Troy Francis I Wasted My Twenties. Well, What Of It?

 

 

Troy Francis

 

I Wasted My Twenties. Well, 

What Of It?

 

An all-day rave in the afternoon. On pills and speed, it’s funny how you can mistake the lights in the club - the strobes, the spotlights and so on - for daylight. But daylight still shines brightly - outside, for other people. For those strange people who are living lives that have an aim - getting up early on a Sunday morning to exercise, to spend time with loved ones, or perhaps to work on a business or some other pet project.

 

But here inside, the music - storming house and techno - rages on, and we rage on with it. We. What a strange collection of people. People who would probably never socialise normally, but do so here because they have been brought together by chemical compulsion and anyway, you don’t actually have to speak to anyone because the beats are so loud.

 

It’s a pub that, every Sunday, gets requisitioned for a dance party. A bar in the corner selling cans of Breaker, shots, chasers and mixers and Red Bull. There’s couple of pool tables. They play party house and there are girls. Upstairs there’s another space where it’s dark, hard, banging stuff and it’s mainly lads dancing, serious, in their heads, deep in the narcotic dreamspace. The smell of sweat is everywhere.

 

Time passes erratically. Sometimes a minute seems like an hour, sometimes an hour seems like a minute. You forget where you are, then you regain awareness and you’re talking to some stranger. You don’t remember who you came here with - or if you came with anyone at all - and you have no idea where they are now. Your ‘normal life’ in the ‘outside world’ has become distant and mysterious - a concept unmoored from your current reality, where the kick drums and the basslines and the trancey topline riffs combine with the flashing lights crowd out all rational thought.

 

You’re talking to a girl with blonde hair. She’s from the South of Ireland. She’s wearing a pretty summer dress with a flowery pattern on it. Her hair is long and she brushes it back from her face when she speaks, which she does a lot, excitedly, probably because she’s on drugs too. Well, everyone is here. Who would come to a party like this at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon otherwise?

 

She smiles, you smoke (you could smoke cigarettes indoors in those days), and then you kiss, and her tongue feels rough and she tastes of nicotine.

 

‘I’ve got some more pills at home’, she says.

 

Well, ‘more’ always sounds like a good idea to you.

 

And so hand-in-hand, single-file, you push through the crush on the dancefloor until you reach the exit, and when someone pulls the door open the searing light of the sun forces its way in rudely,  an unwelcome stranger.

 

Luckily you both have sunglasses - well, this was the 90s, everyone wore sunglasses to clubs then. In the street a few spiky-haired guys in loud tartan trousers and ripped t-shirts, their faces white, their eyes crazed, dance to the beats and sub-bass that booms from within. A man and a woman, a married couple on their morning walk, presumably, look shocked.

 

You take a bus back to her place in a quiet area not too far from the centre. You’re still high and the movement of the bus brings you up higher. You are feeling invincible - as though nothing can harm you and - more crucially - nothing can bring you down either.

 

You get off the bus and thank the driver, who looks professionally nonchalant and ignores your outlandish appearance, and you and the girl roll out into the street. A short walk takes you to her place, a terraced house which she shares with three other girls. Upstairs, across the grubby and worn out carpet, her room.

 

It’s small, just big enough for a double bed and a wardrobe. Mercifully, the curtains are closed. She has some pills here somewhere, she’s sure. She searches in the wardrobe, in the drawers, until you take her by the wrist, pull her close to you, kiss, and then you fall down together on the bed.

 

Several hours later you’re back at the rave. You are alone. Did the girl come back with you or did she stay at home? Is she here somewhere? Did she go off with someone else? You have no idea, but it doesn’t matter because the pill you just took is starting to kick in, and a can of Breaker is bringing you up nicely.

 

The night, as they say, is young.

 

******

 

Most of my twenties were like that. I didn’t ‘do the work’. I didn’t ‘make myself into the best man I could be’. I didn’t accrue digital real estate and currency. Well, to be fair, the internet wasn’t around back then. Instead, I gave a free rein to all my basest instincts and my most urgent compulsions. I chased pleasure, in the form of alcohol, drugs and women. I thought I was having fun.

 

In fact, I was deeply unhappy and I was using these things - these substances and behaviours - to try and escape my past, a past that I wouldn’t come to terms with until many years later.

 

Your twenties is the first decade in which you have a far greater degree of freedom and autonomy than ever before (in most cases, at least). In the UK many people have left home and live with friends or flatmates. Some are still at university. Freedom is a double-edged sword though. On the one hand, it’s great - who wouldn’t want to be free, after all? But on the other, it can be hard.

Because when whatever boundaries you had as a child are removed and you can do whatever you want, then all of a sudden it’s up to you. Now you are steering the ship, but you’re doing so with no prior experience and - in my case at least - a good deal of naivety.

 

I went feral almost immediately, which is strange since we were brought up strictly by my parents. No doubt it was a reaction to the middle class strictures I’d faced, and an expression of my addictive nature. Young adulthood was for me a sweet shop, and I was the proverbial kid walking into it and gorging myself on as many sugary treats as I could get my hands on.

 

It was a time when I was far too focussed on trying to impress others. Emerging, blinking, from childhood, I was filled with a deep sense of insecurity and I wanted to prove everyone wrong about what I thought they thought of me. And so I set about dismantling myself, trying to prove that I was in fact a cool, tough, bad boy and not the bookish, quiet and shy individual I’d really been.

 

And it was this absurd desire to prove a point to people who’d never met me before that was to wreck my life for many years to come. Because everything I did - subtly or otherwise - was a reaction to what I imagined others might consider me. I wore ‘cool’ clothes to show I wasn’t a nerd. I listened to the hardest techno possible to show I wasn’t a fey simp. I drank a lot to be ‘one of the boys’. I took a great many strong drugs to demonstrate that I was a rebel with the constitution of a rhinoceros.

 

It’s common to talk about regrets - as in do you regret the past or not? But the truth is it’s immaterial - my ‘regretting’ my past will have precisely no bearing on it. The past just ‘is’ - like a rock. Regretting it will make no difference either way.

 

If I’d have been a go-getter at twenty and set myself up for life by creating some fantastic business would my life be different now? Probably. But you have to learn to love yourself and that includes loving where you are right now.

 

It is also common to say ‘my past made me who I am today’. But that’s not quite accurate. My past happened in the way it did because of the way I am, the way I always was. My present has unfolded this way because of the way I am too. Yes, cause and effect is real, but character is destiny, and the bloody-mindedness that impelled me to wreck my twenties is the same bloody-mindedness that has impelled me to forge a creative career in my forties. It’s merely a question of focus, and whether that bloody-mindedness is directed towards something generally positive or not.

 

The one thing that does displease me now, though, is the degree to which I was focussed on trying to impress other - indifferent - people. And if I were to offer a word of advice to my younger self it would be this: what other people think is irrelevant. Most of them will fall away anyway. 

 

The one thing you must always strive to do is be true to yourself.