I: Okay so could you, do you remember being lonely because of lack of attention or do you see it retrospectively?

I remember not having the same attention and being jealous at the time. He was fourteen when he died so I’d be seventeen when it happened. Yeah, I think, I think more retrospective more than anything else, but I did realise he was getting all the attention so how that manifested itself at the time, I don’t know. But I do know that my mum at the time wasn’t, I think her mother, my grandmother was an absolute cow. She was like Victorian then. I was born in 1950 so it wasn’t that unusual so she like young kids should be seen and not heard. My mum was pretty much the same so emotions, feelings etc, etc weren’t really shown. So emotionally, I wouldn’t say starved but there’s another word but not as much as you normally would. I’m not going to say it’s like a normal relationship because there’s no such things as normal but yeah, I wasn’t shown much relation-, much emotion. I think that did affect me for quite a while.

I realise that actually I was a very lonely child because of being a looked after young person and not having the ability to make friends. Because I didn’t know how, it wasn’t something that was natural to me because my childhood was spent dealing with my parents’ issues. So as whereas other children were naturally in school, making friends, building support groups, peer support groups, I didn’t have that because I was at home dealing with a, you know, drug addict mother and, you know, no father and so forth.

Yeah, so as a child, so it’s interesting, I have my social services record and I have all my old school reports and almost every report says that, you know, that I was a lonely child. I was often seen on my own in the playground. I would sit and read books instead of take part in group activities. I’m not very sporty, you know, I was evidentially gay as a very young child so it was another barrier, you know, for me making friends because, you know, it just was different and different is sometimes difficult for children.

But, you know, I think all of it goes back to the fact that my upbringing was chaotic, you know, my birth, birth mother, my birth father was never on the scene. My birth mother was heavily involved in drug use and alcohol use so, you know, sometimes she was really good as a parent and, you know, would do great things but then there’d be weeks where there wouldn’t even be food in the house and she’d be too, you know, out of it, either on drugs on alcohol to get up and, you know, take me, take me to school or make sure I got to school. So as a child I had to fend for myself. So whereas other children would be going to the park after school or, you know, to after school clubs, I was going home, if I was at school, I was going home and cooking food for my younger brother and cleaning and trying to make sure that she was still alive and dealing with, you know, very negative people coming in and out of the house, drug dealers etc.

So as a child, I would say that it wasn’t a childhood, it was a survival. It was very sort of neglectful, you know, bad, I use the word bad, but, you know, awful parenting where there was no protective factors. So without those initial protective factors as a child security blanket in a sense, you know, being cared for, the warmth, being fed, having a roof over your head, you know, that was always a constant risk, you know, we’d be homeless and we did become homeless at one point. Sort of without all those protective factors, I wasn’t able to do the other stuff so I wasn’t in school enough to build protective relationships with people.

Um, how loneliness came into my life… I, having signed up a couple of days ago to do this interview with you I started thinking about that, and thought back really to childhood, where I was raised by two parents who definitely cared about me but weren’t necessarily equipped with particularly useful parenting skills. As a result of which I was on the receiving end of quite a bit of emotional and physical abuse in an age where things which now would be picked up on and called abuse were just allowed to pass. That was just accepted. And I certainly had one uncle who turned around years later when I was very grown up and having a conversation with him about my childhood and said, “Oh, yes, we always looked at the way you were being raised and thought this will bring trouble.” But nobody intervened at the time. Nobody said anything at the time. People very much got on with their own lives and didn’t say anything to other people, apparently. And I was also always told when I was growing up that you didn’t share your troubles with anybody else because that only stopped them liking you. You must keep it to yourself.

It took years for me to realise that I actually felt annihilated in his presence. I was so unacknowledged, um, that I almost felt like there was nobody reflecting me back and my grasp on my own existence was tenuous. Um and yeah, I…I realised when I was very much an adult, um, that just being in his presence was enough to make me feel suicidal because I felt so unacknowledged, like somebody had rendered me invisible.

