A Bit Mental Read online

  We were at a standoff but I wasn’t walking out of that shop with a fiancée who didn’t have a ring. We were not going to our party without an engagement ring. ‘Do you take credit cards over the phone?’ I asked. ‘Yes.’ Phew. I rang my dad in Auckland, asked nicely for his credit card details, which he gave me. It was now 5.30 pm, all the shops around us were closed, this shop was closed, but thankfully Dad’s credit was good and we got the ring. I was engaged. I was happy. Jo was engaged. She was happy. Now we could go home and see our friends and family. Yay.

  Six months later we returned to Cairns to visit Jo’s parents. After I left, my old boss had an accountancy firm do an audit on the bar’s books. The guy who did the audit heard that I was in town and asked to meet me. I had nothing to hide and I was interested to see what he had to say, especially as I had made a special effort to avoid the bar and its owner while I was in Cairns. Turns out that my old boss had been right—someone was stealing from him. About $50,000 had been taken—by the bar’s accountant.

  For the record, the accountant was the only person I hadn’t hired. They’d been brought in to be the hardarse in charge of keeping track of the money. The auditors worked out what had happened and informed the police. I felt vindicated and happy but I still didn’t want to see my old boss, so at the end of our holiday we quietly slipped off home.

  I had always drawn things. Random stuff in my own style. Photoshop had opened me up to the world of design and I began by doing the artwork for my own bars and then people started asking me to do design work for them. These requests had steadily increased. Back in Auckland, with no formal training and a very limited network, I had decided to take my talents to the world and start designing full time. Jo and I had moved into an apartment with a couple of others. Our room was quite big and doubled as my first office, overlooking the car park and being looked down on by an office building. I had a desk with some folders (empty) for invoices, stationery, design magazines and my laptop. This was where I would work. This was where I would become a great designer. Only one problem: I didn’t have any work and I didn’t really know where to get it.

  Working from home wasn’t fun. Jo had a waitressing job and the other flatmates were at work, so I was by myself most of the time. That might have been okay if I actually had things to design, but I didn’t. I had no work. And I wasn’t very good at asking for work, or asking anyone for anything. So I started sending out random emails occasionally asking good friends if they had anything I could do. Not exactly a groundbreaking marketing plan and, surprisingly enough, it wasn’t working.

  Jo continued to work at the restaurant, which she didn’t enjoy very much, and collectively we were burning through the money that I had saved from my well-paid job in Cairns. We started to run out of money and I began to feel something I didn’t like. I hated the fear of going broke.

  A friend had introduced me to a girl I became friends with on Facebook. I saw she was posting an event for a bar—a Halloween party. Her name was Gabby and we got on like a house on fire. I felt comfortable telling her things—things like, ‘Gabby, honey, darling, that poster for your Halloween party is fuckin’ horrendous.’ She agreed, but said that the bar she worked for had a designer who had been paid and the job was done. Gabby kept posting the ugly poster on Facebook, over and over again. It really grated on me. Finally I sat down, designed another poster and sent it over to her, free of charge. She loved it but said that she couldn’t use it because it would hurt the feelings of the girl who had designed the previous one—she’s lovely like that. I told her not to worry and to use it anyway—I’m a bastard like that.

  She didn’t use my poster . . . for about a week. Then she did. The owner of the bar liked it and I did some more posters for them. The owner liked those as well, so I did some work for his other company. At last I had a real customer giving me real work that was paying some of the bills and making me feel better. But it wasn’t enough. I needed more work.

  Dad had moved into the office with me to help me out doing invoicing. Not that we had much stuff to invoice for, it just felt good having him around. Dad is semi-retired so it got him out from under Mum’s feet at home as well. He and I had also started working on a project together that meant I had to go up to India to review some technology. It was a free trip to India which was amazing, but I didn’t get paid for it so that simply meant that it was another two weeks without earning any money.

  The lack of money was making me sad and Jo and I were fighting. I had never been so broke for so long before—previously I had always earned more than I spent. Between Jo’s previous debts, moving countries, Jo not earning much as a waitress and me stubbornly trying to start a business without supporting it with anything else on the side, we were losing money and going backwards rapidly. It was seriously messing with my head. Something needed to be done.

  Then something happened. Suddenly I became busy—really busy. My design company, The Creative Difference, had just got the best job of its short life. We had won the contract to do all the branding and design for a company that had the rights to sell the travel and corporate hospitality offerings for the Rugby World Cup 2011. We got this contract in October 2009 and the work had to be delivered for the opening day of sales on 1 February 2010. The timeframe was tiny and the process was laborious. There were four different approval processes required for anything that we designed and a 120-page brand guideline to follow. I didn’t care though, I was broke and this was a miracle.

  I was getting married to the woman of my dreams on 16 February 2010 and, quite simply, without the money that I was making from this project I wouldn’t have been able to afford the wedding. There were a couple of problems though. Weddings take some organising and I was flat out with this project. Jo and I also had our hands full with another project—with some partners, we were opening a new bar in downtown Auckland on 7 February. If you’ve ever opened a bar you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say that it’s even more work than organising a wedding. So there we were, World Cup work due on the first day of February, bar opening six days later, and then getting married nine days after that. I was starting to feel sick . . .

