The One In Which I Realise I Am Chandler Bing

With Help From Talkabout Baby

Last week I read Friends, Lovers And The Big, Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry. I am a great believer in reading widely. I am also a great believer in the Kindle 99p Deal of the Day.

Reading, as RuPaul says, is fundamental. It is my North Star, the means by which I navigate life. I have always used books as the most reliable way to understand the world.

My brother was born in August 1974, when I was two. I remember it because of books. My parents bought me a Ladybird book called Talkabout Baby to help me get used to the idea of what was about to happen.

I studied it with fierce concentration. I can still recall the pictures. A set of bold, hyper saturated colour photographs of things like nappy pins and food that looked like it came from a dusty, Eastern bloc department store. Despite the frankly, terrifying baby collaged on the front, everything else was recognisably real, so I felt I had this under control.

When the time came, my mum went to a local nursing home where, in those days you could choose to have your baby if you didn’t want to be in hospital. I went to stay with my grandparents. They were the ones to take me on my first visit to see the Talkabout Baby my mum was having. The one we had the manual for.

It all went wrong from the start. We had arrived early and because it was a boiling hot day, we left the car and walked around the grounds. In the middle of the drive was a circular lawn and in the middle of the lawn was a swing. My grandparents promptly put me on it and started to push me. About two minutes later, a small, fierce nurse with a huge hat that looked like napkins taking flight came walking out onto the front porch and shouted; ‘That swing is not for children.’ I burst into tears. I had no idea that there were swings for children and other, forbidden swings for grown-ups. And what was going on with her hat?

I had to be coaxed inside to see my new brother because if things could go wrong on the lawn, God knows what could happen inside. I didn’t believe my grandparents’ assurances, because they had just demonstrated that they hadn’t got a clue what the rules were. They were the ones who had put me on the forbidden swing in the first place.

When we got to the ward and I saw my brother for the first time, I burst into tears again. This was not the Talkabout Baby. This was a scrawny, pink thing wearing nothing but a nappy. Where was his bonnet? He was being kept in a clear, plastic box on wheels at the foot of the bed, which was all wrong. I had seen a cot in the book. This was definitely not it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to love him or that I was jealous, which is what I think the grown-ups thought. It was that I was in shock, because it was completely other than I had been led to expect.

I don’t know where I got the idea that books were right and the world was wrong, but it took hold of me early and shaped my formative years entirely. Despite being shattered by the Talkabout Baby situation, I continued to believe that all books were manuals for life for pretty much the entirety of my childhood. I couldn’t believe that something as vast and messy as life, didn’t have a manual. If you had a book to show you how to use a washing machine, surely there must be one about how to survive primary school?

In the books about magic, I just assumed that I hadn’t figured it out yet and when the right circumstances arose, I would be transported to the Magic, Faraway Tree. With everything else, I tried to recreate the world of the books, usually with fairly disastrous results. Again, I assumed it was because I didn’t have the right things to make it work, not that it would never work.

I think I was so persistent for a number of reasons.

I found the world terrifying and largely inexplicable. I was very aware that there were a huge number of things I didn’t know. I was a child who asked a lot of questions and when people couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, I turned to books to fill the gaps and create the illusion of safety. I was still terrified, but at least I had mackled a handrail of sorts.

I was very lonely. It wasn’t just that we lived in a tiny village, two miles from the nearest shop. It was that I felt lonely even when I was around other children. I was an anxious, needy child, prone to weird outbursts and terrors. I was pretty hard to like. I tried too hard and my life was so other that it was difficult to bond with people. I overcompensated for my fear and ignorance by being bossy. I realise it was my attempt to manage a world that I found unmanageable, but to everyone else it just made me insufferable. In later years I tried being a bully for a while (to my eternal shame). I thought it might make people bully me less. It just made me a friendless dick, and the bullies still bullied me.

Books didn’t rush me. They didn’t point out that my clothes came from jumble sales. They didn’t get impatient or angry. They didn’t laugh at the things I didn’t know and they didn’t exclude or hurt me. Plus, they had answers, of sorts. Those answers helped me piece together some way of getting through life, even though it was flawed.

The main thing that books gave me, was an escape route. They showed me that there were different ways to live. They described places and experiences that promised that if I could hang on until I was grown up, I could find or make a life where things were better, where I fit. A world where I might be able to make the rules instead of always inadvertently breaking them.

As I grew older, some of that actually happened, although I realised that I was probably not going to find a Wishing Chair, but books still pointed the way and helped me feel less alone. They still do.

I don’t read self-help books, for the most part. I find them unhelpful and for me, rather judgmental. I find the things I need in other kinds of writing. What I look for is that moment, that click, where I was on the outside reading in and suddenly I am on the inside, looking out. Any book could have a moment like that from Where The Wild Things Are (who doesn’t want to roar a terrible roar?) to Matthew Perry’s autobiography.

