‘I had reached my life’s peak but I was falling apart’
When journalist Jill Stark fulfilled her ambition of publishing a book, the initial joy at the acclaim and attention gave way to deep-seated anxiety and depression. Her new book, Happy Never After, charts her recovery
In February 2013, all my dreams came true. I’d just published my first book, High Sobriety – a memoir about my tumultuous 12 months off the booze, set against a backdrop of Australia’s binge-drinking culture. It soon became a bestseller and was even shortlisted for literary awards. Publishing a book was all
I’d wanted to do since I was a nerdy wee girl growing up in Scotland. And it was everything I’d hoped it would be. During a blissful few months that felt like it would never end, I had to pinch myself as I was thrust headlong into a whirlwind Festival of Me. Mum flew in from Edinburgh and joined me on a national tour, where I jetted around the country doing bookshop signings, TV appearances, and radio interviews with some of my journalistic idols. My face ached from all the smiling.
But something wasn’t quite right. In truth, my joy was a free-falling, anchorless kind of happy that at times bordered on mania. The more praise I got, the more I craved. I was like a crack addict chasing my next fix. My self-worth had been pinned to an external vision of my life that was so distorted it was like looking at my reflection in a carnival hall of
mirrors. I had reached my life’s peak but I was falling apart.
For all my reporting on mental illness and the importance of breaking down stigma, I was terrified of what people would think. Outwardly, I was the outspoken firebrand – a journalist who started Twitter wars with homophobes and was as comfortable holding court in the pub as delivering a public lecture. The world hadn’t seen the me that couldn’t catch a tram for more than two stops without hyperventilating. Or the me that was googling ‘how to kill yourself without hurting the people you love’ in the middle of the night.
But there was no more hiding. I was a shell. A hollowedout version of the threedimensional person my friends had once known. The days dragged on at a glacial pace. Each morning, the weight of what lay ahead pinned me to the bed. It felt like a barbell crushing my chest. Sleep was fleeting; I snatched an hour or two at a time. The brief respite it provided seemed to fuel my anxiety – all that dormant time without a voice. Upon waking, it screamed at me everything that had been left unsaid while I slept. A pent-up jumble of my worst fears and insecurities spewed forth at warp speed, like the mutterings of a bornagain Evangelical speaking in tongues.
As the months off work continued, my absence from the newsroom became more conspicuous. I considered concocting an elaborate backstory: a rich elderly relative had left me a generous inheritance and I’d gone home to Scotland to claim my castle in the Highlands. The truth seemed an easier sell. I started to open up to colleagues, contacts, friends, and even strangers. Almost every person I confided in had their own stories to tell. Depression was common, anxiety even more so. One work friend told me how she’d taken months off work when her anxiety got so bad she was throwing up in the staff toilets every morning. I’d just presumed she was on holiday. Another said the panic attacks he’d suffered since his teens were still a constant feature. He seemed such a confident, laidback bloke. A friend shared the details of a breakdown that had forced her to move to the other side of the country rather than face the people who’d seen her fall apart. She was one of the fiercest women I knew. So many people were medicated: antidepressants, sleeping pills, relaxants. They all secretly worried they were not normal.
As I tried to rebuild myself, I started to see that there were struggles all around me. And it wasn’t only those who were living with clinical depression or anxiety. When I scratched the surface I found a recurring theme: people were worn out. They spoke of unmanageable stress and an overwhelming sense of being ‘always on’. The pace of modern life was exhausting. There was a listlessness – a collective sense of ennui – with the constant striving for success and satisfaction. It was the search for something that seemed tantalisingly close but remained forever out of reach, a frantic and often fruitless pursuit of happiness in an age of anxiety. Something about 21st century living was making it harder than ever to stay calm.
I could relate to all this. In the modern age, there is little downtime and always more to do. I reach for my phone to find escape only to face a barrage of atrocities and doomsday predictions every time I refresh the screen. How do you stay positive when an insatiable 24-hour news cycle reminds you in graphic detail that we live in bitterly divided, post-truth times defined by global terrorism, catastrophic climate change, and the mass displacement of our planet’s most vulnerable people?
When the wheels fell off, I had no idea what to do next. I was living in a world that promised me I could have it all, and here I was at the pinnacle, utterly bereft. But if I was broken, the culture that formed a backdrop to my disintegration had surely played a part in that fracturing. It’s a culture that views sadness as abnormal,
When the wheels came off, i had no idea what to do next. i was living in a world that promised me I could have it all, and here I was at the pinnacle, utterly bereft
particularly when you’ve ‘made it’; a culture so afraid of feelings that we think we can spend, drink, or click our way out of the blues. It’s a culture frenzied by the constant need for online connection and external validation, with no room for solitude, silence, or switching off; an environment in which millions of us feel like we’re drowning in an ocean of toxic stress but feel shamed for not being as happy as we should be by the very forces fuelling the problem. Could it be that the pursuit of happiness is making us miserable?
It can’t be a coincidence that the worst period of my life followed one that was supposed to be the best. My book, Happy Never After, is an attempt to find out why. It is an examination of the enormous psychological challenges we all face in the modern era, but also an attempt to uncover what lies beneath so much of our discontent.
As I tried to put myself back together, I discovered that while my happiness fairytale had been a fantasy, and 21st-century living might be adding to my sense of feeling overwhelmed, these things weren’t the sole cause of my anxiety. I looked into my past and found that this mental collapse had deep and complex roots stretching all the way back to childhood. And so I began to untangle the roots, embracing and understanding those messy, painful parts of me I’d long tried to deny. What I found forms the backbone of my book, Happy Never After. It has been quite a journey. I continue to walk it daily, one step at a time.
The process of unsnarling these roots has been illuminating, bewildering, and at times utterly terrifying. But ultimately, it has been lifesaving. It has taught me that happiness is not what we think it is, and that we all have struggles we worry we can’t survive. Our challenge is to not run from that discomfort, but to make room for it and have the courage to hold it up to the light.
● Happy Never After – why the happiness fairytale is driving us mad (and how I flipped the script) by Jill Stark is out now, published by Scribe at £14.99 ● Mental Health Awareness Week 2019 runs from 13-19 May, see www. mentalhealth. org.uk for more information