Paul Dowker

alking about men’s mental health

 I’ve been posting about it for a while now, especially during the lockdown. That’s the easy bit, reposting amazing content from some really inspiration people and organisations.

The hard part is accepting that some days I’m not OK and to understand that not being OK is OK.

Being in my 40’s now, I’ve realised I can’t do it alone.

So many times, in the past I’ve simply carried on regardless. Put on the ‘brave face’, a smile and ‘rolled up my sleeves’. It is and was so draining to continue to do that. But at the time I didn’t know any better, I didn’t know another way.  

I’d like to think that I’m resilient in the face of a potentially crippling heart problems, a heart attack at 27, cardiac arrest at 34 and subsequently being fitted with a pacemaker/ICD unit, (currently on my 2nd  due to a battery change, they only last about 7-9 years).  The cardiac arrest was strange.  I’ve still got a ‘black hole’ of memory from the time. It happened on a Wednesday, June 15th to be precise, I was placed in an induced coma until the following Sunday. I then spent another two weeks in hospital and two months at home recovering.

This, I can now see as my trauma, kicking off my anxiety and mild depression.  Accepting the medical facts that my body hates me and the collective actions of the NHS doing all they can to save me.  I felt that I had to be strong for my family.  I’m not sure any parent expects to see their child in a situation I was in.  At the time the only decision I had was to the situation, not question it and carry on. I’ve always ‘bounced back and cracked on’ so to speak, carried on with life, not tried to let it be a barrier to doing the things I want, cycling, living the life I want to, work.

I firmly believe that I also suffer with body dysmorphia, not helped by the physical scars and the lump of the pacemaker in my chest.  When ever I look in the mirror I always see the fat, over weight lad staring back at me. This is not that often as I avoid looking in the mirror whenever I can.  This has been going on for as long as I remember.

I think it started when I was at school.  I seemed to ‘mature’ quicker than everyone else and this led to the inevitable piss taking during PE lessons. Now it would be bullying but back in the late 80’s and early 90’s it was banter. Looking back now I see that this could have been a trigger for my feelings now.

During my 20’s and 30’s I became very good at ‘archiving’ my feelings, responding with the common answer of ‘I’m OK’ if I was asked how I am. I now know that  sooner or later that archive will become full, it will not have any more space, it will overflow and things will be difficult and complicated to process.  

The pandemic and mandatory isolation/quarantine/shielding simply exasperated the feelings I was having but not dealing with. The things I enjoyed, cycling with friends became a shit scary prospect, not because of them, but the what if? What if my ICD goes off? What if I have a crash? What if? What if? What if?

All of these thoughts ended with me coming to the same conclusion, I can’t go out in case I end up in hospital and never come out. On the opposite side of these thoughts, lockdown was kind of the best thing to happen to me in a strange way. It made me face upto these thoughts and gave me the space and time to deal with, or at least start to be dealt with them. 

It was during this time that I came across the social media profiles of Nick Frendo, Ben May, Ascnd.cc and the Youtube channel of Francis Cade, where I saw Nick and Ben talking. They have all been open about the struggles they have faced and for me this was the lightbulb moment. It still took a while for me to do anything though.  I took the plunge and signed up to a Boys Talk session with The New Normal and that’s when things started to make sense. Also reading the entries on Ascnd from other who weren’t afraid to be open and honest made me realise I’m not alone.

Being a teacher in Further Education, you’d think that being in a room, albeit a virtual one with strangers, talking would be easy, I do it all the time in the classroom.  The hardest part was in introduce myself,  my pronouns and why I’d signed up. I thought it would be a group of people who’d ‘know’ each other and see me as an outsider. So many times on that first day I’d drafted an email to offer my apologies for not attending but not sent it. Not sure why it never got sent but I’m very happy it didn’t. The New Normal (TNN) offered me that safe space to talk and be open.

I’m probably like a lot of men who don’t really talk about how they are feeling, especially with my family and friends, a simple, yeah, I’m fine is about it, unless I’m physical not well. I now have a group of friends I ride with who have been open about struggles in the past and that has helped me to be open, although I’m still a work in progress. Boys Talk has also helped to open those doors of talking.

Recently I reached out to Jonny at @centuries.cc to ask a few questions as I know he’s been open about his mental health and this is really helping me to figure things out and normalise how I feel from day to day. I know I’ll probably never be 100% OK, but I’m OK with that. Some days I feel great, others I’ll feel shit, grumpy and pretty useless. I still ‘perform’ at work, putting on this persona to my students, they don’t need to know the ‘real’ me, they’ve come to know stuff about photography. And that’s OK too, I am working on ways to cope with these feelings.

I’m thankful to Ascnd and all the hard work Nick is doing for being able to offer the platform for people to share their stories and experiences, without this I wouldn’t have had the courage to write this in the first place.

Paul Dowker