4:00 A.M.
CHILDREN’S WARD, ROYAL FREE HOSPITAL, HAMPSTEAD
IT IS NEVER DARK IN A HOSPITAL WARD. THERE IS A WEIRD, GREENISH half-light that glows from the corridors; the white lamp at the nurse’s desk.
It is never silent, either: there is always a hushed conversation between the staff; a child crying; someone coughing; something bleeping.
It is not day, and not night; you are not awake, you are not asleep. The sealed windows and central heating make you feel sticky. This is the world—but not the world. You are you—but not you.
I remember what the writer Russell T. Davies said, in the years he was nursing his husband through a brain tumor: “There are two worlds—the world of the well, and the world of the ill. No one in the world of the well can imagine the world of the ill. And no one in the world of the ill can remember what the world of the well is like anymore. They marvel that it ever existed. They feel they will never go back there.”
My Girl has taken an overdose.
It is her third this year.
Today is the worst day. The very worst day.
I climb into the tiny bed with her and say: “My poor baby. This is so hard for you. I am so sorry. I’m so sorry. I love you.”
She turns her head into my chest and cries like a little girl.
“I love you, too,” she says.
“Did you do this wanting to die?” the on-call psychiatrist asks.
On the last two occasions, she has answered this question, blankly, “Yes.”
On this occasion, she says, firmly, “No.”
The psychiatrist leaves. We sit, awhile, on the bed. I tuck the blankets around her, tight.
“Mom—I don’t want to do this anymore.”
For a terrifying moment, I think that she means live. I have never felt a horror like it. The moment seems to go on forever.
“I don’t want to come here again,” she continues, as I breathe again. “I am never going to do this again. I am going to get better. I am going to do all the work, and listen to everything the therapist says, and I am going to try, so hard, and I’m not going to give up. I’ve never said this to you, because I couldn’t, but I’m saying it now: I promise you I won’t do this again. I promise.”
I’ve been told, with these kinds of illnesses, that—once it has taken hold—there is very little you can do, save wait for the moment where the sufferer hits rock bottom, and their coping method causes more problems than it gives short-term relief. It’s the moment of unrevelation: The moment they lose faith in the malign voice in their head. It’s where they break up with their illness—because they realize they have been betrayed, and broken, by it.
I wonder—is this it? Is this the worst day? Is it, finally, passing?
She falls asleep, still holding my hand.
Her face is serene and childlike—even though the bandages on her arms speak of a girl who is dealing with problems that would make a wrestler buckle.
In this moment right now, there is nothing I can do for her. I cannot mother her. Nothing to say, nothing to get. I have time to think.
I can see her, not in close-up—but as one of millions of teenage girls in the twenty-first century. The product of her times. The receipt on the world my generation has made.
There are so many girls out there like her. In my social circle, fully a third of the teenage girls I know are on medication; they self-harm; they starve themselves; they have panic attacks so intense they must leave school, or else be taught at home. This epidemic can’t be by chance: In screenwriting, when you are having problems with your third and final act, it’s usually because of problems in your first act. Your children are your third act. If they are troubled, what did you screw up in the first act? Why are our children so depressed and anxious they hurt themselves, in so many ways?
I think, reluctantly, of the conversations she would have grown up hearing. These are anxious times—the debates around the kitchen table, with my friends, whilst she played on the floor with her dolls: “Politics is fucked!”; “Racial-hate crimes are rising!”; “We’ve returned to Victorian levels of inequality!”; “Climate warming will put ten major cities underwater by 2070—Big Ben will look like a lighthouse.”
Those are the conversations of left-wing liberals—a panicky mourning for a future that looks thinner, shallower, and more unpleasant as the years go on.
Had she been raised in another kind of house—right-wing, conservative—she would have heard similar unhappiness about the present: about moral values going to waste; about civilization going backward; “PC going mad”; freedoms being destroyed; a fury that the golden age of the past was ruined by foolish schemes.
Very few twenty-first-century children, I think, will have been raised in a house full of dizzying hope for the future; a house that felt the right people have made the right decisions; that humanity is currently at its best, and things will, slowly but surely, get better. All sides of the political debate are in a state of furious pessimism. All have a sense that there is a fight for simple things: law and order, housing, employment, clean air. By 2020, this is joined, brutally, by “being able to leave the home without contracting a terrifying virus,” and “having a global economy not teetering on the brink of a Depression.” All houses have a dissatisfaction with how they are. All houses have anxiety flowing through them in the twenty-first century. We are a cortisol age. We have made cortisol children. Have we ever raised a generation of peacetime children so anxious?
