Entry 4. June 30th, 2024.
On my 18th birthday, my parents gave me a black terracotta jar adorned with red and white love hearts. A smash jar.
It comes with a small piece of paper upon which you write a wish, a dream, a hope. And once you've filled the jar with money, you're supposed to smash it. And by that point, you'll have achieved your dream, hope, wish. Hopefully. I have had that jar for almost 18 years. It left home with me. It has lived in every place, in every flat that I have lived. It has occasionally been heavy with £2 coins and gifted £20 notes. And when I have been at my poorest, it has been a welcome resource for food and other essentials. I realised today that I have had this jar for almost half of my life, give or take a couple of months. It has been a constant object in my living space and honestly, I don't think I've ever really stopped thinking about it.
Recently, I've been struggling a lot. Being unemployed and generally just feeling kind of lost. And I found myself thinking the other day about the jar and what I wrote on that small piece of paper. What was my dream, hope, wish at 18 years old? I don't have to think about it. I've never forgotten. I remember what I wrote because it's never changed.
I wanna make it.
I looked at the jar today. Swirled it around and tried to gauge how many coins were in it. £2 coins only, that was my rule. Because they're magic. I turned it upside down and looked through the money slot and I saw it. The little piece of paper. I was genuinely scared to remove it, worried I might jinx my wish. But I wanted to see it, feel the paper, check the date. I got my tweezers and fished it out very carefully, and I laid it on a page of my songbook. The paper was really dirty from the inside of the jar but the writing was still clear. At the top were instructions to insert the piece of paper with the first coin. Below was the date, the 19th of November 2006, and at the bottom was a line for me to write my ‘desire’.
I wanna to make it.
Back then, making it to me was about becoming a famous singer. That's what I wanted, more than anything. And at that time, on that birthday, it felt so possible, despite my reality. I actually had major surgery about a month before my 18th. I'd been ill on and off for about six months with really bad abdominal pain that left me being sick constantly. The first time it happened, I was still living with my parents and I couldn't stop throwing up. My parents thought I was just hungover, which is fair. That's kind of what I was like at that time in my life. But it just kept happening and I could not stop. So my poor dad, him and my mum had been on the gin that night. And for some reason, we did not have a hot water bottle. So in order to try and help with the pain, they took the empty gin bottle and filled it up with hot water so I could have it on my belly as my dad drove me to the hospital. Which is a story I'm sure they probably don't want me to be sharing with anybody. So I lay on the back seat of my dad's car as he drove me to the hospital.
So I stayed in for a few hours and the pain subsided. I stopped throwing up, so they sent me home. They didn't scan me, they didn't check, they didn't want to take it any further. So a few months later, I called NHS 24 in the middle of the night with a similar pain. No throwing up that time. But I was told to take 2 paracetamol, wait half an hour. And the pain did subside, so I just left it. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, I was at a house party. And in the middle of the night, it happened again. I could not stop throwing up. And the pain was incredible. My friends called for an ambulance, but they wouldn't come because they thought I was just another drunk teenager. So my friend gave me a few sips of her cherry cola and vodka so that I could spew red, and then they called the ambulance back, said I was spewing blood. And yeah, that thankfully led to them actually coming to get me. I don't know how much longer I would have been able to survive if that hadn't have happened, because it turns out I had a very serious thing going on.
When I finally got to the hospital, they gave me injections to stop me throwing up, managed to actually calm me down enough to do scans. And they found that I actually had a cyst on my right ovary, and the ovary itself had actually twisted around and died, and that's what was poisoning me, essentially. And at first they thought they could remove it with keyhole surgery. But they did an ultrasound and realised that actually it was the size of a tennis ball, the cyst. So I had to be taken in for a C-section very quickly to get it removed. And I remember being really distressed. I was fighting with nurses, I wouldn't let them take my blood. I just wanted to leave. I don't know why. I don't know if I was just having a complete meltdown. And I felt very out of control. And I was in so much pain. But I remember there being the nurse that took me down to surgery. I'm not sure if she was the one who was going to give me the anaesthesia. Or if she was just there to talk to me. But she explained everything to me. She was really nice. She kept me very calm. And she said that usually when you go for surgery they put a little cap on you. But she really liked my mohawk so she let me just keep it up. My parents have this really terrible picture of me sitting up in a hospital bed, with my bent mohawk and my makeup all over the place. And I just, oh my god, I look terrible. But it is quite funny now to look at it and be like, oh yeah, they let me keep my mohawk up, that was nice. Yeah. I had to stay overnight for a few days, and I can never remember exactly when the surgery happened, but I do remember my parents leaving me overnight, and there was fireworks outside, so it must have been Guy Fawkes Day. It was the fireworks from the castle that I could see out the window as I was trying to sleep on the ward.
My recovery time was supposed to be six weeks. I wasn't supposed to do anything that would hurt my stitches. Not laugh, cough, shout, carry things, literally anything that could disturb them. And as an absolutely mental teenager I was so fucking bored! Oh my god. I just spent weeks lying down in pain, waiting to heal. It was absolutely terrible. And I was so bored. So bored. At least I had a lot of visitors. My friends came to visit all the time. And I remember, I don't know when this was. I really don't know when, but maybe it was a couple of weeks after my friends came, and when they left I went out to see them at the car and sneakily got a cigarette. And my mum was raging. I was just like, no, no, I don't smoke, I don't smoke. And she was like, you smell like smoke! It was tense. Very tense. Yeah, it was difficult. So my 18th birthday, if I was in hospital for Guy Fawkes Day, my 18th birthday is 14th November, that's like less than 10 days after the surgery. But we went to the local little pub near my parents' house in the village that they lived in at the time, and we had my 18th birthday.
