One heckuva monkey funk
It all started when I turned 42. That IN ITSELF wasn’t bad. As far as I remember, I had quite a lovely birthday. We had pizza on the beach, at sunset, which is as close as I get to fine dining, thank you very much indeed. So, yes, 42 started WELL ENOUGH.
And then, suddenly, sometime around mid-November, it all went to shit. The new girl at work told me that a monkey could do my job. I told her to fuck off and then cried in a park for a disproportionately long time. Obviously, there were other issues at play here, but the monkey thing really did it for me. A fucking monkey! (It’s still raw.)
I fell into a bit of a funk after the monkey thing. A monkey funk, if you will. Not to be confused with a funky monkey, which is quite a positive thing. The monkey funk weighed me down. Crying in the park became quite a regular occurrence, as did dark sunglasses and waterproof mascara. I just got really fucking sad.
With the atmosphere in my office – shall we say – fairly fucking frosty, an external HR consultant was called in to calm the farm. This external HR consultant – with his shiny purple suit jacket, boot-cut jeans and arsenic smile – was a cunt. There’s simply no other word for it. I christened him JOHNSON (full name: Johnson the cunt), after the similarly styled manager in Peep Show. Fucking JOHNSON.
Johnson, in his eternal wisdom and bootcut jeans, sacked me. He sacked me for being sad. Was my work suffering because of my monkey funk? OH NO, quite the opposite, my work was incredible, perfect, brilliant; OH NO, there were no complaints on the WORK side of things at WORK. It was the sad thing, you see – my employers had a duty of care to sack me if work was making me sad. It’s a novel employment law, I grant you, and certainly not one that I’d encountered before, but hey ho, every day’s a school day, eh? I cried as Johnson handed me my letter of termination, three weeks before Christmas. I cried and cried and then drove into oncoming traffic because it’s hard to see oncoming traffic when you’re blinded by tears and bootcut jeans.
I sat on the freeway, in rush-hour traffic (in my car, mind you, not on my arse on the tarmac), and continued to cry. And then I contemplated coming home to my husband and three children and telling them that I’d lost my job three weeks before Christmas. I couldn’t do it to them. I mean, I could maybe do it to the boy children – they deserved nothing more than a lump of coal and a satsuma in an old pair of tights – but Paul and Alice? HOW COULD I DO THAT TO PAUL AND ALICE?
With that in mind, I begged for my job back.
It takes my breath away to even write that.
I rang my boss and I begged. My boss handed the phone to Johnson, who requested further begging and a little grovelling for good luck. I did both. I promised to be a good, happy girl and Johnson said he was very pleased and told me I should go home and have a nice glass of wine and he’d see me bright and early at the office the next morning. And you know what I said? And I’ll admit, if I could rewrite history, I’d change this bit, because this is fucking gross: I said thank you. I thanked the bootcut prick.
Oh hello, what was that, whizzing past you down the freeway? That was your self-respect, ma’am! It’s going to be a long time until you see that bad boy again. Cheerio, self-respect!
And hello, self-loathing. Welcome back, old friend.
I went home and I drank. I’m not sure I’ve ever drunk out of sadness and self-loathing, but on this night, I did. I sent myself cross-eyed and passed out on the sofa, still sobbing. And the next morning, as instructed by Johnson, I went back to work, bright and early. Still drunk and cross-eyed, admittedly, but bright and early.
I must say, my workplace morale dipped slightly after that.
As we approached Christmas, my monkey funk only worsened. I’m not sure I’ve ever been sadder. I hope I shielded this from the kids, but chances are, I didn’t. With a face like a slapped arse (thanks dad, for that enduring metaphor), I may as well have had an “out of order” sign emblazoned across my forehead. If I was a shit friend/colleague/wife/parent/child during this time, I can only apologise. I was in one heck of a monkey funk.
I was suffering – I realise now – from heartbreak, of sorts. A heartbreak I’ve only experienced twice before: once over a boy, once over a baby. The baby was never meant to be; the boy dumped me after announcing that I wasn’t Lisa, which was strange, because I WAS Lisa (I still AM, for that matter), and the last words I ever said to him – aged 21 – were, “I can never be Lisa,” which, again, is an odd note to end a relationship on, given that I’ve spent a lifetime being no one BUT Lisa. (Confused? So was I. It turns out, Lisa was a former fiancée, who’d broken HIS heart a year prior. Bloody Lisa.)
Anyway, I collapsed in a puddle of monkey-funking heartbreak. In retrospect, I believe my grief stemmed from the stunning realisation, aged 42, that humans could be immeasurably cruel. That floored me. It still does, but at least I’ve stopped crying about it.
It took me a while to stop crying about it. I began to dread the prospect of having time to think; I used to love floatation tanks, but suddenly the thought of spending 60 minutes alone with nothing but my negativity and nipples filled me with abject horror. I began to go to the gym at 5am – a cunning plan to avoid having to lie alone in bed with my dark thoughts and full bladder.
I wonder, now, if my monkey funk may have impacted on then seven-year-old Frankie more than I initially realised. When we first started seeing a psychiatrist for the little fellow’s anxiety (READ ON, readers, because my shit year only gets shitter), the psych asked whether Frankie had any reason to worry about me. I replied, hysterically, “NO! WHY? SHOULD HE BE WORRIED? IS IT CANCER? DO I HAVE CANCER?” but in retrospect, MAYBE FRANKIE DID HAVE REASON TO WORRY ABOUT ME.
(Note to self: must add this to my “parental blame” list.)
Anyway, don’t worry, ‘cos the GP upped my happy pills and I was ticketyboo by New Year.
So, there we are. In rolls 2020 and things have got to start to improve, right?
Not. So. Fast …