Then I think of how we would often conclude these conversations—perhaps when we become aware of the little pair of eyes sitting in the dog’s basket, with its Polly Pockets, looking worried: “But it doesn’t matter that our generation has screwed things up—because the next generation is amazing,” we will say, suddenly, with forced jollity and optimism. “You kids are so much kinder, and cleverer, and more connected, than we were. You’ll have your school strikes and your extinction rebellion marches; you’ll find some new center ground between the left and the right, based on a whole new set of ideals. You’ll invent new economies and medicines! You, and your Greta Thunbergs, and your Emma Gonzálezes. You’ll form new political parties and write new manifestos—you kids are incredible. The kids will save the earth!”
And we will toast our children, in the belief we have shown our faith in them, and that is a good thing. They will feel a capable pride in being better than us. That we have assuaged their panic about the future by telling them they will have control of it.
But of course—they have no control over it. They’re children. They can’t even vote. So what we’re essentially saying is the most terrifying thing a child can hear: Save Mommy and Daddy. We don’t know what to do.
If we want to know why we are raising an anxious, depressed, panicking generation who assume all the bad diversions of animals in psychological pain—self-harming, not eating—the answers to much of it might be here. We have charged them with saving the world.
When we ask our children’s therapists, confused, “But their symptoms are like that of a child raised in a chaotic household, with ill or absent parents. But we are not ill, or absent! We are there! We love and care for them!” This, I think, might be part of the answer.
We have absented ourselves from coming up with solutions to our adult social, economic, and political problems. The generation above these children does not look calm, rational, reasonable, forward thinking, and moving toward a solution. It does not look cooperative and compassionate. It does not talk about how we might live normal lives with dignity, hope, and provision—it talks of battles, and struggle, and revolution, and fortresses, and how there is a fight ahead—whatever side you’re on.
And then, what is the kicker we—loving, modern parents—put in at the end of every conversation with our children? “All we want is for you to be happy, darling. That’s the most important thing. That’s all me and Daddy care about. It kills us to think of you as sad. Just be happy!”
Again, we think this is a loving, kind thing to say. But an overburdened, worried teenager hears this, simply, as another duty. Another thing on their list, along with exams, and homework, and relationships, and saving the world: That we, their parents, need them to be blithe, carefree, roller-skating, and joyous—dealing with everything with a cheery, “No problem! I will be optimistic, untroubled, and happy with my life at all times! For I know my sadness will hurt you.”
Obviously, this is not a hard-and-fast rule, but if you are not allowed day-to-day sadness—if your wholly natural bouts of pessimism and hopelessness are something you feel your parents try, immediately, to jolly you out of—or else, you must conceal from them completely—then is it any wonder that small amounts of suppressed, daily sadness and anxiety start to metastasize into something darker, and harder to shift? That it starts to mutate into symptoms, a syndrome, an illness? In the same way adult women enjoy their Fleabag-like boozing, and hangovers, and periods, and dreams of going to the hospital for a break, is this now darkly echoed in our young girls?
For once an existential unease becomes “an illness”—diagnosable, treatable, discussed at seminars by medical professionals—then you can turn and point at it, with relief, and say, “Look: My unhappiness and anxiety were not my fault. I tried, but I am wired wrong. It’s not that I am weak—that I didn’t try hard enough to be happy—but that I am ill. And, now I am a patient, an ill child, you will be told ways to help me.”
No one starts self-harming or starving themselves thinking they will do it forever. It’s just to get through this tricky bit. To distract you from worrying. It’s like a dreadful mindfulness app, really. Aside from the scars and the hunger, there’s no harm done—save teaching yourself, very early on, that you are a person it’s fine to hurt. That women are meant to feel pain. It’s just part of being a normal woman—like morning sickness and cramps.
PETE’S HERE NOW. My other daughter is at school, so he sits with me by My Girl’s bedside; both of us watching over her like loving hawks.
We hold hands. We are hopeful. We have been silent a long, long time. Eventually, Pete asks:
“What are you thinking?”
What am I thinking?
I am thinking: We just do not make being a grown woman look like an appealing job. We do not sell the idea that being a woman is, yes, difficult—but also amazing, and joyous, and powerful, and freeing. We do not show them a world where we value the skills of women or seek out their knowledge. We do not show them that however hard they might cry, they will almost certainly end up laughing three times as much; that they will, in the end, come to peace and pride within their bodies; that they will remake themselves over and over—better and stronger each time—and that, at the end of their lives, they will be able to look back at their life’s work and think, “Yes. Yes—I loved my life. I made things just a tiny bit easier and happier. I loved and was loved.”
Currently, what eleven-year-old girl would volunteer for growing into a woman? Because we don’t tell them all those things, at all. We are not selling that role we’re all living now. Perhaps, because we know that, however amazing feminism has been, it’s still just an informal network of millions of unpaid women, trying to squeeze “make the world better for our children” in between the other six thousand things on our To-Do List. It is a fragile and precarious system.
I am thinking: Things have to change. But how?