Instrumental (18 page)

And it went well. Good enough, anyway. Which is the best I can hope for. Five encores and the terrific realisation that the Viennese have a sense of humour even about what they hold most sacred – comparing Franck Ribery to Schubert (short, aesthetically challenged, genius) was met with genuine laughter, and not just from my mum, who had made the trip and doesn't even know who Franck Ribery is.

I will always be stupidly grateful to this hall full of strangers whose kindness and support and applause made life a little more colourful and a little less threatening.

It started to go from grim to dangerous on New Year's Eve. Never, ever scour Facebook looking for evidence that your ex is having a better time now she is without you. Ever. Turned out that Hattie's New Year's Eve was everything it should be for a hot young single girl in London. Guys, parties, dancing, short skirts, more parties, more (ripped, handsome, cuntish) guys. Turns out that perhaps my toxic imagination wasn't so far-fetched after all. Me, I was in bed alone by 9.30 p.m. desperate to escape into sleep. Something snapped.

At 6 a.m. I still hadn't slept and called Denis. He answered (he always does) and I went round to his place and just sobbed at his kitchen table. I know that I am in my mid to late thirties. I know that my emotional reaction to all of this is that of a seven-year-old boy. But I am incapable of shifting it, working through it, beating it. And if I surrender to it I believe I will die.

And then Denis gave me a couple of books and suggested I read them.

He said to me:

‘James I need to tell you that I've made my peace with you not making it. I am ready to get the call telling me you've been found dead, and much though it hurts, I am prepared for it. You do what you need to do, but please know it's in your hands now.'

And that was a big enough shock for me to get off my ass, if only a tiny bit, and start reading. I didn't want to, I fought against it, but it was just so clear that I had to if I wanted to stay alive.

This is becoming a difficult thing to write about. How easy it is to put on paper the negative things, the rapes, trauma, divorce,
self-harming. How difficult to write about good things and solutions for fear of sounding like a dope-smoking, tofu-eating, dreadlocked hippie. The two books I was given that day were about the body and mind's response to trauma (
Waking the Tiger
) and the inner child (
Homecoming).
I know. Pass the bucket.

In the most British of ways I am mortified at having to acknowledge that I had to go so far down the hole that I needed books like this to survive. Spending time in a mental hospital is somehow like having a giant scar that at least garners a certain amount of respect. Self-help books? Like I said, mortifying.

The thing is they didn't only help me survive, they did something much, much greater than that. They took the beginning I had made in hospital in Phoenix and helped to nurture and grow that into a deep and long-lasting foundation upon which the rest of my life could be built – reliably, gently and solidly. Those books got past that odd kink in my character that will allow me to give time, money, effort and energy to someone else who is in pain but will resolutely balk at the idea of doing those things for myself. I had finally run out of options and started to honestly appraise things and start mending them.

Clearly I wasn't going to be capable of any kind of relationship, with the emotional and physiological responses of a child. I was intrinsically damaged, selfish, egocentric and self-involved, and the only way out of that was to go back, experience all of it again as an adult and try and mend things. And that's what I did. For several weeks I meditated every day, often twice a day. I read the books, did the exercises suggested, wrote, even prayed, sat with the
feelings without distraction and went into myself as I'd never done before.

The most helpful thing I learned was to experience painful, shameful feelings but to drop any kind of storyline attached to them. In the past I'd feel shame or disgust or self-hatred, and as I felt those things I'd narrate them in my head, give them pictures and words, explore the reasons behind them, indulge in nurturing, judging and growing the feelings even more. Now I learned, slowly, to simply sit and notice them with curiosity, no labels, stories or judgment. I would just see where in the body they were gathered (invariably the heart or stomach), watch them, experience the pain, sit with it. And I promise you, when you do that, it all starts to heal. Slowly but surely it starts to heal and soften and lessen.

And before long, something wonderful happened – I somehow made a connection with the me that existed before that gym teacher got his filthy hands on me, I realised that I wasn't bad or toxic, I started to allow myself to mend and forgive myself and accept things for the first time.

