A Story of Woe and History of FOE
I’m Harry, the founder of FOE. And here’s the story of how I came to launch it.
Fair warning, it’s a bit of a sad read, but (hopefully) an uplifting one also.
Three years ago my father died of cancer. Thirty days later, my mother was paralysed from the waist down when a 21-year-old drove into the back of her car. A couple of months later still, my grandfather died. At around the same time, my then relationship broke down, our family home was sold at a loss (the house was laden with debt, and it was a repossession in all but name), and the final dagger through my heart — with no permanent place for him, my beloved basset hound had to be re-homed with my grandmother.
It was an awful time as you may imagine, and all I could think was: how is it possible for so much to go wrong so quickly? Or as my sister said at the time, ‘All my worst fears have come true.’
I was riven by it all. So much so that I left a job I’d recently started and loved and upped and left London — my home for years — to travel, hoping to avoid the nervous breakdown I felt so precipitously close to.
The trip itself was a mixed bag. You don’t make great decisions under duress, I learnt. At once grateful to no longer be walking around London leaden with grief, but also experiencing depersonalisation so intense I was sometimes surprised that I’d left footprints in the sand beneath me. None of this helped by the bad luck that seemed to follow me out there, including breaking four ribs when I fell down some stairs. Well, bad luck and stupidity.
After ten long months my mother was discharged from hospital and, through a charity, she at least had some adapted accommodation in Exeter to go to. Nearing her release, I wound down my trip and came back to the UK to help. Ostensibly, this was to be for six-weeks. It ended up being 18-months.
The NHS, whilst great, had released her in a battered manual wheelchair almost comically unfit for her needs. In those early days, bar some carers bookending the day, it was pretty solitary. Later, a team including physios, OTs, case managers, etc. would be built around her, and my presence became less essential.
If you’ve cared for anyone with life-changing injuries, you’ll know it’s challenging. An entire world of limitations presents itself, where a dropped phone or raised step can spell catastrophe. What’s more, it can be upsetting and lonely. As for my mother, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone whose stoicism and resilience in the face of such adversity has been so indefatigable. Adversity that’s ongoing, that always will be.
Work-wise, I found opportunities almost impossible to come by, despite having (what I thought anyway) good experience as a creative. As my efforts fruitlessly dragged on, the feeling of being excommunicated from a career in modest ascendency to a professional hinterland became more pronounced. Finally, a form of career paralysis set in. I also found it impossible to disabuse myself that I wasn’t just unlucky but somehow cursed.
The events of 2022 had so transformed me that they manifested in a preoccupation with fatalism, of reliving mistakes, of reliving the past, and an almost pathological aversion to risk. It’s no way to live. But with some distance and time, I’ve now realised that this was a momentary reaction — a paroxysm— and not some permanent state of being.
That said, it didn’t help that I simply continued to have terrible luck, such as: a knee-high flash flood in a house I was house-sitting. A job lead Gmail thoughtfully hid in my Junk inbox so that I only saw it a month later, when the opportunity was dead and buried.
So, what changed? A number of things helped: some on-and-off therapy, exploring the outdoors again, friendships, and, most importantly, meeting someone who understood where I was in my life at that time. That is to say: thinking it was all but over at the age of 36.
The other thing was interrogating and confronting the stasis that had blighted my professional life. I needed to regain not only agency there, something that had been lacking since the multiple bereavements of three years ago, but also recover the self-esteem and confidence to fail again. The world was my oyster, and it was time to stop choking on it.
So, what did I want to do if I could do anything? Well, if you’ve had a look around, you may be able to guess… Start a clothing company. And once the idea stopped seeming so ridiculous (it still hasn’t, truth be told), I began exhaustively researching it. Before I knew it, I’d hired a branding designer, contacted manufacturers, and numbingly waited for the myriad numbers HMRC make you apply for in order to start a business. But start a business I did. I suppose a benefit of having one’s life so resolutely fall apart is that it eventually emboldens you with a devil-may-care resolve. But make no mistake, I’ve bet the farm on this (so to speak).
As for the name — FOE (freedom of expression) — I wanted something that spoke to the combative mindset I had to employ to get through those times. As well as a name that functioned as a neat acronym, giving it a secondary meaning. Around the time I was hunting for a name, I read Carolyn Forché’s excellent What You Have Heard Is True. It’s a book about the civil war in El Salvador and bearing witness to it. It’s a devastating read, and was lent to me by the same woman who’d come into my life acting as a powerful and positive agent of change, of renewal. That she also happens to work in human rights, meant things seemed to coalesce around this theme. All roads pointed to Rome, as it were.
So, this is me dusting myself off again. It’s small and scrappy, but it’s got heart. What’s more, I really love the clothes that I’ve made — unabashedly so. This small run is sturdy, thick, made responsibly from organic cotton in Portugal. You can wear these into the ground and look and feel good doing it. Anyway, that’s enough of the hard sell… I sincerely hope you enjoy them.
Lastly, if you’re going through it right now, I also really hope that you find the thing or person that makes life bearable again for you. There are manifest platitudes and truisms that people can and will level at you in times of crisis, but some are especially infuriating because they’re largely true — time the great healer, being one of them.
I know some things will stay with me forever, though. Acute things, like: finding a newspaper clipping after my father’s death on a recent advancement in oncology that he wanted to share with his doctor in a last-gasp effort to save his life. Or, the image of my mother lying in Salisbury Spinal Centre under her bedsheets at night, stifling tears so as not to disturb the other patients on the ward, as she grieved her recently deceased father.
In so far as getting over something like what we went through (I’m quite partial to the term ‘emotional blitzkrieg’), I’m not sure you really do… You right yourself as best you can, and try not to let it darken your worldview. And god knows we need more light around here, don’t you think?
Harry
Founder
