mostly david ephgrave

For a long time, I've had a complex about giving presents. I often leave gift shopping until the absolute last minute, not because I'm lazy but for fear that I'll choose something that isn't good enough and cause offence. I get extremely anxious about it and second-guess my judgment. I can trace this paranoia to two events. One Mother's Day when I was twelve or thirteen, I decided to write a song for my mum and record it on my four-track recorder so she could have a nice version to keep. I spent a few days methodically preparing a demo, recording guitar parts and then overdubbing vocals and percussion. It wasn't my finest work, but I took the time to get it right. I can still remember the moment I played it to her. We were in my bedroom when I gave her a card and the tape. As she ripped open the package to reveal the cassette, I felt tense. I put it into my Hi-Fi and we listened in silence. Suddenly, the whole idea felt wrong. She looked irritable. And her respo...

The other day, I dreamt about my dad, who passed away a little over two years ago. These dreams don't happen too often, but when they do, it can be difficult. It wasn't until I woke up that I remembered he was gone. In it, I'd bumped into him in a shop like Wilkinson, where he was browsing with a friend. I was in a bit of a hurry so it was more of a quick hello than anything. I may even have been a little brusque because I needed to get away. It was as I'd left the shop that I remembered there was something important I needed to tell him, but on turning back, I found I could barely lift my legs. The more I tried, the less I moved. I knew if I didn't hurry, he'd be gone, but it made no difference. It was like swimming against the tide. When I woke up, sadness hit me. The mundanity of the situation in the dream was bittersweet. I felt guilty for being irritable even though it wasn't real. It's not hard to decipher the meaning of my jelly legs. The prison o...

There's a real fragility to my life at the moment as I carefully navigate the depressive trough I find myself in. It's so hard to express the damage a narcissist does to you. They present themselves as guiltless, while they're endlessly hypercritical of you. They're cruel, bitter, dishonest people who feel they owe you nothing and are incapable of processing criticism, however justified, without blowing up like a petulant child. And they see every interaction as something to win. It's all black or white with no shades of grey, so you're either toeing the line or a villain. And they'll lie without flinching and then seem to forget the difference between fantasy and reality in an instant. I read a tweet the other day that hammered home the problem I face: (Link to the original tweet.) That's my situation in a nutshell. My mother shows little remorse for the damage caused by raising me in such a toxic atmosphere and expecting me to conceal it. Her likely re...

Like so many people right now, my future looks like a massive gaudy question mark. We've now passed a year since Mostly Comedy's last show and, while there's scope for potentially reopening in the Autumn (if Boris' plans are to be believed), it's hard to know when to commit to booking a line-up. This also depends on the venue upping their provisional capacity for the gig to go ahead. On top of this, I'm trying to sell my flat before the lease extension deadline hits in May and I have to find a lot of money to pay for it myself. So much of the past two years has been taken up with resolving the problems behind buying my mum out of my dad's house that I've had little mental space for the creativity my job depends on, plus my longstanding financial fears have been gone through the roof: I used to worry about finding a few thousand to clear my debt or fund Edinburgh...but now, I'm trying to find tens-to-hundreds of thousands while my work's at a stan...

I'm forty in three months and very conscious of all the negative self-talk I still do. And I'm worried that if I don't address this habit soon, it will start to define me (if it hasn't already). That may sound melodramatic, but it's meant sincerely. The fug of depression frequently slows me down and affects my sense of self-worth. I work on this with therapy and meditation, but the recent fallout from a difficult familial relationship that I had little control over knocked me sideways while  filling me with enough projected responsibility  to feel like I'm rebuilding from scratch. Add my dad's death to this - along with the financial implications of my mum's unyielding approach - and it's like I'm running on empty.  I can't help but compare what my parents were doing at my age. When I was born, my mum and dad were 35 and 34 respectively and had been married for nearly thirteen years so they had time on their side to have a baby (though they w...

