Every morning, after I open the curtains, I take a circular saw from my bedside table and slice down my sternum. I shove my fingers in between and pull my ribs apart, opening my heart & organs to the world. Sun rushes in. People. Opportunities. Love. Loss. Regret. Power. Strength. Weakness. Everything. I am totally exposed.

It is how I have decided to live my life.

You can’t help but notice I don’t hold back. Whether it’s a podcast about my mental breakdown, a blog about choking debt or…well, the next completely open thing I can write. As long as I write with my ribs pulled outwards, so you can see in.

I genuinely think about this every day. It is one of my ‘pillars’. The largest constructs of who I am or want to be, that prop me up, define how I live.

I was standing at a packed tram stop in the drizzly South London rush hour in 2003, listening to Elbow’s second album (their best) Cast of Thousands, fresh out the cellophane. The first track is Ribcage.

 

“I wanted to explode, to pull my ribs apart and let the sun inside” hit me like a sledgehammer in the solar plexus. I imagined, eyes closed, face to the drizzle, the sun hitting my heart and lungs. I held the thought, inspired. I spent the day focussing on it. Embedding it.

It’s a potent, forceful, determined image. It’s extremeness creates clarity. It’s not a grim act of self-immolation to me. I’m telling myself a story, over and over again with that image: Here I am. Here is everything. You can’t go back. Come at me.

We need symbols to cling to. Not for safety, but as guiding buoys in gale force winds.

Shouting to myself as the winds howls and the waves crash onto my head: “I AM THIS. I  WANT THIS. I AM GOING TO GET THERE. KEEP LOOKING AT THE BUOY. GET TO IT. CLING TO IT…When the winds die down, I’ll start on the next buoy. Further out, nearer my goal. Keep going. KEEP GOING” This symbol has got me through a few horrors and a lot of hard times.

The day I heard this song was a life changer. No jokes. I didn’t run around the tram stop screaming for a rotary saw and ripping my shirt off. I quietly, internally (phew!) resolved to live openly to everything good. To love and try more heartily, not building a cage around myself.

I find my open ribcage turns close hearted people away. I’m too open, too verbose, too soft, whatever. “Nick, you’re too intense” is something I get. The key is to try not to care. 

I found it hard working for buttoned down companies and bosses, because all I wanted to do was do my best, to help as best I could. As I’m so honest about myself and so determined to try my best and not let my perceived passionate moral structure slide, I have no ability to be political. Corporate life puts a giant hand on the ribcage. It does your buttons back up, puts on a coat, wraps duct tape around your arms and torso and tells you to put up and shut up. It made me miserable. My ribcageness threatened the status quo. The diesel thrum of The Machine. I was a pain in the arse. Well-meaning, but an ill fitting gear in a machine that had always turned the same way and always will, until it breaks, a long time from now, consuming thousands of souls for fuel...

It’s easy to have an image of me in a tie dyed shirt, open to the belly, spouting mad philosophical bollocks (umm, actually, that might be what I’m doing now, ha haaa). A man destined for crystal healing and drinking his own wee in a cult. Lovely.

I don’t think what I’m suggesting is sparko hippy fruitcakiness. Just peeling away the constructs that hold ourselves back. Not removing fear, but facing and accepting it. Fear makes us placid, accepting…drifting… Drifting sounds nice. Until you wake and see where you ended up.

I flitted from job to job. I would rise quickly, but my total honesty and inability to play the political long game left me and likely my bosses frustrated. “Why don’t we do this? This doesn’t work, let’s change it! I’ve invited one of our rivals for tea, because it would be great to share info as a community!” Always polite, enthusiastic, but boy was I hard work. Hard work/change/progress - I'm addicted to it, to making things happen.

I always knew I had to be an entrepreneur. Not wanted, had. I just hadn’t realised it until this predictable cycle of promotion, leave, rise, leave, well paid but lost, unsatisfied, drifting… Satisfaction just kept on sliding away from me. My god, I thought, maybe I’ll always drift, do the 9-8, see my wife on weekends, then die, wondering what life as myself, ribs apart, might have been like.

I had to be my own boss to be myself; to be able to try my best, to find out what I’m capable of. 

So I left. It wasn’t easy, none of this is. But being Ribcage meant I had to find out. To open my ribs up and let the failure, success, risk, problems, fear, flow into me. That’s the rub, you get it all. If you’re going to do it, you might as well run at fear & failure and get it out the way.

Fear controls us, if we let it

I wanted to design clothes. All the time my head kept telling me I’d be made a fool of. I had no experience, no degree, no career path through apparel design. I was a fool, about to make a fool of myself. But I had my pillar - I would pull my ribs apart and take the ridicule, the laughter, the failure, because maybe, maybe, it would work. I had to know.

Now I know. I have exhibits in the Design Museum and the V&A. I’ve won best-in-tests across the world. I’ve sold jackets that people love, passionately. The reviews are beyond my wildest dreams, seriously. This makes happy. I tried. My god, it's working. I had so many opportunities to not do this. To take the safe option and fail by not trying. It scares me how many times I nearly gave up. None of this is easy. So you need that totem to cling to - me, I have my ribs apart.

Living Ribcage is frightening, but exhilarating. I am alive, feeling, fighting, climbing, hugging, falling, learning, breathing hard, feeling hard, falling hard, getting better faster.

Move forward, don't get dragged into the brambles by life. The brambles are after us all.

I went for my first business hard. Very very hard. Stupid hard. Ultimately my lack of business management experience meant my first company failed. The clothes were great. I discovered I was good at lots of things, reasonable at things I thought I was good at and crap at others. My open heartedness meant I had to take my worst facets and failures on the chin.

Vulpine failed. Exhausted, I collapsed. I hadn’t metered my passion, but let it all out in one huge skyward afterburn, and was left depressed and suicidal. Heh, I didn’t say I was the expert at this!!

So I did it again. Started a new business, but with what I’d learnt. Not letting pain and failure close my ribs in, to disengage from life. I applied all I’d learnt.

I created FRAHM and life is better. By now I had learnt that being Ribcage isn’t just my career, but my loved ones, the countryside, health. I metered my effort, slowed it down the something my mind, my body and my family could handle.

My life isn’t some mad turbo liquid oxygen dash up in a rocket ship. It’s not private jets, groupie blowjobs, a cocaine fuelled boogie wonderland. I don’t want that garbage. It’s just me, my family, the dog, walks in the forest, bike rides and working bloody hard, but enjoying (most of) it. All done with commitment to myself, others and the idea of the open ribcage.

I need to live my best life. I don’t believe in a god. I’m going to die sometime today or the next N number of decades. Then I’ll be gone. Meat for the worms. That’s it. There’s a little less time every day. I better crack on and do it the right way today, not tomorrow.

I think, I hope, that my life or rather my experience of it does get a little bit better every day. As I learn I tweak tiny things and these aggregate into a better life. Not spectacular, not grinning all day every day, but contented, happy in my own skin. I did ok.

It doesn’t always go well. The brambles grab at us all, but as long as I’m still walking forwards, arms open, heart exposed, I can walk through these thorns, bleeding, scarred, tired, but still walking. Not hiding.

All I am is my experience of my own consciousness. I better make that some damned fine consciousness. I want to go to bed knowing I tried my best to live, experiencing it fully without hurting anyone. I want to know I tried hard things, that I didn’t give up, loved completely, lost completely but tried again and again. Running through the thorns, for the meadow beyond.

I want to know that I lived unarmored, with my arms open to it all, not over my face, cowering.

 

Thank you to Elbow and to David Hieatt and Mike Coulter at Do Lectures for inspiring me to get up this morning and write.

Nick.