Dead Normal

I have come to the conclusion that I am a remarkably normal man.

I'm forty-five. I have a job, a son who I adore, a car and an increasingly complicated relationship with my own hamstrings. I go to the gym, coach kids' football and spend a large proportion of my working life talking about sewage, so admittedly the definition of normal is already doing some fairly heavy lifting.

I work in wastewater, which means I can spend an afternoon discussing sewage treatment with complete seriousness and somehow still believe I have a sophisticated career. I manage people, sit in meetings and use phrases like governance framework without laughing. I have opinions about construction programmes, temporary works and whether somebody has correctly interpreted a work authorisation procedure.

Then I come home and draw badgers.

Not normal badgers either. Emotionally complicated badgers experiencing loss, navigating relationships or standing beside squirrels looking wistfully towards the horizon because apparently even woodland animals need boundaries.

A year ago, if you'd told me I'd be spending evenings deciding whether a robin adequately represented grief, I'd have assumed something had gone badly wrong. Instead, I now have a website.

I called it Wildly Gentle, which sounds like either a lifestyle brand or an exceptionally disappointing stag do.

The website happened because I started writing. That began innocently enough. I had thoughts, so I wrote them down, and then people started reading them. Some people even liked them, which was unfortunate because encouragement is dangerous when given to a middle-aged man who has recently discovered he has feelings.

Before long I'd published books, which technically means I can call myself an author. Nobody issued a certificate or came round to check whether I knew what I was doing, so I fully intend to exploit that administrative oversight for the remainder of my natural life.

The problem with becoming a writer is that it changes how you experience things.

Normal people have an argument and think, That was annoying.

I have an argument and somewhere in the back of my mind a tiny editor appears wearing glasses and thinks, Interesting. There might be 1,800 words in this.

Bereavement became an article. Parenthood became an article. Loneliness was obviously an article. My son casually asked me the meaning of life while we were out together and, alongside trying to answer one of humanity's biggest philosophical questions, a small part of me was probably thinking, This is fucking gold.

I'm now approximately three emotional crises away from an anthology.

My family aren't safe either. My mum recently found some old photographs and sent them to me. Most sons would probably reply with something appropriate like, Ah, they're lovely, Mum. I accidentally reconstructed thirty years of family history and published it on the internet.

My sisters probably now approach family gatherings like politicians arriving at a public inquiry, wondering whether the conversation is on the record.

Even my childhood has somehow become intellectual property. Dad breaking toilet seats, my sister singing Zombie pissed at two in the afternoon, family holidays, arguments, grief and love have all found their way onto a page eventually. Nothing is wasted anymore.

I am basically a sentimental skip.

Football hasn't escaped either. I've coached children's football for years, which is one of the greatest ways imaginable to discover that grown adults are significantly less emotionally regulated than ten-year-olds. The children mostly just want to play football while the adults occasionally behave as though Pep Guardiola has arrived at Rainhill to assess our seven-a-side rotation policy.

I stand there explaining that development matters more than winning while internally experiencing emotions last seen during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Then there is swimming, which I also manage to make unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes I'll swim a hundred lengths, giving an overthinker nearly an hour of uninterrupted access to himself in a large echoing room.

Other people swim for fitness. I apparently use chlorinated water as an existential retreat.

By length forty I've usually solved my career. Somewhere around sixty I've understood my childhood. By eighty I've redesigned Wildly Gentle and by ninety-five I've become annoyed about something that happened in 2017.

Then I get out and go to Wagamama.

Balance.

Most mornings you'll also find me in the gym at six o'clock. This makes me sound incredibly disciplined until you consider what I'm actually doing. I willingly leave a warm bed before sunrise, drive somewhere and repeatedly pick up heavy objects before putting them back exactly where I found them.

If you saw somebody doing that in B&Q you'd alert security.

In a gym we call it personal growth.

I've also reached the age where exercise increasingly involves negotiating with individual body parts. My brain still thinks I'm twenty-eight, while my left calf has retained legal representation. My back occasionally clicks during sit-ups like someone opening a packet of crisps and my thumb has required reconstructive surgery, yet every morning I wander back into the gym with the confidence of a man whose body hasn't already submitted several formal complaints.

Despite all this evidence, I genuinely walk around believing I'm quite straightforward.

That's perhaps my favourite thing about human beings. We all think we're the sensible one.

I certainly do.

I'm particularly good at giving other people advice. I can look at somebody else's situation and identify the problem within approximately eleven seconds. They're overthinking it. They need better boundaries. They need to stop trying to control something they cannot control.

Excellent advice.

