A memoir of a post-psychotic professional. Nothing for Granted explores one woman's downward spiral of deteriorating mental health over a few years' mixture of her adventures and struggles, resulting in a psychotic breakdown, followed by her determination to return to an organised life. The book focuses not only on the difficulties psychiatric patients face, but also on finding your way back to better wellbeing. The storyline involves different international characters who mainly live in London, UK. Nothing for Granted reached the final of Eyelands Book Awards 2022 in the unpublished category.
A memoir of a post-psychotic professional. Nothing for Granted explores one woman's downward spiral of deteriorating mental health over a few years' mixture of her adventures and struggles, resulting in a psychotic breakdown, followed by her determination to return to an organised life. The book focuses not only on the difficulties psychiatric patients face, but also on finding your way back to better wellbeing. The storyline involves different international characters who mainly live in London, UK. Nothing for Granted reached the final of Eyelands Book Awards 2022 in the unpublished category.
“Help! Mummy, help!” a child’s shriek pierced the morning quiet like a tiny stone shot with a catapult. Bright light flooded my bedsit despite the faded green curtains drawn over my three large sash windows. All my windows overlooked the pavement, and every sound from the street echoed in my room. The squeaky cries for help came from the street.
Having lain awake for most of the night, I jumped out of my bed. Pulling my only working window frame up as much as it allowed, I stuck my head out. The early morning air was fresh and cool. There were no pedestrians in Harlesden Gardens yet. Among the vehicles parallel parked along my side of the street, one car had its passenger door wide open. A fox was prancing in front of the open door. The child seemed to be strapped in the car, alone and terrified of the animal. I knew I was too far away to help if the fox were to attack this little person.
“Ah, this is our fox!” I shouted out into the air with the hope of at least calming down the owner of the high-pitched voice. The child went quiet, although I was not certain whether my voice had been calming or perhaps even more distressing to them, or if I had been heard at all. The fox disappeared from my view.
“I am here baby, I’m back.” A woman came out of the front door two houses away from me, trying to soothe her child.
I pulled my head back into my room. That was me ready for the day. My jogging suit I had worn at night did not require changing. My messy straw-like hair did not require tidying up. My teeth did not require immediate cleaning, and there was no shower anytime soon in my plans. My day had no purpose. I had nothing to look forward to, no commitments to keep, and no friends to meet. I was going through my mental breakdown, and I looked a mess. I would only need to eat something later, and, if there was no food left at my place, I might venture out to the nearby cashpoint and then to some food stores in the area. I might visit specific stores for some groceries that I felt were more magical than others – perhaps to buy some more of those large round flat tins of Brazilian banana jam that I thought could serve as the wheels my life needed to move on far from where I was parked in 2009.
***
Harlesden, a former village that is now part of North-west London, was a good place for buying international food. There was a Caribbean bakery near Harlesden’s main landmark, the 19th-century free-standing Jubilee Clock. I sometimes liked to walk over and try their products, some of which were a novelty for me. I usually chose their cinnamon buns, or slices of different loaf cakes, like Madeira cake, rum cake, or bread pudding. They also served some hot savoury patties, very spicy ones. The bakery was under-explored by the non-Caribbean locals, and I was normally the only pale person in the queue. Two streets across from the Caribbean bakery, also near Jubilee Clock’s little junction, there was a rice and meat takeaway run by some Pakistani staff, and I also sometimes bought their tasty food in their little square Styrofoam boxes. Some of those boxes with bits of leftover meat and bones were dropped by careless customers in the streets around, a feast for animals overnight.
There were some Caribbean takeaways, one of which served some delicious carrot drinks with some spices and a dash of milk. There were also some Brazilian restaurants and a Brazilian supermarket. The small businesses in the area mostly had customers from their own geographical backgrounds. The local Middle Eastern supermarket sold a lot of Asian and East-European food. There were, however, no English restaurants on this patch of England. As someone who had chosen England for my home, I wished there were.
The Somali owner of my local internet café round the corner from Harlesden Gardens greeted me in his friendly manner, “Hello Zainab, how are you today?”
My name is not Zainab. However, I liked this nickname he had invented for me. It is a Muslim female name that must have reminded him of his home and of everything that mattered to him. I appreciated that.
His name was Ghaazi, or Ghais; his was one of two or three Somali-owned internet access and phone repair shops near the free-standing clock. Ghais wore his traditional white robe and a white kufi cap, and he would greet me even outside his shop. I was one of his regular customers.
I was 36 at the time, and my NHS doctor in Harlesden's mental health centre had told me I was probably never going to be fit for work again, which sounded disastrous to me. I had no family of my own, so my jobs had been my all. I dreamt of doing something meaningful. I had brought my various hand-written notes with me to get them scanned at Ghais's shop. Then I posted my scanned scrawlings online. I meant to write about what was wrong with the world. I saw myself as a kind of a reporter, although my notes were made of scrambled words and phrases that made no sense to the reader. I was going through psychosis, and my thinking process was largely distorted. I was a reporter from the other side of madness.
“Zainab, what you need is a lot of sleep. You are having a problem, and you need some really good rest,” Ghais would say.
***
I am not entirely sure why I developed psychosis, but I have a feeling it may have been related to my life-long obsession of always having to deliver. I probably loved myself too little, so any criticism I ever received was amplified many times over in my mind, echoing over and over. I am a Polish woman by birth, and I used to be a professional before I ended up buying my magical tins of food during my 2009 psychosis.
