by Jimi Hunt
My thing was making my goal public. I wasn’t exactly fit and the Waikato River isn’t exactly short so I had put myself in a precarious situation. A situation doomed to failure unless I worked hard. Avoiding embarrassment is one of my biggest motivators. I quite simply don’t want to look like a failure. Ever.
It didn’t matter what I had chosen to do, once I had told my 600 Facebook friends that I was going to do it I was going to do it, no matter what. I had terrible worst-case scenarios running through my head, like I’d paddle for one day and be so broken I couldn’t go on any further, I’d have to pull out of the adventure, my friends and family would be disappointed in me, the public following me would send me angry emails about how useless I was and the media would chastise me. It scared me shitless and spurred me to action.
I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to look like a dick. It was that simple.
So, there really was only one option for me and that was to go to the gym as much as I could. Train as hard as I could and maybe, just maybe, I would actually be able to do this thing that I had told people I would do. Really, when you think about it, I had just made this up and I had zero idea of what it would take to complete it. Like most things in my life, this was something I had decided to do on a whim, but there was nothing that was going to stop me completing it. Or so I hoped . . .
SERIOUS PLANNING BEGINS FOR LILO THE WAIKATO
I’m a big-picture guy. Lilo The Waikato was going to be simple. I thought, ‘This will be easy.’ People had started to take to my silly idea and friends said that it could be quite big. They thought I should try to make it big. Absolutely, I thought, I can make this big.
No one else had ever done this before. People that didn’t even know me might actually be interested in following the trip. It had gone from rogue Facebook status to full-on movement in one day. My Facebook friends and their friends liked the Lilo The Waikato page. But not as many as I would have liked—I wanted more. Whenever I do something it has to be amazing. I started to think about publicity, about promotion, about branding. It was starting to take over my life.
First, I needed a call to action on my Facebook page, something that would actually entice people to ‘like’ Lilo The Waikato. ‘I need 5000 likes to get this on TV’ was what I posted. A blatant lie, but it sounded believable and people did start to believe it and wanted to help me get this on TV! I put out the call for my friends to help if they could and the first person to heed the call was Joe McPhee, a guy from the gym who I kind of knew. He’s a nice guy, an amateur photographer and videographer with a lot of enthusiasm who, most importantly, was keen to help for free. Love that man.
A few weeks later Joe and I were ready to shoot the first of the three promotional videos we hoped would get people to follow the adventure and to offer to help. We wrote a script that basically said who I am, what I was doing, that I needed some help, and that if people wanted to find out more or offer help they could go to my website and Facebook page.
We filmed the first video in July 2011. In New Zealand, that’s the middle of winter, and it was freezing. I didn’t really want to go into the water, but it’s hard to be taken seriously with a Lilo unless it’s in the water. In the name of shameless promotion, Joe and I went down to the Mission Bay fountain and filmed our first 30-second video.
It was freezing, absolutely ball-shrinkingly freezing. But we shot our film, Joe edited it and set it to the music of ‘Wet Rubber’ by Head Like A Hole, and we put it up on YouTube. This was going to be a viral video sensation, it was going to get thousands of people to my website and Facebook page and it was going to garner massive publicity for the trip. So we thought. At the time of writing, the video has had 165 views on YouTube. Hmmm. It wasn’t the internet sensation I had been hoping for.
Undeterred, we went ahead and filmed two more, as planned—one in the Viaduct in downtown Auckland and one out at Piha Beach on the west coast. The Piha video got us another 178 views. Not so good. But the Viaduct video went crazy. A massive success for us—it currently sits at a whopping 279 views. We’re not the viral marketing geniuses and comedic gods that we thought we were. Damn it.
The likes for the Facebook page were growing slowly, but not enough for me because I am inherently impatient. Then, magically, I got a call from the Waikato Times. A young reporter had got wind of my story and thought it was hilarious. He wanted to write a story about it and asked if I’d be keen. Of course! Let’s go!
