undercuts one’s wellbeing and will to live, even if they are ‘good’. And are you really good? Or are you just saying that because you have been rehearsing your lines? Are you saying that because you have nothing else to say? ‘Good, you?’ is what we’d expect to follow from, ‘Hello, how are you?’ And I wonder, is the questioner really concerned for the wellbeing of the person they’re asking? Would they really rush past them if they were preparing for a raw and honest answer? What if they’re not ‘good’? Come to think of it, when do you ever hear people respond with: ‘No! Life is s***!’? Who wants to be ‘good’ all the time anyway? Wouldn’t that be so boring if we were consistently ‘good’ all day long without any peaks, dips, interruptions or variation? One of my favourite things to do when hosting at that vegan restaurant, was to obliterate these nasty verbal weeds wherever and whenever I could, or, better still, transmogrify the weeds into seeds. A customer would come in and ask:

‘Hey how’s it goi…’

‘SPAGHETTI!’

‘Ummm… Okay? You good?’

‘I feel like a decaying piece of meatloaf, but tomorrow I will be slippery.’

The script is destroyed. The human malfunctions. Weeds are now seeds. Success!

***

On my last day working at that restaurant, I got a little bit cranky with a customer. She was sitting inside alone at a small table and approached me to ask if she could sit at the big outside table with the wicker chairs. I said no because the tables were reserved, and she was by herself. She asked again in a more exigent tone as if she hadn’t listened to a blind word I said.

‘Look, do you see anyone else whining? You are no more important than anyone else!’ I exclaimed. She was a bit hurt by my snapping at her and told me I was rude. About a half hour later the manager sat me down and asked me why I sometimes had such a searing lip with people. I told her that after living life on the road, I have zero tolerance for injustice, entitlement or first world bulls***, but those who do not exhibit such traits, I will treat with love and respect. I then went and sat down with a few other employees when my shift had finished as I wanted to say goodbye to them. Everyone was having a giggle about my recent altercation.

‘You know, Harry,’ one of them said, ‘I really like you, but you have an edge to you.’

I handed in my notice with a tear in my eye. I was sad to leave, but it was time.

After a little bounce from Mexico all the way up to Washington State, I drifted towards the East coast where I met with a friend in Vermont. I stayed here for a couple of weeks and worked as an Uber driver. Now this job is a PDAer’s dream if I’ve ever known one. I had no boss and no timetable, I was free to work whenever I felt like it and all I had to do was drive my passengers from A to B. The conversations were always first-rate, and then sometimes I wouldn’t talk to my passengers at all. We would instead sit there in silence and enjoy the serene car journey. In fact, Uber driving or hosting, and sometimes guitar teaching, are the only jobs I’ve ever had where I felt as though I was not even working, jobs where I could truly be myself and didn’t feel as though I was pretending to be something I’m not in pursuit of green, rectangular pieces of paper, depicting Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II or Charles Darwin in the UK, or a smattering of the founding fathers (and other presidents) in the US.

No longer able to sustain myself living precariously in America, and adequately nourished from the many escapades I valiantly undertook, I returned to my island home of Great Britain in November 2017.