You Saw Me Laughing. I Was Drowning.

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]A lot of you watched this Salt House Dock, a Liverpool 2021. You saw me laughing in the water, splashing, trying to get the hang of that paddle board.

[00:00:10]But what you didn't see was what I was thinking in that exact moment. And I still remember exactly what I was thinking. I was trying to work out how long it would take me to lose consciousness if I just let go and let myself go under the water. Right, good time for a disclaimer before I go any further. Uh, this video is going to be honest about depression and suicidal thoughts. And I'm going to try my best not to do it in a doom and gloom kind of way because sat here right now, genuinely, I don't see it like that. And the last thing I want to do is trigger anybody or bring you down. But if it is a bit close to home and you need some support, everything you need is down in the video description. Really, all those years in radio taught me one thing. You can talk about absolutely anything as long as you don't bring down the room.

[00:00:56]So bear with me. So it was back in the early summer of 2021. Everything looked perfect. Our YouTube channel was growing like crazy. We had this extraordinary life on the water. People were writing and commenting saying how much we'd inspired them to change their lives. And every single bit of it was real and good. Although, if I'm being completely honest, I reckon at least 80% of the subscribers just wanted to see Otus, which is fair enough because he's a lot cuter than I am. And that's what made what was happening underneath it all so completely impossible to explain.

[00:01:31]Nothing specific had happened. Nobody had died. Nobody had left. The boat was fine. Me and Sean were fine. But my brain had just decided, which actually made things worse. We just left the River Weaver. Uh we were with our amazing friends Fran and Rich.

[00:01:48]Uh, two boats, four people, three dogs, and a pilot who was a bit of a combination between Captain Bird's Eye and my old college headmaster. It should have been one of the most exciting boating adventures we'd had. Manchester Ship Canal, the River Murzy, and returning to Liverpool docks. Now, the River Murzy is vast. It's dangerous.

[00:02:10]It's got this personality that I think matches the people of Liverpool. They don't mess about. It's raw. It's enormous. and a little bit intimidating and I remember sitting on the roof of the boat as we were crossing thinking this is just the absolute best life. Let me just say one thing about sitting on the roof by the way. Technically on a roof crossing the Murzy, it's not advisable, but that was kind of always my relationship with technically. Now somewhere underneath that thought about being the best life, I think something was already moving, just quiet, like something shifting in the deep murky waters in the mury underneath us. I could feel it. And I think anybody who suffered from depression would probably recognize it. At the time I told myself I was probably tired. I'd been busy weeks of planning and logistics for the Murzy crossing. And there was probably another list of excuses I could have come up with. Same ones that you give yourself when you're not ready to admit what's actually going on in your mind.

[00:03:12]But we did it. We came off the Murzy uh through Liverpool docks. And I want to be really clear about this. Even though we've said it several times before, Liverpool is my favorite boating city.

[00:03:23]It really is. Salt House dock. Uh the live building watching over you as you come in. Whenever we took the boat to Liverpool, it was always like being welcomed home. It never judged us, which given some of the things that we filmed on that boat, I think was actually very gracious of them. Once we'd got mowed up and settled, I think my brain had a chance to slow down a bit after all the filming over the space of that few hours and I was in my favorite place surrounded by people that I loved and it just hit me. Not gradually, not like a tide coming in. It was more like a door just slamming like somebody reached into my head and just switched something. One minute I was laughing on the pontoon and the next I was just somewhere else completely. It felt like somewhere with no way out and nothing. Not the city, not the friends, not Otus or Shan or the sunshine bouncing off the water. Nothing could reach me where I'd gone. And I think that's one of the things about depression that nobody tells you. It doesn't always creep up on you. It's not always necessarily caused by something.

[00:04:29]Sometimes you can be in your favorite place with your favorite people with your best life on a perfectly good Tuesday afternoon and it just pulls the floor from underneath you. Those of you that have been with us since the beginning, maybe you watched that Liverpool video. You laughed as we were trying to balance on the paddle boards, splashing about in Salt House Dock. You left thousands of comments on that video and I read and replied to every single one of them, I think. And I was grateful and I smiled and I was looking at the camera and laughing and I just couldn't tell you the truth. Not because I didn't trust you, but because I I barely had the words for it myself. And honestly, because in my mind at the time, that wasn't why you were there. You came for the positivity, the views, the sunshine on the water, the laughter, the innuendo, and the idea that a different kind of life was possible. And I wanted to give you that genuinely. I wasn't performing happiness to try and deceive anybody. I wanted you to feel good. I wanted you to I wanted to be part of your day that made things lighter. And I just couldn't tell you that the person who was trying to make your day lighter was at that exact moment barely keeping his head above water or even wanting to at that point. Because one thing I've learned, and what I wish somebody had told me sooner, and a lot of people who suffer from depression already know this, is that you can have everything.

[00:05:55]You can have a life that looks from the outside idilic. You can have love from your partner, partner of your dreams.

[00:06:02]You can have freedom and good friends and work that means something. But depression doesn't look at any of that and think, "Oh, fair enough. He's sorted. I'll leave him alone." It doesn't care about how you strive to make people smile. doesn't check how much you earn or what you're grateful for or how many people might swap lives with you in an instant. It just kind of swallows you whole and not in a good way. Now, nobody missed it because they didn't care. They missed it because I edited it that way. The hours of lying on the bed crying and Sean panicking and me disappearing for hours at a time, we never filmed that. And when the camera was running, every desperate moment, every blank stare at the water, every minute that I just felt nothing, that was all cut, gone. There was 30 seconds laughing at something Richard said, and then we were moving on to the next scene. But that's what editing does. It can make life look like some sort of highlight. And I was very, very good at it.

