Chapter 1

[Ren] Hello, everyone. This is the first time I've done something like this before. I wanted to write it down because there's a lot, and I didn't want to miss anything. And some parts of this might be a little bit uncomfortable to listen to, but I wanted to stay as true as possible to the story, not miss anything. For the sake of people who might be going through something similar, or for the sake of people who aren't, but want to help understand a little bit more. I promise that everything in this story is 100% true. Nothing is exaggerated for dramatic effect. Some names I don't mention, and some details I don't go too far into or downplay them for the sake of the people around me. Timelines might occasionally be a little bit off, but that's just because I´ve had to write everything from memory, from a time that was quite hazy. I ask, before embarking on this journey with me, that you will respect the privacy of myself and the people around me. You might be compelled to reach out to some of the people I mentioned, cast judgment, praise them, criticize them, and I ask you kindly not to. It's my choice to be in the public eye, and it's mine alone. This is the first time my story's on the public record, in a concise way. Being in the public eye is strange. The more that I give to you, the less that I get to keep for myself. I don't find the experience of sharing particularly enjoyable, I don't so much like the questions that follow, and I'm not a medical expert, so I don't like to be seen as somebody with all the answers because I don't have them. And because of the empathy that I feel, I'm compelled to try and help as many people as possible. But the last time I opened myself up to this on a one-on-one basis, I was surrounded by a lot of death, and there simply weren't enough hours in the day. So I ask you, if you need support, please reach out to a professional or use my music as your companion. I share my story in hopes that somebody who needs it finds it. That it provides hope, that it might ease the suffering for the people like me. I like my solitude, so I ask that anyone who respects the work I make and respects my contribution to the world to respect my solitude. A lot happened in my teenage years, and I didn't live the most normal of lives. But I'll save that story for another time. The important thing to contextualize the story is that I was full of life. I was full of a burning desire to change the world; the flaws in how we interact seemed obvious to me. I believed in people's power to change the unnecessary suffering we inflict upon ourselves. I was also enamored with music. Music is the closest thing to God that I have. It's a gateway to the unexplainable, and it's a way of communicating the inexpressible. There's just one moment I want to share with you from the years before I got sick. I was 17, and I felt indestructible. I'm not sure why, but my whole life I had this feeling inside myself that I was meant to do something important. Not for myself, not for praise, not for personal gain, but something that would change the world for the better. It's hard to describe it without coming across like an egomaniac or having some sort of god complex, but I felt like I had some sort of divine purpose. And I remember feeling this so strongly that one afternoon after school, I stood in the center of my bedroom and I spoke loud into an empty void. I said that I would single-handedly take on and defeat the forces of evil, and I welcomed them to try their best. Throughout the years, that memory stuck with me, taunting me sometimes. Flash forward to 2009. I remember the first day I knew something was wrong very well. I woke up in an unfamiliar room in Cardiff, feeling like a raven had perched itself upon my heart. Every time a heart beat, it's like some part of me was aware of the foreboding death sentence that was to come. Some sort of primal, instinctive dread. Everything felt wrong, and I felt prosthetic, like I could tear my own skin off and observe, though as watching passively from another room. The night before, I'd been in Cardiff visiting friends in university. It was the end of summer, we'd gone out to a few bars. I wasn't really enjoying myself. That year, I'd been struggling with social anxiety, perhaps from years of abusing my brain with a whole pick'n'mix and selection of party drugs. Engaging with society felt like stepping into the ring with a heavyweight champion. Every single fucking question felt like an oncoming haymaker I had to socially navigate, because of my very limited toolkit of charisma at the time. I don't know why I cared about being liked so much, but the more I cared, the less equipped I became to have a simple human conversation. I used to deal with this by getting fucking hammered. That night was no exception. I got smashed, lost my phone, and woke up in a strange apartment. In the bed opposite mine was a snoring rugby player and his girlfriend. Everything just seemed off, and it wasn't the hangover. My first thought was I've been spiked. I quietly gathered all my belongings and left before anyone could wake up and punch me with a conversation. I wandered around a grey Cardiff in a haze, feeling like I've just been rigged up to an IV bag full of ketamine and cyanide, and the whole world just seemed off, like I was looking at it through a