How depression became my curious ally

Attempting to take my own life in many ways saved it. I wish I had talked to my friends about it, though, just to let them know I knew how they felt, says Alex Chapman

Light at the end of the tunnel (Shutterstock/Adam Radosavljevic)

Around midnight on the eve of my dear mum’s birthday 20 years ago, I tucked myself into bed in my one-bedroomed flat, systematically swallowed 40 Asprin, and settled in for the night, hoping never to wake again. The fact that I am writing these words is testament to the fact that it didn’t quite work out that way but that single event set me on my ongoing quest for integrity and has probably saved my life on at least five occasions in the intervening years. Depression is a curious ally! 

I’ve lost two friends to suicide in the past four years, the most recent of whom cut himself off from contact with me and many of our mutual friends to the extent that none of us knew of his death until three months after he left us for good. I have been mourning his loss for about 15 years, which was the last time I heard from him but, now I know that the chance of ever catching up again has been taken from me, that feeling has only intensified. I’ve read my children his very funny picture book. I’ve named my car in his honour. I recently re-discovered the copy of Piper at the Gates of Dawn he once gifted me on vinyl. And I can’t think of scaling Kinderscout in the Peak District, or sitting around The Nine Ladies stone circle at the Summer Solstice or consuming port and stilton without his quirky face popping into my head.

Apparently, he drove into a remote part of Scotland in his Mercedes camper van, parked up, closed all the windows and put the gas on. My other friend, a few years earlier, elicited all manner of verbal abuse from a publican for not turning up to his gig one night; he’d decided, instead, to hurl himself in front of a moving train. The conversations we all could, nay, should have had! 

Three weeks ago, I was so exasperated by and furious at the lack of importance anyone was giving to my calls to sit at the dinner table after I’d prepared the thousandth meal for my little unit, I stormed off for a walk. I didn’t know where I was going but I found myself at the level crossing near my house. The barriers started coming down as I crossed. I waited for the train on the other side to study the mechanics and the emotions required to jump in its path. Perhaps it was because I was aware of some uncomfortable looks coming my way, or because there happened to be an ambulance at the front of the queue, or because I was two minutes from the hospital, or because I’d been here before and knew the feeling would eventually pass; perhaps it was because I didn’t have the inordinate amount of courage required to move my feet in that direction, or because I really was just being curious, that I let the train pass and carried on up the road in the direction I was originally headed. 

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I hovered outside some friends’ house, contemplating whether to knock on the door but decided I neither wanted the company nor to disturb them. I sat and watched a horse unload its bowels and stayed to ponder why his companion went over to sniff the results. I wondered why a man would choose to open his car door into the very narrow path that I was on so that he could simply continue looking at his phone and force me to step out into the road.

I considered how to get myself out of this debilitating funk and eventually began to mentally script the essay that had already been formulating in my head for the past few days. Once I’d found my way home again, I walked straight down to my studio, put a notice on the door not to disturb, locked it and tapped out the words, describing an extremely painful escapade involving my genitalia. It made me laugh out loud many times and, after six hours, the worst of my rage was over. 

I’ve figured out the pattern. It’s cliche! It’s prosaic and predictable in equal measure: it’s a cry for help! It’s extreme and violent in its delivery because all the conventional ways have already been tried and no one is listening and no one has heard. When all the clowning, the sympathising, the rationalising, the negotiating and the pleading has fallen on deaf ears, I, personally, am left only with Billy Joel’s heart-wrenching line, “My silence is my self-defence”. I wonder how many days Roy and Martin spent in silence before they made their final journeys. I wonder if they would have refused the company if I’d have been there to offer it. I wonder if anything I’d have said would have made any difference to change the story in their heads.

Knowing how far down the line my own narratives have gone, I suspect I would not have been able to change a single thing. The only person that stood any chance of getting through to them is they, themselves. Both my friends were men close to their 50th year in age. Both were dads. Martin had a wicked sense of humour, was talented beyond belief, had many fans in the Comicon world and could demonstrate beautiful moments of generosity. But you often found him on the path of a nihilist.

