The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  ‘Over the years,’ said Juliet Taylor, ‘I’ve met a lot of people whose careers have gone badly wrong in a very public way. Their professional integrity comes under assault. Their home life suffers because they’ve either lost their job or their reputation puts them under pressure and their finance comes under pressure. What keeps them going more than anything, in my observation, is the sense of who they are and their integrity.’

  We were back in our favourite hotel bar. She was taking tiny sips of her Gavi and I was working my way through the bowl of nibbles. ‘Their principles, their values, their integrity,’ she continued, ‘enable them to stay employable and to make the transition into other environments.’

  I took a big slurp of my Viognier. That, I told her, was very interesting. So many people, I said, had told me that I had to be upbeat and say everything was fine. I didn’t. I couldn’t. My feeling, I said, was that people generally warm to people who are human – and anyway, they can tell if you’re faking it. Juliet nodded. ‘There’s been a really big change in the last five or ten years,’ she said. ‘It’s now acceptable for leaders to say it’s really tough. The health service, for example, has a very high turnover of chief executives. Some continue to rise, continue to develop. But an awful lot retire early, broken, exhausted, without any hope that their skills are transferable to another setting. The ones who keep going are true to themselves, accept that problems happen, learn from it, move on.’

  She’s talking about leaders, because, as a high-powered headhunter, most of her work is with leaders, but the principles apply to the rest of us, too. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘your skills are transferable to lots of other settings. Seek advice and support that can help you keep learning. I’m such a big believer that the key to resilience is learning. And courage. And a sense of humour. Some of the most resilient people I know are agile, adaptable and entrepreneurial. They are not afraid to take risks and try new things.’

  I certainly wouldn’t call myself ‘entrepreneurial’. I don’t think anyone on either side of my extended family has ever made a penny from anything other than a job. My Scottish grandmother once told me that one of my ancestors was hung for sheep-stealing, but I’m not sure if that counts. Even so, there’s a dogged part of me that feels, like Grant, that trying to get a full-time job would be a cop-out. The obvious move from journalism would be to PR. I don’t want to work in PR. I would rather put together a portfolio of different things I like than spend my life promoting someone else’s brand.

  In the ‘gig economy’, you have to be flexible. I have learnt to be very flexible. If someone asks me to do something, and it’s reasonably paid, I usually say yes. A man at a wedding asked me to give a talk at a conference on ‘innovation in the voluntary sector’. I had no idea what it was, but I did some googling and it seemed to go fine. I’ve given a speech at a ‘nurse of the year’ award ceremony. Not as easy as you might think when the only thing most nurses know about you is that you’re the journalist who slagged nurses off. I was told by a school secretary how to write a press release. I swallowed my pride and took the cheque. I’ve taught academics how to use Twitter. I also did a session for them on ‘communicating with confidence’ just after I failed an interview for a non-exec role at an NHS Trust. ‘You made us all cry in response to the first question,’ said the chair when I asked for feedback. ‘And that,’ she said, confusingly, ‘got things off to a bad start.’

  If you ask for career advice, many people will tell you to ‘follow your passion’. They mean well, but they are mad. The world does not need all that many footballers or celebrities. It doesn’t need all that many artists and poets. You might just be able to scrape a living as an artist. If you want to try, by all means give it a go. Or you can do as Yana and Maura and Mimi do, and earn your living by healing or teaching or mentoring and pursue your art in your spare time. You need to earn a living by doing something that actually pays the mortgage or rent. Garrets are now called ‘loft apartments’ and cost a bomb. Stefano’s loft apartment is enormous, but then he’s a lawyer. It’s his work as a lawyer that gives him the time and money to pursue his passion for opera and art.

  I do think it’s a shame to do a job you hate, unless there are no other options at all. If you love banking, lucky you. If you don’t and do it anyway, you might find that by the time you’ve racked up your millions to do the things you really want, your soul has shrivelled up. For most of us, work will be a compromise. We’ll like some of it. We won’t like some of it. As long as we like some of it, and have time to do some other things we like, we’re doing pretty well.

  I was incredibly lucky to earn a good living by doing something I loved. That’s a luxury, not a right. I’m still getting this ‘portfolio’ malarkey off the ground, and I don’t know how it’s going to work out. It’s knackering, but it’s interesting. I like the freedom. I miss the security. It’s the same with relationships. You don’t often get both.

