Host: Meg Bowles
[overture music]
Meg: [00:00:13] This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. And I'll be your host this time. Expectations. We set them, manage them and try to live up to them. Sometimes our expectations of what will happen next are spot on. And other times, we miss the mark. All of the stories in this hour deal with the goals we set for ourselves and how we hope things might unfold.
Our first story comes from Benji Waterhouse. If you've ever been to a Mainstage event, you'll know that we bring people to the stage by sharing their answer to a question that we pose to all the storytellers. It's an icebreaker that introduces us to the teller as they make their way to the stage. So, borrowing from that, when I asked Benji, “When was a time your expectations did not meet up with reality?” He said, “When I was working as a doctor for the National Health Service and realized it was nothing like the TV show, Scrubs. Live from the Union Chapel in London, here's Benji Waterhouse.
[cheers and applause]
Benji: [00:01:22] I remember when I started at medical school, I was sitting in a great old lecture theatre wearing a stiff white coat. And our plummy dean was saying to us, “Your main job as future doctors is to keep your patients alive.” Into my fresh notebook, I wrote, keep patients alive [audience laughter] and then I underlined it. By the end of the six years though, I realized that I was less interested in the body and more into the mind. And so, I hung up my now stained lab coat and specialized in psychiatry.
I now know that people are quite confused about the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a psychic. [audience laughter] So, just to quickly explain. Psychiatrists are medical doctors who usually specialize in more serious mental illnesses, things like schizophrenia, and can prescribe medications. And boy, do we. [audience laughter] We also have the power to kind of detain or section people, which is like a strange superpower that allows us to lock a person up in a psychiatric hospital against their will and even force them to take medication without breaking the terms of the Geneva Convention. A kind of sad, but what's considered necessary evil to keep patients and society safe.
There are a lot of unfair, I think, misconceptions about psychiatrists that, like the male ones, all have mad families themselves, and wear cashmere jumpers and have beards, [audience laughter] which just isn't true. This is a machine washable wool polyester mix. So, it is true though that one of my motivations for becoming a psychiatrist was hoping to get my hands on the secret code to fix my own slightly dysfunctional family.
So, I remember turning up optimistically on my first day as a psychiatrist, enthusiastic to get my hands on these secret codes. Instead, I was given a strangle proof lanyard, a panic alarm and self-defense training. [audience laughter] Our judo instructor was this like martial arts guy. He told us before we taught us the throws and the slams and stuff, he said, the biggest bit of advice he would tell us if we wanted to last long on the medical register was that we avoid any of our patients committing homicide. [audience laughter]
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Like, this was nothing like Frasier. [audience laughter] Or, how psychiatry was depicted in Woody Allen movies. But he said, “Don't worry.” He reassured us, “The chances of a psychiatric patient killing a random member of the public are very low.” Thank God for that. Far more likely, he said, “They'd kill someone they knew, like their family member or a mental health worker.” [audience laughter] And so, he said though, “But don't worry.” The most important thing he said was, “If going to see a patient in their home, the most important thing was that if you're going was that you have to go for safety, always go in pairs if staffing levels allow.” [audience laughter]
So, it was my first week, and I was working in this like inpatient ward which also we also under a consultant. We also had a clinic. A patient one day didn't come to his clinic appointment, which my boss told me could be a red flag that people are deteriorating, so he wanted me to go and check he was all right. So, I was going on this home visit in this first week. I was alone, obviously. I knocked on the front door trying to not look like I was absolutely shitting myself. And the person I was going to see was called Billy. He was a young man with something called paranoid schizophrenia, which contrary to what Hollywood depicts. Isn't actually about split minds and multiple personalities, but more usually delusional ideas and hearing voices.
After knocking on the door, I was pleasantly surprised when Billy opened it. He gave me a warm smile. I told him why I was there. And he said, “Oh, sorry. I can't believe forgot.” He said, “Do you want to come in? Fancy a cup of tea? Slice of cake?” These were early signs that Billy was doing okay. So, yeah, I gratefully accepted that. I went in, and the daytime TV was burbling away in the living room and-- We went through to the kitchen. As he was fixing the teas, Billy told me a bit about himself. He said he lived there with his mum, and he said they supported each other and they like watched TV together. And he said although they weren't churchgoers, apparently, they watched Countdown religiously. [audience laughter] “But she was just out,” he said.
