You Just Crack On

I have been thinking a lot lately about loneliness and what it actually does to you, particularly as a man, because I think we are quite good at hiding it from everyone, including ourselves.

The problem is that loneliness doesn't always look like somebody sitting at home with nobody to speak to. Sometimes it looks like somebody going to work every day, training, taking the kids to football, answering emails, laughing, making plans and generally getting on with life.

You can be functioning perfectly well and still be lonely.

I think that is probably why it can creep up on you. Nothing has completely fallen apart, so you assume you must be alright. You get up, go to work, sort the kids out, go to the gym, take people's phone calls and crack on with whatever needs doing.

Nobody is particularly worried because you're still doing everything you're supposed to be doing and, if somebody asks how you are, the chances are you'll say you're fine anyway.

I know I do.

When I think back properly, the first time in my life I can remember genuinely feeling lonely was when my dad died five years ago.

I had recently started working for a new company and had only been managing my team for about two months. I didn't really know people that well yet and, like anybody starting somewhere new, I was trying to make a good impression and probably putting quite a bit of pressure on myself to prove that I knew what I was doing.

I was sitting having a one-to-one with one of my new members of staff one day when my phone rang.

My dad had been involved in a head-on collision.

It is strange how clearly you remember moments like that because everything before the phone call was completely normal. I was sitting talking about work and whatever we were discussing at the time and then, within seconds, none of it mattered.

We later found out that my dad had suffered a massive stroke while driving and that was it.

He was gone.

He was 64.

My dad was basically a giant child who never really grew up, but I loved that about him because he needed very little from life. As long as he could have a pint and a bet he was okay. He wasn't always the best dad when we were younger, but as his kids got older something changed and by the time I reached adulthood we had become really close.

I spoke to him most days.

Nothing groundbreaking was ever discussed. Half the time I probably rang him about complete rubbish and eventually he would decide he'd had enough and say, "Right, you're boring me now. I'll let you go."

Then we would probably speak again the next day.

I don't think you realise how important completely ordinary conversations are until suddenly you can't have them anymore.

I've always been a bit strange when it comes to processing death. Maybe everybody is. Before losing my dad I had already seen three friends die far too young. One from cancer, one through a workplace accident and another following an accident after a night out. They were all in their twenties and every time it happened I struggled to get my head around the fact that somebody could simply be there one minute, living their life, and then suddenly they weren't.

I think those experiences gave me an appreciation quite early in life of just how fragile everything actually is.

My wife and I had also spent eight years trying to become parents. There were ectopic pregnancies and several miscarriages along the way before my best mate in the whole wide world eventually arrived.

My lad.

So grief wasn't completely unfamiliar to me, but losing my dad felt different.

I think one of the reasons was that for the first time I genuinely felt alone.

There is obviously a difference between being alone and being lonely, although I don't think I properly understood that before then. I've always been comfortable in my own company. I'll happily train on my own, go walking, draw, write or disappear into my own head for a few hours. I've probably described myself as a loner plenty of times over the years.

But this wasn't enjoying my own company.

This was feeling like I had nobody.

The person I would normally turn to for advice was suddenly the person I needed advice about losing.

My family were all trying to process the same grief themselves. I had lost touch with some close friends over the years, as people often do, and I had recently left a workplace where I had been surrounded by a team who knew me really well.

Had I still been there, I think they probably would have known something wasn't right without me needing to explain it.

Instead, I was surrounded by new people who were perfectly nice but didn't really know me yet, and I didn't really know them.

So I did what I suspect a lot of men do.

I just cracked on.

Looking back, those first few months were shit. I had constant brain fog and just didn't feel like myself. I started drinking quite a bit, red wine for some reason, which helped me sleep but also gave me a massive fucking face. I piled weight on in a really short period of time and started gambling far more than I should have.

I don't remember consciously thinking that I was doing any of those things because I was lonely or grieving.

They just filled space.

That is probably one of the biggest things I understand now that I didn't understand then. When your head isn't in a good place, silence can become quite uncomfortable, so you start finding ways to interrupt it.

For me there was drink and gambling. For somebody else it might be work, food, scrolling through a phone for hours, going out every night or constantly finding something to do.