Roy was happy-go-lucky, smiling and gregarious. I never saw his nihilistic side but I’m sure it was there. Both felt compelled to take final control and commit the ultimate selfish act. When I attended Roy’s funeral, I was in the depths of my own depression and I later collapsed into the arms of my best friend, sobbing that I was jealous of Roy. 

When I attended Roy’s funeral, I was in the depths of my own depression and I later collapsed into the arms of my best friend, sobbing that I was jealous of Roy

We friends who are left behind can only imagine the level of pain they must have been in. We question ourselves as to how we might have spotted the signs to step in earlier. We wring our hands in anguish and share in each other’s grief. But we, too, are all screaming to be heard. We photograph our toes by the side of the pool. We put up pictures of our children, our pets and our food. We pout into our camera phones to make ourselves look more beautiful. We pull funny faces to make us look carefree and happy. We laugh our way through the struggles of daily life and look for distractions to create moments of respite. But how many of us actually stop to listen? 

To listen in the face of your own pain is the hardest of tasks. It requires courage, humility, strength and to stand tall. How can we do that when we all we want to do is lie down or have a drink and a laugh? We’re exhausted by the struggle of daily life, by the complexity of modern living and, at the moment, it’s compounded by a way of living that we do not even recognise as real life. How do we stay upright?

We need our village back! We need to remember how to be a family, a community, to be together. People need each other. We need each other. As individuals, we must understand that we each, exclusively, hold the key to our own sense of meaning and we cannot place that responsibility on to others’ shoulders. At the same time, we cannot be everything to everyone. That’s the job of community and we must do everything we can to preserve it, not in the nationalistic, protectionist sense of the word but with love and compassion for all, including strangers and, dare I say, enemies. 

I have a reputation among my family and my closest friends for being a bit of a klutz, a maladroit, a liability, not to be taken too seriously. To betray my middle-class upbringing, I’m the guy who can always be relied upon to drop the family picnic from a ski lift, to knock his wine glass over at the dinner table, to misjudge a low wall while parking his car. And I’m also the guy that can be relied upon to step on to a stage in front of 50 stand-up comedians and 150 other guests of friends and strangers, alike, to deliver a best man’s speech, following the best gig of a professional comedian’s life, all under the influence of Citalopram and being heckled by his own wife.

I am used to ridicule but I’ve proven to myself time and time again, that I can carry on standing upright and I am capable of digging myself out of the deepest of holes. I have possibly been too open in the past and reached too far to help at the cost of my own stability. I have always come back to stand strong again, though, and to give it another go with a few more tweaks here and there. The days where I walked along busy roads, hoping a large truck might take me out once and for all, where I stood over a motorway, contemplating the impact my body might make on the poor lorry driver’s soul and windscreen, and where I’ve found myself in Gloucester’s “Hood” to see if I might bump into an arms dealer have not been my best. But, just like the inner voice that kicked me awake all those years ago on the night before my mum’s birthday, somewhere inside of me, there is someone looking out for me and I make it to the next day. 

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I wish I could have talked to Roy and Martin about my dark days and let them know that I get it. It sounds like neither of them had an internal angel looking out for them and neither of them will ever get to meet my own personal demon. It is my hope, however, that these inner thoughts will step in and speak to someone else and hear their despair. It is my hope that anyone reading this will hear their own pain and reach out. It is my hope that anyone reading this will hear the pain of someone else above their own and still reach out. It is my hope that we all start joining together again to rebuild our community, a community that, I believe, is being eroded by fear and manipulation. For without that, we are but individuals, living among other individuals. And that is no recipe for humanity. 

In my attempt, once, to emulate the techniques I was observing on the stand-up circuit, I started f-ing and blinding to the customers, currently walking out of the door during my rendition of their request for “Brown-Eyed Girl”. I was doing it ironically but the owner of the bar, who I hadn’t realised was in the audience, certainly didn’t see it that way. It was my first and my last gig in his bar. A week later, I earned the moniker Potty Mouth Chappers and I still answer to that name, 18 years on. I get it massively wrong a lot of the time and I know I’m an acquired taste. When the alternative is death, however, it’s all I can humbly offer. 

Peace to all!