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Austin Macauley Publishers - Mark Lucas

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88 pages

English

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It wasn't meant to be like this. I won student of the year at college and then was nominated for national awards in the first year of my apprenticeship. I had come from inauspicious beginnings, but I was motivated and hard working. I had every intention of going places. And I did. It seems like every other week, another celebrity is diagnosed with bipolar disorder by the tabloid media. The public are led to believe that the latest superstars' fall from grace is more deep-seated than over indulgence in drink or drugs; or is this sometimes just canny image management to remove any responsibility for bad behaviour? Mark Lucas takes us on a real journey of a bipolar life, as experienced by an everyman, complete with the humour and wit to balance the heartache and crises of this rollercoaster ride. Having been effectively labelled second rate at the end of his teens, Mark has had to fight for everything he has achieved and gritted his teeth through illness, ridicule and unfair treatment at work, and ostracism due to occasional incidences of illness and asks why, in a world obsessed with celebrating the self and individual rights, do the sufferers of mental health problems often have to live a lie whilst hiding in plain sight?

Informations

Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers
Date de parution	29 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528967129
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Life a Bit Less Ordinary
Bipolar Disorder for the Average Joe
Mark Lucas
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-05-29
A Life a Bit Less Ordinary About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © A Brand-New Day Mark Lucas One Departing for Distant Shores Two First Dive Three Entanglement Four Drowning Five Nadir Six Impatient Inpatient Seven Sanctuary Eight First Love Nine Tune Up Ten Attrition Eleven Equilibrium Twelve It Was the Best of Times… Thirteen Forever Changes Fourteen New Horizons Fifteen Stalemate Sixteen Inside Job Seventeen Out of the Frying Pan Eighteen Losing Grip Nineteen Wrap Me Up in Cotton Wool Twenty What Goes Up Twenty-One Taking the Wheel Twenty-Two Ascendency Twenty-Three Speculation Twenty-Four Reinvention Twenty-Five Genesis Twenty-Six Education, Education Twenty-Seven Trajectory Twenty-Eight Introspection Twenty-Nine Closing
About The Author
Mark Lucas is definitely not famous, but he has had to deal with bipolar disorder for almost 25 years. Despite this secret history, he is a college lecturer, former aircraft engineer, former psychological assistant for the Prison Service and, currently, a father of two. His illness does not define him.
Dedication
For Grandad
Copyright Information ©
Mark Lucas (2020)
The right of Mark Lucas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events are portrayed to the best of author’s memory. While all the stories in this book are true, some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528932578 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528932585 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528967129 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
A Brand-New Day