We did the whole interview over the phone. As expected, he asked a lot of questions, and as I have a tendency to do, I made up a whole bunch of answers. The key question that everyone had been asking was the most obvious one, ‘Why are you doing this?’ When the Waikato Times reporter asked me this, I replied, ‘Just ’cos.’
‘Just ’cos’ had become the tagline for this adventure a few weeks earlier. Throughout my life I’ve felt a need to constantly explain myself to other people. But why does there have to be a deep underlying reason for something? Why does action have to be altruistic? Why couldn’t I be doing something for me, for fun, just ’cos? I could see no reason why not. I thought that I could do something for me every once in a while. This trip was for me, to make me happy, to give me something exciting to look forward to, but, most of all, it was for fun. Pure, unadulterated fun.
A week later, on 22 July 2011, an article came out in the Waikato Times. It was about one-third of a page with a photo—they had sent a guy up to Auckland to take my photo. I’d taken my Lilo and we went down to the waterfront to get the shot. Branding is what I do and I had sorted out from very early on my brand image and uniform for this project. I needed a consistent brand image. I would always wear my ship’s captain’s hat, a white shirt and a strange bow tie that I found at a $2 shop. There we had it, my first piece of media, the Waikato Times: ‘Pugwash Port Waikato Bound’ said the headline. What the hell did that mean? I think that bastard just called me fat!
One of the really shitty things about depression is that you do get fat. There it was in black and white in a regional newspaper, I had been likened to a fat mustachioed pirate from the seventies. The formula is pretty easy—you stay at home more, you eat crap, you get lazy and the predictable result is getting fat. I never became enormous, but I had always been skinny and being over my usual weight made me feel like shit, which compounded the depression, and so the cycle continued: stay at home, eat crap . . .
That’s why I wanted something to get me fit. I didn’t like the way I looked and I’m sure my wife didn’t either. It sucked.
Still, publicity is publicity and the good thing about the Waikato Times article is that it went up on stuff.co.nz so I could share it on the Lilo Facebook page. Despite the headline, the article was good and said everything it needed to say. How did I come up with the idea? Quote: ‘[it] came to him during a bout of boredom a month ago’. Yip, I’d said that because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell the world that I was depressed and John Kirwan had told me to do it! Oh well, it was a bit of publicity, a few more fans signed up, so not too bad a result.
I still wasn’t a happy person. Jo and I still weren’t doing great. The doctor’s solution hadn’t worked out for me and neither had the exercise. Exercise was supposed to make me better, wasn’t it? I didn’t feel any different and I certainly didn’t like going to the gym any more than I had at the start.
The arguments Jo and I had weren’t getting any better either. We were both very strong-willed people with strong beliefs, values and convictions. Neither of us liked being wrong—especially me—so we would argue over silly things. The argument would start because I would get annoyed at something, and it would slowly get more heated until we were yelling at each other. At that point I would sometimes get a strange feeling; I would be looking at the pair of us from the outside and I had one overwhelming question, ‘What are we arguing about?’ I couldn’t remember what it was that had started the argument, all I knew was that I wasn’t going to back down. I was right. She was wrong. Sh
e had to apologise. Instead, we’d give each other some space then one of us would go to work. When we saw each other again all would be fine—we loved each other. But this happened too often for anyone’s liking.
These arguments didn’t just occur with Jo. They started happening in my other relationships too. My friends didn’t realise I was suffering from depression. They just thought that I was acting like a prick.
Jo was my safety net. She was the one who was left to cover for me. She loved me and didn’t want people thinking badly of me so she went around cleaning up the messes I was making of my friendships, making excuses for me and explaining to people that I was really stressed and not coping too well. I loved her for that. It must have been really hard on her.
OVERLOAD
A week after the Waikato Times article was my thirty-first birthday. We had no money and I didn’t want any presents. I’m sure Jo bought me something, but I can’t remember what. She had, however, organised a dinner for us and my friends at my favourite Indian restaurant in Mission Bay.
