Onwards

‘LIVE BY THE HARMLESS UNTRUTHS THAT MAKE YOU BRAVE AND KIND AND HEALTHY AND HAPPY.’

Onwards, the recovery zine, is dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut, Mitski, our mums, Archie, Neal’s Yard Remedies Edinburgh, Rupi Kaur, Sylvia Plath, Rebecca Sugar, Karin Dreijer Andersson, Claire Louise Bennett, Virginia Woolf, all the people who broke our shins and all the rest who glued them back together.

Onwards, love. Wear your story like a vignette around your neck. Know that jewellery should come off when you wash or swim or go to bed. Each night, Ra, the sun god, must battle through the twelve gates of the underworld so that the sun may rise again tomorrow. If Ra fails the sun doesn’t rise and the world will end. So far as we know it the world has not ended. If you’re afraid that’s ok. Be afraid. Your fear is a jacket that can be unbuttoned, unzipped, torn, thrown on the floor, forgotten in the cloakroom, tied around your waist or left at home when it’s warm and you’re caught up in the summer of it all. Only when you look the pain in the eye will it stop snarling and start cooperating. You don’t have to be friends but be civil. You’re in this together after all. Don’t mistake forwards for onwards. And remember you’re still here. Arms flailing against the wind and you made it. Take a moment to be proud.

Keep going.

Emily Winthrop

Grief.

It first slunk around my mum’s shoulders when she told me my dad had collapsed and had been taken into hospital. Then, syrupy and black, it dripped into my eyes when we found it was cancer and I absorbed it. It breathed when I did. Ate when I did. It shrank on certain days when I held Dad’s hand and we talked about everything and nothing. It grew large and loud on the dark evenings when he was rushed into hospital. It was there as I waited at his bedside, and it held a breath whilst we watched Dad’s chest move up and down in time with the heart monitor. Finally, on the morning of October 18th - four years after we were first introduced, grief poured from the telephone and crawled up the stairs. It woke me up and shoved itself inside my chest. It was warm and sharp and it hurt, lodged between my fourth and fifth rib. And it stayed there. Grief was there at the funeral. It stood by me when people shook my hand, bristled when they gave me pitied looks and laughed with us as the wrong song played at the crematorium (they played a salsa track instead of relaxing guitar music.) It came home with me afterwards. My grief doesn’t take a permanent form. Most of amorphous, a great black blob that stretches and surface. But sometimes, grief curls itself up in run my fingers over its fur just to double-check have an odd relationship.

the time it is slaps itself on every my pocket. It lets me that it’s there. We

For a long time after Dad’s death, the pain I felt was raw and unrelenting. Grief stabbed me over and over in an overzealous spree. I would snap back. It would claw at me. And then we’d both collapse in bed until I cried myself to sleep. It would smooth my hair back and say sorry. Then the next day we’d get up and do it all over again. But sometime last year, grief took a step back. Life had moved on and I had too. Whilst grief had physically moved with me to University and then into my student house, between those events it had slipped out of my mouth and didn’t go back in. Instead it sat in a chair and looked around. I looked at it and it looked back to me. It nodded in approval. My grief no longer causes me great pain. I don’t think it ever meant to, it just forced me to feel. To digest the trauma and face it (because like a wound, tragedy festers if left ignored.) But of course it hurts to heal. The loss of my Dad and the life I had before all of this aches like a phantom limb - but the pain no longer causes me to scream. Instead, I look at photographs of my Dad and I smile. I’m probably crying a little, because that’s a whole life lost that I’m not getting back. Yet in some selfish way, at least I had some time with him. It’s never enough, but it’s something. Grief stands behind me now. Its hand on my shoulder is warm. I can hear it breathing. Slow and steady. Deep, measured breaths.

When I turn to face it, I meet its sad, humble smile. There is a pause. “I know,” it says, finally.

