BY POPULAR DEMAND, AND FOR ONE POST ONLY…

CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL INSOMNIAC BRINGS YOU...

THE
NEXT
THRILLING
INSTALMENT
OF

C

WEEK 57

CUE LA MUSICA DRAMATICA:

(Anyone that gets the aural reference gets a gold star.  I think I’m looking at you, Karita… )

This post follows on from the extraordinarily thrilling events detailed here.  The following may make no sense if you have not read them.  It may also may no sense if you have.  Then again, they were so tremendously exciting that if you read or have read them, you might die of a hedonism-induced heart attack, so proceed with caution.  Alternatively you might die of a boredom-induced heart attack so, again, proceed with caution.  If you really must read this pointless wank, be prepared to be blown away in amazement by my inspirational transcriptional crafting and the thrilling nature of the fabulous material contained herein.  Either that or expect to find a cure for chronic insomnia.

[The Scene:  C has just admitted to Pandora that it is inevitable that, as he has worked with her for some time, he cares for her in some way].

This should have set a fire of joy off in my heart; he was effectively telling me that he cared, in whatever way his profession allows, about me.  But I was too depressed, suicidal and fixated with his abandonment of me that I didn’t care.

Eyes firmly ensconced towards the floor, I made some noise of response suggesting that any response on his part was purely professional.

“Have these things been on your mind recently?” C queried.  I suppressed a laugh.  What a stupid fucking question to ask.  As if there’s ever anything else (other than suicide, I suppose) on my mind!

I shifted uncomfortably in the seat, and sat silently.  Eventually, whilst still avoiding his gaze completely, I nodded subtly.

“You’re frightened about how I’ll respond to what you want to say,” he said, proving once again his innate and remarkable aptitude for Stating the Fucking Obvious.

You know, at the time I didn’t make the connection.  Now, as I write this, the question seems slightly out of place with my refusal to admit to my suicidal ideation, and much more connected with my perceptions of what he felt about me.  Therefore, it seems he thought that the thing I wanted to say was that I am obsessed with him and want him to like and take care of me.  He’s bound to know that, is he not?  Why do I have to go through the affront of being forced to admit that verbally?  In this particular instance he was wrong.  I was considering telling him that I’m stockpiling medication.  Of course, whilst this is true, was my game-playing of telling/not telling him an avoidance technique to avoid telling him the rest?  Or was it, as I later denied, a “cry for help”?  Who knows.

Anyway, I told him that I didn’t want to discuss the matter with him, but he tried to point out that there were bound to have been things in the past that I had not wanted to address, but when I had, they were not as bad as I might have supposed.  Even though I couldn’t think of an example, I admitted that this had probably been the case at some point or another.

I listened intently to the progressively annoying rhythmic ticking of the clock throughout the ensuing silence.  At least the arseholes from the corridor had apparently been diffused (hopefully literally).

“It must be tricky to be in this position,” said C eventually, but I chose not to respond.  After a few minutes he went on a bit again about how I felt about him and what he thought about me, so he clearly thought – or, as he later proved, merely appeared to think – that everything I was hiding was related to this issue.

“So what if it’s tricky?” I asked mournfully, resenting the fact that he was making me more and more miserable – and, what’s more, visibly and verbally so – than I had been.

“I’m just putting that out there,” he replied.  I hate this fucking phrase of his.  Just say what the sodding hell it is that you want to say, C, please!  You’re the one that gets paid to have these fucking conversations, you need to do some of the fucking work here!

I ignored him, but was stunned – utterly stunned - when he said, “this goes back to what you said earlier about being homicidal or suicidal, doesn’t it?  Maybe you feel that you’re the cunt and that you may as well kill yourself.”

I looked up in a flash and gawked at him.  ”My God, you’re good,” I said, laughing in surprise.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: he doesn’t just look (a little bit) like Derren Brown.  He’s a fucking mindreader too.  Just when I thought he was felt that my thoughts were related to something completely different, he jumps in and works the dirty little enigma right out.

He appeared to be surprised that he had read my mind, and asked in what way.  I admitted, finally – and before I could change my mind – that I was stockpiling pills.  He asked which ones, and I said anything on which I could get my hands that I knew could be lethal in overdose.

Then I said, “have you ever seen a film called The Bridge?”  [I have become obsessed with watching this disturbing but very human masterpiece in the last fortnight or so, and would heartily recommend it to everyone].

“No, but it’s on my to-see list.  That’s the one where people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, right?”

“Yes.  Watch it.  It’s good.”

“You saw it recently?”

“Yes.  I was actually on the Golden Gate Bridge a few years ago,” I went on, sighing.  ”Unfortunately I was moderately sane at the time and didn’t consider jumping from it.  That was a mistake.”

He asked how long I’d been stockpiling for.  I wasn’t sure exactly but reckoned it was months.  I told him I’d become fixated with the film as I was fixated with suicide and that when I finally watched it, it was ‘beautiful’ (even if a jumper’s death itself is not the most pleasant).

Only 2% of jumpers have survived the leap from the Bridge.  C asked if any of them had been interviewed in the film, and as fortune would have it, one man with a severe form of bipolar disorder actually had been.  C was obviously hoping that this bloke would say he was glad that he was not killed.  As it happens, that’s exactly what he said, though I was cursory in my admissions of this to C.

In a later but related rant, I pointed out that stability in my life has been found on some occasions.  However, it’s only ever for a few months…maybe a few years if I’m exceptionally lucky.   The guy who lived to tell the tale of plunging into San Francisco Bay regretted jumping as soon as his hands left the railings, apparently, and was subsequently glad to have lived.  But…will he always be thus glad?  What happens if and when he’s back in the throes of the deepest, darkest, cruellest recesses of the human mind?  What happens if, for instance, his voices return, and order him to kill himself?  What happens, in general, if and when his stability is once again lost?

I wish him well, and hope that he doesn’t experience any suicidal ideation ever again, and I also hope he never has any reason to.  But in my own case, I don’t believe I can ever be cured, and indeed the whole ‘retraumatise-abandon’ issues of therapy’s closing weeks have led me to believe that I am going to be so badly traumatised all over again that a state where I can adequately manage my mentalism can never be attained.  Why bother, I philosophised to C, when it always comes back to this?  It’s a pointless, fruitless little dance of abject, round-the-fucking-mulberry-bush misery.  Why bother?

I went on to tell him about an interview in the film with the parents of a ‘successful’ jumper, the content of which mesmerised me.  The father said, his wife nodding quietly in agreement, that although they obviously missed their son very much and regretted that his life had been so marred by misery, they had a “who are we to challenge this?” attitude to his suicide.  They honestly felt that if his life was so unbearable, that it would have been selfish for them to have tried to keep him alive.  The father said, “some people talk of their body as a temple.  [Their son's] was a prison.”  Their mature selflessness, their humanity, brought me to silent tears.

“That’s an attitude that I think could be wisely fostered by many people,” I said.

“So, regarding you stockpiling these pills, you think I should just say, ‘OK, fair enough, kill yourself if you want to’, is that it?” he asked me.

“Maybe, but it wasn’t really you that came to mind when I regaled you with that story.  I’m more thinking about my mother.”  I exemplified by telling him about the third conversation detailed herein.

“Have you thoughts of actually taking these pills?” he questioned.

“Yes.  I am planning to do so, but not imminently.”

“You’ll be here next week?”

“Yes, unless something dramatic happens.”

“Where has this come from, Pandora?”

I considered the question briefly.  ”That fucking poison Venlafaxine doesn’t work,  this [therapy, a relevant gesture denoting his room] hasn’t work, isn’t being allowed time to work – I’m at least in the same mental position I was two years ago, and indeed it’s probably worse.”  At this juncture I went into the aforereferenced “what’s the point?  It always comes back to this” rant.

