and dangerous than any drug, and it is rarely even acknowledged, let alone talked about. It is insidious, pervasive and at epidemic levels. It is the primary cause of the culture of entitlement, laziness and depression that surrounds us. It is an art form, an identity, a way of life and has a bottomless, infinite capacity for pain.
It is Victimhood.
Victimhood becomes, in a remarkably short period of time, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And having spent so long indulging it, it has its grip on me in ways that serve simply to anchor me further in the self-constructed hell that is The Victim.
When I was a child, there were things that happened to me, were done to me, that led to me operating my life from the position that I, and only I, am to blame for the things inside me that I despise. Clearly someone could only do those things to me if I were already inherently bad at a cellular level. And all the knowledge and understanding and kindness in the world will never, ever change the fact that this is my truth. Always has been. Always will be.
Ask anyone who’s been raped. If they say differently they’re lying.
Victims only get their happy endings in run-down massage parlours in Camden. We don’t get to make it out the other side. We are ashamed, angry, appalled and to blame.
I sat there on that Wednesday evening in my pokey fucking living room, looked at myself on the TV screen being a massive, odious cunt, and realised that nothing has really changed. Deep down, like most of us, still now at the age of thirty-eight, I have this empty, black hole inside of me that nothing and no one seems capable of filling. I say like most of us because, well, look around you. Our society, our businesses, our social constructs, habits, pastimes, addictions and distractions are predicated on vast, endemic levels of emptiness and dissatisfaction. I call it self-hatred.
I hate who I was, am and have become and, as we are taught to, I constantly chastise myself for the things I do and say. And such are the global levels of intolerance, greed, entitlement and dysfunction it is evidently not just confined to a small, wounded section of society. We are all in a world of pain. If it was ever any different way back in the past, it has, by now, most certainly become normalised. And I am as angry about that as I am about my own past.
There is an anger that runs underneath everything, that fuels my life and feeds the animal inside me. And it is an anger that always, always prevents me, despite my best efforts, from becoming a better version of myself. My goddamn head seems to have a life of its own, quite beyond my control, incapable of reason, compassion or bargaining. It shouts at me from deep inside. As a kid the words didn’t make sense. As an adult it’s waiting at the end of my bed and starts talking an hour or two before I wake up so that when my eyes open it is in full-on rage mode, blaring this shit at me about how glad it is I’m finally awake, how fucked I am today, how there won’t be enough time, I’ll fuck everything up, my friends are plotting against me, trust no one, I must try as hard as I can to salvage everything in my life while knowing it’s already a lost cause. I’m exhausted all the time. It’s a kind of toxic ME – corrosive, pervasive, penetrative, negative, all the bad -ives.
I can feel it inside me now. I didn’t realise how fucking angry I still was until I started writing this book. What a terrific smokescreen a bit of money, attention and media can be. How brilliant Beethoven is at distraction. Why do so many successful people keep going, moving forward, trying to outrun their demons by accumulating more stuff, more distractions, more noise until they fall flat on their faces and self-destruct? Because you cannot outrun the causes of anger as potent as this.
I can easily, happily look outwards to find reasons for my inner pain. I can make a convincing case as to why everyone in my life, every event, every situation and person and place and thing bears some responsibility for the fact that I am, most of the time, such a miserable, angry bastard.
And I can just as convincingly look inwards, turn the spotlight on myself, and have a party with the unremitting horror that is self-blame.
And it’s all irrelevant, immaterial and pointless.
I all too frequently blame everyone and everything. I am at times so psychotically angry I can barely breathe. There is no way out and nothing that can ease it other than a few expensive, dangerous short-term fixes. And that anger is the reward for being a victim – every addiction needs a pay-off, and anger and blame are the rewards that sustain me and keep me going on a day-by-day basis.
Believe me, this overly indulgent mixture of self-hatred and whiny self-pity that I seem to be trapped in is not who I want to be.
I know that.
Who would want to be like this? Let alone admit to it.
I’d like to be all humble. Of service to music and the world and those less fortunate than myself. To bear witness to the fact that horrors can be endured and overcome. To help and give and grow and flourish. To feel light and free and balanced and to smile a lot.
But I’ve a greater chance of banging Rihanna.
Ultimately the reason I am so angry is because I know that there is nothing and nobody in this life that can help me overcome this completely. No relatives or wives or girlfriends or shrinks or iPads or pills or friends. Child rape is the Everest of trauma. How could it not be?
I was used, fucked, broken, toyed with and violated from the age of six. Over and over for years and years.
And here’s how it happened.
TRACK TWO
Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 2, Finale
Evgeny Kissin, Piano
Sergei Prokofiev was one of the great musical revolutionaries. He wrote his first opera at nine, and by the time he was a teenager at the St Petersburg Conservatoire he was already established as one of the great enfants terrible of music, composing ferociously dissonant, virtuosic music that smashed down existing conventions around tonality and kicked music violently into a new direction.
I love him even more because he got reviews like this one from the New York Times: ‘The House of Bondage of normal key relations is discarded. He is a psychologist of the uglier emotions. Hatred, contempt, rage – above all, rage – disgust, despair, mockery and defiance legitimately serve as models for moods’
Awesome.
In 1912–13 Prokofiev wrote a piano concerto to the memory of a friend of his who had sent him a farewell letter and committed suicide. The music is so jarring, so angry, so overwhelmingly insane that when he gave the premiere many in the audience thought he was making fun of them. It remains one of the most difficult pieces of music in the repertoire, with only a handful of pianists being brave enough to perform it. One broke a finger while playing it live.
It is the most accurate musical depiction of helter-skelter madness I have ever heard.
I’M AT SCHOOL AND A bit fragile. It’s ‘big school’ after all. I’m a nervous kid. Shy and eager to please and be liked. I’m slight and beautiful and look a bit like a girl. The school itself is posh, expensive, on the same street as our house and, to my tiny eyes, huge. I am five years old. I have few friends and don’t really mind that. I’m ‘sensitive’ but not retarded and awkward. Just slightly apart. I like dancing and music and have a vivid imagination. I am free of much of the bullshit that adults seem to be weighed down by, which is as it should be. My little world is growing and unfurling in front of me