“I know.” Lauren Entwistle

Amy Stockwell

Lasting Last year, in a bid to read something other than my twitter feed on the bus to work, I read ‘The Trick is to Keep Breathing’ by Janice Galloway. In it, a woman is going through a breakdown brought on by the death of her partner. Her days are long and full of loss and suffering. She writes to a far away friend who tells her she only has to last until she comes back. Over and over, to herself, to her friend, she asks ‘what will I do while I’m lasting?’. This is what resonates with me and stays with me long after i finish the book- the feeling of lasting rather than living. What will I do while I’m lasting? What will I do when I forget to feel like I’m lasting?

I used to wonder if I would ever stop feeling like I was surviving, if I would ever get beyond getting through each moment and start to live, build a future. It felt impossible when I couldn’t remember anything different. My entire adolescence was shaped by misery, self harm, self destruction. Anxiety made me silent, fearful, sick. Depression made me wildly unhappy or just plain wild, both equally damaging and heavy with shame. I was too busy lasting to even contemplate living.

Now, it’s different. I get up. I go to work. Sometimes I remember to eat breakfast. I see my friends. I wash my clothes. I buy bags of spinach and they don’t always turn into sludgy green mulch at the back of the fridge. Without the heavy damp of depression packed round my veins I start to grow a new personality, or maybe I’m uncovering an old one I never got to know. I find things I’m good at. I join a gym and quit two weeks later. I buy roller derby skates and it doesn’t matter than I never learn how to put the wheels on. I start new projects, meet new people, go to new cities. I do it all and carve out a space in the world where this whole new me can exist.

I wish I could explain how I got here, but I can’t. I kept lasting and lasting until one day I looked back and realised it had been over a year since I spent a full week in bed, that I no longer needed three propranolol to take a trip to Tesco. There are still bad days, and sometimes bad weeks, but they don’t stick the way they used to. Therapy helps, now I’m not firefighting and have the space and perspective to work on things. Talking helps. Doing the difficult, dull work of self care helps. I don’t take any of it for granted. I’ve learned that recovery is a journey, with no real destination. I won’t ever be cured, this is part of who I am- it runs in my family like green eyes and twins. But I can learn to cope better. I can try to remember that this feeling, as devastating and debilitating as it is, won’t last forever. I can sit with that feeling, hold its strange, heavy weight in my body until it passes. I’ve been here before and each time I get through it I get stronger. This is my life, and I’m done lasting through it.

Ciara Maguire

Survival I am broken glass Cutting away My edges won’t dull Damaged and damaging What does it take to soften? He is inside my chest carving a hole Snatching my breath before I can speak He is inside my head drowning out the world I am slipping Into silence. Darkness is hard Memories are heavy The world is unkind and I am too gentle to survive Daytime is harder I am shattered My pain is boring and I will never be the same again. Survival is understanding I will never be the way I was There is no before No after Only now I’ve learnt to float but I may never reach land; It’s ok Not to be ok

Mel Reeve

I’ve been reading that healing is non-linear – that there’s no ascendant curve which I ride (or limp up) until I am cured, until everything is fine again, until I can try to peel an orange without ending up in A&E. I can see it. I can understand that there’s peaks, swoops and periods of stagnation where you can’t watch Ferris Bueller without sobbing because you, too, Need A Bloody Day Off! So, I can accept that it is non-linear, that it is a process. But what happens when there’s no healing to be had; when every slip’s a slide and everyone is fed up of having to bring you Lucozade to the hospital? I’ve tried to kill myself twice this year and unfortunately for me, I’m comically bad at it. Humiliatingly so. After the first time, I was Ready To Heal™. Ready to shower every day, ready to start brushing my hair, ready to stop throwing up on hospital doctor’s shoes. Obviously, my brain (and the mental health services) had other ideas. I am wary of divulging any gory details, as posting something you’ve written on the internet is embarrassing enough. However, I found myself in A&E again in November, around six months after I first resolved to Heal. For me, there had been no high points – only a painful and sweaty descent to another 7am phone call to my mum. It was not, or is not, the case that I don’t want to be better, or that I wasn’t trying to be. The focus that had been placed on this need to heal, instantaneously, right there and then, no excuses, made me desperate. I was grasping at something I wasn’t yet ready for, pretending that I was adept at normality and that I was finished with suffering, once and for all. Nobody told me that I was allowed to breathe. I was so obsessed with being better that I was furiously happy, furiously busy,