“This isn’t a life, this is an existence,” I declared (one of my favourite phrases, it seems).  ”That’s always been the case, but I had some tiny semblance of hope, quantum as it may often have been.  I don’t even feel that anymore.  Only a handful of people would miss me anyway, and what they don’t even realise is that they’d be better off without me.”

He asked how long my suicidal ideation had been building for, and I concluded it was since about April, which is when I started collecting prescriptions.

“If you take a massive overdose, you do realise you’ll be given your medication weekly,” he said.

“Of course, but that assumes that I awake from said overdose, which I have no intention of doing,” I responded in the blink of an eye.

“Are there times when you haven’t felt this way?  These thoughts seem especially strong of late.”

“I can honestly say that, in – oh? – the last 20 years, I think, there hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t thought about suicide to one extent or another.  I remember telling that to A once, and he said he couldn’t conceive of it.  I said that I couldn’t conceive of it not being the case.”

C annoyed me again by telling me that I am, he thinks, an expert in Not Killing Myself.

Right on, C.  What you don’t seem to realise, mate, despite my having already intimated the relevant information to you, is that I’m also an expert on not not killing myself.  There’s at least one newsgroup out there in the ether that details exact ways to do it (peacefully), and I am now intimately acquainted with the methods described therein.  In fact, there’s also at least three published books on the same issue – two get away with it by pretending they’re about euthanasia in the cases of terminal physical illness, but one is really open about having a pro-choice attitude towards topping yourself.  I have a copy of the latter.

(Actually, it’s a very interesting book to read even if you’re not intent on doing yourself in ((assuming you have some sort of interest in psychology, sociology, anthropology or any other -ology that takes an interest in the comings and goings of human beings)).  The first part of it, before the ‘methods’ section, includes quite a comprehensive consideration of suicide and suicidality as a societal phenomenon.  Much better than Emile Durkheim’s unbearable dirge on the same subject, though to be fair the whole approach is rather different and about 100 years more relevant).

Anyway, my feelings on suicide are meant to be for another post – one that is in the making, I promise.

I said, “it’s not through want of trying,” but the smug git instantaneously batted back with, “well, you don’t try to kill yourself every day.”

He cocked his head at me and said, “look, I take what you’re saying, I get that you feel this way.  I just think you must be fairly resilient as well.”

I laughed bitterly at him and proclaimed ‘resilient’ to be “not a word I would use to describe myself.”

And then….

Nothing.

Except…

Tick, tock…tick, tock….tick, tock.

I wanted to turn round, pull the offensive object off the wall and throw it out the window with a brute force seen only during absolute, unquantifiable rage.  Or maybe I could have considered throwing it at C’s face; that could have been an attractive option at points.  With the clock’s infuriating bloody tick tock mantra, I could hear my time with C ending, those few precious weeks disappearing down some cruel wormhole of time.  C rubs that finity in my face, NewVCB rubs it in my face, Mr fucking Director-Person rubs it in my face, and now even the bastarding clock thinks it is funny to rub it in my face (or, more specifically, eardrums).  Thanks, world.  Thanks so much, you fucking cunts!

After 17 super-eons (OK, there’s a considerable surfeit of casual cosmological terms in this post, what the fuck is that about?) he eventually said that perhaps I felt I was being left alone to deal with all this stuff.  I smiled cynically in response.

Wow, look at Einstein over there.  How insightful, C, that’s brilliant.  Well done.  Get out the champagne, my friend, because you have just come out with the psychological equivalent of the general theory of rela-fucking-tivity.  Or perhaps it’s something akin to the very first tentative bold but wise suggestions that the Earth was not, in fact, flat.  WELL. DONE. C.

“I’m used to that,” I whined.

I paused, then whinged for a few minutes more about how contemplating suicide was very comforting and liberating.  ”You know,” I said.  ”To know that you don’t have to put up with it any longer, to know that at any point you can just go, ‘fuck it, cheerio existence’.”

“Hmm, hmm,” he responded.

For some reason the ‘hmms’ enraged me, and I said, challengingly, “you don’t think I’m going to do it, do you?”

“That sounds like a dangerous mindset to get into,” he replied, furrowing his brow.  ”It’s like you think that for me to take how you feel seriously, you have to do something, such as taking an overdose, to make me believe…”

(Well, actually, asking for your help hasn’t fucking worked, so yeah, I could see how I might think this, as it happens.  STFU).

“I’m not trying to make a point to you,” I interrupted, shaking my head vigourously.  ”I just don’t think you think that I’m going to do it, and I am.”

He went off into a monologue in which he opined that he doesn’t think I have sat down and said, “right, let me make a point to C here…ha ha, I told you so,” but that I have, barely consciously, concluded that this is “the only way [I] can communicate how [I] feel”, and that the only way in which he will “actually understand” me is by my “showing it”.

“You see,” I sighed, again shaking my head at him, “you’re fixated on the idea that I want to communicate something.  I don’t want to communicate something.  I don’t want to exist.  That’s what I want.”  (Or rather don’t, I suppose).

Thinking that he was probably wondering why, then, I had bothered to communicate this information to him, I said that I was only telling him about it because he had already worked it out with his Derren Brown/Mysterion-like powers of mental deduction.  Which, although the matter had been floating around in my mind throughout the session, was sort of true.  Intellectually, I always knew I should tell him, but as already discussed, I really didn’t want to.

“What’s that like for you?  That you feel I’m not taking you seriously?” he asked.

“It doesn’t particularly surprise me,” I responded, in what might have been a slightly pompous, dismissive tone.  Just maybe and just slightly…hmm.  Then, “everybody thinks it’s a ‘cry wolf’ issue.”

He said, “so what did you think I was going to say?  Sort of brush it off and say, ‘oh never mind, she won’t do it’, or what..?”

I smiled cruelly and said,  ”I expected you to say, ‘maybe you should phone the Samaritans’.”  I laughed slightly at the idea, of which he had previously been a proponent.

This remark, to my considerable surprise, seemed to cut him to the bone, to the extent that, despite my palpable wryness at this juncture, I actually felt guilty.

C sighed and said, apparently very earnestly, “I hope I take you seriously – well, I do take you seriously…I hope you feel I take you seriously.”

“Is that a question?” I checked, and he nodded uncertainly.

Overcome with my own guilt, I said, “I do, yeah.”  Which is mostly the truth; I just get so frustrated at the difficult circumstances under which we presently find ourselves, and end up remembering every little thing he has done to piss me off.  In general, it is not my held position in the least that he patronises or dismisses me, and it was indeed cruel, by dent of my underhand Samaritans comment, to suggest otherwise.

“Look, I just wonder if the fact that I’ve actually bothered to tell you this means that you think it’s indicative of it being some silly cry for help, which it isn’t,” I told him, trying to be as nice as I could about it.

“That suggests that wanting help is silly, which I don’t think,” he told me.

“Let me rephrase, then.  What do they call people like me in general…manipulative?  Attention seeking?  Some other pejorative nasty referencing how annoying I am?”

He ignored the latter part of my statement and replied, with enraging reasonableness, that “I see it as that someone who is in distress quite justly wants or needs to be attended to”.

I looked away, unable to think of a clever comeback, and listened to the sodding, cunting, fucking, bastarding clock ticking away the last few seconds of my time with him that morning.

“We’re going to have to finish for today,” he predictably told me in due course.  ”But this is something for us to be looking at [oh, really?] and for me to be taking seriously with you.  I’ll be bringing this back up next week [oh really? x II].”

“OK,” I nodded, and I went to leave.

