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Can I be honest with you? Ten months ago I thought about killing myself. It was only fleeting and it was enough to scare me into doing something about it, but it was there. This is the first time I’ve written about it, mainly because I'm still processing it myself: why did I, with no history of mental wobbles and as someone who’s always been calm and in control of everything in his life, stand on a bridge at three in the morning and consider throwing myself into the river? It's an ongoing process. Even as I sit here tapping on the keyboard I constantly pause for reflection, trying to tease out the reason from a tangle of half-understood emotions.

My marriage had ended a few months before the first national lockdown. We’d been together for a decade, married for sixteen months. I’d sold my home to move to the Lake District, have a big wedding bash, start a new life with my new wife in our new home; we’d both just embarked on seismic career moves, each walking away from our well-paid jobs to try our hands at self-employment. There was a lot going on. And then she left me. At first I felt so angry, so betrayed that I didn’t really do anything except work; I certainly didn’t do the one thing I should have done, which was to talk to her. That’s what I do, you see, when I suffer any kind of loss, I shut out the world and turn in on myself; I thought of it as distraction, when really it was festering. She’d taken work at a local gym, which was the field she’d left her admin role in order to get into, pursuing a career as a personal trainer. That was it, in my mind, that was the moment it all began to dissipate. She’d always had an addictive nature; I don’t mean that she was a drinker or some kind of party animal, just that whatever she chose to do she would do to the nth degree. A few years earlier she’d taken up running, just because she’d fancied giving it a go; within a couple of months she was training to run the Manchester marathon. When she’d first decided to become a personal trainer she’d tracked down a PT she’d been following on Instagram, some guy named Ollie who was based in Manchester. She signed up for his training course and promptly began to starve herself. All meals had to be weighed to the single gram, calories calculated exactly so as to remain in deficit. The pounds dropped from her, she was fit and active, she looked amazing, and she was rapidly making herself ill. Her period stopped and didn’t return for over a year. She, by her own (much later) admission, had developed an unhealthy relationship with food, her moods became erratic, she struggled to concentrate at work. By the time she took the PT role at the gym she’d left all that behind. Her weight had returned to a healthy level, she was eager and focused on a new career. But that addictive switch remained, it had just clicked over in the opposite direction. She began weight training, the gym’s owner, an eighteen-stone bodybuilder, her new training partner. She ate to fuel the workouts, and used the workouts as justification to eat. She would preach the new gospel to all who would listen: how she, the woman who had starved herself into amenorrhea, was dead against the societal expectations of skinny women with thigh gaps, how she wanted to empower and embolden her sororal peers to be strong, badass and proud of it. She just couldn’t see that the pattern was repeating itself.

At first, she was only employed at the gym around eight hours a week, yet she’d leave the house at six am and rarely return before ten each night. When she did get home she’d choose to sit on the single-seat sofa, phone in hand, endlessly scrolling, typing, smirking at the screen. I asked whether I should be worried, but she dismissed it with a laugh. Two months later she came home one night and told me she didn’t want to be married any more. Three weeks after that she’d moved out.

I realise this may seem like an assassination of the woman I married. I don’t mean it to be, not at all. You see, for a long time I blamed her for everything: for ending our marriage, for deserting me, for walking away and never once looking back. This was the bitter pill I swallowed every morning for months afterwards, seeing updates on social media, her laughing and goofing around in photos with the gym owner, posts where she wrote of her recent struggles, how important it is to remain positive and mindful - whatever the fuck that means - whenever the world throws obstacles in your path. As if I was just one of those obstacles. Of course, I knew deep down that it wasn’t as simple as that. Long before she’d begun working at the gym cracks had been appearing in our relationship, nothing major or obvious, but there nonetheless. We’d become irritable with each other for next to no reason, often spending hours in a passive aggressive stupor. The gym was her alarm call, I suppose. She decided, oh, I could do this instead, and that was that. I respect her for it, in a funny sort of way. We both knew things weren’t right, whatever right is, but if it had been left to me we’d still be in the same situation now. She had courage enough to rock the boat. I never did.

Why am I sharing all of this? Maybe it’s a form of exorcism, I don’t know. The thing is, she left our home in the October, a few weeks before my forty-first birthday. Five months after that we were in lockdown. And two months into lockdown, in May 2020, on the eve of my second wedding anniversary, I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk through the deserted streets of Kendal and found myself standing on a bridge over the River Kent wondering whether I should end my life. I didn’t, clearly. But it has taken an awfully long time - and cost a couple of good friendships - for me to reach the stage where I feel I can begin to make sense of it all. You know that John Lennon quote about life being the thing that passes you by while you’re standing around waiting for it to happen? It resonates more with each passing year. Happiness is something I’ve tirelessly pursued - if I just do this, if I can just achieve that, life will be so much better, but it never is, and it never is because I’m too busy tirelessly pursuing to realise what’s in front of me. Though what’s in front of me now is a forty-two year old man with a failed marriage, no kids and no clue what the hell to do with his life. The more I dissect it, the more convinced I become that I simply don’t know how to be happy. When I was thirty I went to university, I quit my job with a vow to pursue a career as a writer. I’d also just met the woman who would go on to become my wife. Until that point I’d spent my life feeling as though I’d repeatedly missed the boat. I’d talk myself out of doing something because, I reasoned, I was too old, my chance had passed: I couldn’t be an intern in my twenties, all of my friends were earning good money, how would I look in comparison, how could I keep up with them, what would they think of me? Following graduation I took that internship. I took unpaid placements. I entered contests and attended new blood events. I could do anything. Life answered when I knocked on its door.

But now - now I’ve become too afraid to knock.

There’s a marked difference between reaching thirty and hitting forty. At thirty you’re a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis of your twenties, relatively settled into whatever career you’ve chosen but with the option to change your mind. At forty it’s too late for anything. Forty is a dad age. Forty is when you’re supposed to have your shit together and be busy planning next weekend’s golfing trip while the missus is away at a baby shower. So to be forty-two… that’s fifteen years more than Kurt Cobain had, for Christ’s sake. And what do I have to show for it?

Life’s not over, I know that. I’d decided as much in the dark minutes on that bridge over the Kent. Common sense dictates that age is just a number, that it’s truly no hindrance to achieving things in life. But I tell you, some days it takes all I have not to just curl up into a ball and sleep the time away. I'm tired. The thought of beginning all over again fills me with abject dread. Maybe the key is to ignore everyone and everything. To delete Instagram and end the constant comparison between myself and my peers, especially when I know full well how many of them are presenting a fantasy existence. It’s strange; we know this is the case yet we keep going back for more. It’s self-flagellation made digital; a moreish exercise in masochism.

I digress.

I began this piece without any idea as to where it would go. It was just about the writing, the act of processing thought through the necessary filter of coherency. I’m still unsure of what purpose it serves, if any at all, other than to begin to unpick the knot of questions and contradictions swimming around my head. But maybe that’s enough.

It’s four thirty and the sun doesn’t set for another two hours. I think I’ll go take a walk up the Scar. It’s a little dull out but that doesn’t matter, I need to stretch my eyes as much as my legs. Life is a smudge of indeterminate shade, nothing is ever binary. Love, hate, joy, fear; they exist together in a delicate tapestry, so it's inevitable that every so often one of those threads will work itself loose. That's what I tell myself, anyway. It's all about perspective, right? It’s all about perspective.

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