refusing any hints that I still wasn’t well. Not only this, but mental health services fundamentally failed me. I was discharged with no follow up care and left with the dreaded Useful Phone Numbers For Suicidal People leaflet. A doctor told me that I should probably consider trying not to overdose again in the future, as ‘ it can really seriously harm you.’ Ironic, of course, and probably funny – if it wasn’t said to a girl hellbent on dying. Six months on, and there again. A deadpan doctor advising me that, if I kept overdosing I ‘would certainly end up in trouble’. A doctor at the outpatient crisis team assuring me that this was a minor blip, that I could be discharged as non high risk, even after I expressed that I had been thinking about jumping in front of a bus on Dumbarton Road that morning. But this time, I know more. I know that there is no Illness-Suicide Attempt-Get Help-Get BetterLive Happily cycle. I know, personally, that this is something I will probably never realise. So, am I ready to heal now? Fuck knows. I am ready to get better, but I am ready to let that flow easily, without force. I am ready to listen to the people I love, I am ready to be open with them, to cry when I want to, to be honest when it hurts. I am ready to accept that maybe I won’t make it, but that I am strong for being here now. I want to look at healing differently, to change my endgame. Healing now, for me, has ceased to be crawling towards an ideal life – where I live late in to my 80s, write dodgy sex novels, read my own suicide notes and wonder how I could have ever felt that way. Today, it is celebrating that I’ve lived to eat all my advent calendar chocolates for breakfast, that I want to wake up tomorrow and be angry at past me for doing that, and that maybe, I’ll be here for a while longer.

Emma Anne

THE THINGS THAT AFFECT YOU AREN’T NECESSARILY THE THINGS THAT LEAVE A STRIPE ON YOUR BACK: 12 STEP RECOVERY PROGRAMME

Programme title pulled from a Janice Galloway Q&A at the University of Glasgow, 25th January 2016 Holly Hallam

Step 1: Leave it alone Step 2: Smoke a lot of weed that isn’t yours with someone’s boyfriend, who isn’t yours. Step 3: Pull knives on house guests who make a pass at you. Sleep next to them with the knife under your pillow, continuing straight to Step 4: Have them stay upstairs while you don’t tell your clin psych about it in the morning. Not relevant. Step 5: Go to uni, get excellent grades, drop out. Step 6: Gain 2 stone with a boyfriend who tells you he isn’t attracted to fat. When he dumps you, get a boyfriend who fancies you bulging through your bodycon. Lose 2 stone. Step 7: Take a dangerous job. Pleasantly surprise yourself at how well you manage the behaviour of violent men Step 8: Fuck older men and argue with them in the street Step 9: Install Tinder. Rack up your body count until you feel justified in being such a slag Step 10: Get a job with a counter between you and everyone who wants to hit you. Go back to school; run out of time to ‘have problems’ Step 11: Accept that it will get worse before it gets better, because you have your own Support Worker to blame now Step 12: leave it alone.

A hunger too divine Winter is a time for freezing. In the winter I remember the ice at the centre of my bones that no warmth could break. In the winter I feel my hands go numb and purple. I remember a body hollowed, sterile and inhospitable. I freeze over like these fields. It's a ritual I half-remember and a rhythm my body sinks into, year after year, with the shortening of days. Sometimes, all my body knows to do is reject. To make itself smaller, concave, as if flesh itself is recoiling from the world. To become untouchable. To be entirely self-sufficient, feeding by cannibalising itself.

