It's finished.
Only took six years
Started writing my book proper in 2018.
Six years later it's finished.
If you ever wanted to know what's the deal with that woman, this is the book for you.
I've resisted getting a book agent until now. But it's time, considering I got over 400k views on the thread that inspired the chapter, An Ethnography of Black, White and Brown Working Class Men.
I posted the first half of the introduction to the book in this post. And here’s the January 2022 newsletter 'Radical honesty’, that made me determined to finish the book.
N.B The big reveal is NOT about me having ADHD. I wish it was that simple.
Writing this book has been an exercise in delayed gratification. It took six years to write but is all the better for it.
I don't feel particularly under pressure to find an agent. One will come along that's right for me. And I expect it will be published at some point. I'm in no real hurry. Got enough on my plate to deal with at
and with other journalism work.Nonetheless I changed a word in the manuscript (plus added about 1000 words since I declared it was finished. Things evolve ya know)
My doomed twin had diagnosed me when dozens of doctors couldn’t.
Which is the point, really. We are so similar we may as well be brother and sister. Who fight.
So one of the things I forgot to put in my pitch (not sure it was necessary to do so as it may put an agent off) is part of the book is this meta thing of me struggling to finish writing the book (for reasons that are revealed later on)
I've enjoyed writing that in the last few months. I'm a very quick writer. Once I've thought something through I can write about 2000 words in an hour. Yet this book took 6 years to write... strange right?
Well if it ever gets published, you'll find out why!
Reach out if you are a book agent (or publisher) that works with foreign correspondents and journalists and want to read the rest.
Here's the second half:
NOT FOR SALE OR DISTRIBUTION
© Samantha Asumadu
INTRODUCTION PART 2
..As I edged back and the other journalists clamoured forward I remembered her comment, part of a conversation with the protagonist I think, the white male protagonist of course in a film about an African genocide. I remembered my boyfriend and I crying. It had been a bonding moment.
Back in 2018 listening to a radio debate about mental health on LBC, a London centric phone-in and talk radio station, a woman caller described something that sounded very similar to my off and on feelings since that reporting trip. She had been working in Borough Market when it was attacked by some determined men with knives and a van who had deliberately driven into pedestrians on London Bridge, and then crashed on the south bank. They had then gone to Borough Market where they stabbed multiple people in and around restaurants and pubs in what was later deemed a terrorist attack.
She told the presenter her story about having sleepless nights, time off work and anxiety and described it as PTSD. I began to wonder did I have PTSD? For a while after the Bududa landslides in a remote region of Eastern Uganda in 2010 I too had sleepless and nightmare filled nights but rather than dream of dead bodies I saw rhinoceros and elephant skin similar to the ashy look of the many dead victims of the landslide.
But then again when I was twenty-two a former colleague who I worked with at a documentary post house that hosted 2nd tier BBC factual and daytime programming had called me unstable. It had seemed fitting then and just past forty-three now I have since been called fiery, stubborn, moody, bitch, a cow, cunt.
In July 2018 after a year’s break or more officially, a sabbatical from the online world and the organisation I founded in 2013 I wrote about my months working on a construction site and what it taught me about working class men and Brexit. Before I submitted the article to the Telegraph I met a friend, a boy and writer, someone who I had spent a tremendous amount of time with in the year before I went offline.
We met at BFI Southbank in Waterloo. We had often met there, or restaurants, Festival Hall, the 5th floor floor balcony of Southbank Centre in 2016. Anywhere we'd be alone.
We had a drink and he read the introduction to this book, bar these paragraphs of course, in front of me. He’s not much of a public reader. i.e. I had never seen him read anything more than a book jacket in the ten years I’d known him. So I sat on tenterhooks as he read, seemingly rapt, I valued his opinion see.
I hadn’t seen him for two years, but in the year before that we’d spent a huge amount of time together. We had become each other, or at least each other’s cerebral self. We'd created our own language, our own shorthand and our own secrets.
When we weren’t together we were whatsapping. Whatsapping as the Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a fascist who shouted “Britain First” and “Keep Britain Independent”, as he shot and stabbed her.
Whatsapping when nine protesters from Black Lives Matter UK got on to the runway and chained themselves together, shutting down London’s City airport.
Together at Southbank Centre having just watched Ben Okri in conversation with Jeremy Corbyn on 5 July 2016 when a coup d'état was attempted by Turkish Armed Forces against state institutions, including the government and President Erdoğan.