I took the opportunity to ask my generic psychiatric questions that my boss had taught me to ask, like, was Billy sleeping okay? Was his mood all right? Was he thinking of killing himself? “No, no, no, everything was fine,” he said, except for the voices. My ears pricked up. And that probably, I thought, explained the unopened packets of medication that I'd noticed on the side table. I tentatively asked him what the voices said. “They tell me to get milk, which is so annoying because we've already got milk,” he said. I relaxed a lot, because even I knew back then that schizophrenic voices are often more sinister than that. And psychiatrists don't tend to get struck off or make front pages for having patients well stocked in the lactose department.
But for completeness, I asked, “Do they say anything else?” And Billy said, “Well, yeah, they're not going to like me telling you, but yeah, they do also say that I'm the antichrist. And that the only way to wash away my sin is to sacrifice my mum.” I was like, “Oh, yeah, that's more like it.” [audience laughter] “But I just ignore them.” He said, “I just ignore them. They're stupid. I don't do what the voices say.” I let out another huge sigh of relief. It's when patients don't feel able to ignore these so-called command hallucinations that psychiatrists don't sleep so easily.
And so, this wasn't the case with Billy reassuringly. As he was making me this nice cup of tea and I could hear the intro music of Cash in the Attic just starting up from the living room and the sunshine was pouring in through the windows. I was thinking, I think I'm going to quite enjoy psychiatry. And Billy asked if I took milk, and I said that I did. He was busy removing the tea bags with a spoon. So, I thought I'd help. I went over to the fridge and casually opened the door to discover milk. [audience laughter] Cartons and bottles, and cartons and bottles and cartons and bottles of milk filling every possible compartment of the fridge. I froze. I literally couldn't move my body. “Shit, Billy was obeying the voices.”
My eyes were transfixed on this wall of white. And trying to sound calm and normal, I just asked again where Billy's mum was. “I just told you, she's out.” I took one of the bottles out and shut the door. When I turned, I saw Billy was now smiling and holding a kitchen knife. Then he cut us two slices from the lemon drizzle cake [audience laughter] and he asked-- He thanked me for the milk, and he put some in our teas and we went to sit down in the living room in front of Cash in the Attic. It was this incongruous scene where I was just thinking, Benji like, “If you behave normally, everything will be normal.”
But I could barely swallow this cake in my dry mouth, like, trying to wash it down with sips from this scalding hot tea. But my mind was racing through all the worst-case scenarios. Like, I was just replaying that the warning our self-defense judo instructor had told us. Like, “Far more likely they'd kill someone they knew, like their mental health worker or a family member.” I asked specifically where Billy's mum was. “Shopping, apparently.” As we sat there, I said, “But will she be coming back soon?” And Billy went, “Shh.” Just nodded me to the telly.
My eyes kept being drawn to this staircase, like at the back of the room that led up to their other floor. And I asked Billy if I could use. And he said, “Well, yeah, if you must.” I didn't actually need to. Like, the adrenaline surging through my body had seen to that. But he said, “Yeah, it's upstairs, first door on the left.” So, I got to the foot of the stairs, and I looked up at this dark landing and I hesitated. I was like, “Am I really going to do this? This isn't what I fucking signed up for.” [audience laughter] And so, I went up the stairs. At the top of the landing there were two doors, both slightly ajar. I gently pressed open the one on the left. Yeah, it was just a bathroom. Empty.
I let out this breath that I felt like I'd been holding in for the last few minutes. But I knew that there was another door. I could feel my heart like beating out of my chest. My shirt just felt like way too tight, like sticking to my back with sweat. And the thing was, I already knew what nightmare awaited me on the other side of that door, from tabloid front pages and horror films and true crime documentaries. I went to open the second door. Bang. The sound of the front door closing. From downstairs, I heard a woman's voice say, “Hello, love, I'm back. Crazy busy in Tesco today.”
