Turning 40
It’s a milestone, they say.
Doesn’t feel like it. Not yet, anyhow.
Nonetheless, here I am. Today I turned forty, and later on this evening I’ll have dinner with friends. I thought I’d ramble on a bit about some things that have happened since I was 30, and some feelings.
It’s been a bit of a decade of two halves for me. 2008’s birthday was during a general election campaign where I was a candidate in an unwinnable seat for a party that was leaving government. I spent the next five years in a policy job or contracting for a few others.
In 2013, half way through the decade, things changed. I started as acting and then permanent Chief Executive at work, and I ended all my party political involvement with the Labour Party. Given the state of Labour at the time, it wasn’t a hard call to make. And since then, my energy has been on my work, and since the start of last year, on my fitness and health, both mental and bodily.
The biggest shock about stopping being involved with party politics is you start to see how tribal, and how very often parochial and angry it is. There is no doubt I am a happier and more relaxed person without that in my life.
The downsides are two, mainly: a sense of purpose that had animated a lot of my life since joining Young Labour in 1997 was gone. The ready-made social life of city-based party activism drifted away too. I am lucky that in the work I do professionally, there is a cause and a sense of purpose. The open Internet matters enormously to everyone in a country like ours. Being part of growing and defending it is satisfying in many ways.
Becoming a Chief Executive before the age of 35 did have downsides. I was in a hard role that I didn’t have all the skills to do. I was on a very steep learning curve. There were many missteps. I didn’t know how to handle the pressure. Being a driven perfectionist and not knowing what to do was, in my case, a very problematic combination.
So my coping wasn’t always the best. My health and my mental health had some definite down-times. Alcohol was a crutch and sometimes a weapon — generally self-directed, but not something I am proud of. It didn’t even occur to me during the worst times that a combo of stress, latent internalised homophobia and frustrated perfectionism might be leading to some of the poor choices I had made.
And my god were some of them poor.
Those of you who’ve seen me at my worst, those who I have hurt or done wrong by: I am sorry.
Those who helped: thank you.
Those who walked away: I understand.
The point about internalised homophobia may surprise some readers who know me. It was being put on to “The Velvet Rage” by Alan Downs by my friend Rudy that finally cracked a few barriers for me and helped me start to get to grips with myself. Those who have read the book will know what a help it can be. Those who haven not, straight, gay or whatever, you could read it and find it interesting or helpful.
It also cracked one of the most painful and self-defeating things I had come to believe, connected with my long term lack of a meaningful romantic relationship. In rather blunt terms, I’d come to the conclusion (as Downs so accurately describes) that there was something fundamentally wrong with and unlikeable about me.
That’s crap. I’m just another guy like all the other guys out there. I have good and bad points; have done nice and unpleasant things; have my good days and bad days.
But probably until only last year, I think I still believed in some underlying flaw or problem that meant I was doomed never to be truly happy, and always to be forever single. It comes and goes. Another down time this June and July was very hard, but here in September things are looking better
It is probably not all that hard to imagine how horrible this feels. I think, all things considered, that I got through it in a bearable fashion. Many times it didn’t feel like I would or could, but here we are.
A wee tangent. I don’t know if I’d have written all that even a year or two ago. Mental health and wellness, depression and anxiety, all of these were in my life and unexpressed — perhaps unexpressable. Too many of us are living shadowed lives, sometimes sad, sometimes alone, sometimes just stuck in neutral. Too many see death by suicide as the way to ease the pain. I’m glad I have not felt that way, but so many do. We have to be more open about these things.
Things have moved on in my head (if not (yet?) in my personal life). A combination of self care, counselling and support, tackling the challenge of getting more physically fit, eating better, drinking a lot less (and less often), connecting more with family and being more assiduious about my friends has helped me enormously.
I feel healthier and in many ways better equipped to get on with “just being me” than I can remember.
Which seems like a pretty good way to start the fifth decade of my life, one that a few times I didn’t think I would be around to see.
So that’s a bit about what has happened to me since I turned 30, and some of the feelings that came with it.
My last point is probably not very insightful, but it’s worth saying. When I was a kid and a student and starting my professional life, I was incredibly driven and pushy in so many ways. I wanted things to happen and I didn’t have a lot of patience for the niceties of life. I also had very little time for people in authority positions, which did me no end of harm when it came to various aspects of politics and professional life.
What I see now is that the missing ingredient in all that was the most important one, the one that matter above all else.
A life is nothing without the other lives around it. The people we are with, who care for us, who work with us, who shout at us, who make us laugh and cry and live, are what it’s all about.
So today I turned 40, and what I want to be doing is being with, for and about people. The work I do helps with a medium of communication and interaction. For me it’s not just the screen that matters.
Joy; connection; kindness; being open. Those matter.
My family, my friends, those I know through work or other means: thank you for being part of my world, my life, my heart.