He stopped me from going however, which – as noted on the only other occasion that I remember him doing it, not that I can be arsed looking for the link right now – suggests that he is actually worried about my state of mind.  I suppose having had me just confess that I have a lethal amount of pills that I fully intend to ingest might just create such worry, to be fair.  Though it is only professional concern, I remain convinced.

“The most important thing for now,” he started, “is that that you’re saying that you don’t have any plans to enact this lethal act today, or in the immediate future.  You’re not going to do this now.  You will be here next week?”

“I have a date in mind which is not in the next week,” I confirmed.

He looked visibly relieved, though I suspect that is only in relative terms.  I tried to smile reassuringly, but I’m not sure I succeeded.

I was still alive for the next session, about which I hope to write soon, and during which I apologised for the laughable histrionics about which you have just read.  It sounds so pathetically childish and self-absorbed as I read it back, but then in thinking that I am betraying my own position on suicide, which is that it is not a per se selfish act.

For those of you convinced that I’ll be dead shortly, please don’t worry.  I told A on Friday night that I’ll try my best to remain alive until such times as a natural or accidental death is forthcoming, and that’s about as big a reassurance as I can give.

There’s very little of amusement on which I can end this.  So I’ll just take the finality of this post out of my hands  [Warning: do not view the embedded video if you are overly PC, offended easily, have a sense of humour that is not sick or twisted, yadda, blah, meh, gah, la, da, de, wah, etc]

Click here to view the embedded video.

This meeting took place on Tuesday 29th June (C had swapped his days from Thursday), but should have been on Thursday 24th.  As stated and explained the other day, for the first time in our entire relationship, I cancelled the session on the 24th, so this was the first time I saw him in over a week.

Mutual agreement was that the session had ended up being a bit disjointed, but I think in some ways it was nevertheless useful – certainly much more so than the Thursday one would have been had I gone.

The conversation opened with a rant from me on how horrified I was that, straight after leaving C’s office, I would be forced to see Paedo, after my mother’s non-consultative decision to take me to Hotel California.  It feels a little odd writing about this now, as I have been and gone on this delightful little sojourn, and in the end it went as OK as such things can.  However, I was certainly not looking forward to it as I sat there with C, and must confess to being somewhat critical of my mother for some time.

I don’t remember exactly what was said, but there was one point at which he really annoyed me. He asked me if I was pissed off at having to see Paedo, or everybody else. I responded by telling him that both troubled me. He then went on to enquire as to whether there was “any value” in my mother encouraging me to see the non-Paedo members of the family.

I pointed out that I had nothing in common with them and could not see what benefit having some sort of relationship with any of them would have. “Of course,” I acknowledged, “whilst my view is that family is mere genetics, my mother’s is that blood is thicker than water.”

“I think that’s the point,” he said.

I’m sorry, but what the fuck? Even if there was value in the pursuit, even if there genuinely was, it’s fucking irrelevant because Paedo is there anyway.

I made some noise about not existing to keep my mother happy, and told him that the reality is that my mother is a hypocrite because she spends half her life slagging the McFauls off. I bitch about them here and to A, for example, but I generally avoid unsolicited criticism of them in front of my mother.

C responded by reminding me that my mother was also traumatised (due, of course, to her experiences of long-term domestic violence). So that makes it alright for her to force me to live through my traumas, or for her to be have hypocritically? How does that work?

To be fair to C, I’m paraphrasing considerably here because of my poor memory. I eventually conceded that although I fail to see the point of a relationship with most members of my family, I was willing to continue to have one of some description or another because it pleases my mother. “However,” I said, “I still don’t think it reasonable to have to face him.”

The stupid but inevitable question of whether I could see them without him was raised, but the answer is pretty definitively ‘no’.

I’m not sure what I had been looking for in discussing this with C. Was I looking for him to forbid me from going? So that the reinforcement of the earlier opinions that I should avoid Paedo due to the psychotic symptoms he has induced re-emphasised to me how dangerous it was.

Whatever the case, I also pointed out that this trip would see my first encounter with Sean, Marcus’ baby brother, who is named after Paedo. I told C that I was scared that I would react badly to the faultless child because he represents an honour bestowed upon Paedo. He, to my considerable irritation, proceeded to point out to me that I had not reacted badly to Marcus, despite my general dislike for children.

“Marcus isn’t named after the man who sexually abused me,” I seethed through gritted teeth.

“No, but you told me that the baby is known by a shortened form of your uncle’s name,” he pointed out [if Paedo is James, the baby is Jim]. “Isn’t that the case?”

This was correct, but I figured at the time that it would make no difference to my reaction. However, it turned out that C was pretty much right; I definitely saw the kid as being the diminutive of his name, rather than as his full, Paedo-related title. It’s funny how much difference a few little letters make, even if the symbolism is the same.

Anyhow, C enquired as to whether I would hold the kid. I told him that, if past experience was anything to go by, I’d have it pushed onto with or without my consent. I have to say this has always made me feel slightly uncomfortable, but it happens and you deal with it accordingly.

“So I’ll survive,” I shrugged.

He smiled wryly, and said, at which point I wanted to smash his face in, that I might enjoy holding the kid.

I told him that I did not share his apparent optimism, and decided that that angle of conversation needed to desist. I confessed to feeling guilty about slagging off my mother, and told him I had a little anecdote.

The previous evening I had been in the shower at my mother’s house and had seen a lot of little shower gels and whatnot that she’s picked up from hotels. This reminded me that she had collected a bunch of these things for me a few weeks previously, but then had accidentally left a bag full of them in a coffee shop whilst out with her friend. Upon realisation of this, my mother phoned the shop in question, got them to hold the bag for her, and went and retrieved it for me.

I was disgusted that regaling this tale to C make my voice break because, as I said, “it’s the little things that count.” I was advised that just because my mother has not always been the most validating figure in my life, it does not mean that she does not love me very much.

Hmm. So he reads my mother’s mind now too, does he? She who he has never even met? Before he had cause to irritate me – or, more accurately, before I actually fucking cried – I changed the subject.

Don’t ask me how but I ended up telling him how laziness had dictated that I’d been taking a reduced dose of Seroquel for about a week, and had only the night before resumed taking my normal dose of 400mg. When I started to space out shortly after this, he seemed slightly concerned initially but I protested that it was probably a drug hangover.

“Is that normal with this medication?” he asked, and I confirmed that it was.

He looked dubious, then admitted if there wasn’t more to my daze.

“Maybe my mind has decided to dissociate this whole sorry day. I do hope so.”

This led to discussion of dissociation in general, though it was kind of brief and the content is consigned to history as I don’t remember it. What did happen was that the topic naturally progressed to a discussion of identity and a revision of the bollocks of the previous week about (a) a possible over identification with mentalism on my part (something that I continue to dispute) and (b) a fear of intimacy on my part (something that I am willing to acknowledge).

He banged on for a bit again about how much investment I have in engaging with other mentalists online. “They’re very real, don’t get me wrong,” he told me, “but as I’ve said previously, it’s almost like you’re looking to have relationships that exist only at arms’ length. Real and meaningful, yes – but different.”

This made me laugh a bit, which confused him. I clarified by saying that I was laughing as some sort of stupid response to sadness because “even online relationships have the power to hurt you very greatly.”

“Why?” he queried, seemingly slightly concerned. “Has something happened?”

I told him of the circumstances that led to this post, and advised on how I responded to it.

I was astonished when he started – gently, in fairness, but still infuriatingly – questioning if I had been behaving in a fashion that reasonably precipitated this fallout.

I denied this most vehemently. So someone who’s opinion I had otherwise respected decided they think I’m a shit writer who’s self-obsessed. That’s unfortunate, but other people’s opinions of me are only things that I can control within reason. If I was being a complete bitch, that’s obviously something for which I am responsible. If I was merely doing the same things that I have always been doing, as in this case, someone’s changed view of me is not something I caused or can change.