I was an only child for eight years and then my brother came along and I guess when he came along he was kind of like the golden child I guess even to this day to be fair he can do no wrong at all. So my parents favoured him over me pretty much from the get go so I kind of, because everyone was always all over my brother I kind of retreated and just kind of spent a lot of time in my room by myself not really socialising and isolating myself I suppose.  As my brother got older it was more, again my parents were kind of all over him it’s, it’s almost like he was their only child because whatever he did was the best of the best. I wasn’t massively popular or outgoing at school I didn’t have loads and loads of friends and I kind of struggled to fit in at my primary school, I moved there just after my Reception class because we’d moved house so I didn’t know anyone in school or in the area. And then two years after we moved my brother came along so I guess that’s where it kind of started.

I: You talked about a preference towards your brother, why do you think that is?

My, my real dad always wanted a boy, always, always wanted a boy whereas my mum was kind of, she didn’t wanna treat either of us differently but she ended up doing that anyway and I’ve got a little boy myself, so I know that the bonds with mother and son is strong so whether that had something to do with it or not I don’t know to be fair.

I: So how, how was that feeling how, how was everyday life?

Horrible

I: How did you feel that preference?

Well my brother, so he was, he would do things, he was naughty and he would get away with it somehow the, it would then be turned around on me, you know, if I hadn’t left something out in my room on the side, which he shouldn’t have been in anyway then it wouldn’t have happened. It was very, whatever my brother did even if it was something that he’d done off of his own back it was always my fault, always my fault. And it would, me and my brother have never bonded, we’re not close at all, we can’t stand each other which is a shame because I’ve got friends who have got huge families they’re really close with their siblings and stuff and I don’t know what that’s like.

Yeah I can honestly sit here and say my parents never neglected me but I felt neglected, there’s a difference. And what it was, again it might just be my perceptions because other things were happening with this babysitter and I wanted people, I wanted it to stop then I became naughty and I wasn’t a naughty child but I thought someone will ask me why I’m being naughty but no-one did. And just little things like I might be in the garden, my brother and sister were older than me and they might be planting plants with my mum and dad and things and I was like not doing anything just watching and I felt like a bit of an observer, I don’t think there was any malicious intent in there it was just how I perceived it. But the babysitter was hurting me and no-one was helping me and so I thought well nobody sees me that’s why I’m not getting any help and that’s why I’m really interested in the invisibility that it creates, a lot of people with mental health problems.

Oh I was lonely as a child, because I was an only child, and my mum didn’t want me because she was um raped and I’m what come out of the rape. And I was a sixties child, and in those days I don’t think they had anything like counselling, so I don’t think there was anywhere for my Mum to go to talk about what happened to her. And then these days as well, you had to be married before you had the baby, it was that sort of time where you get married, you have sex on, or making love, you don’t have sex outside marriage, so I suppose it was all taboo.

But what had happened was I remember it being my fourth birthday and I woke up thinking what’s the birthday bunny gonna bring me, is it gonna bring me joy? happiness at all. I was all I wanted and it brought me nothing but pain, anger, from my mum’s perspective, pain, neglect, loneliness. I was put in a coal bunker for up to 2 days and nights. And it was lonely because I’d nobody to talk to about it.  I saw visions in the bunker, heard all these voices, and I feel that if I hadn’t heard voices, especially from the ages of 4 to 7 years old, when they were positive and friendly, I’d be dead, because they gave me survival techniques. They told me how to keep warm, how to get food, stuff like that, where I’d hide food if I managed to get it.

And it was quite lonely because I’d no friends at school, because I used to wet myself a lot, because when I was in the bunker I wasn’t allowed to go out to the toilet. I wasn’t allowed to use the family toilet, I had to do the toilet there. So, I was also getting beaten up for that, for something that wasn’t my fault. So, children wouldn’t come near me unless they were going to bully me. Because I smelt of wee, and as I said only children that did, and the teachers never understood either. They just, you know it was, “You’ve got to do your work, you’ve got to get your schoolwork, your grades up.” But obviously my mind was elsewhere, with my voices and paranoia because when I was at school, I’d be thinking of ways of escape, oh how can I get out of school at 4 without so and so seeing me.