As I headed back downstairs, I overheard Billy say to his mum, “Did you remember to get milk" in a loving kind of what are you like kind of way. She said, “Yes, angel, I got your milk.” I managed to avoid sectioning Billy on the condition that he restart taking his medication, which, with much persuasion from me and his mum, we managed to make him agree to. Back at my workplace, in the hospital, I was telling my boss about how shit scared I had been. He told me that actually, people with schizophrenia are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. He also told me that alcohol and drugs are far bigger risk factors for homicide than schizophrenia is. So, actually, technically, I was safer being in a psychiatric patient's house than at a psychiatrist's house party. [audience laughter]
It's a weird one, because I am now the consultant psychiatrist with 10 years’ experience now. I've seen thousands of people not dissimilar to Billy. And about a few close shaves, but I'm yet to judo slam any patients, which is a strange thing for a doctor to boast about. [audience laughter] And the dean of my medical school, I think, would be proud of me too. Like, all of my patients, luckily, are still alive, as are the people that they've crossed paths with. But I sometimes wonder at what cost. Yes, with medication, Billy's voices quietened and we got the milk situation under control. But they took away other things.
On this powerful antipsychotic medication, side effects meant that he'd sleep for like 16 hours a day. When he was awake, the lethargy meant that he felt like a zombie. The meds also gave him obesity, and later diabetes and heart disease. During a painfully lucid moment when I was reviewing him later in the year in clinic, he said to me through groggy eyes, “I know you're going to write in the notes that I'm doing well, aren't you, just because I'm taking my meds? But on them, I'd rather be dead.”
So, I'm still very much looking for the secret codes for my family and for the more extreme end people like Billy. It seems that often the solutions to people's lives aren't straightforward. Even psychiatry's modern best cures, best treatments can be as disabling as the conditions that they aim to cure. It's been weird for me remembering that back then 10 years ago, the thing that really scared me was the patience. But now, with the benefit of experience and being more informed, by far the biggest thing that I'm fearful of, is that as a psychiatrist, I am maybe causing more harm than good. But maybe if I wanted things to be black and white, I should have specialized in radiology. [audience laughter] Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Meg: [00:16:24] Dr. Benji Waterhouse is an NHS psychiatrist, and an award-winning comedian and author of the bestselling book, You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here. He's also a resident host of our open mic StorySLAMS in London, and not just because he lives five minutes away. You can find out more about Benji on our website, themoth.org.
Coming up, a man finds himself in the eye of a social media storm, whenTThe Moth Radio Hour continues.
Jay: [00:17:44] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Meg: [00:17:53] This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. In this technological age, people have expectations of those in the spotlight, and social media platforms allow them to easily share their opinions. Everything people do and say is scrutinized, interpreted and sometimes wielded like a baseball bat to make a point. But even those with the best intentions, sometimes miss the mark.
When I asked our next storyteller, Jamie McDonald, “When was a time that your expectations did not meet up with reality?” He said, “Being asked to be on the panel for the television show, Have I Got News for You. It was even more fun and nerve wracking than I ever imagined.” And just a note, we know that the social media platform that's referenced has had a name change, but it was Twitter when the events in the story took place. Live from London, here's Jamie McDonald.
[cheers and applause]
Jamie: [00:18:46] Yeah, is that high enough?
Female Moderator: [00:18:46] You still thinking about that?
Jamie: [00:18:47] Is that high enough? Is that as high as it goes?
Female Moderator: [00:18:51] As high as it goes, baby.
Jamie: [00:18:51] Okay. Thank you very much. Good evening. All right. So, [chuckles] October 2022, I was invited to be a guest on the long running satirical panel show, Have I Got News for You. [audience cheers]
If you're not familiar with the show, it features two teams each with a guest, captained by comedy legends Paul Merton and Ian Hislop. And together, we answer questions humorously on that week's news. The show's an institution. It's been running for over 30 years. Its panels are who's who comedy greats, right? So, to be invited on, it was a massive highlight in my stand-up career. Only slight concern. The show is riddled with loads of video and picture rights, [audience laughter] which is a unique challenge for a blind comedian. [audience laughter] But I wasn't worried, because in this case, my concerns are more about how do I get to stage without killing myself or somebody else. [audience laughter] So, a few pictures, I wasn't bothered. I was just excited.
The day of the recording arrived and I was collected from St. Pancras station in this like air-conditioned Mercedes Benz, like a superstar, [audience laughter] was driven through London up to the studio where I was greeted by a runner and I was whisked down to hair and makeup. Then it was up to this audience packed studio where amidst this light flashing din, I met the captains, Paul and Ian, who are two comedy heroes of mine. And were applauded into our seats, and from nowhere I was given a bottle of water and a layer of anti-shine powder. [audience laughter] There was some shouting. The cameras started rolling. The theme tune blasted out. With this kind of bowel melting surge of adrenaline, [audience laughter] we were off.