I told him so, but wouldn’t let the fuck up. He went back to all the wank with Mr Director-Person, my former colleagues, la la la. I wanted to rearrange his face. What’s especially galling is that C fucking encouraged my original correspondence with Mr D-P, and now he goes about accusing me of fucking aggression?

Of course, my attempts to defend myself were seen as evidence of my aggression. I find this circumstance grossly unfair. Are there times when I’m aggressive? Yes, of course there are. That, I am all but certain, applies to us all at times. Am I more so than others? Possibly, yes, but I really don’t get his fixation with the issue. It’s not that bad, and generally there is at least some (and usually more than just ‘some’) justification for such a reaction. But C seems obsessed with it, insofar as any psychotherapist is ever obsessed with anything that applies to their clients. I just don’t get it.

Rather than continue defending myself and apparently prove his point in doing so, I shut the fuck up. I glanced about me, at his desk, his bookcase, filing cabinet, yadda yadda. Eventually my eyes returned to his desk, where I was interested to note the presence of his iPhone. I noted with smug satisfaction that it was a 3G or 3GS, whereas I now have an iPhone 4.

Silence ensued for a minute or two, when he broke into my thoughts.

“What’s going through your mind?” he asked. “You’re staring into space there.”

“No I’m not,” I stated grandiosely. “I’m looking at your iPhone and thinking, ‘fuck you, I’ve got an iPhone 4 now’. Hahaha!”

His face developed into an enigmatic sort of expression. Jealousy? Yes, I think so, but also bafflement. It was vaguely amusing to observe.

Eventually, he asked if I had really been thinking that.

“Yes,” I confirmed, “why wouldn’t I have been?”

“So, you have a sense of triumphalism – again – about this.”

Jesus fucking Christ.  I mean, JESUS CHRIST!!!!! Is there anything, anything at all, that does not have an ulterior psychological motive?! What the fuck?! Everyone who has got a fucking iPhone 4 is a smug, self-satisfied twat. Why am I such a fucking guinea pig-like example to him of supposedly flawed psychology, when the reality is that in some ways I am just as fucking ordinary as anybody fucking else?

I responded to his insult with a redacted and calmer version of the preceding paragraph.

“Again, were you really thinking that?” he pressed on. “During that pause you looked upset, not pleased or smug or anything like that.”

I shrugged and proceeded to ignore him, instigating yet another silence.

Eventually, I cautiously began to tell him that it seemed obvious to me from his continual harping on my alleged aggression that he thought I was a belligerent bitch of Satan and that he hated me. This was perhaps exacerbated by a newly acquired submissive, almost child-like stance on my part. Plus some evident upset at these possibilities. Just a little of that. Yeah. Right.

His reaction was extremely interesting to me. He seemed taken aback by my assertion that I believed that he hated me – though I am certain I have postulated the idea to him in the past – and he took a few minutes to think about it. Thanks for boosting my confidence there, C.

Eventually he entered into a rather epic soliloquy about the issue. He talked for quite a while, but the long and the short of it was that I have many, many different facets to me, of which assertiveness (as he had now renamed it) was only one. “If you were always like that, well yes – it would be very hard to like you. But you’re not, so…[here he clearly realised he was teetering on a dangerous line]…so, well, again – you have many more sides to you than just that. I don’t think that defines you by any means.”

“OK,” I responded, meekly and unconvinced.

He sat looking at me intently, his chin in his right hand, his index finger crossing his mouth at a diagonal angle. He always does this when he is considering something intensely. I wonder if he is even aware of this behaviour.

I avoided his gaze and stared at my shoes, but his eyes bored into me, and eventually he spoke.

He said, very slowly and very definitely, “there’s more to this, isn’t there?”

Such a simple statement, but so laden with deep connotations that someone outside the therapeutic dyad would surely struggle to understand.

I pretended to think about it, the operative word there being ‘pretended’. Of course there’s more to it, and really it surprises me that he’s only worked out the magnitude of it.

“Maybe,” I admitted, quietly.

And so the immortal line of, “we’re going to have to leave it there,” came to pass – but there was a second part to the quotation this time. “We’re going to have to look into this in much more detail. You know that, don’t you?”

I nodded and left, perhaps ostentatiously hurriedly. I sat in Disraeli, my car, for a long time, hugging the steering wheel. Thinking, contemplating, ruminating, musing.

This all sounds very cryptic, but of course there was an unspoken understanding between C and me. In essence, he’s worked out that issues of transference in our relationship are not just confined to attachment. It runs very much deeper than that. I’ve been fairly open on this blog on the issue in the past and I don’t want to repeat myself because it fucking hurts like hell to do so. I don’t want to face it either myself or with him. I want it TO GO AWAY.

It’s difficult because, despite some of the twatty things he says and my anger at same, overall I am glad to report that I have a good therapeutic relationship, and one that I think is effective. I also recognise transference as an inevitable side effect of that, demonstrative of the fact that the therapy is actually working to some extent. The difficulty in this case is that I am in the throes of this transferential obsession and being discharged, before we will ever be able to properly address the issue. Perhaps I am at fault because I never brought up the matter in terms of its intensity before, though the word ‘transference’ is bandied about quite a lot in our sessions. But, as any of you who’ve been there will appreciate, facing it head-on is a matter of profound difficulty.

On the issue of the end of therapy, and because I want to avoid discussing this even more, Mr Director-Person has still failed to respond to my most recent correspondence. I have therefore taken the liberty of writing back to him, a copy of the previous letter enclosed, asking for his response as a matter of urgency, though I was quite nice about it. I did, however, hear from his Assistant Director, as regards the personality disorder steering group that the Trust is developing. The letter was official but pleasant and stated that, whilst the development of their PD services are in their infancy at present, they would be glad to have my input and will be in touch again as things progress. If C thinks he’s seen my aggression, he can think again They don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for!

NB. Please forgive the probably-multifarious amount of spelling, syntax, formatting and grammar errors in this post. I’ve been writing it for about 40 years and am sick looking at it, so am just going to publish it without adequate – indeed, any – proof-reading.  Sorries.

What’s wrong with me?  This pathetic malaise has been permeating my existence for weeks now.  I always had it to some extent, in fairness, but my small levels of creativity were at least granted some outlet here, and now I am disallowed even that simple pleasure.

I used to have a life.  A shit one, perhaps, but at least I could derive pleasure from some things.  I may not be quite as severely depressed at the minute as I have been at a number of previous junctures, but there’s something new now and it is, in some ways, almost as bad.  Everything is not a completely opaque sea of blackness, but I now see and experience everything as if there’s a veil between me and it.  Not in the sense of depersonalisation or derealisation necessarily, but as if there’s a haze of fuzzy discolouration everywhere that keeps me from enjoying any of the things I am genuinely lucky to have in this world, or even wanting to enjoy any of them.

This is an existence, not a life.

Anyway, I don’t know why but I wanted to write something.  I suppose I worry constantly that if I allow myself to avoid posting for a few days, I’ll fall into a rut of utter insouciance towards writing.  I’ve invested so much time and effort into this blog*, and I only want to discontinue writing when I actively choose to do so – which will not, I hope, be for many years.  However, I am intimately acquainted with the tenacious lure and power of inertia, and I do fear giving myself even so much as a few days’ break from writing will lead to a de facto dead blog.  I’m probably over-reacting, but I fear it considerably, and the thought makes me tearful and desperately sad.  How can one be so attached to a website?!

[ * I worked out today that over the 181 one published posts (before this one, which is 182), I have written in the region of 700,000 words.  I'm trying to get a plug-in to measure the figure exactly, but as a rough guide, there you have it.]