Having spent six years in higher education, I had become a Sworn Translator of English Language in my native Poland at the age of 25. I had considered myself a success at the time. I had translated people’s documents, stamping my official seal on the paperwork I produced. “Sworn” meant I had initially had to take an oath in my local court of law that I would translate to the best of my knowledge and ability. I had received a round metal seal made by my country's mint with my name on it, and I had had my work periodically reviewed by the court.
Interestingly, I had not earned much from that job. Those days, in Poland, the price of sworn translation had been fixed by an act of parliament instructing us to charge “not more than” a certain percentage of the country's average salary. Formal sworn translations had effectively been made cheaper than other, non-certified translations with a free market price. I had provided inexpensive services for the benefit of the public for the prestige of it, on top of my day job as a schoolteacher.
Before I had been appointed Sworn Translator in 1998, the local police had made checks on me. My clear criminal check had not sufficed. The police had visited my family home, and they had even visited some of my neighbours to enquire about my character. I had apparently passed their screening, as my neighbours had only had good things to say about me. I then always felt that I had to keep my life and all my affairs crystal clean. I felt as though the world needed me flawless, and I expected nothing less of myself. That perfectionist attitude may have contributed to the acuteness of my anxiety a decade later. You should be more generous to yourself than I had been being to myself.
***
Translating is a never-ending adventure. In the first months of my work, I was contacted by a Polish factory that needed me for their international shareholder meeting.
“We need a sworn translator for our voting procedure,” they said, “It is a formality. You will only have to say in English what the voting results are, and we will need your invoice for our records. Everything has already been translated into English and all the foreign shareholders will have their own interpreters, so there will not be much for you to do.”
I requested some materials from the factory so that I could familiarise myself with their specialised vocabulary. Unfortunately, they only sent me a fax with a few large hand-written words, 'FOR, AGAINST, ABSTAINED.'
I arrived at their meeting wearing a string of my tiny colourful hippie beads with my otherwise smart suit. I never felt I belonged with the uniformed corporate crowd entirely, and the tiny beads were my lucky charm. Their conference room was full of people. I was greeted with a professional handshake and a few welcoming words by a couple of the factory representatives. Then one of them walked over to me again.
“Our English shareholder has arrived with no interpreter,” he said, “Would you mind interpreting for him during our meeting?”
I tried my best. Seated beside him, I whispered along to the English shareholder while somebody was reading out their report to the microphone. You must be very focused for this type of interpreting. You listen to somebody and at the same time you whisper your translation of what they have said a few seconds earlier. It was my first ever simultaneous interpreting assignment, and it had come as a surprise. The speaker's vocabulary became more technical, which was difficult for me, and I felt more and more desperate. The room was in the basement. I fixed my eyes on the fire escape ladder leading up to a window at the top of the wall. I wished I could climb up that ladder and escape through the window.
“He is now talking about different kinds of engines. Kill me but I have no idea how to translate it,” I whispered to my English client in the end, without turning to him, my eyes on the speaker.
The English shareholder looked at me stunned, then he also turned back toward the speaker.
“Don't worry at all,” he whispered back to me, motionless, “They had emailed me the translation of all this text in advance. I don't even know why they had you interpret this during the meeting for me. How old are you? You look very young.”
“No, I am already 25,” I whispered back.
“Still very young,” his whisper was, “Translating must be a very difficult job.”
He was not old himself. We spent the rest of the meeting looking ahead while chatting quietly under our breaths. He told me jokes to put me at ease. I could not laugh, but I could not help smiling and I felt my seat beside him was the best place to be.
“Thank you very much,” grinned the factory representatives to me later, “You did wonderfully.”
“My” shareholder had clearly not given the game away.
Most readers of memoirs enjoy the window into another person's world and life. Where you read everything from the ho-hum to the fantastical, we all go on adventures. Some are more jarring than others.
As a caregiver of a woman with a mental health diagnosis, what I enjoyed about this book was its reliability. I saw portions of the woman I care for within K.M. Weber's words. From anxiety to paranoia, sometimes what appears natural isn't always the reality that surrounds us. From a mental health perspective, the nature of paranoia, believing those around you are constantly talking bad about you or that you are being relentlessly spied on, amasses stress that can lead to a breakdown. Such is the case with K.M. Weber.
Within psychosis, a person can still be cognitively knowledgeable but lack sound judgment. This is the case with the woman I care for. She is trapped in a psychosis that she cannot find her way out of, fully capable of caring for herself in some aspects while needing help in others. What K.M. Weber has done through her memoir is to allow people suffering from similar experiences to know they are not alone, there is hope, you can go on to lead a good life, and to not let words spoken over you of hate, dislike, or limitation to stop you from fully blooming into who you are capable of being and meant to be when the Creator first thought of you.
What I dislike about the book is that it's a bit jumbled within its timeline, contains a litany of coworkers that I found hard to keep track of, and contains add-ons within each chapter, separated by asterisks [*] that are not always related to the stories shared within the chapter that had gone before. The add-ons serve almost as additional history markers but are not necessarily cohesive to the revelations preceding them.
However, overlooking the above, you find the heart of why K.M. Weber shared her story. While memoirs are often cathartic, they are also complicated. It's not pleasant to bring the challenging aspects of life to the surface, but it is necessary for processing and moving forward. Beyond self, a memoir like K.M. Weber's is written with the sincere hope her vulnerability inspires others to remove some of the stigma of mental health; she hopes for change and, if nothing else, change within the people suffering from mental health issues themselves for them to know they will be okay and they, too, have hope and a future that's bright waiting for them on the other side of their worst moments. What K.M. Weber has accomplished here is a triumph she should be proud of.