You aren't necessarily trying to destroy yourself.

Sometimes you are just trying not to think.

And the awkward truth is that some of those things work, at least for a little while. A few glasses of wine can quiet your head. Gambling gives you something to concentrate on. Work can swallow entire days.

That is why they are easy to fall into.

The problem is that eventually the distraction finishes and whatever was sitting underneath it is still there, except sometimes you've created a few additional problems to go alongside it.

The other thing I found difficult was talking.

Whenever I did try to explain how I was feeling, people would often respond by telling me about something they had experienced. I don't mean that critically because I understand now that they were probably trying to relate to me and say, "I get it."

But at the time I didn't want somebody else's story.

I couldn't even make sense of my own.

In my head I had somehow become the first person in the history of the world to lose a parent and nobody could possibly understand how I felt. Completely irrational when you write it down, but grief isn't particularly rational.

So eventually I stopped trying to explain it.

I disappeared into myself a bit and developed a sort of fuck you, world mentality.

There wasn't some dramatic collapse. I still went to work. I still did everything I needed to do. From the outside I probably just looked like me, only slightly heavier, more tired and perhaps a bit quieter.

That is why I think loneliness can be missed so easily.

Sometimes the person struggling isn't the person who stops functioning.

Sometimes it is the person who becomes extremely good at functioning.

You become busy enough that you don't have to think too much and independent enough that nobody really asks whether you need anyone.

Eventually, one of the things that started pulling me out of it came from somewhere fairly ridiculous.

We had a birthday party for my dad in the April and my sister took a photograph of me and shared it in a WhatsApp group.

I looked fucking awful.

There were about three chins involved and I just looked rough.

I've always trained, but during those months I had completely lost my motivation and seeing that picture did something to me. I went back to the gym properly the next day, stuck my headphones on, put the Rocky playlist on because apparently I am still about twelve years old when I need motivation, and really pushed myself.

Then I went back the following day.

And kept going.

Before long the weight started coming off and physically I began to feel like myself again, but looking back I think something else was happening that was probably even more important.

I was around people again.

I started speaking to the regulars in the gym about life and, more importantly at that point, absolutely anything other than feelings. We'd talk about training, football, work, families or whatever rubbish happened to come up at six in the morning.

They were tiny conversations, but I think they mattered more than I realised.

I was reconnecting with people without having to announce that I needed connection.

There wasn't any pressure to explain myself. Nobody was asking me to unpack my grief between a set of squats and a bench press. I could just be around people and slowly start feeling part of the world again.

Five years later, I still train pretty much every day and I am probably in some of the best shape I've ever been in.

Part of that is because I love training and I know how much it helps my head, but part of it is definitely linked to losing my dad.

He wasn't exactly the healthiest person in the world. He was a fat shite who would put salt on a Chinese meal, which still makes absolutely no sense to me, but he was only 64 when he died.

That number has stayed with me.

If I die at 64, my son will only be around 30.

That scares the shit out of me.

I know training every day doesn't give me some magical protection against dying and my dad didn't die because he wasn't doing enough cardio, but looking after myself is one thing I can influence. If I can improve my chances of being around for my lad for as long as possible, then I'm going to do it.

For a long time, though, I probably treated the gym as if it was the complete answer.

It isn't.

You can't train 24 hours a day.

Eventually the headphones come off, the workout finishes and you have to go home. If your head is busy, it normally follows you.

That is probably where the last twelve months have taught me something different.

I've started writing a lot more and drawing again. When I'm not off somewhere with my lad, doing the football, taking him swimming or whatever else we have decided to do, I have realised that I need other ways of giving my brain somewhere to go.

Drawing works because it makes me concentrate on one thing.

Writing does something different.

It lets me empty my head.

Anyone who knows me properly knows I reflect a lot. I'm a deep thinker and probably, on occasions, an overthinker. I can take something that has happened, look at it from seventeen different directions and eventually create three additional problems that may not even exist.

Putting those thoughts down on paper has been one of the most useful things I've learned to do.

Sometimes I'll write something when I'm pissed off and read it back half an hour later and think, you're being a bit of a knobhead there.

Delete.