So, bearing in mind my fear of an apathetic fall from whatever low level of grace I may or may not be occupying, I’m going to publish the following pile of wank, which I wrote last Tuesday evening in the wake of the C session.  I was trying to articulate the exact nature of my misery, and while it’s drivelsome bullshit, I think it does grasp that reasonably well.  To be honest, it probably describes my current mood quite well too.

Alas.

I am not in the frame of mind to write anything here, but maybe that’s exactly why I need to do so.  Perhaps I need to articulate these so-called feelings that pervade my sorry consciousness (oops, did/does that sound like wallowing? ) I’ve had a strange day.  I saw C this morning – specifics to follow – which has set me up for a weird week; as I normally see him on Thursdays, I’m going about thinking that tomorrow’s Friday, and that A will be there for the weekend.  Since it’s not, the rest of the week stretches out, seemingly infinite in its loneliness. C has, I think, hit upon something I have been trying desperately to hide from him.  I don’t want to discuss it right now because it’s a sensitive issue, and in any case I might be mistaken in my reading of what he thinks (I don’t think I am, but then I suppose I wouldn’t think it if I did think I was wrong, would I..?  Hmm).  I may or may not be more forthcoming in my review of this session, but whatever the case, the matter reminds me yet again of how imminent the separation is (as Tossface Mr D-P still hasn’t bothered to respond to my recent ramblings) and how invested in therapy – in C – I am.  I mean, I already know this – I have done for a very long time – but until relatively recently I could box it up and store it away in some far-flung, virtually inaccessible area of my brain.  That fails to work nowadays, with this severance looming in the air.

So.  I feel rejected.  I feel lonely, yet simultaneously I feel the need to hide away from the world.  I feel forgotten and I feel cheated.  I feel desolate, sad, and depressed.  Tears prick my dissenting, hateful eyeballs, and I feel my bottom lip quivering in a threatening, child-like fashion that I have not felt (at least with this strength) for quite some time…well, apart from the last time I saw C, that is. I still think ‘grief’ is a good word.  Pre-emptive grief, but grief nevertheless.  I do not pretend to understand the horror of what living with the impending death of a loved one with a terminal illness (and I hope I’m not disrespecting anyone in saying this – many apologies if so), but this feels like the closest I’ve ever been to that situation.

Friendships often taper off in my experience, and whilst you may look back on them and regret not making more of an effort to sustain them or whatever, you’re not generally faced with the abject grief that an instantaneous dissolution of your relationship would bring.  The ending of some romantic relationships may be more sudden and hurtful, I suppose, but I still find myself thinking that this feels to me more akin to losing someone important to death.  Perhaps it is because I am fixated with death.  Perhaps I am just a histrionic bitch.  I don’t know.

Anyway.  That was pointless.  I’m always told I should put my “emotions” into words, rather than uttering an allegedly meaningless sentence such as, “I’m pissed off,” but then everyone knows how I’m tortured over the forthcoming end of my relationship with C.  How many dozens of thousands of words have I written on it?  Enough, that’s for sure.

I knew the time would come when I had no choice but to face him; even though I am now in the fortunate position of no longer having to see him and that side of the family with the frequency that I did as a child, not ever going to their house would raise many, many eyebrows. In all probability, the extended family would simply think I was either a selfish bitch, or that I was in the throes of a mercilessly long depression or something, but whatever the case, the power of one’s mother is very strong, and to that end I knew I’d have to face it eventually. I wanted this, however, to be entirely at a time of my choosing, and on my terms.

As if! I should have known that I was shockingly naive to even think that a possibility.

I went to my mother’s house on Monday this week, as I was seeing C (who had swapped his days from his usual Thursday) on Tuesday morning (I usually stay with my mother the night before C). I was sitting there in her living room at one point minding my own business when the phone rang; it became apparent as soon as my mother picked it up that the caller was my cousin Sarah, Maisie and Paedo’s still-resident-in-Paedo’s-house-despite-being-well-into-her-40s daughter. There was nothing unusual in the call itself – Sarah is a chatterbox who rings my mother with some frequency to harp endlessly on Very Little Indeed.

However, a few seconds into the conversation, my mother started abruptly, and put the phone under her arm.

“Shit, I forgot – I meant to ask you before now, Pandora,” she whispered urgently, “but are you OK to go to their house tomorrow?”

My face fell. I didn’t say anything for a few seconds, I just looked at her in a sort of disgusted desperation.

She either failed to notice my horror or she chose to ignore it. “Well?” she pressed, irritably.

“Um…I have to see C in the morning,” I replied, clutching at straws, whilst simultaneously trying to think of a better excuse to avoid the proposed sojourn.

“Yes, yes, I know, we’re not going that early. It’s OK to go after that, I take it?”

My mind failed me and went completely blank. Defeated, I nodded meekly.

She returned the phone to her ear. “Oh, yes yes Sarah, that’s fine!” she cooed sycophantically. “We’ll see you about 11.30am tomorrow.”

My first reaction had been of horror, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt anger. She claimed to have forgotten to ask me in advance, and in her defence that’s entirely possible, but my cynicism did wonder if she had deliberately taken me off-guard to prevent me from having time to think of a decent excuse to get out of it. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this were the case. Either way, being put on the spot is not something I appreciate in any but the most extreme of circumstances, and I was annoyed in the extreme. I went on a mental rant on Twitter.

The consensus from my Twitter support group was simple and clear: DO NOT GO. Everyone was right, of course, and I decided to concoct a story for my mother along the lines of how I would be so “emotionally distraught” as a result of the session with C that I would be unable to face anyone (as it turned out,this wasn’t that far from the truth, but that post will come).

In the end, though, I caved in. I started to protest to my mother when I got back from C’s, and she become predictably hostile, and I figured I would rather be persecuted for weeks by ‘They’ that be persecuted by her – at the end of the day, at least I hate ‘They’ so I don’t mind being in conflict with them (even if it does one day result in my suicide). I did manage one minor win against my mother though, which was to use Disraeli (my car) as our transportation, rather than The Box (her’s). I figured this put control of when we left Paedo/Maisie’s house (Hotel California) in my hands, and furthermore that if I went really mad, that at least I would have an escape route.

Of course, this was an imperfect plan. My driving was berated the whole circa 30 miles from her house to theirs – either I was speeding (when I wasn’t), I was taking corners in too high a gear (second or third? Really, mother?) or I didn’t look over my shoulder when changing lanes on the motorway (even though I did). And so on. When I told her to leave me alone, she accused me of “having an attitude,” and that that was why she had tried to persuade me to take her car.

The hypocrisy of her little diatribe both irritated and amused me. She is an utterly crap driver these days, whereas I really think that I am relatively OK for the most part. Yet if I open my mouth in her boxy piece of shit, I get what she would describe as “the rounds of the kitchen” (a Northern Ireland rural colloquialism for a Northern Ireland urban colloquialism – “slabbering”. She grew up in the middle of nowhere, whereas I was raised on the outskirts of a city. In proper English, they each mean something akin to “harsh criticism”).

Anyhow, eventually we arrived, without me having deliberately driven us both into a wall at 100mph in a fit of pique. I turned into the gate of Hotel California and noticed Paedo was gardening. He looked up and saw us, but made little attempt to desist from his activity. This was excellent.

Even more encouraging was the fact that, when we went inside, only Maisie and Sarah were there. Normally everyone in the entire Northern hemisphere that shares a trace of genetics with Maisie is perpetually packed into her house, which even if Paedo was not guilty of anything would freak me out nearly as much. So, win number II.

Of course, the presence of a mere small number of personnel wasn’t to last. Eventually Sarah’s daughter, Suzanne, turned up with her two young children – Marcus, the two-year-old, and the four-month old that is named after Paedo. I had been lamenting this fact to C earlier that morning (as I have lamented on many other occasions). I was scared of how I would react to the baby given its name, even though of course it is not his fault. I mean, of course it is not its fault!