Jo hadn’t really been happy all day and that had annoyed me. It was my birthday, goddamn it. I just wanted a nice day, what with all the shit that I was going through. The dinner was good and my friends had all come, too many in fact. We couldn’t fit everyone around one table. My friends Craig and Tors bought me a wonderful bow tie as a present. My parents were there and everything was good.
Jo and I were on a roll and we decided to go out afterwards. I was driving. I could tell Jo wasn’t happy and I prodded her for a reason. I can’t stand not knowing. The night had been good. I had been good. I couldn’t see any reason for her to be angry or sad at me! And then we had one of those arguments I talked about earlier.
Jo tried very hard not to be drawn into it. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. This just made me angrier. Why couldn’t I know what was wrong? I was her husband, I loved her! I could help! Finally, after much prodding, she turned to me and said, ‘Tonight was my friend Ryan’s funeral and I couldn’t go because I wanted to make you happy on your birthday.’
My heart dropped. I felt terrible. So it was my fault she couldn’t go to the funeral. ‘It’s my birthday at a bloody Indian restaurant on a Tuesday night!’ I argued. ‘It’s not that big a deal! I would’ve much rather you had gone to the funeral!’
She came back at me about how tonight was the happiest she’d seen me in ages and she didn’t want to make me angry by ruining my birthday. I’m not that selfish. I would have happily let her go to the funeral instead of coming to my birthday. Hold on, I thought, ‘Who the hell is this Ryan guy?’ I’d never even heard of him! So why the hell was he so important?
Should I have been more sensitive? Probably. But it made me furious that I was getting blamed for her not going to her friend’s funeral, so I lashed out. ‘It’s not my fault. He’s not even that good a friend of yours because you’ve never even spoken about him! He committed suicide, fuck him, that’s the most selfish thing a person can do! What a dick! How could he do that to his wife? He’s a horrible person.’
Silence. Then crying—we were both in tears.
I had said horrible things, and I actually meant them at the time. It wasn’t my fault that he had killed himself. It wasn’t my fault that she didn’t go to the funeral. It wasn’t my fault. I knew right then, though, that I had done something that had hurt Jo and it hurt me to hurt her.
But there was my silly pride again. I didn’t apologise, or at least I don’t remember apologising. If I did it would have been an empty half-hearted apology that I didn’t really mean. I felt a slight tear in the fabric of ‘us’. I felt her move slightly further away from me. The constant fighting had weakened us. It had weakened me and made me so miserable inside. I loved her, I was married to her and I was going to fix this and make our marriage work. The first thing I should do is apologise properly. Oops, I can’t make myself do that . . .
Jo and I were perfectly suited and not suited all at the same time. We both had a spirit of adventure. I loved that about her. I would say, ‘Let’s go and . . .’ and she would always say yes. That was awesome. She was wonderful, caring, loving, supportive, generous and amazing but, for some reason, I wasn’t happy with her. Everything she did annoyed me, grated on me, made me frustrated.
The thing is, I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it was me that was the problem. It was my fault that I felt this way. I knew that the feelings I had were caused by the strange goings-on in my head. I knew they weren’t the truth. I had married the woman I loved and I wanted to be with her forever, I wasn’t going to leave her. Ever. No matter how frustrating things got, no matter how much we fought, this was a phase that I was going through and I would make it out the other side.
I was sure of that. Plus, I loved her even more for how much she was helping me.
Looking back, I think the problem was that I was starting to subconsciously push her away. I just wanted to be alone. I just wanted to wallow in my own misery. None of this was easy. And it wasn’t easy for Jo, especially, who was a wonderful wife. She had all the attributes you could ever hope for in a partner, but I was pushing her away. I would break her down mentally with small jabs. Cutting jabs. Over and over again.
Nothing she ever did was right. Ever. I set the highest possible expectations for her and she constantly met them. But on the rare occasions when she didn’t I would get angry. I’d tell her off. Get snappy. Even if they were small petty things—things that in the grand scheme of life mean absolutely nothing—it didn’t matter. If they annoyed me I would pick on her for them. She lived on a knife’s edge. Would I be happy when I came home from work? Had she done everything right so I couldn’t pick on her?
