We’ve lost one of the girls.
I obviously didn’t know Caroline Flack. My friends and I often chatted as if we did though. We’d sit on a sofas in our homes joined together by TV and whatsapp, and talk about Flackers.
She seems like a good laugh
Yeah, down to earth, I like her.
Her legs are amazing.
Not sure about her new hair.
I like it. I’m getting it done.
Do your reckon she’s shagging Olly?
Hope so, they’d make a great couple.
I’m drunk.
Me too.
She’d be good to get drunk with.
Not sure about that dress mind, who’s her stylist?
Over the last 24 hours the chat was mostly this:
I can’t believe Flackers is dead.
WHAT?
I burst into tears.
I cried too.
She’s committed suicide.
WTF, Is this a joke?
Her poor family.
Do you think stuff was going to come out about her?
It’s just awful. Girls, I don’t want this to be you, always talk.
And we all feel weird about it. We can’t really get to grips with why we feel so shocked, so sad, why we can’t stop thinking about it. And we can’t stop talking about. We can’t work out why we feel so impacted by it, unlike other celebrity deaths. Why it’s so THERE for us. We didn’t know her!
But it’s simple. She was one of the girls. Whether we knew her or not.
She’s you, she’s me, she’s someone we’d like to be, someone we’d like to be friends with, someone we are friends with. She’s your sister, your cousin, your work buddy. She’s someone you love to dance with, have a drink with, go on holiday to Ibiza with. She’s gorgeous, she’s cool, she’s a top bird.
And now she’s dead.
One of the girls has gone. And it feels too close to home. It feels like it could be one of us.
We’ve dabbled with dark times too, been through hell, suffered. Needed help. We weren’t famous though. Sure, everyone feels anxious at times (usually around Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday evening) but it’s not the same as Killer Anxiety. Killer Anxiety is all-encompassing. It steals your rationality, it injects you with negativity, it leads you down a path of catastrophe. It tells you that bad things will happen, it lies to you about situations that are never going to happen. It convinces you that you’ll go to prison, abduct a child, stab someone accidentally, hurt your child, that you’ve got a brain tumour, that everyone hates you. It makes you believe you’ll drive over the bridge, it dares you to step in front of the train, even though you don’t want to. It fools you into believing things will never get better and that you’re not normal. It gifts you a constant sick feeling. It makes you feel very sad that you think all of these things. Over and over again. Every day. And the worst of it all is that you know it’s anxiety and you can’t stop it, so then you are anxious about the fact you have anxiety. IT’S EXHAUSTING.
Now imagine this with the paparazzi camped on your doorstep, photos of you in national newspapers every day with lies printed about you. With spectators and trolls talking about you every day on social media, tweeting and messaging you that you’re basically a shit person. That you’re guilty, toxic, desperate, lonely, unlovable, violent, troubled.
Killer Anxiety loves this kind of company. They get on well.
At its worst, Killer Anxiety whispers to you that it would be much easier to be dead. If you’re lucky it’s just a whisper and the sweet sweet sound of a happier life eventually plays louder and the whispering stops.
But for Caroline, the Killer Anxiety’s best mates – the tabloids, the trolls, the unkind people - egged on that whisper, they amplified it, supported it, made it talk louder, turned it up to 10. It was deafening - it’s all that she could hear – and Killer Anxiety did its thing. It killed her.
We’ve lost one of the girls.