And then I was worried about when I went home because I was thinking well if my mum’s in a bad mood again, she’s gonna lock me up, you know or she’s gonna beat me and lock me up, or she’s just gonna beat me. So, there was always that constant fear of you know something’s gonna happen. And the fear and loneliness was in my eyes, and I got to thinking that if people could just look into my eyes, they would see that there was a frightened lost lonely child in there. But nobody ever sort of asked, or, and once they actually picked my mum up for the state of my appearance she liked to cut off all my hair and this day I can only describe, I was like a, a concentration camp victim, you know when their hairs all cut into the root, and the teachers actually said you know, “Could we ask you why your daughter’s hair is like that?” And just she said, “Oh she got nits.” And they said, “Oh what do you mean?” She says, “Well do you know what it is when you, you’ve got nit’s, you’ve got to go and comb the hair, well we, I tried to go and comb her hair, she wouldn’t let me, so I had no choice but to cut her hair. And as you know hairdressers won’t cut your hair if you’ve got nit’s. So, because I’m not a hairdresser, this is why her heads like this.”

And they believed it. You know so again I felt alone. So that was really you know  loneliness as a child, cos you’re in that bunker. But in a way although I was alone, I was safe if that makes sense, because nobody, the hurt and pain was outside, the only time the hurt was inside in the blackness, the darkness, was when she came into beat me up in the bunker. Oh, that’s, as I say, I was just alone.

I: Could you talk to me a little bit more about the relationship with your mother?

Yeah, it wasn’t very good, it was as I say, she just beat me up all the time and my Gran was just the same. My Gran didn’t live with us, but if we were up my Grans, or my Gran was here our house, but I don’t know if she knew about the beatings, cos she never locked me up, my Gran, but she did beat me up. So I think in a sense she knew about the beatings, but my mum and my Gran would say awful words to me, vile words that a four year old couldn’t understand, like you should be aborted, am I allowed to swear?

I: Oh absolutely.

Say things like you’re a bastard, and when you’re four years old you’re like what do these words mean? And you just want your Mum to hug you. But she never ever showed me affection at all. She showed me plenty of hate and anger, but never love.  To the extent when I had my first child, years later, when I held him and he, in my arms I was like, “How do I love this wee boy? What do, what do I do?”

I started feeling lonely when I was a teenager, so I would say around 15 it started to really sort of hit me a little bit, and it’s the first time I sort of realised that I was a bit lonely. I think partly because I withdrew from society a little bit at that age because I realised that I was homosexual and that the environment that I grew up in didn’t cater for that sort of lifestyle, I suppose you could say, so I started to feel very isolated from the people around me, and I kind of withdrew into myself because I really struggled with my sexuality and how I was going to cope with that through the coming years of getting older.

And the feelings of loneliness then were… You know, I used to look outside, I used to look outside my bedroom window and see my peers, like people that I went to school with socialising with each other, and I’d just feel so left out and so isolated. Especially the boys, because the boys were all into like football and sport and I wasn’t really into that sort of thing, so and you know and I used to see them look up at my bedroom window and call me things and make signs and that used to really hurt me, you know?

Well I always felt very different even as a child, as a young child I was very frightened of things, extremely sensitive as I said before I didn’t mix well with people, I didn’t get on very well at school because I was bullied quite a lot through school and college actually but now…I was, I was very timid, just didn’t, I just never felt normal if that makes sense.

I think, no I mean there was times I remember quite lonely [um] that I didn’t feel normal that I didn’t feel like the other people in my class or things like that [um] I felt sorry for my mum and dad because they’d had, I still can see that they know I thought that and I was only five and I can see that day very clearly and I can still remember the music that was on the radio in the morning before I went to school and it was at the school desk that I thought it [um] that I just felt so sorry for my mum and dad that they hadn’t got a normal daughter [um] that came out of school happy [um] that had people that liked her, yeah.