So it was like my family, my sister was there, and my friends were there. And we just like fucked about in the little area, the little seating area of this sort of village pub/inn thing. Such a country thing to do, isn't it? Oh my god. And I had, you know, I probably didn't even drink that much. But because of all these painkillers and stuff I was on, like however many drinks I had was too many. And it was Jack Daniels and Coke because I was like, you know, 18. And I was sick the next day. And oh my god, oh my god, it hurt so much. Like, it just, oh no, no, no. I even feel sore now. Like I'm rubbing my belly, like thinking about it, rubbing my scar. It was so bad. And I managed to make a little tear in my stitches and had to get them sorted out. So I have this like really lovely, big, long scar. Just where a C-section scar would be. But there's also this little kind of like oval shape on it near the right hand side where the stitch had clearly like popped or whatever. When I, ugh, yeah, anyway. Gross.
So at 18 I was in a pretty weird place. That had just happened. But really the last two years of my life had been pretty chaotic. My gran had died about two years before that, maybe three. And that just completely derailed my life. And now I think about it, I would have also have been obviously going through the puberty! But there's so much of that time that I spent just being so unmanageable, unreasonable. Completely wild, really. And definitely, you know, her death had a lot to do with that. But I also think now, if I think back on it, there's also the fact that when you hit puberty, that's when your neurodivergent tendencies come to life in a very, very big way. And can present in a lot of ways. And I went from being this really, really quiet, really shy, anxious, nervous child to a complete, I don't even know what the word is. I don't know what the word is. But I was just the complete opposite, basically. Complete opposite. And it was really difficult. It was a really difficult time for all of us. And that really coloured the next couple of years for me.
My gran had looked after me and my sister for years while my parents were working. We spent so much time with her. And then it was when I was 15, she got diagnosed with cancer. She had tumours in her back, but they never found the primary cause. And literally, like, not even six months later, she was just gone.
I remember the morning it happened. Every day at that time, my parents would drive me and my sister to my gran's house. We'd all go in for a bit, say hello, and then we would walk to school while my parents helped my grandparents out. That morning, my dad went in first, and before we'd even got that far from the car, he came back out and told me and my sister to just go. Just go. Just go to school. And we knew what that meant. And we didn't question it. And my sister and I walked in silence, not knowing what to do or say. And that was just kind of the end of it. And the grief affected us all very differently. And I spiralled and got kicked out of school, actually, when I was 16. So by the time I got to 18, I'd had a couple of years of just being restless, agitated.
A lot of difficult times had passed, and I just was so desperate to leave home. Desperate to leave East Lothian and all of its trappings. Which is so funny, because now I would love to live there. I don't have that much love for the city anymore. I really crave that countryside silence. So when I wrote ‘I wanna make it’, I think that actually meant so much more than, oh, I want to be a famous singer, I just want to be in a band for a living, and I want to do music. It was about escaping what I saw as a dead end. There was nothing for me there, in the middle of nowhere, and I just wanted to leave.
If I got that jar for my next birthday, my 36th birthday, I would write the same thing.
I know this because whenever I have had to write down a wish, a hope, a dream, this is the best way to explain it. What that phrase means to me now has changed. I still want to be a famous singer, not going to lie, so download my music. But I want more what comes with this notion of making it. I want financial stability. I want a healthy and active lifestyle. I want to be able to afford to go to therapy, afford to go to the gym, afford to buy healthy food. I want my own home. True artistic recognition, even.
The last couple of years have been really difficult. I had a really bad burnout at the end of 2021, which honestly I've never really recovered from. I've struggled so much financially in the last year, specifically. And even though I have so many amazing things happening, being unemployed affects your sense of self. And your self-worth, and your self-esteem, and your self-confidence. And it's so difficult because it feels like I can't do anything about it. It's really affected me, and I still feel kind of lost in life, generally. I'm still trying to figure out what should I even be working towards, how can I get there, and what's the point?
So, as ever, I have tried to explore all of these questions, feelings, experiences, in my writing, and have ended up with a piece of spoken word. The line that I had that started off this idea isn't even in the finished piece of work, which is so annoying because I love it. And it just encapsulates exactly what I'm trying to get across, but it just didn't fit in this iteration of it. So, maybe if I edit it, I'll fit it back in. I think it perfectly sums up this feeling of being nostalgic for the past, but also seeing all the stuff you still carry from then, and finding some of it so stupid, and some of it you'll guard with your life. Like, I know, £2 coins are magic.
*******
I never thought I'd wake up at 35
unemployed
broke
and energy deprived.
I think about being 15.
I had nothing
but it was everything to me.
I had a wee part-time Tesco job
enough money to buy vodka and fags at the weekend with my best friends.
I saw them every day.
I was far from content
often restless
but I could be so happy.
Endless nights
and punk rock summers
camping in the woods
and lying to our mothers.
Meeting in car parks
drinking in kids' parks/back gardens/uptown/Scotsman's Steps and The Works.
Bumping cigarettes off strangers
no real sense of danger
lighting them up behind bus stops
and stubbing them out just as quick because someone's mum just drove past.
I was a teenage conduit
all sparks and electricity.
Nothing to worry about
but so much to carry.
Why did we want to grow up so fast?
Because grown up is so different
from any imagined reality
any dream I had
any way I thought I would be.
I was so desperate for the future
now I spend it living in the past.
*******
