That Moment When You Realise… You Never Quite Made it.
Freewriting
When I was seventeen and a half, I started my nursing career. By eighteen and a half, it was over. So far as the professional nurse training was concerned anyway. So I then worked as a nursing assistant, not really what I wanted, whilst I decided what I wanted to do next. By twenty five, I realised I wanted to be a therapist. So for the next four years I trained, trained trained, whilst still working as a nursing assistant, in counselling, holistic therapies, and Time Line therapy.
By thirty, I was an uber therapist.
Result.
Just as I walked out of my counsellor training, as in, the days after, I landed three huge jobs. All part time. All pretty well paid. I also landed a boyfriend.
I was living the normal life we all dream of. The partner, the nice home, the car on the driveway, the food in the fr…
Imagine screechy scratchy vinyl record glitch.
By thirty two, the boyfriend had gone, by thirty four, the mum who had previously been estranged due to alcoholism and ‘stuff’ had been nursed by me and died from cancer, by thirty eight my life had completely caved, by forty I was rocking under a table in a suicide prevention unit.
Then it really, truly, wholly, all came crashing down.
For several years.
But that’s not it.
Not really what I am talking about.
What I am talking about is that this is a mere smidgen of the ‘never quite making it’.
This is just, really, the surface symptoms of how someone without a root support network gets hit MUCH harder than those, say, with a partner family money and stash of premium bonds.
It’s the middle class lick of paint we all could do with, but the lick of paint, for many of us, turned out to be made of lead.
My ‘making it’ couple of years were pure illusion.
Why?
Oh, not because the relationship didn’t work, nope. Nor due to the jobs not working out (oh… the uber therapist didn’t last), neither because the money ran out.
Not really.
The root cause of the deep, deep, deep: fall to the concrete was due to:
Being alone.
Or, alone-alone, as I call it.
I was chatting with my therapist the other day… she was saying how ‘grief impacts those without a core support network much deeper and longer than those without a family’.
I knew this.
But hearing someone say this, and refer to ‘research shows us that’ was kinda a mind blowing nod. I saw and heard that as ‘you haven’t imagined it’.
Rather than the usual ‘get over it’ I have heard over the years by those with, say, a partner family money and stash of premium bonds.
We as humans project our own realities onto others without knowing it.
I see this as deep empathy if we happen to have experienced what the other is going through.
Or absolute stupidity if we haven’t, and are then projecting our, say, having a partner family money and stash of premium bonds.
If you are still reading this, maybe you get it. Or maybe you are thinking ‘wow what is this guy on’ (it’s called freewriting let’s go…) but this matters not….. stay with me because this little piece, this realisation that I haven’t quite made it is, actually, not all bad….
In fact…
Come closer…
Here is why I wrote this today:
I already know that I haven’t made it. I knew this as I rocked under that table in that suicide prevention unit, and I definitely knew it as I sat on the bare carpet-less floor of the housing association flat after being evicted from the penthouse. I knew it when the GP prescribed the anti-psychotic and boy did I truly know as the psychiatrist gave me the diagnosis.
But.
But.
But.
THIS realisation… today…. This week… this month… this 2026 has told me the other aspect of not making it.
In realising that I haven’t made it:
I looked back.
Just for a minute.
No longer.
I glanced at my child self, as he sat there on the edge of the camp bed in the basement. As his fluffy grey-white socks made clouds upon the naïve ankles, as his legs, white scrawny and weak, played and cavorted with the thinning dusty air, as the little boy looked up through the tears mould and stained pain, within his knowing, his wanting and sensitivity, through that little child’s eyes and within his soul he knew:
That in not making it,
Throughout the ears of failures and abandoned pain
Grief
Loss
Poverty
Struggle
Ignorance and social services.
That actually,
Now,
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At fifty-three in the year Anno Domini…
Well…
I may not have ‘made it’.
But I ain’t dead.
So actually,
I made it far more than most.
They might have the car.
The partner.
The money.
The premium bonds.
They might not know what to say to the suffering (because of the projection of privilege).
But I do.
I have.
I can.
So,
In that way:
Maybe I made it.
After all.
And.
So.
Have.
You.
No-one will know your strength, friend.
No-one who has the premium bonds can know.
They haven’t been where you have.
They are not where you are.
You are.
It hurts I know.
And when the lights go off
(because you couldn’t pay the bill)
Remember that your own light,
Will dim.
Yes,
Bad news.
But.
But.
But.
There is ignition,
In your darkness.
A match in your pain.
A lighter
In that anger.
So burn,
Babay,
Burn.
For one day,
I know,
Know,
Know:
You will be sure to:
Set The World ALight.
I Love You.
IAmMattVC xx
Written by a human (obviously). Image by AI (probably).
I’m here: www.iammattvc.com Donate here: https://ko-fi.com/iammattvc
