All the Fault of the Hollywood Heart Attack. And the lack of tattoos.

Photo by Brianna Santellan on Unsplash At least it’s not a picture of someone with their head in their hands. We’ve all had quite enough of pictures of people with their heads in their hands.

I had to tell her that the cracks were showing. I had to use the late, great Viv Stanshall’s song as a way of trying to putting into words what was happening to me. “The Cracks are Showing.” He made it sound so original. He made everything sound original. I made it sound like the cliché it really was.

And the trouble was, the cracks weren’t showing. I was too much of a professional to let anyone, let alone my line manager, see the plasterwork crumble. And so I used words. And then entirely undermined myself by continuing to turn up in suit and tie.

Until I didn’t turn up at all. But that came later. That came last.

From the first, the required “concern” was shown. And then, once the concern was exhausted, and as I continued to show up despite the unpleasantness of me outing myself as in some way broken, we reached the point where they determined for me that things must have improved. “You’re looking better,” they’d say, sometimes several times a day, like they were challenging me, provoking me, trolling me. If you can make this much effort, they said without saying, then there can’t be anything wrong with you.

And it wasn’t their fault.

Like so many things in life, it was the fault of Hollywood. In particular, the Hollywood Heart Attack.

If you haven’t Googled it, go ahead, do. WebMD, I seem to remember, has a decent article. The gist being that, thanks to the clenched jaws and mad eyed staring of the afflicted on camera, people entirely fail to recognise the symptoms when they strike. In themselves as much as others. I’ve known at least two people who’ve had heart attacks without realising it. And all because things don’t look like…well, what they’re meant to look like. It’s a shorthand. It’s so we don’t have to think. We recognise it immediately. And we pity the poor bugger about to breathe their last.

Or not.

Anyway, I had said the cracks were showing.

Which fed right into my colleagues’ need to see that pain.

So they wanted fucking cracks.

If I couldn’t give them the clutch of the left arm and the necessary spasms of your actual coronary, then what I did have — which, funnily enough, had enough of the symptoms of a heart attack at times for me to wind up in Accident and Emergency — ought to damn well look like it was supposed to look.

You’re anxious, depressed, suffering from something somewhere related to the churn in your head? Well, for fuck’s sake, at the very least go round clutching that head. Oh you’ve seen it. You know the one. The first photograph used in every single news item about mental health. The person in question will have their head in their hands. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

That’s what they need to see. You see?

And I didn’t give them that. No clutching of head and no paroxysms of agony. And I persisted in continuing to turn up so, of course, they could determine that I “looked better”. To the point where I thought that must be a symptom of my malaise, too. It can only be felt. It cannot be seen.

And it certainly shouldn’t be put into words.

So I began to doubt myself. I felt what I felt, but I didn’t look it. I was supposed to look it. Hell, my hair wasn’t even mussed up. And why wasn’t I clenching and clawing at myself? Why weren’t my clothes in tatters?

I’d told my line manager the cracks were showing.

But they weren’t. Not to her. Not to the others. And, eventually, not to me.

Damn it, I must have been alright, then. I was better. That was it — they were right. I was better.

Over a year off work and periodically institutionalised “better”, as it turned out.

I waited to give them what they were looking for. Because I’d started with that phrase that I could never live up to.

What we should actually do, of course, is agree our own very difficult to miss and very Hollywood visual signifier that things are cracking and they need attending to right now.

I’m going to suggest we get the cracks tattooed.

Right there in front of the unsympathetic buggers, if necessary.

And on those days when you’re still “managing” (and that’s a sign of good mental health how exactly?), and you’re in danger of seeming “better” because what choice do they give you in work now but to try to keep going, the tattoos can take the strain — and make the point — for you.