  BLOKES DO CRY

  When I look back, I see warning signs much earlier, but the first thing that made me think there was something wrong was when I developed a sudden inability to open emails. I became scared, really really scared. I was afraid that every email would bring bad news. I was afraid that clients would hate their design work. I was afraid suppliers would be angry with me for something. I was afraid of everything. It felt horrible. The only person I told about this was Jo. She tried to tell me that I was being silly and that my clients loved me, but I wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  Sometimes a week would go by and I wouldn’t have opened an email from a client. My phone would ring and it would be one of them, and I’d know I couldn’t avoid them forever and so I would pick up the phone. Usually they wanted to tell me they had emailed me a week ago asking for a quote on a new job that they needed doing. These people were trying to give me work and money—they were not angry with me.

  So now I had to quote on a project. I would work out the cost at $4000. No. That’s too much. They’ll never accept that. They’ll tell me no and then go to another company. I’d better make it $3000. No, I’ll just do it for $2000. Okay, $2000, done. I’d send off the quote, the quote in which I had woefully undervalued myself, and I’d sit there terrified that they would reject it and go to a competitor. Of course they didn’t turn it down—at the price quoted I was the cheapest in town. But now I hated myself more because I had to do the work when I knew the job was worth more and I was worth more. So, to top everything off, I resented the clients for the work they were making me do. Which, in turn, made me even more reluctant to open emails . . .

  It was a vicious circle. My solution was both simple and pathetic. I got Jo to check my emails a couple of times a week and only read them to me if they were good. This was when
Jo and I both knew that something was really wrong. She suggested I go and get some help. I said that was a good idea and I would do it.

  Of course, I didn’t get help and more strange things started to happen. Similar to my issues with opening emails, I began to fear checking my bank accounts. I knew I had very little money but I didn’t want to look at the balances—I didn’t want the lack of funds to be a reality.

  I had a business but I actually had no idea whatsoever how much money was in my bank account. Again, I was terrified. This is the absurdity of it: I didn’t know how much money I had in my account so I didn’t know how much money I could spend, and each time I went to pay for anything on my credit card I would have a hollow, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and would repeat over and over in my head, ‘Please go through, please go through . . .’ No matter how much more scared and sad this made me, I just couldn’t make myself check my bank balance.

  Generally, I am self-aware. I know what I do and how I do it. This is a strength but sometimes, in my case, it goes too far. It works against me and I start over-analysing myself. Looking back, I think that I was actually much more self-absorbed than self-aware. I was analysing myself but I didn’t really understand it. I was in denial of what was happening to me. I was in denial of what it was doing to Jo.

  One day I noticed something really strange happening that I recognised because I’d watched some documentaries about it on TV. I was having obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) tendencies. Wikipedia told me that OCD is ‘an anxiety disorder in which people have unwanted and repeated thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensations (obsessions), or behaviours that make them feel driven to do something (compulsions). Often the person carries out the behaviours to get rid of the obsessive thoughts, but this only provides temporary relief. Not performing the obsessive rituals can cause great anxiety.’

  Now I’m not saying I have OCD, I just started displaying some of the behaviours. The main thing I noticed was obsessive straightening of objects and furniture. One day I was at my desk and felt an overwhelming compulsion to make sure that the writing pad on my desk was exactly lined up with the glass panel on my desktop. It had to be exactly three centimetres from the left edge and three centimetres from the bottom edge. ‘That’s strange,’ I thought, but for the life of me I couldn’t move it back to where it had been. I couldn’t bear for it not to be straight. From then on I started to be acutely aware of doing it with other things. I’m messy at the best of times but objects on tables now had to be parallel and straight. ‘This is weird,’ I thought. ‘I think I’m going a bit mental. Not totally mental, just a bit.’

  I am a very social man. Like I said earlier, I don’t drink but I just like to go out. I like people-watching, I like socialising and, most of all, I like to meet new people. But I was finding that more and more I just wanted to stay in. So I would. I would stay home on a Friday or Saturday night and watch TV or movies on my computer. Jo would always be trying to get me to go out and do things but I didn’t want a bar of it. Then, later, I would decide that I did want to go out after all and I would look for things to do. Then I’d decide that there was nothing going on that I wanted to do so I should just stay at home. This was another vicious circle.

  If I found out that my friends were doing something on a weekend I would get really annoyed if they hadn’t invited me personally. Jo would tell me, ‘Everyone’s invited. You’re not going to get a personal invite!’ but I would still feel like I wasn’t invited, that friends that I’d had for a decade didn’t want me there. So I wouldn’t go. I’d sit at home thinking there was nothing wrong with me—there was something wrong with them. They didn’t like me anymore. Well, stuff them, I didn’t like them anyway. I was fine by myself. I was fine at home.

