Mental Health (MH) has played a significant role in my life, so I have decided to do a charity event to raise awareness and money to help those who are also being affected by MH issues and show why this means so much to me. I have chosen to support Aviation Action by pulling a car for the length of a marathon distance, which is 26.2 miles, on 29th Oct 2021. Aviation Action helps people in the aviation industry who may be suffering from MH issues. As I belong to the aviation community, I feel it's appropriate to start from the sector I have been working in for many years; hence I decided to support Aviation Action and help those in need. Would you please support me in raising money for this important cause by donating and sharing with others to donate as well, please?  

I was born into a large family. I am one of three children to my parents. I have two older sisters but a vast number of aunts, uncles, and cousins. The story in my younger years is based mainly around my father. I want to describe my father as there were quite literally two sides to him. He had a terrible mental illness; he had multiple personalities and was schizophrenic, which he struggled with his entire life. Therefore, there were definitely two halves to him; one was the real him, as I believe. This was a truly amazing man - he was a very talented musician, extremely clever and an extremely loving man. I loved every moment spent with him. I was his shadow as a small child, and people used to joke that I was attached to his leg as I was forever hanging on to it. He loved everything with an engine or anything electronic, and there was really nothing that he could not fix or build.  Some of the happiest memories of those early years were our trips to the local scrap yard foraging through the piled-up cars looking for parts he could use.  I still remember the distinct musty smell from inside the cars on the hot summer afternoons.

As such, I have numerous happy memories with my father, with which I could literally fill a book, but I also need to talk about some of the sadder memories; as I said earlier, there were two sides to my dad, and the other side to him was much darker! 

I do have large parts of my childhood memories missing, probably blocked out for my own good, but even those that I do have are very fragmented and extremely vivid, although exact timelines are harder to recall.  I have very early memories of riding the train with my mum to visit my dad in the mental wards in the hospital. Unsurprisingly, I never liked the hospital, which I found scary. He spent a lot of time in those wards throughout his life, which for him must have been terrifying at the time. I remember being told how once my nan had gone to see him and his front teeth were missing as he had been given electroconvulsive therapy at too high a voltage, a practice which reportedly they were not allowed to do without family permission. That is just one story, although I remember hearing many other stories of horrific treatment he had received. I could always tell by my father's eyes when his personality had flipped; his eyes would change, they would become dark and have a blank stare behind them. When this happened, it was scary because you knew what was coming; anger and violence. I will mention a few occasions, although there is far too many to tell.

When I was still pretty young, my grandparents moved to Devon, and my parents followed as they were my dad's
biggest support; he doted on them. I always remember him being worse in Devon when we first moved there - even though we were closer to my grandparents overall, the first house we moved to was still quite a distance from their house in a very secluded country setting. One of the memories from this time was standing in our kitchen, and he was going mad because he was talking to me, but I would not look into his eyes; this infuriated him, but his eyes scared me, I couldn't look into them, so he grabbed my head and smashed it into the countertop behind me. I remember feeling the blood running down the back of my neck.

He went through a stage of saying he would kill himself and me, and he would take me in his car and drive off with me. My poor mum must have been terrified. I remember sitting on the edge of a stone bridge with him and looking down into the river below. Over the years, he had attempted to kill himself several times by overdosing. I also remember my mum telling me about when he stood out in our garden and poured petrol all over himself but could not light the matches before they were taken from him. Another time he dived out of the bedroom window, and she saw him fall past the kitchen window as she was washing up. There were numerous occasions like this as I grew up, and in the end, we did move even closer to my grandparents.

My dad and my mum separated and divorced. One of my sisters and I ended up living with him; he was always
violent to me, but thankfully not my sister. He seemed to enjoy watching me get electric shocks at one point - he would say to me, touch this wire while he was working on something. I got blown across the room quite a few times, but things came to a head one night when I was woken by him smashing my head off of my bedroom wall and several other walls around the house. My sister managed to get me out, and we ran all the way to my grandparents' house and hid in their walk-in cupboard in their bedroom because he followed us there.

I have another large blank in my memory after this, although I was now living back with my mum. The next thing I remember after that is I took up rugby, which I excelled at, and I joined the army cadets, which I also did really well at. During my first camp away, about a week before I turned 13, we had a few days left at camp when I was called in to see the padre, and I was told my dad was dead. He had taken his own life, which was a shock at first, but when the reality hit, it was like running into a brick wall - I remember crying until I had nothing left in me, and I was so angry with him. I was filled with so much anger, but they let me stay until the end of camp, and they were really good to me. A lot of the other cadets didn't know what to say to me, and I kept hearing them say, don't mention your dads around me, which annoyed me at the time, but my sergeant drove me back to Essex where they had his body, and he asked the cadet force if I could wear my uniform at the funeral. In my uniform, I lead his coffin from the house to the hearse and then from the hearse through the church.  The night before the funeral, I remember seeing his body laid in the open coffin in my nan’s house; it was all surreal. During the night, I was woken by remembering the head-smashing incident. I hadn't seen him for literally two years before he died. 

I still feel guilt for that, even now, but I understand more how his illness tormented him for years over years. Growing up, I had a real fear of silence. I would be filled with an absolute deep dread when things were silent, even when I was 18 and my mum was away in the army at night when the silence set in. I would sit at the top of my stairs, staring at the front door filled with fear that someone would come bursting in, and I would sit there until the sun came up and the birds would start singing outside.  This is all part of my story. There is far more than I could write, and I believe I could fill a book.

Mental Health issues, as a result of many things, including Mental Illness in the family, impact so many people.
I wanted to show my support for those impacted by MH issues by pulling a car for the length of a marathon distance. I appreciate everyone’s support, enabling me to fulfil the objective to support others who may be suffering from Mental Health issues by raising money for Aviation Action. 

Thank you all for reading my story and for the support.