But last winter something toppled this logic and up-ended my world. I was choked with Valium and at the centre of increasingly elaborate religious delusions: I was special, chosen, a reincarnated fallen angel with important work to do. I felt desperately that I should go to midnight mass. I approached the altar to receive a blessing. Psychotic as I was, I knew, somehow, that I wasn't ready for the bread and wine. The priest put his hands on my head and I remember how it passed through me like a shudder but warm, full of something. That night, I walked out of my flat barefoot and walked a mile or so through slushy piles of leaves to jump off a bridge. I have no idea what was going through my mind, no idea if I would have done it if someone hadn't pulled over and wrapped me in a coat seconds after I climbed onto the ledge in the early hours of Christmas Day. It's only after a year that I understand what happened.

I had tasted love and it made me want to die.

Faith, it turns out, is not the sedate and gentle thing I imagined it to be. It is confusing, often brutal, often violent, and transformative in the sense of losing the ground beneath your feet. I was baptised recently, and for three weeks afterwards I descended into an all-out breakdown. I was drunk constantly, using cocaine daily and benzos to cushion the nights. I didn't eat. In sober moments, I screamed and writhed because I couldn't stand to occupy this body, this brain, to be so raw at the mercy of my own self. I was blank-eyed in confusion. Baptism was supposed to be about being wrapped up in God's love – like a hug, right? It felt more like a punch in the face. There's a poem for advent by Kathleen Raine called Northumbrian Sequence 4. One part of it goes:

“Let in the dark, Let in the dead, Let in your love tonight.� Loving, especially loving God, is usually caught in the language of kitsch and sentimentality. Honk if you love Jesus. Jesus as best friend, holding your hand, taking the wheel. But love is terrifying: as it warms, it burns. At the centre of love are five still-bleeding wounds. This is never going to be easy. When I tasted my first communion, the chaos fell into place. This is love, I thought. Perfect, unconditional, all-forgiving love, given to everyone whether we think we deserve it or not. I didn't think I deserved it. And yet there I was, turning up to a nearly empty church on a Thursday morning, because I needed it.

I opened my hands. I ate.

Rose Lyddon

Anna Starosolsky

Ending

The end was nigh. It had been brewing for some time. Petty arguments escalating into you throwing vicious words and me trying to hide the tears in front of friends. Just because I knew it was coming didn’t mean I was prepared. It was always going to end; but I thought it would be me doing the ending. That message from her at 11 o’clock at night, as I sat in the warm glow of a log fire and Pitch Perfect 2 somewhere in the Fife countryside, did more than end it. It wasn’t cheating, it was a rejection of that me. The me that was a dress size up from when we first met. The me that constantly worried about everything, about what you thought, about what you would do, about what I felt like I could do. It was me not being good enough, not being fun enough, not being sexy enough, not being enough enough. It was difficult to shake that me, the nervous me, I’m quite happy being a bit squishier than before. There were days where I would alternate between watching Magic Mike XXL and sobbing. I remember once you called me meek. I was meek for not taking charge. Meek for not causing arguments with people I disliked, preferring to just vent in private. I was meek for not deciding what we would eat, where we would go, what we would do. I was always wrong anyway, so what was the point in trying. It was three months later and new me, now almost perfect in the final routine of Magic Mike XXL, decided I would no longer be meek. I fought back. I told people. I told my closest friends. I showed them the streams of messages where I was told about what a nasty piece of work I was.

I let them listen in on the phone calls letting me know that all of my friends hate and are embarrassed of me. I found me in the Girl Gang (and Channing Tatum’s six pack). I didn’t hide the upset. Crying wasn’t weak, pathetic, overly sensitive or even meek. I didn’t hide the anger. I am a fierce woman. I love hard and I feel things. So yeah, when we were in the same club and Dancing On My Own came on, to others I may have looked like a tit, but to me I was fighting you. I was fighting how you had managed to make me feel. I was fighting feeling unsafe in my favourite places, where we had once been together. I didn’t want it to end like that. I couldn’t believe that I’d let it happen again. But in that ending I found myself. I got me back. I found a new me. Recently a friend told me that this was the happiest she’d known me since we met. I embraced my emotions, that I was once ashamed of because of how they made you look and feel. This me is enough. She is sad and happy and upset and would rather be nice to someone’s face than have an argument over something small. These aren’t weaknesses. They’re strengths and they’re my strengths. It took that ending for me to understand that. So shout out to my ex.