The big, terrible thing in the biography is Perry’s addiction. I’d say addictions, frankly because it reads very much like Whack A Mole crossed with Groundhog Day. The man is a hot mess. I’ve read a lot of books about addiction and this is similar in that it is boring and terrifying in equal parts and you find yourself pitying him whilst simultaneously wanting to kick him downstairs. There is nothing worse than a rampaging ego the size of Godzilla coupled with flatline levels of self-esteem.

I learned nothing about addiction that I don’t already know. What I did learn is that I am Chandler Bing.

Chandler, who is basically Perry but with the addiction turned down for prime time television, is a man who copes with everything life throws at him by making jokes. The more something hurts him, the more jokes he makes.

As a socially awkward child, who spent a great deal of her childhood being bullied, I learned that the only time my weirdness became acceptable was if I made people laugh. At first I mostly made people laugh by accident. Things I thought were ‘normal’ were, it rapidly became apparent, not normal at all, but if I said them at the right time and in the right way, I got laughs. Laughs were so much better than being nailed up at the school gates. Who knew?

After a while I began consciously exercising that muscle. Finding material was easy. My parents’ lifestyle was on the fringes of acceptability. Because of the way we lived I had material for days. Books also helped. I had a head full of ideas that were too big for my life and nowhere to put them. When I talked about grown up things, it made people laugh to hear words like that coming out of a child’s mouth. It especially made grown-ups laugh, which made a change from being told off.

Being funny gave me space to protect the most vulnerable parts of me. It bought me time to escape some awful situations and survive them. It meant that I was able to shuffle closer to acceptance by what I had come to think of as ‘the gang’. After a few, big mistakes I realised it didn’t mean I was in the gang. People who are funny are often people who exist on the margins. It is their otherness that helps them be funny. People who are in the gang are not funny. They are in charge. Once I had learned my place, I coped better.

I also learned that I didn’t really want to be in the gang. I had been choosing people who seemed to be successful at life to be around, not for their winning personalities. I didn’t actually like them. They were just the possibility of a life raft and if I was tolerated by them I was less likely to be punished by them. When I realised they weren’t going to save me, I started making better friends, but by then, the funny had stuck. It was who I was.

When I broke down, I couldn’t be funny. There was nothing to be funny about. All that work - gone. Those months were unendurable. I thought I was going to die. I figured, somewhere in my lizard brain that it was because I wasn’t able to see the funny side of things anymore, so when I recovered I worked extra hard at finding my funny again. It didn’t occur to me that I was perpetuating the problem.

In his book, The Descent of Man, Grayson Perry talks about patriarchal ideals of masculinity being like an exoskeleton that stops men from growing, evolving and changing. Being funny, I now realise, did much the same for me. Anything that you exercise and prioritise over anything else will do it. It throws your balance off. What once freed you can so quickly become a prison.

I realised this last week when I was telling a colleague at work a funny story.

The story was about a time in the early months of my divorce when I was so stressed by everything that was happening that my heart tripped and started beating wildly out of control. A paramedic came to the house and tried to set it back to normal by getting me to imagine I was doing a massive poo (funny, see?). It didn’t work and I ended up having to be blue lighted to hospital in an ambulance. During the ride the paramedic was so worried about the blood flow to my brain that he hung me upside down from a bar in the ambulance, like a bat (funny again, see?). I didn’t even have my glasses on, so I was a blind bat to boot (oh, the lols). I remember thinking that it would make a good story at my funeral.

When we got to hospital, I was rushed to the crash team, who refused to believe that I hadn’t taken drugs, I was in such a state. I was lying on a gurney, being covered in electrical pads, with resuscitation paddles on standby and I still managed to say that my only drug of choice had been a rhubarb crumble. Playing it for laughs to the last.

Nobody was laughing.

Shortly after that I was given a drug that stopped my heart. For a second that felt like an eternity, life blipped out of me entirely. It was one of the most terrifying feelings of my life. I had always been afraid of dying and now, just for a second, I did.

Coming back to life felt like being kicked over a fence by a mule. By the time Jason got to the hospital I was ready to be discharged. In all the rush, he had forgotten my shoes and had to give me a piggyback to the car to get home. I spent the week after that feeling like I had been crushed by a huge weight and with the worry that I might have irreparably damaged my heart (I hadn’t.)

I don’t tell that bit in the story. I finish with the piggyback.

It’s funnier that way.

When I told this story to my colleague expecting laughs, what I got was a look of utter bewilderment from a friend who was simultaneously horrified that this had happened to me and shocked at the way I told her. In turn, that shocked me. It forced me to look at what I was doing to myself.

I can be funny. I am funny. Things in my life are still funny, despite everything, even in the darkest times. But I am coming to the long overdue realisation that not everything is material for a stand up routine. Some things in my life have to be acknowledged as a sucker punch, not a punchline.

It’s time to look at this stuff honestly, with my whole self, not just the part of me looking for a clown suit because as the once great Morrissey said, the joke isn’t funny anymore.