Stranger In A Strange Land

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The Purple Cow
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jul 05, 2017 4:56 pm

Stranger In A Strange Land

Postby The Purple Cow » Wed Jul 05, 2017 5:37 pm

Hi all,

I’m a 63-year-old male, in South Cheshire. I grew up in and around Birmingham, though I lived in Amsterdam for 23 years until 2010. I’m married to an American woman I met in Amsterdam and have twin 17-year-old sons.

I’ve been treated for depression off and on since I was 17 years old, though truth be told I can never remember a time when I was not depressed. I’m sure now I should have been treated in some way even before my tenth birthday. I was a big, clumsy kid, with few friends and was widely regarded as “weird” by my fellow pupils. I was also pretty sickly, with chronic asthma and eczema, which didn’t help my efforts to fit in. I wouldn’t allow mirrors anywhere in our house because I considered myself so ugly, my poor Dad had to shave on a piece of broken mirror he kept in a bathroom drawer. Academically I underachieved massively in school, a crippling lack of self-belief and a firm conviction of my own uselessness stymied any chance of getting on. My school tried to prevent me from staying on for the fifth year, but I stood my ground and managed to scrape four ‘O’ levels somehow.

So at 17, my G.P. gave me some pink triangular tablets called ‘Tryp – something’ (Tryptezol?) but they achieved little or nothing so I stopped taking them after a couple of months. So I battled on from crisis to crisis until one day in early ‘87 I read an article that suggested that if you don’t like your life you should cash it in for a new one. So I went to an agency and asked what opportunities there were for Radiographers abroad. They had jobs in Iceland, Norway, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. I applied for jobs in Reykjavik and Amsterdam, ending up in Amsterdam in September of that year.

Things went well at first, but predictably my old issues re-emerged and after a couple of years my life span completely out of control. I felt oddly detached from reality as if I wasn’t living my life but rather viewing it at a distance through the lens of a video camera. Fortunately, Amsterdam has good psychiatric services and within two weeks of visiting my G.P. I found myself opposite Joop, a Consultant Psychiatrist – quite a famous one – I recognized him from T.V. Anyway Joop gave me a toolbox of techniques to deal with my problems and things got better. I met and married Paula an American, we had a couple of kids, I got an M.B.A. from night school, and we started a business together. By 2008 we had 23 employees and were doing well. Then came the great recession of 2008/9 and our customers disappeared – we were bankrupt in months and had to sell our house and move out. So we came to England, my wife and kids struggled to cope at first, but they now seem more at home in England than me. We are getting by, but my crippling self-hatred and low self-esteem remain a shadow over my life. I’m on Prozac, but tomorrow I’m going to phone my G.P. and ask if I can double my dose, ‘cuz things are falling apart again.

Sorry, this was so long-winded, I got carried away. Kind of therapeutic though.

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