Now, prior to the show, the producers and I, we had a chat about the video and picture rounds. We all just thought it would be funny [audience laughter] that whenever a picture or a clip come up for comment, I just have a guess [audience laughter] at what it might be. [audience laughter] So, a Ford Fiesta popped up. I guessed it was Vladimir Putin. [audience laughter] More unseen images popped up. I kept guessing it was Vladimir Putin. [audience laughter] It turns out it was a very effective answer. It went down well with the audience, the recording was good fun, the producers were happy. I thought I've done a good job. [chuckles]
The morning after the show aired, my wife and I, were driving to Bristol. I opened Twitter just to see if there'd been any buzz around the show. And boom, I was hit with this Force 10 Twitter Storm. If you don't know what a Twitter storm is, it's where a ton of Twitter trolls decide to suddenly get incandescent with rage at a person or an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with them. [audience laughter] They lampoon, they attack, they go nuts. In this case on my behalf, until something else as equally as nothing to do with them happens and they bugger off to shout at that for a while. [audience laughter] These are some of the tweets from this storm. I've changed the names, the handles just to protect identities. [audience laughter] @i'mapatronizingbellend [audience laughter] wrote, “Shame on you. Have I got news? You invite a blind person onto your show and you make absolutely no adaptation to the format, so he can take part.” Okay.
And then, @don'tworrydisabledpeople,I'llstandupforyou [audience laughter] wrote, [chuckles] “Am I missing something here? What's wrong with giving the poor guy-- a porro guy prick. [audience laughter] What's wrong with giving the poor guy an earpiece for audio description?” [audience laughter] Because that would be about as entertaining as a seat heavy game of musical chairs. [audience laughter] So, I thought, hang on a second here. I'm going to have to set the record straight. So, we pulled into this rundown motorway service station where I tweeted, “Last night was a career highlight. I absolutely loved being on @haveigotnews. I really appreciate everybody's concern on my behalf, but at no point did I feel excluded in any way.” Job done. I nipped that in the bud. [audience laughter]
We bought ourselves a triumphantly horrible service station picnic, [audience laughter] and we get back in the roads. But even before, like the heartburn from a rank motorway pie could kick in, [audience laughter] I got this reply, @shoosh. Now disabled Shoosh. [audience laughter] Wrote, “Thank you, Jimmy. But the concern wasn't simply personal. [audience laughter] It was lazy and showed poor production values. You should have been facilitated to provide your very best contribution.” I thought I know, right? [audience laughter] “Blind people need to be shown to be provided with full inclusion.” Oh. Oh, do we now?
I know sometimes people do the wrong things for the right reasons. But man, I was fuming, because I have spent a long time trying to figure out how to own my disability. So, to have these keyboard warriors wrestle it from me with a patronizing pat on the head and, “It's okay, Jamie. We'll take it from here.” [audience laughter] It really boiled my blood because I started seriously losing my sight in my mid-teens. Actually, to this day, people still say, “Oh, that must have been a very tough stage of life to start losing your sight,” which implies it was a good time. [audience laughter] Lucky you, going blind in your 40s. [audience laughter] It wasn't a good time.
I was embarrassed by my failing eyes to the point I spent my late teens and a good whack of my 20s in denial. I pretending I could still see. [chuckles] But sight is surprisingly tricky to fake. [audience laughter] I was nailing myself off street furniture, stumbling into main roads, constantly smashing into strangers who just thought I was aggressive and rude. [audience laughter] I had to stop misrepresenting myself as this bollard bashing yob before I get run over or punched.
I need to accept the inescapable fact that I was. I was losing my sight, which I did at the age of 25. My transition from able to disabled came when I started using this white stick, which, to my amazement, wasn't just an excellent mobility aid, but it was also instantly explaining why I was accidentally in various dodgy situations. It was transformational, because before it'd be, “Oh, quick, there's a big Scottish pervert creeping around the ladies.” [audience laughter] But now with the stickers, “Ah, that was a big blind sweetheart lost in the lose.” [audience laughter] It was brilliant. Strong human traits are often characterized through metals. Steely eyed, iron willed. My white stick was giving me a brass neck.
