Mum, Middlemarch and the Mind’s Mountains
Polly Wright is the founder and director of the Hearth
Centre, which encourages the use of the arts in mental wellbeing. I was lucky
enough to meet her at the Depression Alliance Awards a few weeks ago. Her
Reading to Well Being workshops are a subject close to my heart, and I hope we
may work together in the future.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there
– Gerard
Manley Hopkins
It
is 1970. I am in Central London with a friend on a hot day. Suddenly I clutch
my friend’s arm. She’s not a particularly good friend – just someone I hang out
with. Soon we will be going our separate ways.
“
I’m dying,” I tell her.
“
Are you sure?” she asks.
“
I can’t breathe. Help me.”
“
My God!” she screams.” Your face is bright red!”
That does it. I collapse on the pavement, and
the next thing I know I’m in the back of an ambulance, looking up at anxious
faces, and being prodded and wired up and cross examined.
In
the end, the ambulance men’s faces change. They drop us off before we get to
the hospital and, although nothing is said, I know they think I have wasted
their time.
But the same thing happens again and again, and,
after another episode involving an ambulance, I go back home to my parents and
fall into bed for three months.
Looking back, 43 years on, I can see that I
was experiencing panic attacks – not well understood in 1970 – and that I went
on to suffer a serious depressive episode of the kind which Rachel describes in
her wonderful book. I experienced acute physical symptoms. I couldn’t move. I
even put off going to the toilet for as long as I could in case I fainted. I
started to run a high temperature, and the GP prescribed bed-rest to bring it
down.
“Could it be…” he dropped his voice, “psychological?”
My Mum told him that, if that were the case,
she couldn’t understand it – things were at last going well for me. After
initially failing to get into university to do English, my dearest wish, I had
re-applied, and would be going in the autumn.
After that my Mum took up a vigil at the end
of my bed for the whole summer. She changed my sheets and kept me clean by
helping me into the bath and washing me like a baby. She brought me childhood
foods to coax me to eat, but, more often than not, it lay on the tray untouched
till she took it away.
All I could do was look up at the lime trees
outside my window and drift from weeping to sleeping, from day into night and
back into day again.
I knew I should be reading to prepare myself
for my new course but I couldn’t concentrate on anything, least of all the great
tomes of English Literature which made up the curriculum then. Middlemarch sat
on my bedside table and added to my sense of being a worthless person, because
I could not get to grips with all those long sentences and erudite quotations. Middlemarch
came to represent my future life. If I couldn’t read it, I would never get up
from my fevered, stinking bed and become a grown up.
Mum knew it was on my booklist so, one day,
she moved the book from the table to the pillow. I lay on my side and stared at
it for a long time. Eventually I opened it.
At first all I could manage was just a page a
day. But then it became a chapter. Suddenly I was doing nothing but reading it:
all day and much of the night, on and on, never moving the book from my pillow,
fearful that it might be taken away from me, until at last I came to that famous last
sentence, and I was forced to leave its whole magnificent world and come back
to my own life. Looking out at the trees, I saw it was nearly autumn and time
to get up.
Why
did I love that book so much? In some way it was the distraction I needed: like
every other young reader I was on tenterhooks to find out whether Dorothea was
at last going to find happiness with Ladislaw, and, of course, I was in love
with Lydgate, for all his arrogance, and yearned for him to dump the
superficial Rosamund – but, on a deeper level, I think I drew tremendous
comfort from the wise counsel Eliot was giving me about life. It is difficult
to write now about that first emotional impact, when my response to Middlemarch
has been overlaid with subsequent analysis, but I think that the greatest
lesson I learnt was that everyone is vulnerable, everyone can be brought down,
but with love and compassion you can come through, and give to others in ways
you never predicted.
I never had another depressive episode of that
magnitude again. But 43 years later I am able to look back to see what effect
it had on my life. I learnt about mental vulnerability, that the mind has
mountains and even though it can literally floor
you, you can recover from a breakdown, and that what got me through was
compassion and reading.
But I also learnt that reading is the bedrock
of my wellbeing, and forty years on – and a few careers later – that early
experience has led me to the work I do now. My company, the Hearth Centre, set
up the Reading for Well Being project, where we read poems and prose aloud in
groups, to allow people to respond emotionally and reflect on how they can
apply the lessons in literature to their own lives. We also help them to
fashion their responses by modelling their own writing on the good practice of the
Masters and Mistresses of language. Our first anthology of these responses,
printed alongside the poems which inspired them, is called Turning the Page,
and will be launched in June. And the panic attacks? Well, I still get them –
this time in the middle of the night. Semiconscious, I clutch my partner’s arm
and cry out that I’m dying and I can’t breathe. But I know them for what they
are now, and when I come round I am able to go back to sleep quite easily. But
when I can’t – yes Boris – I do ‘Read a Poem!’
For
more information about Hearth’s work log on to:
Thank you for sharing your dark experience in such courageous detail. I'm glad it had such a positive outcome for you, both then and in the recent past. I can empathise with your bedridden days :and the inability to open a book. I was going through something parallel in 1970.71.During my second year at Uni.things seemed to fall apart and I went through a dark patch but after a year out, returned and gained a good Degree. I'm greatly interested in the work you are doing now with poetry and drama, not least because I was born and bred in Birmingham and returned regularly to the city when my Mother was still alive. It's strange to read the familiar place names and venues such as Cannon Hill Park. Very bitter-sweet! I wish I lived near enough to take advantage of your Creative Writing Workshops, I've been going through a depressive period recently and what is pulling me out of it with great force is writing poetry again.encouraged by my wise Therapist. And I love Gerard Manley Hopkins! But I am aware that my poems need much honing etc. wish you all the very best in your outreach, I'm so glad that Rachel asked you to guest blog.
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