And in all that time we’d never touched. Not in that year, not in ten years, bar once.
For all of three seconds we held hands at a literary night where he'd just announced we would be publishing a book together. His publishing press, my writers. It may as well have been a high five, as we were actually just acknowledging how fucking great we were when we worked together. We were building empires and we were killing it.
We were on the rise in those months, working hard, finding comfort in each other (mostly).
When we weren’t working, we would be telling each other our woes, our frustrations with ‘lesser’ artists. The fakes, the inauthentic ethnics, our hates, our loves, our jealousies, sex, death.
He would send me his videos. I would send him my articles and school him on his politics (We had different ideas of what a liberal was).
We'd post public messages with our private jokes and jabs on social media, knowing only we would understand them. He’d give me advice on my messy love life. Both of us looking for approval, comfort and perhaps an escape.
I was his conscience, he was my challenge, the Lyndsey Buckingham to my Stevie Nicks, without the substance abuse issues, just a little alcohol dependency on my part. A working class kid done good. Same as me. Because we were each other, but he was Brown and I was Black.
We cared about everything and nothing at all. That's what made us lethal.
So on this day we walked down the graffiti tunnel that connected South bank to Lower Marsh, to dinner, to drinks. I was knackered, as at that time I got up at 5am each day to start my job on the construction site I’d been working on for a few months. I would stay there until around six in the evening and on fun days go to the pub with the boys after.
We went to a cosy bar I‘d loved for years, which a few weeks later I would go to again by myself after I had quit. That was the night my article about class, misogyny, racism and Brexit was published in the Telegraph. I only take special people there, special people and me. A treat.
It was there he diagnosed me with ADHD. We were having probably one of our only banal conversations, refreshing. I had Ronan Farrow’s book ‘War and Peace’, with me (I was reading it on my down time at work alongside teaching myself how to do trigonometry) He said he would read it.
Something, something about TV. I said I rarely watch new TV series. I would instead re-watch a series that I like because I found it hard to concentrate on new things.
He said that sounds like you have ADHD. A friend of his had said something similar to him or maybe he was projecting and finding a way to talk about himself. I had obviously seen something in him and he in me that made us drawn to each other for over ten years.
I said erm, “don’t really know what that is”. In the days and weeks to follow I looked into it and suddenly my world, my whole life made sense. It seemed.
I’d had times where I thought I must be a psychopath or a sociopath, or be bipolar or god forbid have narcissistic personality disorder (during the Trump years I became very paranoid about the latter). So having such a straightforward (possible) diagnosis that explained why I had recurring negative thoughts was like managing to get a taste of the last bite of ice cream you dropped in the sweltering heat two hours ago.
I’d had recurring thoughts for decades. I’d say them to myself over and over again, sometimes out loud too. “You’re worthless, you’re worthless, you’re worthless. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself”.
My extended periods of activity, my extended periods of inactivity. The convoluted way I spoke, the convoluted way I wrote. My obsession with Rachmaninov and DJing. It made sense. This boy had made sense of me.
This boy whose company I had enjoyed, who just a few weeks later was screaming at me, and I was screaming at him, hurting each other, hurting those around us. My doomed twin had diagnosed me when dozens of doctors couldn’t.
So maybe it was PTSD or maybe it was ADHD, or maybe it was just me but I knew looking at the devastation in Bududa I had wanted to get away from breaking news reporting and back to making films asap.
Chapter 1. The Day I Thought I Would Die
I haven't gotten on the London tube in 14 years. Ever since I returned from living in East Africa. The last time on it I got in a panic, had an asthma attack and had to get a black taxi to the hospital. It was expensive. After that when I had need to explain to someone why I didn't get on the tube I'd tell them it was because I'd spent the last few years in East Africa, riding on motorbikes, I didn't like being underground. I believed it. For years. It wasn't until quite recently one of my oldest friends, told me “it's because of the landslide of course”.
I looked at him and said, “huh?” He said “well you're afraid”. “Of what?” I replied. “Of the tube tunnel collapsing on you and burying you alive”. It made sense. I just hadn't been able to see it.
Cont.
(Constructive comments welcome 🙏🏾)
P.S I know there is going to be some non-black women and /or middle class women who try to take my experiences and use them as their own. Trust me, I will hunt you down if you do and you will catch these hands