Rachel Earnshaw

recovery as home in your physicality when what happened to your body rips your mind from it separates at 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 but i think i am now; unencounterable, imcomprehensible, inhuman. try to fil up on food on sex it’s a cliche to say you feel empty when gorging, penetrated, but its distinct i’ve become a dualist. put my forehead to his and hand in hand but i am in space, out of space. i am not here

l . j . m

Cecile Richard

I think knowing that I had to do this for my friend is what made me do it. Where I fail to do basics like brush my teeth, not spending my last £40 on drugs and alcohol and having to go to sleep for dinner, I will move heaven and earth for the relationships in my life. When I consider recovery, it feels like such an alien concept. What am I recovering from? Poor mental health, a warped sense of self and situation is who I am. What am I recovering from? Being myself? That is why I am writing this for my friend. Because she asked me to and the only thing that can get me out of my nightmares and out of my head is doing something for her. For them.

When I have no hope for myself, but her heart is broken, I have hope for her. When they feel alone and confused and angry, I’m angry for them. I will never be someone who can love themself enough to eat right, sleep right or say no to what might hurt me. Knowing that they need me and that she needs me, I can get dressed, I put down a bottle or a baggie, put on foundation over my mascara stains and tend to theirs. Wherever she may be. I am not a sickly sweet person by nature, but I feel so intensely the feelings of those around me, and hold so close the influence of those around me that, in this instance, I know no other way in which to express myself. Wherever she needs me to be, I’ll be there, because I won’t go there without her. Whatever they need me to do, I’ll do it, because I won’t do it without them.

A. G.

I am grateful this winter has been mild because I wasn’t ready. I was careful when I packed myself up. I took care of the big things first and then the bulky ones. Woolly jumpers and winter coats went down to the charity shop or off to live with friends. I made sure my room was left neat and tidy; the kitchen and toilet scrubbed and fresh. I had to be very quiet about it, that was only polite. Spring and summer were so harsh I had to shut myself off to cope. Then, in the middle of winter, I came back. Was it dark outside? Was it rainy? What about the river- was it still and glassy or choppy and frothed up at its edges? I had to know so hurried out in whatever clothes had been left on the floor. It was late and the streets were empty anyway, it wouldn’t matter.

The sky was so dark except at the horizon where the light was pressed down against the hill, desperate to hide itself from me and trick me with night time so I would take myself home to bed and never care about anything again. I suppose the botanic gardens were in on the joke, glowing radioactive green to try and scare me off but the joke’s on you, I thought, because all the scary things have already happened. The next day I overslept and had to scramble out again, checking I’d managed to grab keys and money. On the doorstep I stopped and rubbed my eyes like a cartoon. The sun was just setting and everything was washed pink. Everything. I had finally been welcomed to the party. I wasn’t ready.

C.R

This zine was brought to you by Emily Winthrop and Charlotte Roberts. Emily dropped out of university and got a cat. She is aspiring to something (not sure what). @emthro Charlotte has nothing to say yet, but hopes to soon. @aianismorissett Our Contributors Lauren Entwistle @cityofspooks

Ciara Maguire @ciaraaa12

medium.com/@lauren_victoria

Holly Hallam @nrthrnrnssnce

Emma Anne lobnoyepesto.wordpress.com

Rose Lyddon @lleuadau

Mel Reeve @melreeve PCDYT.tumblr.com

girlfury.blogspot.co.uk

L.J.M. Rachel Earnshaw @rchlrnshw

Anna Starosolsky @annastarrra

Amy Stockwell @AmyLStockwell

A.G.

Cecile Richards @haraiva haraiva.tumblr.com

never for money always for love

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