  I’m a man, a strong New Zealand man, but I had started to cry. A lot. When John McClane hugged his wife at the end of Die Hard with a Vengeance, I cried. The producers and director of that movie blew up a whole heap of stuff then they made the hero win in the end. They were like, ‘Man, this ending is beautiful, it’ll have people in tears.’ No, no it won’t, it’s Die Hard with a Vengeance. No one else in the world cried at the end of that movie, except me, turning away so that no one would see me. I thought, ‘What the hell is wrong with me?’ And it wasn’t just that. I would cry at a lot of things. Jo and I would argue. I would cry. We would talk about bills and money. I would cry.

  I was sick of crying, but I couldn’t seem to stop . . .

  By then I had a first-floor office in downtown Auckland. Each day I’d go out for lunch. There were as many as 100 options for lunch within a 10-minute walk of that office. One day, the hunger pangs hit me at midday and, as usual, I got up from my desk and walked down the stairs to the foyer. I opened the door and stepped out onto the street. It was a lovely day and the street was bustling with office workers doing the same thing as me. I hadn’t been feeling fantastic—I was my usual worried self. Did I have enough money to support Jo and me? Did we have enough to cover rent and bills? Where was I going to get my next client from? Everything was causing me to worry. But those questions weren’t the most important ones to be answering at that precise time.

  The overwhelming decision I had to make was what to have for lunch. I was starving. I had a choice to make. Should I turn left or right? Left had slightly more options than right, but both were worth a thought. Did I want Vietnamese? Thai? A sandwich? Burger? Burrito? I didn’t know. Should I eat with someone else or by myself ? I didn’t know. ‘No one will want to have lunch with me anyway,’ I thought. ‘Just get a pie from the shop next door. No, I don’t want a pie. I want . . . I don’t know! Ummm . . . Shit!’ Twelve minutes passed and I was still standing on the doorstep of my office. I was crying. Not just a tear or two, but actually sobbing. People walking past me must have been wondering what the hell was wrong with me. I felt completely ridiculous and out of control. They were all looking at me and thinking what a freak I was. I couldn’t handle the pressure anymore so I turned, defeated, walked back up the stairs and sat back down behind my desk. I said to myself, ‘I don’t need lunch today anyway. I’ll just get back to work.’

  But I couldn’t work. I was still bawling. What a baby.

  ‘What’s wrong with me? I’m actually mental, like, really mental.’

  I realised then that I needed help. Jo knew that I was having a hard time and she had been encouraging me to get some help. She was right: I needed to talk to someone else.

  My father is the man I admire the most in the world. When I was growing up he was frequently abroad for work yet he managed to always keep in touch, bring me home presents, turn up to sports games and generally be awesome. On top of that, he was the CEO of a big company and had fantastic insights and lessons to teach me about business, morals, integrity and life in general. Most of what he taught me I can still repeat verbatim and he can’t remember he said it. I have such a deep respect and love for him that I could tell him about what was going on and how I wasn’t coping.

  What I learnt then was that he had been in a very high stress job and when my sisters and I were kids he had struggled with his stress. He’d had to go and see someone about it and so we concluded that my problem could also be to do with stress. It made sense. I was trying to deliver the Rugby World Cup design work, open a bar and get married, all in a three-week period that was hurtling towards me . . . that is a lot to take on in such a short timeframe. Dad said the first step was to go and see our doctor. It was a fine suggestion and I agreed.

  I don’t get sick, which is great. As I’ve explained, though, I’ve done some stupid things in my life, breaking a bunch of bones, tearing a lot of muscles and getting far, far too many concussions. My point being, I sat in the waiting room at the doctor’s surgery, feeling well, while people around me coughed and spluttered. That wasn’t too strange—what was strange was that I was going to a doctor to talk about how I was feeling mentally, not physically.

  True to stereotype, the doctor was late. I hate waiting.
I don’t get nervous about many things at all but I became unnerved waiting for that appointment. The doctor came out, said ‘Hi,’ and I went into the consultation room and sat in the chair. He asked me how I was.

  ‘I’m not well,’ I said. I looked and sounded fine, so he looked at me inquisitively and asked what ‘not well’ meant. I explained how I was fighting with my fiancée for no reason, how I didn’t want to leave the house, and all the other strange things that had been going on. I have a massive problem with what happened next.

  It seems to me the system is broken in regard to depression. Where do you go to get help with depression? Well, the first and most obvious stop for most people is their doctor. And so it should be. My doctor has helped me through almost my entire life, but he is called a GP—short for general practitioner. He should be able to deal with most things that come up and he usually does. Surely depression is common enough to be fitted into ‘general’? If it isn’t, send me on to someone good.

  So let’s run through this typical scenario: your doctor has 15 minutes allocated for your appointment. That is not very long. In that time he has to diagnose what is wrong with you, decide how to treat it, talk to you about the treatment and send you on your way. That’s tough work.

  So, my doctor listened to my symptoms and diagnosed that I was stressed out. I don’t remember him ever using the word depression but he might have. What I do remember is the treatment he offered. Drugs. And that makes sense, why? Because he has a job to do in a strictly limited time: he sees symptoms and in this day and age a symptom is matched to a drug and, voilà, a cure is prescribed.