tunnel. A heavy feeling of fear clung around me like a straitjacket. The only comforting thought was with enough time, rest, and water, it would pass. But it didn't. For eight long years, it didn't. And this is my story of an eight-year-long nightmare. PART ONE [Ren] I returned back to my dad's home. He was living with his partner at the time. It wasn't my home, so I already felt uncomfortable and out of place. These unusual symptoms persisted. I figured I'd caught some sort of virus and I'd get better with time. But by the end of the week, things were a lot worse. I took myself to the doctor, and he said he thought it sounded viral, that if I went home and got enough rest, it would eventually pass. And it didn't. For eight years, it didn't. I returned for my second year of university. My brain was full of fog, and my body felt poisoned. There were intermittent days where I felt like a hollow suit of skin. I'd sit in lectures, unable to focus, and was devoid of any sort of personality. I'd be able to have basic conversations, yeses and no's, but I was stripped of the ability to think spontaneously. It's like my body was taking up so much processing power being sick that I could not have original or spontaneous thought. The most peculiar thing about this was there was a me that was aware that this was all happening and was observing it from outside of myself, locked out, screaming silently, banging on the walls of my mind to be let in and never successfully. And nonetheless, there I was, like a ghost haunting myself. My usual routine was getting home, running the shower, and curling up into a ball to cry underneath the running water. Not understanding what was going on. I brought myself to the doctors numerous times during this period, requesting every blood test they'd let me have. Often being dismissed and told things like "stress from university can cause strange symptoms". But how come no one I knew from university could relate to this? Eventually, I was put on a six-month-long waiting list to see a mental health specialist who did a short one-page questionnaire and wrongly diagnosed me as hyper-cycling bipolar and put me on a course of citalopram. After a few weeks, it stole my ability to sleep. I was told to stick it out and it would level out, and eventually I'd feel more like myself. I stuck it out and I got worse, and I pulled myself off it after two weeks of in a row, sleepless nights and insomnia. There's something pretty peculiar about being told you're in some sort of spectrum of madness, even if you suspect that you're mad. Your diagnosis finds a way to claw itself into your identity, even if it doesn't belong to you. Ever since I was a child, I'd always be asking what and why and how things worked. I couldn't really accept things as they were without knowing how. I carried this into my adult years. And so as the bipolar hammer crashed and sentenced itself into my reality, I began searching online for behaviors associated with it, people's firsthand experiences, what it felt like to be manic. In these earlier days of my illness, the symptoms would fluctuate in severity day by day. Some days I'll be in the thick, tired fog, and other days they'd be more merciful. I began to associate the days of not suffering as mania, and would act more erratically on the days that my symptoms were less bothersome. I did things like climbing out of windows of a six-story student accommodation, or get so drunk I'd wake up outside the university campus lawn. But it wasn't mania. I just wasn't hurting. I spent one day a week with my therapist, who was teaching me cognitive behavioral therapy. The issue was mentally reframing unexplainable symptoms caused a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. I was told my anxiety or depression was causing my symptoms, but in reality, it was my symptoms which were making me anxious and depressed. So I was in some sort of inescapable bind. I'd devotedly work on my mental health, following every new tool for coping to the latter, only to have my symptoms get worse, which made me frustrated, raise the intensity of my treatment, only to get even more frustrated as my body seemed to deteriorate. After six months, I told my mum I'd happily saw off my own leg with a blunt knife if it meant my symptoms would vanish, and I meant it. I told her if I had to live with the strange feeling for one more year, I'd kill myself. And I meant that too. But something happened that winter which showed me firsthand the horrors and the fallout from suicide. I met Joe when I was nine years old. I remember the first time clearly. I was standing in his living room when he turned to me and he was like, "Watch this!". Then he proceeded to climb on top of the sofa and did a front flip onto a stone living room floor. He landed on his back and laid motionless for a few seconds before grinning, getting up, and then doing it all over again. We grew up terrorizing the streets of the small village we grew up in. Playing knock, door, run, or breaking into people's gardens to play on their trampolines. We stayed friends throughout high school, going through various phases together. Joe was comedian of the group. I remember countless mornings after messy all-nighters, Joe would be cracking endless jokes like a professional stand-up routine, and we'd all be in tears laughing. When