[00:07:06]Depression can look like productivity. I think it can look like a joke. It can look like being the entertaining one, the the one at the back of the boat that's always laughing. It can look exactly like a successful YouTube channel. And this went on for days. And then I don't know how many days later, 10, maybe 12, I'd lost count by then.

[00:07:26]Something happened that I just didn't see coming. There was a lot of commotion in Canning Dock next to where we were mowed. It was really early, probably about 6:00 a.m. And it was the sort of noise that kind of pulls you out of yourself whether you want to or not.

[00:07:39]There was blue lights and shouting and screaming. And I went out, Sean came with me, and we went to see what was going on. I'm not going to go into what was going on cuz it was pretty tragic to be honest. But somebody else's story, not mine. But it was shocking and it was a bit too close to home to be honest.

[00:07:58]But it shook something loose in me that I think had been stuck for days now.

[00:08:02]While this was all going on, somebody, a stranger who'd been out for a morning jog, uh, he stopped right beside me, stood next to me, and he was asking what was going on. And we got talking, and I noticed it was Jeff Brazier. If you don't know who Jeff Brazier is, go and Google him. Now, what I will tell you is that he's somebody who spent a lot of time, a lot of his life doing exactly this, just showing up, talking to people. He runs mental health walks and talks. He writes about grief and survival. Just quietly, consistently being the sort of person who stands next to somebody and asks how they are and actually means it. Oh, and is extremely handsome, which I only mentioned because Sean's entire personality briefly left his body, which was impressive given his knees. I think he moved faster in that moment than he'd moved in the years before. Honestly though, I think given everything that had happened, the Jeff Brazier Sean thing, it kind of it made me smile the most I'd smiled in over a week. But here's the thing about that morning. Jeff didn't know what was going on with me. We weren't standing there having some profound therapeutic conversation. It was just a person in the right place at some unreasonable hour in the morning radiating this kind of calm steadiness. or it might have been steam because he was running and it was pretty cool at that time on a morning and somehow between the drama that was going on in Cannond dock, the blue lights, the early hour, Shawn quietly trying to hide his heart racing, something inside my head had changed and I started talking first to Jeff, then to Shawn, not all at once, but I did start and it was very slow and things only ever really changed slowly on a narrow boat, which is probably why it was so slow, about 3 and a half miles an hour.

[00:09:52]But I did start to lift out of it. And although that wasn't the first time it had happened, I think it was the worst.

[00:10:00]I did learn a few things. Not from a book, not from a therapist or from CBT or pills. I think just from that week in Liverpool, and that's that a horrible thought can feel true without it being true. A bad thought isn't always an instruction. And that water outside the boat at 6:00 in the morning, it's completely unbothered by how I was feeling. And it would still be there in 10 minutes and so would I.

[00:10:28]And then 10 minutes after that, and so would I. And then 10 minutes after that, and so on, and so on. It would still be there. I'm not going to tell you that I fixed it because I don't know how I fixed it or if I did. I don't know if it was the shock of what was going on that morning that did something to me.

[00:10:46]I do know that talking helps. It can release some of those thoughts and it can help you process things in a more realistic way rather than that kind of overthinking way, the spiral. I know you can generally feel helpless despite having the perfect life. And beyond that, all I can do is tell you how it felt for me. Now, that was 5 years ago.

[00:11:06]And what I can tell you is during those days in Liverpool, it became a bit of a turning point, I think, in more ways than one. Because coming out of the other side of it, it was the first time that I started to wonder quietly whether life on Silver Fox was still right for us or whether we had this different chapter coming. I don't know exactly how I feel about that. Those two and a half years on the boat were kind of everything. The life you saw was real even though it was edited. And I think something shifted in Liverpool that week that went beyond the depression and and it subsequently lifting. It was like Liverpool knew me and that's why it always felt and still does feels like home. It showed me something I think about myself that I couldn't quite unsee. Maybe some chapters end because they're supposed to or maybe some of them end because you nearly didn't make it to the next one and somewhere inside you knows that.

[00:12:04]I think if any of this feels familiar, not necessarily the boat or the canal or paddle boarding or Liverpool, just the feeling of it. Do you know what I mean?

[00:12:12]Performing, editing, smiling at the camera when something entirely different is going on underneath. I get it and I see you. Not in a creepy way. You don't need a reason. You don't need a reason to be bad enough yet. You don't need to be able to explain it or justify it or make it make sense before you're allowed to say something to somebody else. I think you just need to say it to anybody. Even if it's bad, and I say bad stuff, even just I'm not okay right now.

[00:12:45]That's enough. It's always been enough.

[00:12:47]And I wish somebody had told me that back on that pontoon in Liverpool in June 2021, but I'm telling you now.

[00:12:55]There's some links in the video description. real ones, by the way, not just the usual ones about buying my book and our honey. So, if today's one of those days for you, use them. If not, if you're watching this from a good place, hold on to it anyway, because one day, you never know, you might be exactly the right person in exactly the right place standing next to somebody who needs to hear it. Just like a slightly too handsome man on the side of Canondok at 6:00 in the morning was for me. Jeff Brazier I'm talking about not me dumpling for me well five years on from that now it's a new chapter new waters the locks and the sea big hills a bad back but I'm still here and I'm really genuinely glad that I stayed.

[00:13:44]Take care of yourself and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.