Both children were asleep as we had lunch so my reactions to the baby temporarily remained to be seen, but at this point of course Paedo came in from his horticultural tasks in order to get fed. He sat directly opposite me. I was interested to note that he consistently avoided eye contact with me.

Emboldened by this apparent deference, I decided to talk to him. At first I just gabbled about inane, everyday stuff, but eventually I became so confidently snide that I started making oblique references to his behaviour around children. Nothing which would have been decipherable by the various assembled members of the clan, of course, but possibly to him. Then again, him decoding its cryptic nature assumes that he has an IQ of over five, and I really doubt that he does. Very few that have any connection to Hotel California do, even those that are on the mere fringes of the place, never mind those right in the centre of it.

My party piece came later when, when a discussion about cancer somehow arose, I was able to tell my dining companions that (according to Heal My PTSD) victims of child sexual abuse are eight times more likely to develop adult cancers than the general population.

The comment was specifically addressed at Suzanne who had been musing about the possible causes of the Big C, but I shot a surreptitious glance at Paedo to gauge his reaction to my hint at him. I was disappointed to note no discernible guilt or shock on his face, but I was nevertheless pleased at having the balls I did to make such a direct statement.

Eventually the baby started crying, and Suzanne went to address whatever need it was expressing. I absent-mindedly commented that I had not ‘met’ it yet, and was instructed by She Who Thinks I Am A Five Year Old to go and engage with it. Mainly because I was fed up sitting opposite Paedo, I acquiesced.

Suzanne had her back to me as I walked into the room, and the baby’s head was resting on her shoulder, facing me. I looked at it and nervously said ‘hello’ in that ridiculous tone that is always employed by adults when speaking to babies. To my astonishment, its fat little face seemed to light up, and it smiled a massive smile at me. Suzanne passed it to me without prompting and it sat in my arms for a long time, laughing innocently and playing with my florescent hair.

I’m not going to sit here and lie: I wasn’t overcome by some overwhelming love and spiritual awakening by holding the baby like some people claim to be, but – just as with Marcus – I didn’t dislike it, despite my general contempt for kids. I probably wouldn’t have expected to have actively been repulsed by it but for the fact it was named after Paedo, but I am pleased to note that that issue didn’t really impact upon how I felt about it.

I don’t know what to call it here [muses for some time]. OK, I think I will call it Sean. That will pretty much guarantee that if my family ever find this blog they won’t know that I’m writing about them, as they would never call one of their offspring an Irish name (some of them are sectarian bigots, on top of everything else). Yes. Sean. Marcus and his little brother Sean.

The rest of the clan began to arrive in dribs and drabs. StudentMcF, who had just graduated with a First in Psychology, turned up with her mother. Student talked about her plans to undertake a doctorate in Educational Psychology – and, perhaps surprisingly, this was the worst part of the whole day. My blood was infused with a pulsating, jealous rage and, even though she is actually quite a nice girl, I wanted reach across the table and break her neck to prevent her becoming Dr McFaul.

Mentalism has ruined my fucking life. I didn’t even get to finish my Masters degree because of it. If I hadn’t been mental, I would have been the first one to get a doctorate. I always wanted – I always intended – to do a PhD. I was fairly lazy at school and university I admit, and I recognise that that’s not terribly conducive to becoming a doctor in one’s chosen subject, but lazy or not, I’ve always done well academically because I’m intelligent. I find fault with myself daily in a million different ways, but my intellect and capacity for retaining knowledge is never, ever one of them.

I’m the smart one out of Student and me. Student is not stupid, not at all (which is a remarkable achievement given that she comes from the dubious auspices of Hotel California), but what she is first and foremost is an intensely hard worker, rather than a brainbox.

Here I am, sitting on a sofa all day, existing. The issue of identifying with my mental illnesses has been hovering about quite a bit recently, and whilst I feel that I have some sort of self-definition through that, as I tried to state the other day, that’s only part of how I see myself. My stronger life narrative is that of my intellect. I should not be existing in this sad, pathetic bubble of blankness. I should be working in Downing Street, or researching at a decent university within the area in which I am educated, or forming policy on same, or something. I should not have been sitting in a few glorified admin jobs and then sitting on a soft instead because I don’t know where the next fake fucking voice is coming from. FUCK.

*throws toys out of pram*

Anyhow, this is not meant to be one of those ranty posts about my wasted life – it’s meant to be about my day yesterday. At one point, a curious thing happened. Marcus wanted to go outside and play, so I took him – but to my considerable distaste, Paedo followed. I felt the sting of hypervigilance pervade my body and mind, and perhaps I chewed at my lip a little too much.

Paedo and Marcus started paying football (soccer to Americans), whilst I hovered about trying to figure out how I should proceed. Marcus made the decision for me, however, by insinuating that he wanted me to be the goalkeeper in this hugely life-changing, World Cup standard, epic match. So I ended up playing fucking football with the man who raped me throughout my childhood, and his great-grandson about whose welfare I had become obsessively worried.

I was acutely aware of the surrealism of this bizarre circumstance as I stood there, deliberately letting in Marcus’ goals (and saving all of Paedo’s – hahaha). As I reflect on it now, as well as that sense of strangeness, I also feel some mild self-disgust. Have I sold out to something or someone by behaving so nonchalantly around Paedo? Shouldn’t I be threatening him with justice or something? Shouldn’t I be telling him that if he so much as looks at those two children in the wrong way that I’ll personally cut off his sorry bollocks with a rusty scalpel and feed them to his beloved fucking ducks? Shouldn’t I be doing something less normal than playing football with him? Shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, what if, why didn’t, blah blah blah, subjunctive musings ad infinitum.

Most of the rest of the day was a write-off in terms of my engagement with members of McFaul dynasty. I spend most of it in the toilet being sick or in agony with IBS. Although these issues can be psychosomatic, in this case I don’t think they were. I didn’t eat that much by Hotel California standards, but one of A’s favourite McF-similes is that Maisie is like Mrs Doyle from Father Ted. “Oh, you’ll have a wee bun, Pandora. You will. You will, you will, you will!” If you attempt to refuse, she looks appalled and eventually, physically or hypnotically, manages to force your concession. In this case, it was not so much the amount of stuff forced down my throat that sent me running so frequently to the bog, but the amount of fucking wank in which it was cooked. It’s no wonder that Maisie literally makes Jabba the Hutt look thin.

We eventually left around seven, which was a lot later than I had intended, but it hadn’t been quite the unbearable experience that I’d been predicting. Let me make this clear – I’m certainly not in any rush to go back, despite Maisie’s continual begging that A and I “get up a weekend soon”. But at least now I know I can do it, even if my social anxiety has to deal with 12 people in one room (as indeed there were at one point) on top of dealing with the nefarious demons of the past.

All that being said, a combination of the McF visit and the session with C left me in a pretty poor frame of mind after I’d left my mother off last night. I flew down the motorway back to the city at close to 100mph, just to see if I could. How reckless and borderline of me. I then sat here pointlessly doing nothing at all for a few hours, before knocking out 700 words of a blog post trying to enunciate how I felt. Because, you know, you’re supposed to put words to these alien things they call ‘emotions’. It was navel-gazing but pretentious bullshit and anyway, most of it relates to C rather than the visit to Paedo, so I’ll not share it here.

So here I am: alive, not yet psychotic and not in the best frame of mind…but surviving. It’s not ideal, but then very little in my life at present is ideal. Every cloud and all that. At least it’s not the polar worst it could be.