Other times I'll come back to something later and realise that what I thought I was angry about wasn't actually the thing bothering me at all.

That gap between feeling something and reacting to it has become really important to me.

Writing gives the adrenaline somewhere to go before I decide what I actually think.

It hasn't stopped me overthinking, and I doubt anything ever completely will, but it has helped me understand my own head a little better.

And I think that is where my understanding of loneliness has changed most.

I used to think loneliness meant having nobody.

Now I think it is much more complicated than that.

You can have a family and still feel lonely. You can work in a building full of people and feel lonely. You can stand in a busy gym and feel lonely. You can have hundreds of names in your phone and still struggle to think of the one person you want to call when something is properly bothering you.

For me, loneliness is probably less about the number of people around you and more about whether you feel connected to any of them.

Whether there is somewhere for the stuff in your head to go.

That is where I think men can get themselves into trouble, because a lot of us are very good at turning pain into activity.

We work.

We train.

We keep busy.

We solve problems.

We look after everybody else.

We tell ourselves that this is coping, and sometimes it is.

But sometimes constant activity is just another way of avoiding the quiet.

That doesn't mean every bloke needs to sit down and suddenly start talking about his deepest feelings. I've never particularly liked the way that message is sometimes delivered because "just talk" makes it sound incredibly simple.

Sometimes you don't know what you want to say.

Sometimes you don't even know what is wrong.

And sometimes you don't need a massive emotional conversation. You just need to stop disappearing.

That might mean going to the gym and talking complete rubbish to somebody for twenty minutes. It might mean phoning the person you've gradually stopped speaking to. It might mean coaching your kid's football team, going for a walk, joining something, drawing, writing or sitting somewhere with another human being and not talking about anything particularly important at all.

I've learned not to underestimate those small connections.

They sound insignificant when you write them down, but when you've spent too long inside your own head, they can be the thing that starts pulling you back out of it.

I've also learned that loneliness can make you behave in ways that don't initially look connected to loneliness at all.

It can make you drink more than you intended. Gamble when you know you shouldn't. Overthink conversations. Become overly dependent on certain people. Shut other people out. Get angry about things that aren't really the thing you're angry about. Fill every spare minute because doing nothing means thinking.

I recognise some of that in myself now.

That doesn't mean loneliness gets to excuse poor decisions. It doesn't.

But understanding what is driving your behaviour gives you a much better chance of changing it.

Five years after losing my dad, I still spend a lot of time on my own. I'm probably not exactly the same person I was before he died either.

I don't think I am supposed to be.

Loss changes you.

So does becoming a dad. So does getting older. So do relationships, mistakes, disappointments and all the other things life throws at you while you're busy trying to make plans.

What matters to me now is recognising when being alone stops being peaceful and starts becoming isolation.

I know the difference now.

I know that if I start disappearing too far into my own head, constantly looking for distractions or convincing myself that I don't need anybody, that probably isn't independence.

It's usually a warning sign.

So I train.

I write.

I draw.

I coach football.

I take my boy swimming.

We disappear on little adventures together.

I talk to people in the gym about complete rubbish.

None of those things, on their own, are some miracle cure for loneliness.

Together, though, they keep me connected to something outside my own head.

Maybe that's the thing I wish I'd understood five years ago.

You don't necessarily beat loneliness by finding loads more people.

Sometimes you just have to stop convincing yourself that you don't need any.

I still miss my dad.

I still occasionally have something happen and instinctively think about ringing him before remembering that I can't. Five years later, that can still catch me completely off guard.

Mostly, though, I miss the ordinary stuff.

The pointless phone calls.

The conversations about nothing.

The fact that there was simply somebody at the other end of the phone who had known me my entire life.

I think I'd probably tell him about all of this if he was here. I'd explain that I've been writing about loneliness and wellbeing and all the things I've learned since he died.

He'd listen for a bit.

Probably longer than I'd give him credit for.

Then eventually he'd decide I'd been talking for long enough.

"Right, you're boring me now. I'll let you go."

And five years on, I understand something I probably didn't appreciate enough when he was here.

Sometimes having somebody to tell you that you're boring them is a pretty fucking special thing.