How I started my professional mad career

After years of sitting alone, suffering in silence, razor-whipped, razor-jarred by negativity and isolation, I decided to take small steps into improving the quality of my life. I started by doing voluntary work and visiting free galleries and museums.

As I gained more confidence I went out more. One Thursday morning, I would have rather have stayed in and watched TV, my energy levels were quite low and my attention span almost non-existent, but as per usual when I felt like this, I pushed myself off the sofa and out through the front door. Usually on a Thursday I went to LUV’s weekly Coffee Morning. LUV was Lambeth User Voice, a forum for mental health service users to support each other amongst other things. I enjoyed talking with the regulars there, Barry, Andrew and John. Carole Myers, the user development worker for LUV, used to laugh at my stories. This time she wasn’t there but there was a new face around the table. I took off my coat and this new face stuck out his hand for me to shake. “My name’s Jason.” “Dolly,” I smiled back. There was a book in front of him. I compared the guy on the cover with Jason and realised they were the same person. “You wrote a book?” “Yeah, I published it too.” “Really, wow, I’m a writer and publisher too.” “Really? Wow.” We talked shop and exchanged email addresses. I had no idea would be one of the defining turning points of my life.

We emailed each other for a while, talking about writing mostly before I got his book ‘A Can of Madness’ in the post. I read the book straight through, and then read it again. It blew me away. I had read books like ‘The Bell Jar’ with great curiosity because they talked about the ‘mad’ experience. Now I had met an author of a ‘mad memoir’ in the flesh, and he didn’t kill himself but was remarkably positive. He wanted to change the world and how it viewed mad people. I had been planning my own memoir in my head for years. I began to write seriously in 1992 when I was 21, and my memoir was in my plans then but I kept putting it off with other literary projects because I was basically too scared to do it. I thought it would be so painful, that it would turn into a suicide note. Jason really inspired me to finally sit down and write my story, so that’s what I did. Once I actually started it, the story couldn’t be stopped, it wanted to be told. I spent about 12 hours a day on the computer, with lots of necessary breaks to chill out. It was bittersweet liberation. I felt freed by the writing of my life but also I don’t think I had cried so much in my life. It was like watching a speed aging of a scared, scarred child into a scared, scarred adult. I wanted a happy ending for this person, and writing the book gave me an opportunity to script a better future for me.

Writing has always helped me. I found it when I was 22 and it has kept me alive since then. During my worst depressions, writing gave me a reason to wake up in the morning. Would I still have carried on writing if I never was published? Of course I would. One of my favourite writers, Charles Bukowski, said of writing: ‘It is the last expectation, the last explanation, that’s what writing is’.