I: Could you tell me a little bit about your experience with bullying and how that really affected loneliness?

Do you know, I think that’s where it started actually, cos that just… I, I don’t think about it that often because it was in year 7 and it just, it feels so long ago, and I left the school after a year of being there and being, getting bullied cos I just hated it so much and that’s actually, because in primary school I’d had my really close best friend with me the whole time and I was like never alone so it wasn’t a problem then, but I went into year 7 I didn’t really know anybody and I started realising that I actually had trouble making friends, and I found it really difficult, and then when I started to get bullied a bit, and that was by my, by the group of friends I was in, which was just really odd, so like they would kind of bully me and then I was still around them and it was just, yeah, strange, but I remember sometimes if they were like particularly mean to me, because I would have no other friends because that was my group of friends then I would just kind of wander around the school grounds like with nobody and just… It just… That, that was really the first feeling of loneliness, like just walking around and seeing all the other kids in school in their groups and just finding some isolated place to go and sit because I didn’t have anybody and I was like oh my god, I’m such a loser. And it, it just felt so awful. I used to um go to the nurse’s office and like say that I felt sick and my dad had to come and pick me up like so many times cos I just, I had no friends there, I just felt so awful and lonely that I just wanted to go home. Like it was such, such a deep, horrible feeling of being alone, but I just didn’t even want to be there anymore.

Nobody came near me, I smelt of wee a lot. Nobody wanted to know. Nobody wanted to be my friend. And the only people that did come near was people to hit me, so they would constantly, and in these days I hope they don’t do it now, but in they days you’d have the victim which was always me, and the bully, and then you’d have other kids in a big circle, egging up the XXX, going you know, “Batter her,” that’s a Scottish word for getting beat up.

So it was, it was years later when I looked back and I realised, with all the training I’ve now got as a professional, that actually I missed a lot of that development stage which other children [er], you know, have naturally. So, it’s, for me as someone who, you know, now lives on their own, I have friends, I have good support networks, but I often find that I don’t have that go to support network that other people will just have at a drop of a hat. You know, I’ve got friends I can call, I’ve got people that I can always get in touch with but I do often feel like I’m not as involved in friendship circle groups I would say, and as an adult, I recognise that, you know, I recognise the link to my childhood but I also recognise that’s something very difficult to change and, you know, I became very self-reliant and obviously that’s moved into adulthood and it’s a, a big effort for me to then go out and try and change that and I know the ways to change that but less so in lockdown to be honest, but, you know, the normal sort of things of joining groups and so forth but I don’t find that even if I do that, I don’t find that I naturally develop those relationships which is I find really interesting because everyone at work would describe me as very sociable person.

And when I hit 40 I started to, for some reason, I really started to think about my childhood again, and how it had affected me, and I hadn’t thought about that for a number of years, and I think it’s because I blocked it out. And then once I found myself by myself again and alone, not in a relationship, living by myself, these feelings of loneliness and isolation just came back. And I really struggled with that, you know, really struggled with it. And I’ve done silly things that I’m not proud of to try and combat the loneliness, and yeah.

I: What would you classify as silly?

Oh, you know, I used to take a lot of drugs and I used to drink too much, and you know I was quite promiscuous.

I: This is in your 40s?

Yeah, yeah. Promiscuous as well, and I’d say that was between 37 and 42, I went thought a few years of just self-neglect, I think you would call it.

I: Was it to combat loneliness?

Combat loneliness and combat feelings of rejection from my family. Because I hadn’t really faced that head on before. It had always kind of been in the back of my head, but I’d kind of managed to block it out because I was having a good time in my 20s and I was in a long-term relationship, so I had a support network, and then when that goes and you’re left by yourself again, I think the bubble bursts and stuff comes back that you’ve not dealt with for years. And I didn’t want to do therapy at that stage because I thought… Well I just didn’t understand therapy and I didn’t think I was going to get anything out of it, and I’m so glad that I did start doing it because it’s really helped me with my mental health. But yeah, there was a few years of trouble in my head. Big, big trouble.