It’s World Mental Health Day, and here are some thoughts, a little wandering, from a stormy Monday in Stavanger; thirteen degrees, seventeen in the gusts. I wake up every morning with a pounding head. The thoughts tumble around, acute, wild, they spread a fan of emotions out into the body, bad, good; and the head, what does it say? It says: We have to get out of here! The relatively few times I wake up refreshed, without a nagging thought, I get worried. Have I woken up in someone else’s body? You have to learn to be where your body is, the wife used to say. In this day. In this moment. Of course she’s right. I’m working on it, but it’s hard to beat my impatience. When the day has managed to break the darkness (hello day) and the morning finally rises, I wonder who I am and who the others are. Sometimes this wonder creates terror, other times joy. Regardless, it creates the rush: “We have to get out of here.” This haunting root note, where does it come from? I have always envied the balanced people; I could sit and stare at the portrait of Tarjei Vesaas for hours when I was a young man. I think some of the chase is innate, I have to live with it. But I also think it comes from the insecurity I had to live with when I was a child. Simply put, without lingering (I’ve done enough of that in some novels I wrote a long time ago): In my parents’ house, things darkened, unfortunately, as my dear father’s mental health deteriorated and he chose to solve his problems with it brandy (or was it the other way around, Dad?). It became a bad house to live in. I folded my hands and prayed to my God. It became a dangerous house to live in. My God stayed in the shadows. When it is like this for a child, what happens? You have to get out of here. But where is “away”? There is a set of solutions and they are outside of yourself, maybe you are lucky enough to be assigned the best of them? I was just that lucky. I had others around me who were not. Friends! Girls!Friends’ parents! Teachers!The pop music! The movies! The literature! But is there also a solution that comes from yourself? Yes. It does. It is free. It doesn’t require you to look someone in the eye. All you need is a pen and paper. Hi. My name is Tore and I’m 14 years old. I’m not doing too well. Can I write? Poem? Stories? Diary? On Boxing Day 1986, I wrote my first proper poem. I wrote it in the diary I had received for Christmas. This became something I continued with, quite quickly it became ambitions and a life goal, and as the years went by, I ended up with an authorship that is mostly about mental health. It is overflowing with young people who need to be seen, people who need a hug; I often think that I am a kind of nurse, that writing is a work of care. This is the advice I give to everyone I meet, if they ask me for a way out – whether they are now school pupils or inmates in prison: Write. Whatever. Lower your shoulders. Just write. Read. Whatever. Lower your shoulders. Read. You will feel a kind of peace. You will know that you are not alone after all. You will be lifted out of your own world. You will get to travel to another world, where you will meet a friend who may look like yourself. You will feel it. That you are not alone after all. When you feel it, you will feel the darkness crack. You will feel the light begin to seep through the cracks. You will feel a little heat coming to your skin. You will feel that you dare to get out of bed. You dare to put your feet on the floor. You are able to move your hands, fingers, mouth. You’re out and that’s, strangely enough, okay. You want to talk. You want, maybe, to look someone in the eye. And that’s, strangely enough, perfectly okay. Hello, my name is Tore and I am 50 years old. Will you join? Out? In the light again? Happy World Day; hold each other!
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Hold each other – Speech