I started writing my first songs, Joe and Sager were the first people who always knew every word, and they would sing along at the top of their lungs. They gave me a lot of self-belief, and they helped me build the foundation of what I do today, and I owe them a lot for that. That Christmas, I came back home to Wales from university. On Christmas Eve, me and Joe were sat in a pub and he turned to me and he told me that he'd fantasized about walking into the sea until he was totally submerged. He had a pretty morbid sense of humor, so I didn't really take him as seriously as I should have. Two days later, it's 3 A.M., and I get a phone call; it's my friend Ella. She tells me that Joe is on the bridge by my house. He was drunk, he'd called her up, and he told her he was going to jump. I was still half asleep. I fumbled, pulling on whatever clothes I could that were near, and I walked out of the front door, and the winter air stung my face, and it woke me up. Adrenaline kicked in, and I started sprinting towards the bridge. It was about a five-minute walk, two-and-a-half-minute sprint. As I was running, I dialed Joe's number, and I got a busy tone, and I felt relief because it meant he was still alive. I kept hitting redial as I ran, and as I got about halfway to the bridge, the busy tone changes. I get an automated voice note saying the number's out of service, and my heart sunk. I got to the suspension bridge that connects Anglesey to the mainland, and it usually looks very beautiful. I sprint up and down the bridge yelling Joe's name. The silence is deafening, and I peer over the bridge into the blackness, and the bridge sits about a hundred feet above the water. Hitting cold water at that height it's like smashing into concrete, and the waters are notoriously dangerous because of the cross current. I hear nothing, no sounds, nothing. I run up and down the bridge about two times before I spot a figure at the end of it, and my heart jumps into my throat, and I run towards the figure. And it's my friend Ricky, who's had the same call, and we both run around up and down the bridge and around the surrounding area looking for Joe. More of his friends eventually arrive, and there's nothing. I was about a minute too late. We spent the next week walking up and down the beaches with flashlights, and when it's that dark, every other large rock starts to look like a washed-up body. We plastered all the neighboring towns and missing posters, contacting whoever we could, someone who might know something. We checked bank records to see if any money had been withdrawn since he went missing. There was CCTV footage of him walking onto the bridge, but it wasn't any of them coming off. But there were dead zones in the footage, so there was still a small chance he could be alive. I was sleeping about three hours a night, pretty determined that we'd still find him. For about ten days, we had nothing. And then suddenly a call comes through while we're all at my friend Miles's house having food. It's the police. A body had been found in the water by the bridge. We piled into my friend's car. I remember being in the back seat in floods of tears, repetitively punching the back of the passenger seat as we drove to the scene. As we pulled up, I saw a lifeless body being zipped up into a green bag near a parked ambulance. Its skin was bloated by the seawater, and it wasn't Joe; someone else decided to jump that day. Joe was never found. It's difficult to truly let go when you can't say goodbye. For months following, I held on to this fantasy that we'd get a call that he'd run away to some European town, and he was happy and he was healthy. But that call never came. The time during his inquest was also around the time I was struggling with the side effects of a new antidepressant. I remember sitting in the courtroom feeling like I was listening to the whole thing, deep underwater. The judge felt that the circumstances surrounding Joe's death meant that the verdict was left open. It kind of stung even more to not have an official ruling of suicide. I remember going to visit his mum not long after, and witnessing the aftermath of a mother grieving for her baby boy. The silence of his father, the tears of his mother. I decided that day that I'd have to wait until my illness killed me, because I couldn't do it by choice. I couldn't put my family through that. Over the next ten years, I returned to my hometown only a handful of times following Joe's death. My last visit was in the summer of last year. I reconnected with Joe's parents and showed them a song that I'd written, simply entitled 'For Joe'. We cried together, reminisced together, joked, and I'm proud to say that I gave Joe's mum enough money to afford a caravan she told me she'd been saving up for. I felt pretty good. We'd also do a fundraiser for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who were integral for searching for Joe during that time, and we raised a pretty good amount of money too. Being able to give back in whatever small way I could felt good, and it felt right for all the years Joe had made us all laugh till it hurt. He was a solid person, just a little lost, as we all are sometimes. And I miss him. Life was about to take an even more unusual turn, and I was about to meet the first angel of this story, so stay tuned for that.