November 15, 2024

Existential crisis

The complete history of how I lost my faith, 20 years ago this autumn

Contains suicidal ideation of the passive “Maybe I'd be better off dead” variety

This autumn marks the 20th anniversary of my existential crisis.1 It was one of those dreadful experiences that automatically divide life into Before and After. Or perhaps After would more accurately be called During, because it doesn't seem as if I've moved on, even now.

At the age of 25, I wasn't religious, although I might reference my Church of England upbringing when it seemed relevant. But I did have what, for want of a more precise term, you might call "faith". I didn't realise how central this faith was to my life until a succession of events in the autumn and winter of 2004/05 showed how hollow, and sometimes how dangerous, my beliefs were.

I believed in love. I didn't necessarily think it could conquer all, but I did believe it was a force for good, inspiring positive actions and even redeeming people who had few other admirable qualities. I wrote a novel in which the protagonist's capacity for love fought back a monster that would otherwise have overwhelmed humanity, and I had no doubt that I was right in loving my boyfriend of six years.

Then he broke up with me. He spent about six months trying to manipulate me into breaking up with him, to spare himself the difficult conversation, but I loved him and sincerely believed we were just going through a rough patch, so eventually he had no choice but to say it. And then, quite apart from the immediate heartache, I began to reassess what had gone before.

I had forgiven him for letting me down in a hundred small ways. I had given up opportunities because they didn't fit in with his plans. I had smoothed over arguments that, looking back, felt like him throwing a childish tantrum because things weren't exactly how he imagined them. I had believed all these things were worth it because we loved each other, but now I was faced with the devastating fact that we did not.

Friends tried to tell me that I still had my memories, but they were all tainted by the suspicion that, during every happy moment, he had actually been playing me for a fool. Love had been a weakness, convincing me to act against my best interests for the sake of someone who never considered doing the same for me. I had done much the same thing in earlier relationships, but this time the investment was too much to write off as youthful foolishness.

I saw a therapist, who tried to convince me that "real love" would never result in that kind of heartbreak. But since I couldn't trust myself to reliably tell "real love" from the counterfeit kind, that was no help. Perhaps love was a force for good in some realm of abstraction, but in my life it was only a dangerous temptation.

I tried to break myself of the habit, even though that meant cutting out much of what I'd been working for in the last few years. I stripped my life of everything that might suck me back into old ways of thinking, and then had no idea what to replace it all with. Life felt bleak and empty, but the shocks weren't finished. I still had more beliefs to be shattered.

I believed in stories. I was always looking for a narrative to fit life into, one that would make the hardships just obstacles on the path to eventual success. And I thought for a brief moment that I'd found one. It was a classic story: when your life reaches rock bottom, the universe will throw you a lifeline, if you can only hang onto it.

Rock bottom for me was my dad coming home to see me sobbing at my computer as I discussed mortality with some online friends. He laid into me for what he saw as unproductive wallowing and all but ordered me to go to the doctor and not leave until I had a solution. Unable to cope with his anger, I walked out of the house with nothing but the clothes I stood up in and my bank book, getting as far as the bus stop before I realised I had nowhere to go.

The best option I could come up with was to go to the pub where I correctly suspected I would find him, and attempt to patch things up. And that was where I found my lifeline. A man I'd never seen before was ranting about hanging Germans and how evil his ex wife was. He offered to walk me home at closing time, and we went for a drive in his car.

I didn't for a moment imagine this was love, but that was so much the better to me. Instead, I hoped we could use each other and perhaps give each other a little comfort. Unfortunately, even this modest hope was more than the reality. He had no intention of speaking to me again, and my desperate attempts to stay in touch only got me barred from his local pub a month later.

An attempt to ease my feelings by ritually burning his telephone number only succeeded in setting my dad's living room on fire. But for the lucky chance of my dad leaving his key in the door, I might have died that night; as it was I had to watch my home damaged by fire and then gutted by insurance agents, destruction I still can't forgive myself for causing.

The immediate cause of the fire was my carelessness, under the twin influences of alcohol and emotional upheaval. But the deeper cause was my insistence on clinging to a lifeline that anyone less desperate would have seen much sooner was not to be relied on. Another belief was shattered, and I've thought many times that it might have been better if my dad had taken his key with him and let the wretched story end there.

I still believed in my capacity to work hard and achieve anything I put my mind to. The same day I argued with my dad, I'd told the doctor that signing me off work would solve nothing, because as long as I was working I had some kind of structure to keep me going. With love and stories discredited, I had nothing I wanted to work towards, but I still believed I could work if I had to.

I had spent the autumn registered with a temp agency, taking various jobs as I was offered them. I stacked shelves at B&Q, washed dishes in a works cafeteria, and even took pride in cleaning tampon bins. Then I was offered a job delivering leaflets. It was supposed to be for people with their own car, and there would have been no penalty for admitting that I didn't even have a full licence, but I scorned to let such trivial matters hold me back. I said that I was sure I could manage it with a push bike.

I was very much mistaken. I endured two weeks of trudging the streets on foot and returning home in the evening too exhausted to do more than eat and sleep. Then my already uneven mental health broke under the strain.

I was living in a caravan while the house was repaired from the fire, and I just didn't leave. I left my bed permanently set up, and spent the vast majority of the time lying in it. I made a few half-hearted excuses to the temp agency before switching to the simpler method of ignoring all phone calls. I think they would have understood if I'd just told them I'd overestimated my ability, but I couldn't face that admission on top of everything else.

The last blow of the winter fell in early 2005. I believed in Scunthorpe United, believed that if I supported them with all my heart and soul they would eventually win the victory that made it all worthwhile. And for much of that bitter autumn, they consoled me by seeming to make good on that promise. On Christmas Day, they were top, seven points above their nearest challenger, with a mouthwatering third round Cup tie against Premiership leaders Chelsea to look forward to.

Chelsea had huge investment behind them and had assembled an expensive array of talent. We had only one player in our squad that we'd paid a transfer fee for - and he was suspended for the tie. I joked that they'd outspent us by a factor of infinity and that unless they also outscored us by the same factor, they'd wasted their money.

Chelsea had let in just four goals at Stamford Bridge in the first half of the season. But to our astonished delight, they let in a fifth that day, the opening goal scored by Paul Hayes. For "eighteen glorious minutes" as the local paper put it, we were in the lead.

Normal service was resumed with an equaliser before the half hour mark, and we ultimately lost 3-1. We had, by every metric, given a good account of ourselves, and by my pre-match calculations, Chelsea had wasted their money. And yet I couldn't escape a sense of bitter disappointment. For those eighteen minutes I had dared to hope, and thereby laid myself open to disappointment.

Our league form was much less impressive in the second half of the season. We ultimately finished second, which was good enough to get promoted, but disappointing after we'd spent Christmas dreaming of the title. And this was just more proof to me that hoping would only lead to disappointment. Two years later, we did win a title, and up until it was mathematically certain I tried to guard against false hope by calculating ways it could still go astray.

Life went on, at least superficially. I found a part-time job - five hours a week was the most I felt capable of - and I had a brief relationship with the man who became my daughter's other dad. Pregnancy and learning to be a parent gave me a new goal in life, and one that I could commit myself to with all I had left in me, even though I felt like the world's worst heel for inflicting my broken heart on an innocent child.

I don't think I ever realised how much being a parent allowed me to paper over the cracks until she got close to school leaving age. As she became more independent, I had to confront the losses that I'd avoided dealing with for her entire life. This summer, it's hit me as hard as it did twenty years ago, and I'm no closer to finding a way to handle it.