Chapter 2

[Ren]

A year of living in a nightmarish purgatory does strange things to your psyche. I was still trying to push through university, but I found myself missing many lectures to stay in bed. I started noticing more unusual symptoms creeping in. A strange buzzing sensation in the soles of my feet. My vision started looking like fuzzy television static. Something that I later learned was called visual snow. Something with no known origin.

My calf muscles started constantly twitching and spasming. At any moment they wouldn't go longer than twenty seconds without twitching. And that can drive you a bit nuts. All these symptoms I still live with to this day. You just become very used to tolerating constant discomfort, it becomes kind of the norm. And kind of becomes like an annoying, unsettling radio static in the background of existence.

I stopped taking my antidepressants after having cycled many different kinds. None of them helped, all of them gave me some new kind of symptom or side effect, like insomnia, dry mouth, heart palpitations, no libido, etc.

I spent a lot of my time alone, but in the moments of respite, I'd hang out with friends. We formed a band called Trick the Fox the year before I'd gotten sick. It was the one ray of sunshine I had at the time. I quickly became friends with the bass player called Charlie, and we developed some kind of musical telepathy where we both knew what the other was going to play before it even happened. It was the first musician I've ever felt this kind of chemistry with. I became a kind of third wheel in his and Momoko's relationship. With time Momoko became like a sister to me. To this day is one of my favorite people on this spinning rock.

Performing with Trick the Fox was one of the rare times that I felt free. There was something about the duty of having to entertain others that let me escape the physical limitations of my own sick body. Even if just for a moment. I usually pay for it the next day with what can only be described as an energy hangover, where I'd be stuck in bed all day. But for me, that was worth it. Those days I was still fairly functional.

It was around this time I started losing faith in the medical industry. The more appointments I'd go to, adamant that something was wrong, the more of a hypochondriac they'd treat me as. Medical gaslighting is a real thing with chronic illness. They'd chalk me down as someone who was always requesting blood tests, and my mental health diagnosis probably didn't help that. Strangely, they never tested me for any kind of pathogens.

I decided to embark on a precarious journey into the Russian roulette chamber of doctor Google. I would type in the most predominant symptom of the day, and doctor Google would tell me that I have a rare disease and I'm probably gonna die. With time, I sharpened my search engine axe and refined what I was looking for.

I dived headfirst into the abyss of online support groups, hoping to find solace or answers amongst fellow sufferers. We were like crabs in a barrel. Very rarely, someone would find their silver bullet and announce what it was that cured them. Hundreds of people would follow their protocol, some with mild success but most of us will still remain trapped.

I joined as many online support groups as I could. It was a bit like the beginning of Fight Club, except instead of faking conditions to feel accepted, I was desperately hoping I had those conditions so I could cure myself and get the fuck out. I convinced myself I had conditions like candida, magnesium deficiency, parasites, adrenal fatigue, heavy metal poisoning, etc.

At the time, I felt like I was single handedly keeping Jeff Bezos in business. While most students were spending their student loan on drinks, I'd spend mine on the supplement or protocol of the week. I'd follow whatever herbal or supplement protocol was suggested, sometimes noticing mild improvement and sometimes getting a lot worse, most of the time feeling nothing. A story would pop up on one of these groups, like: "After I did a thirty day parasite cleanse of wormwood, cloves and garlic, all my symptoms disappeared". I'd read a story like this, get full of hope, and put myself through a grueling thirty days, which would often result in a worsening of symptoms. My body felt even sicker and weaker, but I'd stick it out because I was told that this was a good sign. The parasites are dying. I peered into the toilet bowl and valiantly waved goodbye as I flushed their imaginary corpses into a watery abyss.

At the end of the thirty days, I'd be left with a lighter wallet and all my symptoms still remaining. And if that didn't work, I'd move on to what was next. Maybe I have seasonal affective disorder. All right, so I'd get on the internet, order a light, stare at it for ten minutes a day, and to my big fucking surprise, still have all my symptoms. The only thing that that light illuminated for me, was that I was desperate enough to buy a glorified table lamp.

I kid you not when I say that over the years I probably have taken nearly every dietary health supplement known to man. One of the most grueling self-treatment courses came when I did a round-the-clock heavy metal chelation. I will take a supplement called ALA and DMSA, which supposedly shuttle mercury molecules out of your body through a process called chelation. I'd have to take the pill once every three hours around the clock, which meant setting multiple alarm clocks to wake up and take them. The supplements came with their own side effects. I remember one time standing in a supermarket and feeling like the sounds and lights were so bright that I couldn't even bear to be in there. I stuck with this protocol for a whole year with no luck.

I was still coming to terms with the death of one of my best friends during this time, too. I was too sick to hold down any kind of stable job, so I was mostly living off my student loan. Welsh students studying in England also weirdly get given a small sum of money just for being Welsh, almost like a "We're really sorry that you're Welsh" sort of condolence prize. I've always prided myself on my own financial independence, so whenever I could, I'd get out on the streets of Bath and I'd busk.

I remember the very first time I did. I had my guitar in hand. I perched myself on a bench, took a deep breath, and then bared my soul to the jury of the street. And it was exhilarating.