  Every time someone tells me that they ‘used to love’ my column, I want to yell out that I used to love it, too. But I’m learning not to define myself by work. Almost every night of my life, I have gone to bed asking myself what I’ve achieved and concluding that it isn’t enough. I’m beginning to learn that it’s sometimes OK just to say: I had a nice day.

  The incredible machine

  The doctor seemed young. Doctors, like policemen, now seem very young. This doctor looked at my notes and told me that he was discharging me. I was, he said, ‘effectively cured’.

  It was about eighteen months after I left The Independent. I had only been at the paper for six weeks when I felt something springy in my left breast as I soaped myself in the bath. Since then, I have tried not to take a single day for granted. Since then, I have had nearly twelve extra years of life.

  Through all the things that have gone wrong with my body, I have learnt a lot about being well.

  I have learnt, for example, that if you are angry or sad, it might well show up somewhere in your body or your skin.

  I have learnt that being ‘comfortable in your skin’ is not just a metaphor.

  I have learnt that chronic pain usually only goes when you start to concentrate on something else.

  I have learnt that if you define yourself as ill, that’s usually how you stay.

  And I have learnt that the body has a truly miraculous capacity to heal.

  *

  ‘I remember,’ Anna told me, ‘the doctor saying, “Don’t worry, you won’t die of it.”’ This was just after he had told her she had MS as she pulled up her jeans. ‘I thought that was quite wise, actually, because I had seen people with MS who were just about dead.’ After she got the diagnosis, she spent a weekend with a friend ‘like a second mother’ who also had MS. ‘She made me quite quickly realize that it could be for the better. She said, “In the end, you might end up with someone kinder” – and I think that’s true.’

  Anna did ‘end up’ with someone kind. I have seen the way her husband looks at her, and the way she looks at him. What struck me, over our spaghetti in that Italian café opposite her office, was how matter-of-fact she was about everything that had happened, and how much she laughed. So didn’t she, I asked, ever think ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be horribly crippled and it’s all going to be a nightmare’? There was a pause. ‘No.’ And did she think that attitude had affected the course of her illness? Anna nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think mental and physical health are closely related, but if I hadn’t thought that, it would have been incredibly difficult to cope.’

  What, I asked, about the times when cabs wouldn’t stop for her, because she looked drunk? Wasn’t that upsetting? There was another pause. ‘Not really, no. I think when you’re in that moment, you think: “I’ve got to somehow get to the next place.” Again, it’s the practical thing kicking in.’ And what about when she was in hospital, and that woman was singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ as a corpse was being wheeled out? Anna smiled. ‘I’ve got really good friends,’ she sa
id, ‘a lot of people saying “this is awful: let’s just get out”, but not in a woeful way, just as in “you don’t belong here, this is just the worst fit ever”.’ She laughed. ‘I think this is where you go: I actually just need a load of people round here to make me laugh.’

  She had told me about the women in their fifties she used to see in the waiting room, who seemed to be crippled by their MS. That, I know, because my aunt died of MS when she was fifty-eight, is when it often gets much worse. Was she, I asked, worried about the future? This time the pause was so long I thought she had forgotten the question. ‘No,’ she said in the end, ‘because I don’t think it will happen to me. And if it does,’ she said, and her smile was firm, ‘then we’ll handle it.’

  The days following my mastectomy and reconstruction were among the worst of my life. I had expected the nursing to be good, because I was in a hospital that was meant to be one of the best in Europe. Unfortunately, it was terrible. People were screaming out and asking for help, but nobody came.

  The day after the operation, Stefano sent a text and asked if he could visit me. I couldn’t reach the phone to text him back, but thought I could no more talk to someone from the world outside the hospital than fly to Mars.