While I'm slowly coming to terms with the abuse I suffered within a toxic family relationship and am learning tactics to cope with it, it's still hard to counteract the mental burnout. I'm dealing with many layers at once. Firstly, I'm receiving therapy for narcissistic abuse, which has specific and nuanced characteristics. One of the most painful aspects of recovery is learning you'll never rationalise with a narcissist. They'll never empathise, acknowledge or apologise for their behaviour. They can't be wrong. And they deliberately create drama to feed off; hurting you has an impact, and that's the best retaliation to hand if they can't compete with the truth (though if they can distract and deflect from their actions in the process, that's a bonus). And they have little autobiographical memory and endless double standards; it's one rule for you and another for them. On top of this, I'm gradually accepting that the person I thought they...

I spend a lot of time ruminating over the events of my childhood and those surrounding my dad's death. It returns, repeatedly, without choice. That's the nature of trauma from emotional abuse. And the impact when it's at its worst is frightening and can put me at risk. Recovery's often a case of one step forward, two steps back. You occasionally make leaps apparently from nowhere, though progress is fragile, particularly when you've been conditioned to take the blame, or made to feel your pain's only real if the person who causes it can see it. I hope this doesn't sound conceited, but yesterday, as I lay in the garden mulling it over, a statement came fully-formed in my head. And though I'd heard it before, at that moment, it had clarity:  "It's not your fault. You did your best. And if your dad were here, he'd see it." I can't understate what a massive shift this is. And last night, I had a glass of wine to celebr...

I'm struggling to process the loss of both parents; one to cancer and the other to end a cycle of emotional abuse. My nerves feel utterly shot. The past year saw my relationship with my mum unravel through being built on unsteady ground. Whenever her expectations tested my boundaries, I still did my best to meet them. Some of my earliest memories are the lies she made me tell - to hide four affairs from my dad when I was a child, right up to her secretly getting married seven months before he died, yet refusing to tell him, and insisting I lie about that too. And though it wasn't fair to repeatedly put me in this position, I met her terms, because I loved her.  I was a witness at the wedding to show forgiveness to the two people who'd made my childhood so traumatic, yet within months, I was accused of homophobia by a solicitor my mum refused to correct. And she walked off from my dad's burial, seconds after I'd lowered his ashes into the grave, disappearing a...

After a lifetime of narcissistic abuse that only intensified since my dad's death last May - and after a year of trying to preserve our relationship without letting her pathological lies pass unchecked  - I've reluctantly ended contact with my mother. When someone's mistreatment of you and lack of accountability makes you consider ending your life to escape it more than once, both as a child and as an adult, and telling them doesn't make them change their behaviour, self-preservation dictates to walk away. And when they twist reality so frequently that you start recording your calls to maintain your sanity, you're in an imbalanced relationship. How can you continue association with a person who thinks saying a lie out loud makes it real? In time I'll be open about my story, but for now, I want to be clear she doesn't represent me. And I have the support and testimony of my dad's family, his ex-girlfriend & family, the teacher I first opened ...

My mood has been very low over the past few weeks as I try to express and process the scale of unaccountability of a relative who's caused so much pain for years, yet won't acknowledge or understand it. What's horrible is they've crossed so many lines throughout my life that amount to emotional abuse, but their disordered mindset won't let them recognise this. They seem to believe that any negative comment about them is unjustifiable even if you can prove it, and can't process criticism healthily, yet they'll act disrespectfully and dishonestly all the time expecting no ramifications. And they won't do anything you ask, however small, to put things right and make you feel better. The most destructive thing I'm coming to terms with is how they have no concept of how they compromised my childhood, and therefore impacted my adulthood too. I've spent years in therapy adopting strategies to cope with my past and process the dichotomy of a pers...

I've had some difficult things to deal with in my lifetime, mostly at the hands of the same person, which are being compounded in a way I just don't know how to navigate. The problem is I can't say anything without them laying the blame back in my direction; their instinctive response is to compete: "But what about me ?". It's a mantra I was hearing long before I realised they were abusing their position, yet despite the fact they experienced similar things when they were younger, they won't link it. I worked hard to fight the demons left by their treatment ( "How can you say that?") and kept secrets that weren't mine to keep ("But I'm your --- "). The first eighteen years of my life were a vortex of toxic stress, confusion and fear ("How can you put this in public? It's embarrassing") but because of they were in a position of authority with a duty of care I thought it was my fault or saw myself as the gl...