Rolling in the Muck, Dancing with the Law: A Story of “Addiction” and the Remaking of a Self

Abstract

I spent the first decade of my existence in the small working class and mostly white Catholic mining town of Birtley in north-east England. Aside from labouring full-time as a parent to my siblings and I my mother worked as an Avon-lady, while my father, having worked down the mines upon leaving school, then became a police officer. Adored, disciplined and comfortably acquiescent here to the demands of a divine sovereign promising immortality in paradise, when I was ten my parents, successful in their chosen careers and socially mobile, moved us to the new town of Washington. In some ways, this marked the end of my childhood. Thrown into a liminal space, distressing recurrent dreams involving the movement of time, space and matter first entered into my conscious experience. I would wake from these and my mother would find me sitting at the top of the stairwell outside my bedroom in a semi-conscious state of terror.