  Three days later, Emma and Tony turned up, with a giant chocolate cookie and a bunch of orange roses. While they were there, Ros and Nick arrived, with more cakes and flowers. It was still hard to sit up, but it suddenly felt like a party. The next day, Winston strode on to the ward and up to my bed. He had gone to my flat and picked up my post. Among the bills there was a parcel. When I ripped it open, I saw it was a black knitted hat I had ordered from a ‘chemotherapy head gear’ site. I was still waiting to hear whether I needed chemotherapy and hated the thought of wearing a wig. Winston held out a mirror as I tried it on. We couldn’t decide whether I looked more like Mussolini or a member of the IRA about to plant a bomb. The only thing to do was laugh.

  The night I met Winston, at that rice and peas stall at the Elephant and Castle, he made an unusual request. We had gone back to my flat and he suddenly lay down on the floor and asked me to walk on his back. Something, he said, was out of joint and it needed to be clicked back into place.

  ‘I broke my back falling off a roof when I was squatting,’ he told me, when he finally agreed to let me quiz him on what I’m tempted to call his nine lives. We were at the Coach and Horses, just down the road from where I live now. I had offered to buy him a Thai meal in return for the poached salmon and seared beef he did for my fiftieth. ‘I was,’ he said, ‘helping rewire a squat for a friend. I bent down and stood up really quickly and got a rush of blood to the head. I went really dizzy, in fact, and fell over the edge. It was almost like a cartoon falling.’

  I couldn’t help smiling. Winston loves cartoons. On the rare occasions he would stay at mine at weekends, I sometimes used to nip out for a pint of milk and come back to find him stretched out on the sofa watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Superman. He had, he said, asked a friend who worked at an undertaker’s to make him a coffin for his drum stands. ‘It was purple,’ he said, ‘and I had it in the basement of my friend’s squat. As I fell off the roof, there was a glass mezzanine. I’ve gone through the glass mezzanine, second floor, first floor, straight through to the basement, and landed on top of the coffin!’

  If it was anyone else, I’d think they were lying, but I’ve known Winston for a long time. Did he, I asked, trying not to laugh, remember what he felt when he was falling? ‘I don’t remember falling,’ he said, ‘I don’t remember hitting the coffin. I do remember looking up and thinking “that’s weird!” and looking up at the glass, and the shape of me gone through the glass. I got up. There’s a scar on my back.’ He wriggled round in his chair and pulled his T-shirt up. ‘A tiny scratch. Can you see it?’ I peered over and could. ‘I said to my friend, “I’ve got to go now, because I’ve got rehearsals.” I got to the front door, fell down the stairs and that was it. Out for the count.’

  He woke up in the back of the ambulance. At the hospital, they told him he had a fracture in his lower back. ‘Can I feel my feet?’ he said. ‘No, I can’t. Can I feel this? No, I can’t. Couldn’t feel a thing!’ Bloody hell. And how did he react? ‘I didn’t really think about it, to be honest. I wasn’t worried at all. The only time I kind of thought “whoa” was when the doctor said, “You may not recover from this, and you may not be able to walk.”’

  Up to this point, Winston had always been extremely sporty. He boxed for the Lynn, a boxing club in South London, and never lost a fight. He won gold medals in athletics. He had a black belt in Wadō-ryū. He did competitive cycling. He ran for miles every day. So how on earth did he feel when the doctor said this?

  ‘I felt really annoyed,’ said Winston. Annoyed? My voice had gone up about an octave. ‘More annoyed than anything,’ he said. ‘I was thinking: no, that’s not going to happen, because how the hell am I going to play drums and ride my motorbike? But yeah, weeks turned into months. I was in for about four months. What really motivated me, it may sound silly now, but I was busting for the toilet and there wasn’t a nurse around. I just thought “right, I’m off”. I’m either going to piss and shit myself, excuse my French, or force myself to go and do this. I remember it took me about five minutes to get up and out of bed. It took me ages to get to the toilet and nobody noticed.’

  When he got back to his bed, a nurse asked him how he was. ‘I said, “I’m all right, I’ve just been to the toilet.” It was like a delayed reaction, and she went, “Oh my God! Nurse! Get the doctor! He’s walking!” And that was it. From that point, I was on the road to getting up and walking.’ It was, I told him, like a scene from the Bible. Was it agony? ‘Oh yeah,’ said Winston, ‘it was absolute agony. The kids used to come and stay with me in the squat and they used to help me bathe.’