Then something happens in my own life and suddenly I'm Sherlock Holmes investigating the emotional significance of the word okay.

Was it okay or ok? Because those are obviously completely different things. Was there punctuation? How long did the reply take? They started typing and then stopped typing, which is clearly information that requires further investigation.

It doesn't.

It means somebody started typing and then stopped.

Go and draw a fucking squirrel, Andrew.

In fairness, I am getting better at this. I've slowly learned that not every silence requires investigation, not every mood requires intervention and not every person I love needs me standing beside them holding an emotional first-aid kit.

That's been quite a revelation because I spent a lot of my life believing caring meant doing. If somebody was struggling, I wanted to help. If something was broken, I wanted to repair it. If somebody I cared about was hurting, some primitive part of my brain immediately put on a high-vis jacket and started developing an action plan.

It turns out people don't always need an action plan. Sometimes they need somebody to listen. Sometimes they need space and sometimes they're simply in a foul mood and the world will continue rotating perfectly well without me establishing the root cause.

This is disappointing because root-cause analysis is one of my transferable skills.

The contradictions don't stop there. I can stand in front of hundreds of people and speak without being particularly nervous, yet rewrite a four-line message seven times because one sentence doesn't quite sound like me. I can make significant decisions at work involving money, risk and people's livelihoods and then spend half an hour deciding whether a picture of a badger should be six millimetres further to the left.

I've written openly about grief, loneliness, fatherhood and some of the hardest periods of my life, then hovered over the publish button thinking, Fuck. People are going to read this.

That is generally the objective of publishing, but apparently I haven't completely reconciled myself with it.

For years I probably thought contradictions like these were evidence that I hadn't quite worked myself out yet. I can be confident and insecure, independent and needy, sensible and spectacularly irrational. I can understand something perfectly well intellectually and still struggle to live it emotionally. On a particularly good day, I can even tell myself to stop overthinking while simultaneously overthinking the fact that I'm overthinking.

I'm beginning to suspect that's not unusual at all.

In fact, the older I get, the more I think the contradictions are probably the most normal thing about me.

Because nobody is quite what they look like from the outside.

We meet the polished versions. The bloke who seems confident, the woman who appears to have everything together, the couple with the lovely house, the successful manager, the brilliant parent, the funny one and the strong one everybody else goes to when things go wrong.

Then occasionally you get close enough to somebody that the curtain moves slightly and you see what's behind it.

There's usually just another human being trying to work it out.

Someone is carrying grief nobody can see. Somebody else is worrying about their children or wondering what happened to their relationship. Someone is lonely in a room full of people, somebody desperately misses a person who isn't coming back and someone else is trying to become a different version of themselves while quietly wondering what happened to the person they used to be.

That's the bit we don't photograph.

We compare our backstage with everybody else's performance and wonder why ours looks such a fucking mess.

Mine certainly does. There are cables everywhere, somebody has lost the script and there's an emotionally complicated badger waiting in the wings.

Strangely, I'm becoming okay with that.

I'm starting to wonder whether being normal was never about having everything sorted in the first place. Maybe it's getting things wrong, learning something, getting something else wrong and occasionally developing enough self-awareness to laugh at yourself somewhere in the middle of it.

Maybe it's loving people while finally accepting you cannot save them. It's being a parent while knowing you cannot protect your child from everything, missing your dad years after he's gone, wanting more from life while still being grateful for what you already have and occasionally being frightened while doing the thing anyway.

You can be strong in one room and completely lost in another without either version being false.

Perhaps that's why those two words ended up making so much sense to me.

When I started Wildly Gentle, I thought I was building somewhere to put my writing, books, journals, artwork and whatever other strange thing I decided to make next. I'm not sure I understood at the time that the name was probably describing the person making all of it.

The serious bloke who draws squirrels. The manager who writes about feelings. The dad learning to let go. The overthinker slowly accepting that not every question requires an answer.

Maybe Wildly Gentle was always about making room for the bits of ourselves that don't fit neatly together.

And perhaps that's what I've been writing about all along.

Not how to fix yourself.

Not how to become some perfectly balanced version of a human being who gets up every morning, drinks green juice, understands his emotions and never analyses a text message.

Just what it's actually like to be one.

Messy, funny, frightened, confident, grieving, hopeful, ridiculous, loving and occasionally completely full of shit.

So after forty-five years, several questionable decisions, a reconstructed thumb, one increasingly litigious calf and an alarming number of emotionally complicated woodland animals, I think I've finally worked myself out.

I'm dead normal.

And, weirdly, so are you.

Before you disappear...

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