(NB. I know some new followers of this blog have queried how my mother could even consider taking me to see my childhood abuser. The reason is simply that she doesn’t believe – or, rather, that she has chosen not to believe – that he is guilty of any of the things of which I ‘accused’ him. Most of the story is detailed here, here and here, but feel free to ask if you need any more clarification).

What triggered it?  It’s stupid, really.  All that happened was that A decided he would clear out two big boxes in which I throw things – either for hoarding purposes, or because I can’t be arsed dealing with them.  What a preposterous, utterly ridiculous thing to induce a panic attack.

I feel dreadful.  I feel better than I did 10 minutes ago, but I still feel dreadful.  My head is fuzzy; nothing seems real – not me, not the world.  Ah, depersonalisation and derealisation, my old friends.  Welcome back.  Not.  You have not been missed.  (NB. These states are not induced by the Diazepam; I felt this way before I took it).

My chest is still heavily constricted, and I find myself forced to take long, slow breaths in order to obtain any at all.

I have a vile, flat, metallic-y sort of taste in my mouth.  Slightly salty, a little watery.  Tingly.  It wasn’t there before this attack, but it is a sensation I know intimately from other occasions.  There’s something at the back of my throat; it’s as if something is trapped, like I want to gag.*

The hypervigilance that characterises some of my C-PTSD symptoms is here in droves that are comparable to armies.  The TV, my medication alarm, even the distant sound of one of the cats stirring quietly in its sleep is sending me into cosmic levels of freak-out.

I feel a repugnant nausea to my core and my nerve endings are alert to the point where my skin is actually sore to the touch.  It’s compounded by a sense of inner restlessness that is essentially and atrociously unquantifiable (although I suppose it slightly reminds me of akathisia).

I’m horribly irritable, shrieking mindlessly at things for no reason and banging around the place like some sort of bloody barbarian.

Oh yeah, and there’s the whirlwind that my thoughts and cognitive processes presently are.  I am trying to work out what has triggered this batshitiness.  Paedo and his depravity keep entering my mind, but that makes no sense.  Something as inane as this has nothing to do with Paedo.  A spring clean [I cut off here mid-sentence when that phrase suddenly resonated in my head.  I was going to write 'a spring clean has nothing to do with any of what he did to me'.]

No, wait!  ’A spring clean’.  A spring clean.  That rings a bell; that most ordinary of phrases for this most ordinary of acts rings a bell about something deeper, something darker.  I can’t work it out completely, but there are hazy images somewhere in here of my aunt talking about ‘spring cleaning’ and of her husband’s wrinkled, grey, perhaps even expectant face hovering about at the edge of my peripheral vision.  I don’t remember anymore.  But there’s something there, oh yes.  Something.

Fuck.  FUCK THIS!  FUCK IT TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH AND FUCKING BACK AGAIN AND THEN FUCK IT SOME MORE.

I hate that I still don’t remember all of this stuff, I hate that I dissociated so much of it away.  I feel like I have no control of triggers, of life events – fuck, of life itself - if I have no conscious recall.

The attack also acutely reminded me that this is far from the first time I have reacted in a similar fashion to simple, everyday clear-outs and clean-ups.  I recoil in horror when my mother asks me to examine my remaining possessions at her house.  I have vague memories from when I was growing up of being constrained by overwhelming and indescribable disquiets every time she asked me to clear out my wardrobes, under the bed, the toy cupboards or whatever.

Indeed, the two boxes that A was clearing out tonight have sat in the kitchen looking at me and demanding my attention for the past week, and I have quite deliberately avoided dealing with them.  As I always do.  Always.

I had never realised before this day, this hour, how much of a pattern this avoidant behaviour is.  Even if I had, I suppose that I probably would have thought little of it beyond my self-confessed laziness.

But…can this really be about child abuse?  Seriously?!  I mean, that’s…well, it’s insane.  Hazy memories or otherwise of some afternoon in Hotel California** aside, I can’t see the connection.  It’s silly.  Occasionally clearing things out of one’s abode is a normal part of life, unless you are some sort of minimalist (which I most certainly am not).  Why do I make everything about my being mental?

I remember the mixed states I used to have before I started taking Seroquel (which, perhaps ironically, were similar to the akathisia that Seroquel ((mercifully temporarily)) induced!).  They were similar to this.  God.  Eugh.  How awful.  I had forgotten just how utterly unbearable these sort of sensations are.  If I never experience a mixed state or anxiety attack again it’ll be far too soon.

Things from the boxes adorned the seat to both my left and right.  I gathered them up and put them in a bag and hid them, which is exactly what I was meant not to do.  But I just couldn’t look at them.

Fuck it, I’m too away with it to continue this post.  Now I want to cry and hide under the bed and be away from everything – not exactly pleasant ways to be, but it’s better than the restless, overpowering anxiety of before.  I apologise for rambling and whinging and probably making damn all sense, but at least the composition of this post seems to have given me some sense of perspective on why this unpleasantness occurred, daft and all as that reason may have been.

* Based on this description, perhaps my eventual conclusions about this being sexual abuse-related are hardly surprising.  Hmm.
** Hotel California is what I call Maisie and Paedo’s house, if you don’t already know.  This is because you can check out but you can never leave.  Google it if you’re too young to get the reference

This is not some sort of hyperbole indicating that I find telephonic communication to be a mild irritant or inconvenience.  I’m honestly, truly terrified of it.

I decided to write this post after a discussion developed on my Facebook page between a few of us that regard the act of ‘being on the phone’ with genuine horror.  The most rudimentary of Google searches suggests that we are not at all alone.  I can’t speak for others, obviously, but my phone phobia perplexes me entirely as, certain parameters of social anxiety aside, I am not too bad with people in person.

Let me qualify that; I freak out around new people, unless I am surrounded by people I know very well.  I refuse to go out without people I know intimately, and I’m very uncomfortable around mere acquaintances, not that you’d always know it.  However, if you catch me in the right mood, and I am with the right people, you’d be stunned to know I have any mental health issues at all.  My in-laws, for example, are constantly amazed that there’s anything wrong with me, as I give the appearance of being a social animal in front of them and in front of a number of others – sometimes it’s a mask, but occasionally it’s real (hypomania?  Who knows).

The phone changes everything.  I will usually answer if A phones me, because although he doesn’t actually have the full-blown phobia that I do, he hates the device too.  Anything, therefore, that he has to say via the bloody thing is either (a) quick or (b) urgent.

I only answer to my mother about 25% of the time, and everyone else thereafter becomes pro-(or re-)gressively more likely to be ignored.  This includes my close friends such as Daniel.  If they warn me that they’re going to phone, and give me some indication as to what it is they want to discuss, I’ll usually reluctantly give in – but not always.

There is 0% chance of me answering to a number that is either unfamiliar to me or is withheld.  It just will not happen.  As far as the land-line goes, I never answer it at all as I have no way of knowing who’s on the other end.  If it’s anyone that even has half a chance of speaking to me, they’ll get me on the mobile anyway.

When I hear the accursed thing vibrating (I almost never have the sound on) for any more than the second it takes to denote a text message or an email, or when I hear the infuriatingly cheerful but simultaneously ominous sound of the land-line, I begin to feel desperately uncomfortable.  It’s hard to say exactly how things progress, but let me attempt to dissect it.

It starts with a horrible ‘butterfly’ like feeling in the pit of the stomach, progressing to a sense of heightened physical alertness in which it feels like one is aware of every cell in one’s body.  It produces goosebumps.  The struggle for breath begins, the eyes widen.  One’s heart beats so desperately that one feels it will surely explode from one’s chest.

It reminds me of what I’ve heard of the mammalian ‘fight or flight’ instinct, except in this case things definitely fall on the side of ‘flight’.  Run away.  Hide under the bed, where you can’t hear it or see it taunting you.  Be gone, phone!

