The first time I saw my face on a billboard, I was coming out of a club in Shoreditch, east London. It was 3am and raining — that electric, fizzing rain that seems to rise off the pavement like static. It was 2015. I was 25 and high, my heart racing, coat half-buttoned. A friend in Paris sent me a photo: Gare du Nord, my face two storeys tall, staring down in a Breton top beside a baby who looked uncannily like me. It was an Evian campaign: Live Young. My expression: startled, absurd.
I had fallen into modelling by chance when I was 20. I was living in Manchester when a friend suggested I should sign with an agency, and I did. I carved out a surprisingly successful niche as model-poet. My first book, Modern Love, came out in 2011 when I was 21; I was shortlisted for awards.
Evian printed my face across gondola lifts in the Alps, slung banners through train stations, plastered me from Jakarta to Berlin (they photoshopped lederhosen on me in Germany). I didn’t even drink much water then. “You’re everywhere,” someone said, and I laughed, but something twisted in my chest.
For over a decade I lived a life of movement. I walked runways in London and Paris. Once for Comme des Garçons on zero sleep. At Cerruti the fitters told me they’d never seen a waist so small. Some days I survived on coffee and adrenaline. Others I binged whatever I could find at 2am. In the weeks before those Paris shows, over Christmas, I remember nudging food around my plate and hoping the flesh would disappear.
In 2017, for Topman, models in Germany strutted across a runway of LED lights cascading with my poetry. My lines about lost and beautiful men lit up beneath their boots. The audience clapped. The singer FKA Twigs went on minutes later. I did Prada and GQ, learnt the exact temperature of a flashbulb on bare skin, how to hold a smile long enough to feel my jaw hum. I was flown to Malaysia to write poems at a hotel for two weeks, all free.
It looked glitzy. But beneath it was a darkness I couldn’t name — a dependency on chemicals my brain didn’t make for itself: dopamine for reward, noradrenaline for focus, both of which booze and cocaine created a very expensive approximation of.
As I hit my late twenties, the modelling work began drying up. Then Covid hit. While my brother, aged 30, worked as a doctor on the Covid wards, I moved from beer to wine to vodka; I was 31. I might not have contracted the coronavirus but I was deeply unwell.
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By the time the world reopened, I had disappeared. No social life. No real life at all. My eating spiralled the other way — I remember being offended when my dealer called me fat. Sometimes collapse isn’t loud. It’s cereal eaten with a fork. It’s not answering a single call. It’s not even crying. Just vanishing.
In February 2024, at 34, I went out and nearly didn’t come back. I’d set off for Westminster Bridge intending to die, but ended up outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Two priests came to me, read the Lord’s Prayer, and led me into the cloisters. Safeguarding rules meant they called an ambulance. Police arrived. I bolted straight into the middle of the London Winter Run, sprinting briefly with runners in pyjama shorts, before being shepherded back into the ambulance.
At the hospital I was sectioned. They laid me on a bed made of children’s soft-play blocks. A blinking camera like a beetle stared down. I ate custard creams while a man down the corridor watched true crime on repeat. I wasn’t dangerous. I just didn’t want to live. I lied through my teeth to get out: “No, I don’t want to die” (I did). They discharged me the next day. But the truth is I should have remained there.
I went back to my flat in Hackney, packed a rucksack and left for a train from Euston to Chorley, leaving my keys. A friend took me in first, made tea, left out food I couldn’t always eat, gave me silence when I needed it. Then they gently told my parents what had happened to get me to that point.
I moved into my childhood home in the first week of March. After four years estranged, it wasn’t exactly home. Yet when Mum put Lenor-softened sheets on the bed, I cried. My parents were relieved most of all, but still cautious. Mum set tea before me as if it might leap away. My father stood in the doorway, quiet, watchful. “We’re just glad you’re here,” Mum said, voice catching. Dad added: “We’ll do whatever we have to do.” They had weathered my absence, but the storm had returned with me in it. A town that I had resented throughout my childhood for the bullying I’d suffered was to soon become my solace, even though I did not know it yet.
For most of the year I was bed-bound, momentarily able on good days to walk, run and go swimming with my family. But the new normal was panic that jolted me awake, night terrors and sometimes a total loss of time where I’d find myself staring at a wall. Slowly, with my parents help, I began to stitch a life back together, attending meetings to keep me sober.
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My GP said any referral for specialist support would take over a year. So my parents and I turned to private doctors. Friends who recognised symptoms of undiagnosed ADHD encouraged me to get assessed. My parents filled out forms about my childhood: school reports that said “talks when he should be working”, “easily distracted”. They read ADHD memoirs, recognising me on every page. With their encouragement I booked an appointment to see a psychiatrist. When the doctor told me I scored 100 per cent on the ADHD scale, I cried. Not out of sadness, but recognition. I wasn’t lazy or broken. I had been trying to survive without the right language.
Months later, another diagnosis helped to explain why I could barely get out of bed: complex PTSD — the delayed echo of trauma I had tried to outrun. It’s one for which there is no easy fix. My psychiatrist explained that unlike, say, one single event, like a car crash that “triggers” you when you see cars, complex PTSD involves multiple traumatic events that compound one another. With me, it was the bullying throughout my teens, then years of addiction and what brought me to want to end my life.
Somewhere between silence and birdsong, I remained clean and remained sober. I sat in the garden naming things: bramble, lungwort, hawthorn. I watched oystercatchers carve the sky. And then, slowly, poems returned. First in fragments, then in torrents. My phone filled with urgent notes, angry and delicate alike. Magazines I had once dreamt of being published in — the Rialto, the Spectator, Poetry Scotland — began to say yes.
A short book took shape, Well Done, You Didn’t Die, and I began working on a memoir. Still, I wanted to build something not just about me.
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I called two friends — Dr Anna Percy, a poet from Manchester, and the literary critic Suzi Feay. Together we created The Aftershock Review, a poetry magazine. I became publisher and editor-in-chief. Suzi and Anna joined as contributing editors and soundboards, I raised money through crowdfunding and, eventually, the Arts Council. From bed, I manifested a steady wage and a job for myself for the first time out of the very ruins that destroyed me. Issue one sold over 1,000 copies. Issue two came out last week. We’ve published three TS Eliot prizewinners alongside poets whose work is being published for the first time.
In 12 months, I came third in the Michael Marks environmental poet of the year award, won the Verve poem of the month prize, received a judge’s special mention in the Renard Press Building Bridges competition and was longlisted for the Frontier poetry challenge.
Today, I am one year and eight months sober. I am an ambassador for Lancashire Mind, I’m a publisher, and I am a poet again. My life of excess was replaced with illness, then slowly with hope. My mantra remains simple: choose life, over and over again. And on the hardest mornings, the only words I can still say to myself: well done, you didn’t die.
Well Done, You Didn’t Die is published by Verve Poetry Press, £8.99. aftershockreview.com