Mark Lucas
The pub was quiet on that early weekday night, but the regulars that were there were astounded by my wizard-like perception. Between frames on the pool table, I buzzed around guessing the favourite tracks of the staff and patrons, feeding the jukebox to prove my gift; they were clearly spellbound by my abilities and musical expertise, and my game was that of an enigmatic pool god, while thoughts and ideas poured from brain to lip without pause, or explanation.
After some time, my younger sister arrived, upset and concerned. “What are you doing? Where have you been?”
I was incredulous.
“Chill out, what’s up?” I said.
“You’ve been gone since nine this morning. The police are here to take you back.”
I’d left the hospital that morning with enough money for cigarettes and a newspaper so I could read the football transfer news. With me, as always at that point, was my snooker cue in its big silver aluminium case. I’d been playing a lot of pool recently. At some point, after visiting the shop, I decided I needed money and here’s where things started to unravel in an improvisational manner.
Five minutes later, I arrived at the Nationwide Building Society, having decided to get a loan. I approached the counter nonchalantly as if I had planned a simple shake-up in my personal finances like a responsible person might do… In fact, I sauntered in like the chairman of the board going through the trifles of a spot of bookkeeping. The cashier politely informed me that there were no appointments to be had with a financial advisor that day. I made a hasty departure, with the over-the-shoulder retort of ‘It’s your loss’, hissing the words out before she had even finished. I was not about to be denied.
Across the road, at Barclays, I found more success and was given an appointment for an hour’s time.
So, I had time to kill, but only a small amount of loose change—for now. Easy… I went the few yards across the precinct to Carphone Warehouse. I described my forthcoming meeting at Barclays and offered to pay the salesperson £20 back if he’d lend me £10, after my appointment, leaving my phone as a deposit. He disappeared to ask his boss what to do and returned, having being given the option to make his own judgement call.
Ten minutes later I was tucking into a double bacon and sausage sandwich and mug of tea from the café around the corner.
The financial advisor at Barclays was a young lady in her early twenties. She quickly accepted my reasons for wanting a £5,000 loan; I’d been a long-time customer, and of course, I was a newly turned professional pool player about to embark on a lucrative career—I had the cue after all and that was my spiel. She quickly arranged the loan and then moved from the private side room to the counter, where she slid me a £1,000 advance in cash, with the remainder going into my account, as she had suggested. The process took half an hour maximum.
After retrieving my phone and making good on our deal, the next stop was a new watch from the nearby jewellers. I told the owner I wanted a Rolex, but…not now. Somehow intimating that I had not earned that, yet. £250 cash bought me a Citizen Eco-Drive instead, the kind that charges itself when exposed to light, manmade or solar, and is meant to keep time nigh on forever.
I strolled out of the jeweller’s, with an increasingly self-satisfied feeling building in my gut and a bounce in my step. I didn’t just think that everything was unfolding for me, my every whim. It seemingly was, so far, I had a wallet full of cash, with more in the bank and a shiny new watch. Looking back, in my mind’s eye was a cartoon scene where the viewer sees the next frames being pencilled in and brought to life and in technicolour just in time for the unassuming main character to breeze through to the following scene and the next, and so on.
The obvious next step was to buy a new car. I wanted a Volkswagen, ideally. The brand suited my station in life somehow, but pragmatism won; the Ford showroom at the edge of town was a more straightforward proposition. After a short bus ride, I was in the showroom looking at the newly released Ford Focus ST. The promotion material showed a garish orange beast. I was sold, and became fixated on the name ‘Focus’; the connotations of the word seemed to gel with me. I was on a mission and needed to maintain mine. All was going well until the young sales clerk went to confirm something with his boss. As I sat having my naff, complimentary coffee, watching daytime telly, it seemed a given that I would be leaving that day, with a brand-new Focus ST, or at least a date to collect one.
Briefly, reality showed its face in the form of the kid’s supervisor. “What you after mate?” he asked brusquely.
“He’s gone to get me some details on a Focus ST,” I replied.
The guy was having none of it and told me to leave. Unperturbed, I asked for a courtesy car for no good reason, to which he scoffed, “I’ll get you a taxi.”
I chatted machine-gun style with the receptionist as I awaited my ride. Despite this setback, things were still flowing seamlessly from one moment to the next. When I looked at my new watch to check the time, the hands began to spin wildly resembling something from a sci-fi movie. I thought to myself, it’s like the quickening from the ‘Highlander’, although I wasn’t worried about losing my head to the Kurgan: Christopher Lambert’s head chopping nemesis. It was too late for that. I didn’t flinch at this phenomenon and accepted it as an extension of the flow I was in. The watch occasionally catches up when you pull your sleeve up and expose it to light. Hence the fast-forward motion, but that was lost on me.
The journey to a nearby village was full of uncanny coincidences, from the music the driver played to the people we both knew, everything meshed, for me at least. There was a familiar, reassuring unease here, a feeling in the stomach, the same as with the watch, akin to some form of blissed-out paranoia or pronoia, where everything connects and fits together synergistically, without any effort to force things. In reality, I’m sure the driver, like others that day did a slow-motion double take and shook his head as he dropped me off at my destination, the sleepy pub in the next village on from where I lived, where I vaguely knew some of the regulars.
Bipolar disorder first showed its symptoms in my late teens, beginning with a long, bewildering depression. After about sixteen years of treatment with lithium, though, I was unsure. Do I really have this illness lurking in the background? Do I need to take medication, which I believe is affecting my short-term memory? I don’t want to be different: damaged goods. I had my doubts. I consulted my psychiatrist, whom I hadn’t seen on an outpatient basis for years, and he was happy with my relatively even keel and spelt out a twelve-week phased withdrawal from the drug.
By around week eight, things were already rocky. Pressures at work and a tempestuous relationship added to my stressors at the time I ideally needed calmness and stability in my life. After a poorly managed situation at work, which meant I essentially had to disclose my medical past to my colleagues, the die was cast. I ended up on sick leave, and things quickly spiralled out of control.
I’ve only had a few manic episodes and no real issues for well over a decade. For me, they have involved feeling like a ‘Superman’, or at least a super version of myself. I thought and spoke faster, drank more heavily and more often. Money was no object; sex was more casual and less di