Nick Drake saved my life.
I had vicious insomnia aged fourteen. The doctor prescribed an old-school heavy-duty tricyclic antidepressant called amitriptyline. He wouldn’t prescribe my requested melatonin because, in his words, ‘It’s a hormone. You’ll become addicted. And then you’ll be back for more.’ This only scratches the surface of why I despise most doctors.
Nick Drake’s 1972 album Pink Moon was the soundtrack to my adolescent turmoil. Soothing, yet haunting. Drake paints pure image: ‘Pink, pink, pink, pink, pink moon.’ I liked that you impose your own meaning. Drake doesn’t dictate how you should feel. He simply saw a beautiful lunar phenomenon on a spring night in Cambridge and, in Blakean, Yeatisan, Keatsian fashion, translated it into a cluster chord melody with his detuned guitar. So why did it pierce my heart so?
I had a panic attack and broke down to the sound of ‘Pink Moon.’ French class and one of the school thugs, the kind to fist-fight at midnight in a carpark, was kicking the back of my chair. I told him to stop, but he just grinned. What was I gonna do about it? The week before I’d sunk my fountain pen into the leg of another thug, that time in Religious Studies, when he had grinningly refused to stop kicking my chair. The week before that, I’d been assaulted on the bus-ride to school, shard of cut up Coke can stabbed into my cheek, narrowly missing de-eyeballing me. I’d responded, blood streaming down my face, by thumping him over and over until he cried and I got pulled off him. And just a day or two before that I’d given another thug three warnings to stop shoving me in the chest, and when he only grinned wider and continued I busted his nose open, sending him running for the toilets in a sobbing mess of blood and tears.
So what was I gonna do about it now? I stood up. The thug in French class leaned back. He smiled wider. Expectant. Encouraging. I scrunched up my fist, and left the class. Fuck this prison. Fuck the other inmates. And fuck the wardens. I made my way downstairs, across the vacant concourse, and headed for the front door through reception. Just as I pushed the door on my way to freedom, there was a click. The door locked. The receptionist, a middle-aged jobsworth of a woman who would turn a blind eye to shower rape, wagged her finger and told me she was calling the deputy head. I left reception and made my way across the school field, behind the football pitch, and jumped the fence. I landed in front of the deputy head, who stood hands on hips and crooked his index finger, leading me back into school. In his office, I refused to answer his questions, pulled out my first generation iPod, put my head against the wall, closed my eyes, and, feeling completely trapped, struggling to breathe as a tear escaped, listened to Nick Drake.
Nick Drake continued to be my companion a couple of years later when I changed schools for sixth form. I’d go to school in a zombie-state, deep purple bags beneath my eyes from chemically-induced sleep, ‘River Man’ or ‘From The Morning’ helping me through the haze. I decided to read about him one night before bed. Made myself a bowl of cereal and had my strip of amitriptyline tablets beside me. I discovered that he died aged twenty-six from an amitriptyline overdose. His final night looked similar to mine – archaic side-effect laden antidepressants washed down with sugary breakfast cereal. He died from a dose not too far off what I was taking. I didn’t take my dose that night. Embraced withdrawal and would forever find it difficult to trust healthcare professionals. Years later, I’d go to three different doctors complaining of sleep issues and each one defaulted to prescribing the “medication” that had proved so deadly for one of the most sensitive-souled artists to ever put voice on vinyl.
My complicated wrestle with the idea of suicide began when I came off the drugs. You don’t want to die, so you stop rolling the dice with dodgy pills. But then you find the world is quite a raw place to live in when you don’t have a foggy cloud to cushion you. John Martyn, in penning one of the most chilling folk songs of all time, dedicated to Nick Drake, ‘Solid Air’, put it best: ‘You’ve been painting the blues, and you’ve been looking through solid air.’ Solid air is a defence mechanism, a muting of the technicolour world outside for those too sensitive to handle it all. Callousness and obliviousness can both be signs that one has too much empathy, scabs to protect and open wound always ripe for salting.
And I think about all of those who couldn’t get a thick enough scab and took their lives. The last picture of Kurt Cobain taken before his suicide was him smiling. Not a masked smile. Not one of those smiles where you can tell what’s really going on. An honest-to-god genuinely ecstatic smile. I imagine it was like that the night before my friend took his life. He was a talented musician and tender soul too. And no one saw it coming. It’s not always like that though. I can’t imagine Robin Williams, Ian Curtis, David Foster Wallace, or Marilyn Monroe were smiling before they took their lives. I have more than a handful of friends who put plans in place and thought through their own suicide. From the sounds of things, they weren’t smiling either. When I’ve been close to complete darkness, I didn’t smile. But it’s strange because when you finally find darkness all-encompassing, that’s when you do smile. Then you know you’re in trouble and you better pray for a miracle. You better start looking for miracles. And look hard because you have an obligation to find them. That’s my belief and this is where my view on suicide becomes complicated – it looks like I’m disparaging the dead, attacking those in pain, failing to understand the issue’s gravity. And, on the surface, it seems simplistic, reductionist, callous, oblivious.
Suicide is selfish. In nine out of ten times anyway. How can one make such assertion when they are advocates for euthanasia, abortion, and go back and forth on the death penalty? How can one utter something so seemingly blasé and uncaring when their friends and best-loved artists have taken their lives? Do I not understand the pain of depression? Real depression? I get asked these questions by people who have never come home to find their loved ones hanging from the rafters, who’ve never had to cut down their loves, and cradle their body as the detective questions them. I get asked these questions by people who seem to believe I’ve never felt pain. Like anyone who hasn’t taken their own lives has not felt pain. Not real pain anyway. Not real suffering. Talk to anyone who has endured a real ordeal, who has gone through hell on earth, and you know they’ve thought about making it all go away. And when you realise that these people have thought, and thought deeply, about righteously and understandingly ending it all but didn’t, you realise you’re in the presence of true strength. You realise that many concede to stride boldly forth, their art and life and gifts an obligation to keep going, their suffering a cross they bear for other people. And when two souls that have reached the brink of darkness meet, you know they’d follow each other anywhere, even through solid air.