Crystal Maze, Mental Health, and Me

Before I really get into this, I'll say there are a few things in here that I've never really talked about for a long time. But if you're going to read it, stick with it.

I've already covered how much the show meant to me as a kid but I really glossed over why. Which has always been a problem of mine, glossing over the bad to make it less of a problem for myself and others. However something happened recently and for the longest of times, confidence has been a very scarce commodity in my life but that has somewhat changed.

As a kid, throughout most of my school years I was bullied, bad. The kind of level of bullying that a headteacher denies because they don't want to admit that there is a bullying problem in their school. They look for loopholes so they don't have to have paperwork linking their school and any particularly bloody incidents. So it continues because those doing it have got away with it. When you grow up in a small place with just two primary schools and one secondary school, which brings in pupils from a lot of other small places, every possibility and grouping is concentrated. You don't just get a mild mix of good, bad and other spread through a few schools in an area. You get the brightest and nicest of the best, as well as the most unpleasant and most violent of the worst.

I hated school, utterly hated it. I was good, I behaved, I kept quiet and left at the end of each day as soon as I could to ensure I didn't have to spend longer than necessary in those walls. I made sure I didn't get one detention after school because I wanted out every day. I was THAT kid and made myself that kid for a logical reason.

Gameshows were what made me smile, all I had to really cheer me up when console games weren't distracting me, We're talking about the days of basic satellite tv, dial-up internet in the pre-Youtube days, Playstation 2 (without online gaming) and for me: VHS recordings of The Crystal Maze and repeats on Challenge TV of shows such as Interceptor, You Bet!, Bullseye, Takeshi's Castle, Krypton Factor and many others. I could watch those recorded CM episodes over and over till the tape wore out. Most of which were preceded by a couple of seconds of Denise Van Outen and Richard Orford introducing them as part of 'The Bigger Breakfast' during school holiday mornings. Time went on and the repeated views on tape turned into repeated viewings on Youtube. Any reference to TCM on any other show and the small reminder would instantly cheer me up, seeing that it wasn't just me remembering it.

All through my adult life, the bad stuff stuck with me. Day in day out, I've struggled with people because for a big portion of that life, most people I've known contributed to a lot of unpleasantness. Even those who never physically contributed joined in verbally, at a guess they'd just rather be on the side of the bad than in its path, and with what I got I don't really blame them. Some stuff just doesn't get forgotten no matter how hard you try, so you bottle it up, you bury it and hide it. Now years later I know that's the worst thing to do but the damage was done, and for the last few years I've been getting various treatments to get myself sorted. I've never had any real confidence, but as I said at the start something happened.

 For a long time, I've been talking to people online with a shared love of The Crystal Maze. For certain reasons I ended up doing a lot of traveling a couple of weekends ago and meeting these like-minded, great people. A 570 mile round trip.  It's because of that day out, that opportunity that I finally have a bit of self-confidence. I have the confidence to be able to say that crap happened but I finally have a chance of something kind of big. Anything else I wouldn't have done all that traveling, I wouldn't have been able to mentally cope doing that kind of thing alone, that far, all those hours hundreds of miles from home in a city I'd never been even close to before. Sounds daft saying it aloud or in type, but having been somewhat hardwired to be withdrawn, it feels amazing to have done something like that which to many might seem a bit normal.

I guess when there's something wrong, look for anything good. Whatever it is if it makes you smile it'd absolutely worth it. If an opportunity of a lifetime comes up, say yes to it and work out how to incorporate it into your life later.