I Met My Saviour

I met the man who saved my life. A gentleman called Rich, who used to be a “bobby on the beat” but now works as a traffic cop and as soon as I saw his face, it all came flooding back. It was an emotional time meeting him, but I am beyond glad I did.

We had a good conversation about that night. I was always curious as to what was going through his mind at the time. Who knows, if he had said or did one thing differently, I might not be here to type this, which is quite a thought to get my head around, but a thought I’d rather not dwell too much on.

Ever since that day, I’ve been contemplating a suggestion made by my communications manager at work about doing some media work about it. For the whole week, I have been to-ing and fro-ing over whether or not I wanted to publicise this. I have done all I wanted to; I have met the man who saved my life and thanked him and chatted to him. However there is a huge thing at the moment in regards to breaking the stigma of mental health, and I want to do all I can to do that. Presenting my story, going from rock bottom and on the roof of a high-rise building to where I am now shows that it’s possible to get better from mental illness and it isn’t the life sentence many think it is. This story would help chip away at that stigma.

On the other hand, it is a deeply personal story and although I have never shied away from sharing personal stories about me, I do worry about being the face of something like this. It’s not that I’m ashamed, (far from it); it’s more about people asking questions. That one meeting was emotional enough without going through it again and again.

I say “again and again”, because I was asked to write a blog for the charity I work for called the World Youth Organisation, which I was only happy to do. The charity has started to gather some scope in recent months, and as the blog was posted all over their social media, it was publicly visible.

Yesterday, I received a message from The Sun on Twitter:

“Hi Tom, we have just come across your blog about meeting the police officer who saved your life. It sounds like an extraordinary story and we would like to have a chat with you about it.”

Completely out of the blue and bold as brass. I do not like The Sun. At a stretch, I don’t like British newspapers, but The Sun in particular are an establishment I despise for many, many reasons. I had an opportunity a couple of years ago to write a piece for them in a guest section they had running at the time, but after seeing a vicious headline and subsequent general slurs about a pilot who crashed a plane, I changed my mind. This time around, I wasn’t even going to entertain the idea of giving them a personal story to twist. So I (politely) refused.

One hour later, I got practically the same message from a journalist at the Bedfordshire on Sunday, my local paper. I was thinking about it, and let them know I was thinking about it, but I got a passive aggressive message back.

“What are you afraid of? All we want is a positive mental health story”.

So I refused them too.

Now I have decided to scrap the whole media coverage idea. My mind has been swayed by journalists who seem too hungry to fill column inches instead of genuinely discussing the issues at hand.
I’ve had dealings with the Bedfordshire on Sunday before, when I went to them with a story about my old chief executive at the Bedfordshire FA sending out racist emails. The backlash from that was pretty nasty. I don’t want to feel like I’ve let the mental health community down by not publicising this good news story, but I simply cannot trust the media, whether local, national or idiotic to run the story sensitively and from my point of view.

Part of this internal debate I’ve had with myself however has been about me. I have to admit, there has always been an element of me who wants others to tell me I’ve done a good job and/or been brave to tell my story. My mind goes back to the column I wrote for Attitude Magazine. While I felt strongly about the words I wrote, I wanted people to think, “Hey, Tom wrote for Attitude Magazine. That’s pretty cool.”

Part of what I do is because I genuinely think I am in a position to help make a difference. But part of it is to help stroke my ego. I've always felt a bit guilty about doing things for my satisfaction, but that’s not a crime, right?

But this time, I don’t think “selling” my story to the tabloids, especially one that has a history of mocking mental health and creating negative headlines for us, isn’t the right move. Hopefully people will appreciate that.