Every day was the same. I didn’t want to go out much so she had to stay at home with me, while I wallowed in my misery, picked on her, argued. Every once in a while I would get a break in the clouds and I saw what I was doing. I would feel genuine remorse and even hatred for myself that I was making the woman I loved feel miserable too. But I couldn’t stop myself. Soon enough I would be back doing exactly the same old things. I was destroying her. I was abusing her. I had never punched her or hit her, but I was abusing her, mentally, emotionally. I was making her unwell.
Depression works in a cycle. You have good days and you think you’re getting better, then it gets worse again. Then it gets slightly better, but it’s actually worse. It is really quite weird. I had been to see the doctors, I had been on the depression website. I had tried, but nothing had worked. Then things got out of hand. Jo and I had a fight, a big one. There was yelling and screaming and arguing and throwing things and insults and stomping and hands being waved around.
What was it about? Who knows.
Was the fight my fault? Probably.
Was it serious? Yes.
My brain just couldn’t cope and I had another massive breakdown. I couldn’t stop crying but I didn’t know why. It felt as if I was wearing a 20-kilogram vest on my chest. I was shaking, crying and getting angrier. Then my brain stopped working and I shut down. Everything went quiet and still and felt empty. I felt empty. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to feel this way. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. I wanted it to end. I wanted it all to end.
Jo knew that this time was more serious than the last. She knew that I was really unwell. She had kidded herself that we could work together to get me well. I had kidded myself that I could help myself get better with assistance from her. We were both wrong.
Because the doctors hadn’t worked for me I had it set in my head that no doctor could help me and that I had to help myself. But this wasn’t the case. I needed serious intervention whether I wanted it or not.
Jo rang my dad and he came straight over. The three of us sat together on the couch. Dad said he wasn’t there to be a marriage counsellor and he didn’t want to get involved in our marital problems. That was fair enough, but I explained to him that while our marriage wasn’t in the best place right now, it was actually me that needed the help, not
our marriage. I told him about all the things that had been happening. I explained how my thinking about money was worse than ever—I knew we were broke and I was going to lose my business and not be able to pay my rent.
Since these money issues had started a couple of years earlier, Dad had been looking after all the invoicing and accounting for my business interests. Honestly, I had zero idea how much money was in my business accounts, I just had a feeling that I was bringing in less money than we were spending. Dad explained to me that the business owed zero dollars. Plus, although I wasn’t bringing in an awful lot, it was enough to cover our basic living expenses. So I wasn’t going broke and I wasn’t about to lose my business. Immediately feeling a little bit better, I said, ‘Cool, everything is good then.’ But of course it wasn’t, and Jo and Dad both jumped in on that very quickly. I was left in no doubt that I needed help—professional help. And I needed it now.
Dad had realised that this day was coming. When he was the CEO of a large company he had got a guy called John McEwan to come in and do stress training with the top management. Although Dad hadn’t used him himself, he had heard wonderful things about the results that Dr John was getting. Jo and Dad agreed that I should go and see Dr John. ‘I can’t afford it,’ I replied. I could actually see the love and concern on Dad’s face. ‘I’ll pay for it,’ he said, ‘whatever it takes to get you better.’
The following day, Dad and Jo asked me if I had booked my appointment with John. No, I hadn’t. Along with all the other strange things that manifested with my depression, I hated making phone calls to people I didn’t know. If you were my friend and you rang me, sure, I’d talk to you on the phone. But I couldn’t talk to people I didn’t know. Jo had to set up our TV and internet account herself under my name, resulting in our account being under the name of Ms James Hunt. It was irrational, but to me the feeling was real—there was no way I was going to call him. So, as she had done many times before, Jo took over and called Dr John’s office and booked me the next available appointment—3 pm the following day.
