Guest 2. Eleanor Paisley

17.2.18

Eleanor Paisley moved to London in September 2016

London is many things to many people: formidable, dirty, modern, exciting, full of opportunity. For me, London represented a step towards the life I wanted to have: being at the centre of everything in a multicultural society. As a student, I did feel as if I was in another world. It didn’t feel like I was in England at all. I would regularly socialise with fewer English people than otherwise – which suited me just fine. In university as well as all over London, the word ‘metropolitan’ applies perfectly. However, the adjective that I would most use when describing my time in London is ‘lonely’. In a sea of people, running from A to C to B then back to A again on the tube, buses, bikes, taxis, cars and trains, you become totally anonymous. Despite walking every day from Southwark to Strand, I rarely got to see much greenery. The air is alive with the business of the people, and only myself and a handful of my cohorts dared to notice the number of people living on the streets rising every day. We would go to the co-op on Sundays to collect the reduced food and distribute it on Mondays, but I always felt useless, helpless, and always anonymous – probably similarly to the people I was trying to help.

I think that a lot ofpeople  arrive in London expecting to find work, to find a house, to make their family back home proud. The reality is that London is a harsh, unforgiving place for people with no money.  I could never pull myself away from the signs of disparity and poverty that surrounded me. Big, consecutive-looking buildings are what you see within an instant of looking at the place –  you don’t see the people. I was incredibly lonely as a student in London. I arrived full of excitement at the prospect of opportunity, protests, marches, museums, plays, galleries, pubs and clubs… but I found that there was so much out there I developed a bizarre agoraphobia that has never affected me before in my entire life.

Loneliness is by far one of the worst and least recognised mental health issues there is. Especially in a place with such a dense population and living in a flat with eight other students, I always felt like I was lying to myself – I couldn’t be lonely? I couldn’t explain it to myself. I blamed myself for how I felt because I didn’t go out and do enough to not feel lonely. It was my own fault.

I have since reviewed my opinion completely. It wasn’t me. It was London. I loved Camden Lock, Soho, and Stoke Newington; I loved being in the centre of political uproar and veganism, where I constantly met people of like mind. I hated the constancy of chaos, the constant feeling that I was moving totally against the grain. Everybody else seemed to have got it right and no matter how hard I tried I always felt I had got it wrong.

In no way am I trying to tell you that this is how you will feel if you live in London, but myself and a handful of friends have all found that the place has a very negative affect on our mental wellbeing. There is so much to do, so much to see and so many people to meet, but the sad thing is that I felt too overwhelmed by it to actually do anything other than study in my room, waiting for nightfall, waiting for sleep or waiting for one of my flatmates to knock on my door, and tear me away from my own mind.

For me, London is a great place to go for a gig, to see friends, to see a lecture, visit an art exhibition, to join a protest, to have an expensive weekend away and as a go-between for the Eurostar, but I could never live there full-time again. I will always remember vowing with a flatmate that, once a month, we would do a ‘touristy’ thing in London somewhere. We pretty much managed it, and during those outings I really enjoyed myself, but that was only ever once a month, was barely affordable, and the rest of the time I had to deal with the gross monotony of life in a concrete jungle.

On a positive note, a lot of the friends I had there have truly made something of themselves, thanks to their resilience and the opportunities that they were given just by living in the centre of our little island. One friend works for the Samaritans and on a volunteer basis for the Met; another friend scours the nightclubs and winds her way into some high social circles with Russell Brand and many other famous names; another has been able to show his own plays in various small theatres in the many districts of the city, outside of the university campus. It really is a wonderful place, it is one of the many centres of the world, being so metropolitan and so interconnected with every single other country following its immigrants and emigrants , its political kudos and art culture. But, after all, I would much prefer cycling into campus without the constant fear of being run down, without passing streets and streets of enormous concrete high rises, and with the knowledge that I’m never too far away from a quiet spot by a river where I can hear the birds and breathe the fresh air.

'The Sea' runs March 1-3 @ Camden People's Theatre
Tickets: https://www.cptheatre.co.uk/production/the-sea/