Now, a brass neck is a very High tolerance to excruciatingly awkward or embarrassing situations. It's very popular amongst politicians. [audience laughter] It was lucky, because I'd been running out of options, you know, what was I going to do? Was I going to spend the rest of my life being embarrassed by my eyes? Sod that. Ironically, I was starting to see the humor in them. The first sight situation I remember finding funny, I was in a supermarket and I reached out for an apple. Just as I was about to grasp the [unintelligible [00:28:37] [audience laughter] I glimpsed another hand going for the same piece of fruit. So, I whipped my hand back and I said, “Sorry,” just to realize that the apples were next to a mirror. [audience laughter] I just apologized to my own hand. [audience laughter] I chuckled away. [audience laughter]
No, my brass neck was allowing me to own my disability and that was incredibly liberating. Constantly finding my life funny naturally led me into standup comedy. And now, my comedy and my blindness are inextricably linked. So, to be invited onto a show like Have I Got News for You, wonderful, chatting over ideas with producers, brilliant. But now, I had all these faux outraged trolls deciding I hadn't been in on the joke. I'd been exploited. Not only were these people hijacking my disability, but they were using it to go after a show I'd love been on. And no joke, the Twitter storm, it made the papers. The Sun, the Metro, the Times, all attacked the BBC and Have I Got News for You on my behalf. Not one of them asked me for comment.
And tweeting my enjoyment of the show hadn't worked. I was very reluctant to engage any further in case this was taken as some kind of vindication or recognition. God knows how much the storm would rage if they felt they had agency. Yeah, I was absolutely powerless in the face of it. So, I did what you do in any storm. I battened down the hatches, hope it blew itself out before it wrecked my career. [chuckles] Producers don't love it when you turn up to their show, complete with your very own angry Twitter mob. [audience laughter] And part of me starts thinking, have I got this wrong here? Do I have the right to full ownership of my eyes, or do others have a stake in them if I'm using them for entertainment?
It wasn't so much an existential crisis. It was more a question of, do I, as a blind person on a high profile show, have a duty to entertain or to uphold best accessible practices at all costs? [audience laughter]
At the recording, if a voiceover had come on and saying, “Jamie, you're looking at A picture of a Ford Fiesta.” Brilliant. [audience laughter] Yeah, that's accessible. But as a comedian, what am I going to do with that? I'd probably say something like, “Huh, just another car I can't drive.” [audience laughter] The trolls would go, “Nuts. Insensitive monsters. How dare you tell a blind person he's looking at a picture of a car?” [audience laughter] You can't win.
I think one of the problems is that some people, they see disability as one thing. It's not. Blindness is infinite combinations of psychological and physical impacts on people. You could have relatively good sight, be miserable, vice versa. Everything in between. Blind people, we're all different. We're like snowflakes, not two of us the same. And if a lot of us fall, people panic. [audience laughter] I was reflected. I was reflected in all this when I opened Twitter to see how the storm was doing. It was finally fading. But one tweet did catch my attention. Finally, somebody with some skin in the game wrote, “I watched this as a newly acquired sight loss woman, and I found Jamie the cup of tea with no sympathy I'd been needing. Being Glaswegian, I got both his personality and his patter.”
That decided it for me. These trolls, they may have given themselves the right to attack anything and everything they please, but I have been given the privilege to use my eyes to make myself and other people laugh. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Meg: [00:33:20] That was Jamie McDonald. The day after Jamie told this story in London, he got a call from the people at Have I Got News for You asking him to be on the show again. He told me that, “Like before, they didn't change the format. And this time, there was no Twitter backlash.” Recently, he took part in another popular television show in the UK called Celebrity Masterchef. And though he couldn't tell me the outcome, when we spoke, he did assure me that he had all his fingers. In the bio, he has on his website, he says he doesn't believe disabled people triumph over their adversities. They triumph with them and get to have some fun along the way.
You can find out more about Jamie and all the storytellers you hear in this hour on our website, themoth.org. While you're there, why not pitch us your story? Does a story in this hour remind you of something from your own life? Stories, big or small, we'd love to hear from you.
Coming up, what happens when all your great expectations blow up in your face, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
[whimsical music]
Jay: [00:35:04] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Meg: [00:35:13] This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. The expectations we set for ourselves are often based on what we've seen or heard around us our family's hopes and dreams, our successful friends, the people we see on Instagram or TV living glorious and happy lives. What happens when you manage to meet those expectations, but then find they aren't the key to happiness you hoped?