Amazing, isn't it? That big a statement in one sentence. As if I'd undergone decades of trauma, personal reflection, medication, therapy, struggle and analysis and then suddenly something popped and I became whole again.
Again.
Not for the first time. But whole like I was when I was three years old and really fucking happy.

And everything changed. Music became even more alive and important. Sleep started to become natural and restorative. My guts stopped exploding five times a day. My various squeaks, tics and twitches, which had come back, eased up. I didn't have to flick light switches
and tap out specific rhythms every few hours to prevent bad things from happening. I actually forgave myself for something that no one in their right mind would see as my transgression but that I had felt, since the age of five, was my fault.

And although there had been several false starts over the years – shrinks, hospitals, twelve-step meetings, medication, psychiatrists, work-shops, a plethora of mental health remedies – it was, in addition to months of work in Phoenix, these two books, given to me by my manager on a rainy, miserable New Year's Day, that finally brought about my new beginning.

We are riddled with trauma. Abandonment, divorce, violence, abuse of every kind, neglect, alcoholism, anger, blame, judgment, religion, bullying – a thousand different forms of hell surround us from our first days on this planet. Sometimes intentionally, often totally unconsciously, we are, I believe, the walking wounded from a very young age. Some people seem to adjust well despite it, some don't. And although I tried everything I could to distract from that hurt, I could not outrun it.

And while forgiveness and meditation, reading and writing, talking and sharing all help, creativity is, for me, one of the most profound ways through trauma. Even more so when all that New-Age, treehugging stuff has finally cleared enough space in my head to allow me to be free enough to explore creativity in a new and slightly more manageable way.

Three months into this new chapter in my life, I had never been so in love with the piano, with playing, writing, reading, devouring anything and everything creative. And I wrote an article for the
Guardian
that seemed to resonate. It was shared over 100,000 times, I got emails telling me it was read out in school assemblies in Texas and offices in Australia, hundreds of messages letting me know how much it had helped people move through into new areas of wonder. I wrote it at 6 a.m. one morning and it felt like the closest thing I've ever got to a mission statement.

Here it is:

‘Find what you love and let it kill you'

Guardian
Culture Blog, 26 April 2013

After the inevitable ‘How many hours a day do you practise?' and ‘Show me your hands', the most common thing people say to me when they hear I'm a pianist is ‘I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up.' I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they ‘always had a book inside them'. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8 p.m. on a weekend.

Do the maths. We can function – sometimes quite brilliantly – on six hours' sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones).

Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can't even smoke?

What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece – these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you're very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.

What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes' proper practice a day you could learn a piece you've always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?

What if rather than a book club you joined a writer's club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?

What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym
membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married, you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of ‘I love you' until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?

I didn't play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.

Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the happy ending I'd envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.

My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right
sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, be ‘good enough'.

And yet. The indescribable reward of taking a bunch of ink on paper from the shelf at Chappell of Bond Street. Tubing it home, setting the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and emerging a few days, weeks or months later able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis. A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, that simply cannot be made sense of that is still living and floating in the ether and will do so for yet more centuries to come. That is extraordinary. And I did that. I do it, to my continual astonishment, all the time.

The government is cutting music programmes in schools and slashing arts grants as gleefully as a morbidly American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if only to stick it to the man, isn't it worth fighting back in some small way? So write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, get all Jackson Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a haiku. Do it because it counts even without the fanfare, the money, the fame and
Heat
photo-shoots that all our children now think they're entitled to because Harry Styles has done it.

Charles Bukowski, hero of angsty teenagers the world over, instructs
us to ‘find what you love and let it kill you'. Suicide by creativity is something perhaps to aspire to in an age where more people know Katie Price better than the ‘Emperor Concerto'.

The response to this piece made me realise that there is a way of doing things that has an impact. That we can all be a little less separate and a little more together. When I got asked to write this book I suggested on Twitter that people join me and that we all write a thousand words a day. And knowing that in a couple of months there will be a bunch of new novels, plays, novellas, short stories out there, that a bunch of us are doing something small and yet giant every day, is special to me.