Hello, I’m James…

and in the 1990s, struggling to break into the fashion world, I got together with Michael Oliveira-Salac and we produced twelve issues of the satirical magazine BLOW on a budget more slender by far than a shoe string. I went on to become a freelance journalist and editor working for various publications including The Guardian, The Independent and The Face. I also edited guides for the Time Out group and it was while doing so that I had the brain haemorrhage which was to guide me in all manner of new directions.

Neurosurgery followed, after which I was sectioned—detained on various psychiatric wards under the Mental Health Act—on numerous occasions. During these terrible-seeming years, I was told that I was bipolar. It was a diagnosis with which I completely disagreed but because of it, I had the good fortune to be given a local authority flat. This gave me the time and space to work out what it was I actually wanted to do with my life, or rather what I wanted to be.

I tried many paths and activities, and the two which made the most impact were Buddhism and dance. Firstly, my daily spiritual practice enabled me not only to come off the medication, but to stay out of hospital at the same time. Secondly, I decided to challenge a long-held belief that I couldn’t dance. So it was with a great deal of reluctance that I joined London’s LGBT+ Scottish country dancing club, The Gay Gordons. Doing so, I found that not only could I dance, but I danced beautifully, and best of all, it brought—and Scottish dance continues to bring—friends, joy and increased health into my life.

Scotland called me, and I moved to the north-east coast, becoming part of the international spiritual ecovillage community at the Findhorn Foundation. I lived there for ten years, during which time I cleaned toilets, talked encouragingly to vegetables and taught Scottish country dancing.

In 2018, while living in the village of Findhorn, my mother committed suicide. As with my brain haemorrhage, Mum’s death became a pivot in my life: I left Scotland not long afterwards, moving to the West Sussex countryside; I stopped practising Buddhism, returning to a mixture of silent meditation and nature connection, and wrote the memoir, Seventy-Eight Thank Yous.

Struggling to get it published I received guidance to come out from behind the safety of my computer screen, and to take this important story out into the world and deliver it in-person. In order to do so, I faced another fear when I undertook a three-month, full-time, residential storytelling course at Emerson College. It was there that I gained the skills and confidence which have enabled me to perform my one-man show to audiences all over the country. By doing so, I have unwittingly joined those who wish to get people facing, thinking and talking about death in general and suicide in particular.

photo: Jonny Dredge