People sometimes ask me what music means to me, and it means life. This was usually the one time I felt like I didn't want to die. This was the one time I could feel a resemblance of something that resembled spirit, that resembled my soul, that resembled me. I even found myself cracking jokes with onlookers, which for someone dripping with social anxiety at the time, was huge for me.

It was March, roughly three months after Joe had died, and I was sitting on a bench in Bath with my guitar singing into a busy street. And this is when I would meet the first angel of this story.

ANGEL ONE

[Ren]

I'd see two more angels years later, one in the guise of a homeless man, one a doctor cheating death in a Beverly Hills clinic. But that bit will come a bit later.

The angel was walking on the opposite side of the street with a mother. They both stopped to watch me for a moment. I saw her mom whisper something to her. The angel turned bright red and she giggled and they shyly approached. We got talking and the angel asked where I was from. I told her that I grew up in Wales, in a small village that was once described in a local newspaper as being worse than an Iraqi war scene. I told them they would have never heard of it. They looked surprised and they said they had family there. I asked which part and it turned out to be the village that I grew up in. Since you can basically count the population on two intergenerationally bred, mutated hands, I asked who they were, and it turned out that that angel happened to be Joe's cousin.

This encounter was always a foundational moment of serendipity in my life. In the years that followed, I took serendipitous occasions to mean I was in line with my purpose. Sometimes I felt like I'm following a script. It's just that I don't know the words or actions until they actually happen. But in moments of serendipity, I feel like they are playing out exactly as they were meant to.

It was quite a bizarre moment for me that hundreds of miles away, by chance this angel would be related to my lost friend. Upon learning who I was, they invited me back to theirs for a cup of tea, and I accepted and I fell in love. It was really good tea. That week, the angel took me to her favorite botanical garden, and she pointed out her favorite flower. So that night - true story - I dressed in black, broke in by climbing over the fence, dug up the flower and presented it to her the next day. She called me insane, but it's safe to say that angel ended up being my first serious girlfriend.

It was a weird kind of relationship. We both shared an unusual trauma for people who were so young, brought together by a tragedy. Even though sometimes I feel like she might have hated me at the time, I was convinced like it was some sort of Shakespearean fate that had brought us together. A morbidity that birthed light, that it couldn't be anything else. It felt like divine intervention. She was pretty troubled in her own way, and I was very troubled in mine. But in between the sludge of dealing with the constant symptoms, it was beautiful.

That summer, her parents took us to Center Parcs (which is a posher version of Butlin's, if you don't know), where they paid for all the activities and meals and they let me do whatever I wanted. Coming from a poorer family, I wasn't really used to being spoiled to that degree, but I figured I'd just roll with it.

One morning while I was there, I got a call from my friend Sagar and he sounded pretty mixed up, so I asked him what was wrong. He told me that there was no easy way to say it, but one of them, one of my other best friends, Callum, had died. He'd gone cliff jumping in the same cliffs we used to jump off as kids. The sea was particularly choppy that day and he caught a cross current and he started to drown. Another guy that he was with jumped in an attempt to save him and they both drowned.

The first day I met Callum, I was 11. He was in the year above me in high school and used to walk around with his massive baggy, bright orange jeans. He hung around with all the goth kids and I thought they looked super cool. So the next day I painted my nails back and fashioned a necklace out of a severed extension cable from an old VCR machine. I infiltrated the group and I gained their trust. Not long after, me and Callum were friends, wandering around beautiful Welsh countryside looking for the most scenic places to smoke weed. We stayed friends throughout high school and I truly loved him.

When Callum died, I couldn't properly grieve. I felt weirdly numb after losing Joe. I'd often feel guilty for my inability to cry all the time. A couple of years later, I'd learned another friend of mine I used to play function gigs with had thrown himself off a cliff face in Dover and again, I felt numb. I couldn't tell if this new acceptance of the inevitability of death was a beautifully liberating thing, or if it was a sign my humanity was slipping away.

To this day, death has kind of remained a bit of a matter of fact, part of my life. During my years of sickness, I had to crawl through a morbid longing to be killed by my illness, to find a more peaceful acceptance, that death is just an inevitable consequence of life, and it doesn't spare anyone. That never left and I haven't ever really been scared of dying since. Some days I've tempted it. What I'm more scared of is having to live my whole life as a sick person.

In my relationship with death, the most healing moment occurred just two years ago. My grandmother, who I love to pieces, was dying, but I actually got the chance to say goodbye this time. To hold her hand, to thank her for being alive. I remember not long before she passed, she was lying in a hospital bed, and she was very weak and very pale, barely able to open her eyes. I asked how she was, and it seemed like a stupid question as soon as it left my mouth. She paused for a long moment and she turned her head to look at me, and she opened her eyes and she smiled, and she said she felt happy. And it was just one word, happy, which was simple and it was beautifully profound. And that was one time I'd gotten a chance to say goodbye. And it was the first time that I hoped that one day I would die happy. The following year, I would achieve something beyond my wildest dreams, and then I would lose it almost as soon as it came. Stay tuned for that.