Early into the first lockdown, four friends- all male – were suicidal and I felt the
same. My life wasn’t supposed to go like this,
I thought, wondering how I’d survived a trek
to Everest Base Camp a year before I’d left
London, but now couldn’t sit still and just try
to be. We talked each other down and out
of the despair and panic attacks, but the
rootlessness my generation has always faced
felt exaggerated by the evacuations from a
life we’d built in a city where we’d never been
able to afford a proper home.
I saw clearly that being made to live with
insecurity in every area of our lives, as the
young are now, is too much for a mind to
bear. My therapist informally diagnosed
post-traumatic stress disorder, historic and
recent, and we began, from the beginning,
to work out what had happened to me up
until now. For the first time, aged 30, I was
joining the dots and it felt like the most
important thing I’d ever done, learning to
understand why I’d spent the past ten years
relationship hopping, moving house at least
twice a year, making snap decisions and
running away from routine.
Seeing how many of my friends moved out
of London when I did makes me wonder if
the pandemic will result in a permanent brain
drain from the capital. Some have trickled
back, but not all. If my generation wants
permanence, if we want to be able to find
a home, London doesn’t feel like the sanest
place to look for it. Older generations say
mine is too worried about owning a property,
which is easy to say when you’ve never had
to consider renting for ever, but it ignores themain problem, which is the state of renting
in the UK: the dishevelled places, the
extortionate rents, the constant moves.
At one point in the pandemic, finally able
to save, I thought I could stay in Bath until I
had a deposit, but if that took five years I’d be
approaching 37 and what about my fertility?
Do we really need to choose between financial
security, home ownership and having kids?
After a year of celibacy, I’ve recently
returned to dating and it’s been fun. It’s been
reassuring that I am able to face it, howeverexhausting it is. I feared I would never trust a
man to come anywhere near me ever again.
I’m determined to take things more slowly.
I wondered how I’d cope if I moved back to
London. What if it all happened again? “One
thing will be very different if you do go back,”
my therapist said. “You.”
He’s right. When I look back on mytwenties, I see so much bravado, so much
surface-level assurance of what I was doing
and where I was going. My book is my way of
laying my life on the line in order to say, this
is what it’s really like to be young now. Isn’t
it brilliant and dark and hilarious and hard?
More than that, you’re not the only one who
feels floored by all of it sometimes. But do you
know what? We’re still standing. nLucid by Lucy Holden (Simon & Schuster,
£12.99) is published on February 3I SET OUT TO WRITE SOMETHING
FILTHIER AND FUNNIER THAN ALL THE
OTHER MILLENNIAL MEMOIRS I’D READ