When I asked our final storyteller, Salima Saxton, “When was a time that your expectations did not meet up with reality?” She said, “Usually, when I improvise meal times.” Here's Salima Saxton live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Salima: [00:35:55] Thank you. [chuckles] Thank you. So, it was Valentine's Day. My husband, Carl, came into the sitting room and he closed the door. He was wearing a big thick winter coat, even though it was quite mild outside. And he was shivering. He was trembling. I didn't recognize him. “Something terrible has happened,” he said.
My husband, Carl, is a coper. He is a man with a plan. If you want someone on your team, pick Carl. Well, he's an oak tree. Then he said, “I just can't do this anymore. Whatever I do, it is never enough.” He has a business. He'd been navigating it through COVID, through Brexit, through all of it. I'm embarrassed to admit right now that I just got used to him being stressed all the time. I barely saw it anymore. And then, he added, “Do you love me? Can you still love me? Because sometimes I just think it would better if I wasn't here anymore.”
I met Carl when I was 22, in the waiting room of an audition room for a Bollywood film. Neither of us got the part. [audience laughter] I asked him for the time as a really spurious reason to talk to him, because he was simply the most handsome man I'd ever seen in my life. On our first date, I asked him if he wanted children over the starter. [audience laughter] I cried over the main course. [audience laughter] I am a crier. And over dessert, I very optimistically asked him for a second date. [audience laughter] Miraculously, he agreed. And six weeks later, he asked me to marry him.
[cheers and applause]
The following summer, we were married in a London registry office. Me in a red vintage dress, him in an ill-fitting suit, but he still looked really handsome. We cobbled together a reception at a pub down the road. A chef friend of ours made a big chocolate cake. We bought tons of boxed wine from a Cash & Carry. So, on my side, my family. There was my dad, very angry because I'd walked myself down the aisle. There were my extended family, the Buddhists, the Amnesty International members, the Liberals, the very earnest guests.
On the other side was Carl's family. They were different. There was a man called Mickey Four Fingers, [audience laughter] whose name really explains the man. [audience laughter] There was a group of ex-cons whose gold jewelry competed for attention with their gold teeth. And then, there was his dear dementia ridden mum, Pat. She'd actually been a getaway driver for her naughty brothers in the 1980s. [audience laughter] She was an amazing woman. But now, she just called everybody darling, very charmingly, but mainly because she didn't really know where she was or who any of us were.
So, it was a joyous, it was a sad, it was an awkward, it was a stressful occasion. And it made both of us yearn for elders that could be there to hold our hands in such big life events. We both wanted to rocket away from our upbringings. Carl partly for physical safety, both of us for emotional safety. And together, we did that. I also had ideas of success from 1990s romcoms and TV series. Do you remember the Party of Five, The O.C.? I had an idea that if I had a kitchen island, freshly cut flowers, linen napkins and a gardener, like just a weekend one, then [audience laughter] somehow the perfect TV family would just walk in.
So, together, Carl and I did actually do some of that. We lived in the Shishi neighborhood. I had a tiny dog that I carried under my arm, Raymond, because he couldn't really walk very far. [audience laughter] And our three kids, they went to a progressive private school where they called the teachers by their first name, didn't wear uniform and didn't learn so much. [audience laughter] But they were happy in their early years, at least.
I hadn't had this kind of education, by the way. I'd been to a state school. I'd ended up at Cambridge. I'd really been like a happy geek at school. Sometimes Carl and I wondered what we were doing, pushing ourselves to such an extent to make sure that our kids went to that kind of school. I think it was another idea of ours to be safe, to be successful. But there wasn't much joy in all of this. We were just like busy, frantically scrabbling up this hill all the time. Yet we had the kitchen island. We did have linen napkins, but they were grubby and they were mainly kept in the back of the kitchen cupboard.
So, that Valentine's evening, when Carl said to me he couldn't live like this anymore, it cut through all of it. He kept saying to me, “Do you love me? Can you still love me? Do you love me?” And I kept saying, “You are loved. Oh, my God, you're so loved.” I felt angry. I felt angry at him. I felt angry at me. How could we have got this, that the boy in the ill-fitting suit was asking me whether I still loved him.
I phoned our family doctor who said that she thought Carl was having a breakdown and that he needed medication and respite immediately. I phoned a friend whose husband had a breakdown a few years earlier. I remember seeing standing on the front lawn in my pajamas, it was dark, I was freezing cold and I was whispering into the phone, so my kids wouldn't hear, so the neighbors wouldn't hear. I mean, who cares?
