It’s been exactly a year since I entirely fell apart.
It was something that had been building for a while, like a swelling on the brain until the pressure on my skull had become unbearable – and I cracked.
I always thought that it would be something big and explosive that would force me to quit my job, walk out on my friends and lockdown my life, but when it eventually did happen, it was over something so trivial, so minor, something that should have been entirely inconsequential. But it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. A whimper broke me, instead of a bang.
With no job, no friends to confide in and no direction, I spent most of January and half of February last year slumped under bed covers, marinating in my own sweat and tears and adjusting my churning stomach to a new diet of crisps and anti-depressants (so when lockdown finally happened in March, I had already perfected the art of doing nothing. Self-isolation? I’m an expert).
After a few weeks of watching the hollowed-out and insipid version of me staring blankly at screens, my boyfriend decided to try and give me something to look forward to – something to get me out of bed, and hopefully out of my rut. God knows my empty schedule needed something to stop me spiralling further into total nothingness. I never knew a mental breakdown could be so boring.
He told me to be ready to go out one Friday early afternoon, and after the huge effort at stuffing my increasingly sausage-like body into jeans a jumper, we slowly traipsed the twenty minute walk together, hand in hand, to the cheap Vue cinema in Shepherd’s Bush.
I am by no means a movie buff. I think The Shawshank Redemption is boring, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a cash-grab and that Nicholas Cage is quite a good actor, actually. I hadn’t paid to see a film for quite a while and I didn’t feel too impressed as we sat on crusty velvet seats in a drab and empty room, a small pot of extortionate sweet and salty popcorn between us. But as the deafening trailers started to roll, and I settled my aching head in my boyfriend’s comforting nook, I started to feel excited to actually be doing something.
We watched the Harley Quinn Birds of Prey film, and if I’m honest I can’t really remember what on earth happened. But that was inconsequential. For a few short hours, I forgot I was unemployed, suicidal and isolated. I just remembered, for the first time in a long time, that I felt something that vaguely resembled happiness.
It became a weekly habit, that every Friday I would discard my pyjamas in a stale heap by my bed for actual, normal clothes and walk with my boyfriend to the slightly dingy cinema for popcorn and a movie. The trips to Shepherd’s Bush were a shining beacon of light on a dark horizon and for a few hours I could pretend that everything was okay.
The films we’d watch were of varying quality – from the disappointing misfire Greed we watched one week, to the truly jaw-dropping The Invisible Man, how good the films were was almost irrelevant. Myself and my boyfriend would spend the rest of the walk home dissecting every scene, giving us something to talk about other than how I was “feeling” that day and how my last counselling session went.
Naturally, coronavirus happened and lockdown kicked in, which saw our weekly cinema trips cancelled – but it didn’t stop us from making a makeshift screen at home: together, we’d make sausage rolls from scratch or piles of pizza to eat as we were served up thick, buttery slices of cinema in our living room.
It helped both of us dissolve into a simpler existence where we only needed to worry about if Thor got back to Asgard or Harry Potter was really the chosen one, and not how long we were going to be stuck in quarantine for. While I eventually started to recover from my entire mental collapse, we haven’t stopped our weekly film nights – which have often kept me going when lockdown seemed to stretch to infinity.
The world of cinema may be entirely different post-pandemic, with several studios choosing to release the latest blockbusters straight to TV and with the movie theatre becoming a relic of the past. My heart breaks for those who work in cinemas and may be find their livelihood nearing extinction, and I am equally concerned for those whose mental health have also taken a nosedive – with the escapism of a trip to the cinema snatched away when some of us need it most.
