Where Cake Happened - Part 4
- Kepplemarsh
- Jan 31, 2024
- 5 min read
Even when I spoke about my mental health in videos, I did so in oblique terms. Depression, anxiety, loneliness - these are all nebulous concepts and saying their names doesn’t conjure up what it’s like to experience them, or the ways in which they might directly impact your life. That’s what was missing from my videos of the time, and what I intend to touch on now: things that were a tad too real to talk about on camera, and that in fact I kept as far away from the camera as I could.
Kepple Sadness
I debated whether to write this next part at all. It gives me no joy to tell it, and you’ll get none from reading it, but to omit it entirely would be disingenuous. So I shall compromise and be brief.
The end of 2015 marked my most serious mental health crisis - serious enough that I don’t even feel the need to make a witty aside to spare my own blushes about calling it a crisis. It just was. On New Year’s Day I hurt myself pretty badly and a paramedic had to patch me up. That is where the story ought to begin and end; it’s not one I would choose to tell at all - it doesn’t even have a three act structure, the story about drunkenly overestimating my fame in part 3 was much better - but I’ve got to mention That Video.
The same night, minutes after getting back to my flat, I filmed a vlog talking about the evening’s events. Showing the damage. And it all felt very natural at the time, it didn’t occur to me that there could be such a thing as sharing too much, that by showing every sordid detail I was not, in fact, contributing something to the world - truth, meaning, I don’t know what. I had begun to think the camera was my friend, which it was, in the same way a diary has been a friend to me at various times. The only difference is that I didn’t proceed to paste photocopied pages of my diary on lampposts around town. Something I believe to be true of any creative pursuit, whether vlogging or writing or stand-up comedy, is that you don’t know your audience, and they don’t know you, and it’s poor judgement indeed to act like you do.
You can be honest without necessarily being truthful. Total, uncompromising truthfulness ignores the form of a vlog - of a story, film, song - which after all is made to be published, meant to be seen. Showing everything is base laziness. It’s brainless. Creativity is omission as well as inclusion. Competent art is far more a work of omission - and that’s not dishonest, I challenge anyone to try and tell me it is. That goes doubly for vlogs, which purport to show life as it really is. Maybe I achieved absolute truth with my video, but was anyone better off for it? Was even a single person glad that I shared what I did?
Better - more honest, even - had I kept it to myself.
Onions have layers
The lesson was learned. In early 2017 I filmed myself chatting to the camera while I made my dinner. It's a bizarre video, and a funny one, filmed not in the kitchen but, inexplicably, in my bedroom. I sit at a chest of drawers and attempt to chop an onion on its surface using a bread knife. For fifteen infuriating minutes. It's utter madness, and what makes it so funny is that I seem to see nothing whatsoever strange about the scenario. I chat blithely away about uni coursework and future plans, and eventually I start making flatbread. In my bedroom. Like a psychopath.
“You might be wondering why I’m sitting in my bedroom chopping up vegetables, and partly it’s the convenience, but mostly it’s because I feel far too self-conscious to set up a tripod in my kitchen and talk to a camera for half an hour when people might wander in and look at me strangely."
It's a casually flippant remark, and typical of me, but it wasn't true. What I don't mention is that I am in fact living in a flat with two people I don't know and have been diligently avoiding for the last 6 months, going so far as to use the kitchen exclusively after midnight when I knew I would be the only one awake. Daylight was a distant acquaintance for me that year. Sometimes I’d wake up at 8 in the evening after going to bed at 6AM. I isolated myself, quite deliberately. Anxiety is an indulgence; it wasn't until some friends saw first hand how I was living, after escorting me home after a different type of overindulgence, that anyone else realised how bad it had got. It was then - once I’d sobered up next day, anyway - that I admitted to my friends, and even more to myself, I know I'm not a well person. I remember the words exactly, they arrived unbidden and fully formed. I had been filming my life for almost two years at this point, sometimes daily, but this was the first time anyone saw the real thing.
I was a compelling protagonist, in part because I had a genuine talent for being on camera. As someone who has all the charisma of a struggling metaphor in real life, I felt intensely aware of the differences between myself and Kepplemarsh: the guy on the screen was sure of himself, had his jokes planned in advance, and got to leave his cock-ups on the cutting room floor, whereas I chopped onions in my bedroom to avoid social interaction. No wonder I liked becoming that other guy.
I think the other reason people stayed with me is the vulnerability that ran through my videos. Even if the vlogs were an act - a hopeless introvert impersonating someone with none of the same faults - they were never a lie. I talked freely and often of my struggle with loneliness. I didn’t talk about the fact that my bedroom looked like an explosion in an alcoholic hoarder’s house - some of my vlogs were very carefully framed - but I didn’t sanitise my experiences completely either.
Honesty without relentless truth.
Truth
Writing these posts has provided me with a chance to re-evaluate the ‘Kepplemarsh era’ and what it meant to me. With hindsight it’s laughably obvious to me what it represented: it was a life of two halves. The year I held the Kepplemarsh meetup, when I was the centre of attention in front of a group of strangers, was the same year I spent locking myself in my room and wondering why I felt so lonely all the time. I adored being approached by people who had seen my videos, while studiously avoiding attending uni because of my anxiety. The videos were the way I stayed connected and prevented my self-imposed isolation from being absolute.
The truth is, Kepplemarsh wasn’t something I did, it was someone I could be.