So, I realized that things had to change really quickly. This life of ours that we had created was a weight around us. And Carl in particular was gasping at the surface for air. I had to change things immediately. I knew it. So, I told Carl that, I said that we were going to move to my childhood home, that we were going to take the kids out of the school and we were going to do things very differently and look after him. He'd always looked after us. So, I did that. It was a bit like triage, I suppose.
I gave notice to the school, I started to pack up the house and then I would drive out of London with my car filled to the brim to set up my kids bedrooms in advance of us moving. I would do that. At that end, I'd go to the tip, visit schools and then drive home to London sobbing. I felt like I'd taken a shrinking pill. I felt like everyone in London with their game faces was saying, “Who did you think you were trying to live this big life?” I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed for feeling ashamed.
I remember saying to people, “Oh, please don't tell them, because I think it would make really good gossip.” But then, there are the people and there are the moments that stand out for me. There was the friend that flew across the ocean with Squishmallows for my children and words for me saying, “We have got this. We have got this.” There were the class mums who organized my son's birthday party. There was the woman in the playground who squeezed my hand, because she could see I was feeling really wobbly. All those signs of kindness had actually always been there, but I've been too busy looking for other.
So, for about 13 weeks, I lived on coffee, sausage rolls and adrenaline. And by that April, my kids were in their new school. Carl was beginning to resurface and I could exhale again. That February 14th, it took the sheen off everything. I couldn't give a-- Fuck, can I swear? I don't know, can I-- But I couldn't care less about-- [audience laughter] I couldn't give a fuck actually about- [laughs] [audience cheers and applause] -appearances suddenly. I just couldn't. I felt like I'd woken up. We lost Deliveroo. [audience laughter] We lost complicated cupcake flavors. We lost hotel people bar watching, which I love. We lost the perfect butter chicken thali. Oh, and we lost 24-hour access to chocolate buttons and Pringles. We lost the people for whom a postcode matters. Most surprisingly of all, we lost the fear. Because when your life explodes and it morphs into something far better, the fear evaporates, disappears, distills, just goes into the atmosphere. I'm not scared anymore. There's just like a little firefly of fear. And that's to do with the health of the people that I love.
There was an afternoon last summer, I was sitting in the garden in the farmhouse that we now live in. And it was sunny. I was watching my husband and my son tear up the lawn on the ride on mower. They were my two girls and they were leading their friend's horse, Stan, to get a bowl of water just inside the front door. And there was our cat, Tigger, failing to catch a mouse in the hedgerow.
Tigger was an indoor cat, actually, in London, but now, well, gone is this skittish creature whose mood you could never predict. Instead, we have a creature that leaps up trees, parties all night, purrs by the fire. She knows exactly who she is, I think, much like all of us. Valentine's Day. [sighs] It reminded me that most success is a wiggly line on a grubby piece of graph paper. I used to think of success as tick, tick, tick, ambition, ambition, ambition. Now, now, I think of it as finding the people, finding the places that make you feel safe and bring you home. Thanks.
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Meg: [00:47:46] Salima Saxton is an actress, writer and podcaster. She cohosts the Women Are Mad podcast, where she interviews extraordinary women and finds out where and when anger has been a positive power in their lives. Salima says, “My husband and the rest of my family continue to bloom and look back on this transformational moment as a gift. It truly was the beginning of us becoming ourselves.” She's still working on not being a catastrophist and daring to believe that everything actually could work out. She says, she now reminds herself to look for daily unexpected moments of joy, even in the midst of the mundane.
You can find out more about Salima and her podcast on our website, themoth.org. To pitch us your story, you can go to our website and look for Tell a Story or you can call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-M-O-T-H, the best stories are developed for Moth shows all around the world.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope it met all your expectations.
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Jay: [00:49:29] This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison and Meg Bowles, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show. Coproducer is Vicki Merrick. Associate producer, Emily Couch.
The rest of The Moth's leadership team including Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jenifer Hixson, Kate Tellers, Marina Klutse, Lee Ann Gullie, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Sarah Jane Johnson and Aldi Kaza. Most stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.
Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Galt MacDonald, Vulfpeck and Chet Baker. We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Special thanks to our friends at Audacy, including executive producers, Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reis-Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.