  It took Winston about a year and a half to get back to normal, or something like normal. Three years later, he broke his back again. ‘I’d just got a motorbike,’ he said, ‘really nice, a 750. I was dispatch riding. I’d just been to see my mum.’ He was at the roundabout at the Elephant and Castle, just opposite the rice and peas stall where we met, when a car zigzagged first to the right and then to the left, and then slammed into the back of his bike. ‘I’d had my hair cut,’ he said, ‘I’d had my dreads cut off. I just had a new crash helmet, which kind of saved my life. I broke the barrier, like three tiers of metal barrier. I’ve gone through the railing. Half my body is hanging through it. My head and back is, like, over the barrier and my legs are the other side. I looked up and all I could see was my bike coming towards me. I thought: “oh fuck”.’

  He was taken to Guy’s Hospital. ‘I remember waking up in ER,’ he said, ‘and all these doctors and nurses are running around me, and blood here and there. My neck was in a brace. I had these brown leathers, really sexy brown leathers. They were so cool! They were starting to cut them and I said, “Don’t cut my leathers, take my pants off.” I got a fractured neck, broken collarbone, broken jaw, knocked out five teeth.’ He opened his mouth and showed me the gaps. Why, I asked, didn’t he replace them? ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

  When his girlfriend came to visit, he didn’t know who she was. He was in and out of consciousness for days. This time the recovery took nine months. ‘And the third time,’ he said, ‘was in France.’ Third time? I didn’t know anything about a third time! ‘I was working up in Courchevel,’ he said, ‘round about Christmas. Not a lot of snow, and it was very icy. El Stupido here went up on the piste. I got on the snowboard. It was like the Titanic coming down the slope, it hit the tiniest of rocks and it just went over. I kept on going over and over and over. The run is about fifteen hundred metres long. All I heard was,’ and he made the clicking noise of a bone breaking, ‘on my neck. The doctor said, “You’re going to die if you don’t stop.”’ Don’t stop what? I said. ‘Being an arse!’ Well, I said, exactly.

  When I first met him, I reminded him, he was very fit, but he did
have problems with his back and with his nerve. ‘Sciatica,’ said Winston, ‘that’s caused by all the back injuries.’ Did he still have it? ‘Yeah, it’s happening now, just along there, on the outside of my foot.’ Does he have it all the time? ‘Yes, pretty much, but it’s manageable now.’ Has he, I asked, basically been in pain all the time? Winston shrugged. ‘Not all the time. It’s as I’ve gotten older it’s gotten worse.’ In all the years I’ve known Winston, he has never complained about it. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘There are other people who’ve got much more serious things than I have. I’m up and I’m alive.’

  Gosh. Where did he think that lack of self-pity came from? Winston smiled. ‘It’s my mum,’ he said. ‘My mum’s tough, man, she was tough. She’d say, “If there ain’t no blood, don’t bother crying.”’ But there was blood! ‘I couldn’t see it,’ said Winston. ‘If you’ve got a reason to moan, moan, but make sure there is a reason to moan, you don’t moan because you wanna.’ What, I said, counts as a reason to moan? ‘I don’t know,’ said Winston, ‘because I haven’t got a reason to moan.’

  Winston joined the Territorial Army when he was thirty-six. ‘When I first joined,’ he said, ‘I joined the medical section of the Paras, because it was the closest regiment. But then I smashed my knee. I didn’t know until about six weeks later. They said, “The break’s healed nicely,” and I said, “What break?”’ Then he was transferred to a different regiment, but went back to the Paras and got his ‘wings’ just before my forty-seventh birthday. I remember, because he was doing the food for my party when he went to pick them up. Seared beef and poached salmon, again.

  And then, a couple of years later, he had a stroke. ‘I cooked some breakfast,’ he said, ‘had a nice pot of fresh coffee, sat down, about ten o’clock, next thing I know it’s half past four. I couldn’t get up. I was really dizzy. I was slumped over the coffee table. My eye had gone, my lip and nose and this and that. I thought, “Who the hell come and kicked the shit out of me?” That’s what I thought.’ So how, I tried again, did he feel? ‘Well,’ said Winston, ‘I’ve had a stroke, how are you supposed to feel? My hand doesn’t work as good as it did, but it works. I can write, I can cook, I can chop up food.’