In short, I suppose I am essentially describing a panic attack.  Because of a fucking phone call. It is, when you think about it, absolutely preposterous.  What’s the worst that can happen, seriously?  You answer; if the person is a tosser, you hang up.  BIG DEAL.

Making a phone call tends to be less of an issue simply because, with the rare exception of my mother and A, I almost never do it.  Phoning those two individuals is always done through my choice and is on my terms, so whilst I don’t especially relish the prospect of communicating in that way, I don’t completely dread it.  I only call other people that I know when something very urgent arises, and as for calling people I don’t know – hahaha!  No.

There has been the odd time when I’ve had no choice but to do it – for example, when I changed my name, some companies with whom I deal refused to accept emailed or written confirmation of this (which seems rather unusual to me, but anyway).  This takes several hours of preparation on my part…sometimes more if the people concerned – eg. credit card companies – have proven themselves historically to be bastards.

How to prepare?  Well, the CBT-like approach of rationalising the probable simplicity of the impending conversation does not of course work, so I have to attempt to find means to make myself calm (*cough* Diazepam *cough*).  In such circumstances, I merely hope to convey facts to the other party, but although I usually get there eventually, even with the help of my little yellow friends I end up embarrassing myself wholly in the process.  Compare this to when I went into the bank with my deed poll to change my name with them in person.  Admittedly I had to take my mother (otherwise that would’ve been a fail too, no doubt), but I nonetheless communicated effectively and succinctly when dealing with the personnel directly.  Hmm.

Reverting to the issue of phoning people I don’t know, an alternative to the ‘calm’ approach is, on extremely rare occasions, to be really angry.  I mean, real, absolute, ‘I’m-seeing-fucking-red-here’, total anger, not just ‘I’m pissed off with these wankers’.  This leads to a very dominant me, blinded by rage, demanding answers and results.  This has happened maybe twice in my life – both times when I was regularly overcharged by packs of twats who consistently ignored other communications.

Compare the Mr Director-Person letters.  Am I angry in those?  Well, yes, I am – but not with that all-consuming, overpowering rage of which I speak.  Yet I can articulate myself coherently and intelligently, if rather arrogantly, on paper.  I cannot do this on the phone.  I’m either furious beyond furious, in which case woe betide whoever answers, or I faff and babble and make a complete tit of myself, thus ensuring the very opposite of what I’d like – an even longer bloody call.

I’m trying to pinpoint a time when this started.  When I was at school, I had a rather blasé relationship with the phone; I didn’t usually go out of my way to use it, but neither did I avoid it with the determination that I now do.  Daniel would ring me quite a lot, as would a few others to whom I was then close, and I was fairly OK with that.  A certain friend – Louise – and I even used to have a very childish (potentially cruel, I now see) laugh now and then phoning those stupid chatlines (they were free for women for some reason) to wind people up.

I would always have used email in preference to the telephone where possible, but my first memories of really being troubled by using it were when I was working in a firm of solicitors just before I started my postgraduate degree…so, what?  At the age of 21, maybe?  I remember phoning in sick a few times, and being terrified that my employers would doubt the authenticity of my illness, so to avoid accusations and 20 questions, I would ring before the office opened and leave answering machine messages for them rather than speak to anyone.

In my most recent job, it began to become a real bugbear.  Again, I used email where possible anyway, not particularly concerning myself about the phone, and my first boss had enough faith in me to get the job done in whatever manner that she let me get on with doing things in my own autonomous way.  When she retired and a colleague took over, things changed.  My new boss – a lovely woman, but dreadful boss – she was hell-bent on micro-managing everything, and as a techno-phobe she decided that email was a facility akin to Guantanamo Bay, and she all but banned the use of it in favour of the bastarding phone.  The nature of my work meant that I almost always took the entire department’s flack, even when the fault was mine maybe at most 5% of the time.  I felt that I could deal with this in writing, because any letter or email that was critical of me would be very easily trumped by anything that I could write in response.  Constantly having a bunch of stupid fuckers screeching in your ear about how useless and dreadful you were, however, was not quite so easy to contend with.

When I was embroiled in a pseudo-row with the office during the absence that ultimately led to my unemployment, I told them that I accepted the need to use the phone on many occasions, but contended that under the DDA it was a reasonable adjustment for them to allow my primary means of communication to be email.  They did not agree.

However, it would be easy to blame my last workplace, but my discomfort did not entirely emanate from there; it was merely worsened.  I cannot work out exactly where or how the discomfort, then the fear, then the abject terror first came about, and I cannot work out how I will deal with the issue in the long-term.  I hate the fucking phone.  I absolutely hate it.  I don’t ever expect to like it, but I would really rather it didn’t send me running to hide under the bed every time its use becomes necessary.

In this hugely electronic world that we have come to inhabit, perhaps ultimately the phone will end up being redundant and forgotten, consigned to unread, dusty pages of technological history books.  But that state of affairs is not at all imminent, not even vaguely so, so I must hope to find a solution to this most irrational, but frankly pathological, of fears.

And yeah, for those of you that have been paying attention over the last 13 months, I do have an iPhone  That might be a bit of a ‘go figure’ moment for some of you, but trust me – the phone facility is by far the least used one on what is otherwise an amazing device.

So I’m weird.  Surprise surprise.  That is all.

My mother rang me about 11am this morning, but I was suffering from a (fairly infrequent of late) Seroquel hangover, so I ignored her call, with the intention of calling back as soon as I was feeling a little less out of it. Unable to wait for me to contact here, however, she left a voice message advising that she was calling to determine whether or not I would care to be in attendance with her at the McFaul residence tomorrow.

Hearing the words asking that question struck a familiar, yet nonetheless steadfastly awful, terror through me. I felt a cold sweat on the back of my neck, my pulse quicken, my body freeze. I struggled to breathe. All as a result of a few little words. Would you like to go to Maisie’s tomorrow? Such a benign, innocuous sounding question. A normal familial pursuit, an everyday occurrence of simplicity and sheer ordinariness.

Except that it really, truly isn’t – not for me. I still haven’t met (insofar as you can ‘meet’ a baby) Marcus’ baby brother, which I suppose was in part the rationale for the proposed sojourn, but given that the poor kid is called after Paedo I am not sure I know how I will react to him. I know it’s not the baby’s fault. I mean, of course it is not the poor baby’s fault – how could it be?! But he, entirely unwittingly on both his and his parents’ part, represents a history with which I would rather not deal. A dark, venomous period of wickedness levied against me, an evil that has insidiously but definitely rubbed itself off on me. The poor baby, with his Paedo-infected name, represents abuse, despair, abandonment, neglect, betrayal and lots and lots of pain, of every conceivable description.

But this navel-gazing is not about the baby per se, though there is a possibility (as the above attests) that there could be difficulties arising in my potential relationship with him. But no, I am wondering how I will ever deal with Paedo again.

The abuse probably finished when I was about 11 or 12. Since then, until my early 20s anyway, I still saw Paedo with fairly considerable frequency, and though I could have been accused of sexually taunting him at times [whore], and though I deliberately removed myself from what I felt were potentially ‘dangerous’ situations, I never much thought about all the rapes – not overtly. Presumably it was compartmentalised in my Pandora’s Box-esque bank of traumatic memories, but it was not there out in the open, not in general.

It is now though. It is very, very much out in the open indeed. Pandora’s Box of tricks is well and truly opened, and I have no control over the psychological consequences of same. I have hallucinated him. He has followed me – watching me, wanting me, needing me to suffer just as I suffered as a child. Rumination on what the real him actually did haunts every electron and neuron of conscious (and probably unconscious) thought that zaps through my brain. What he did, how he did it, why he did, what I did to encourage it.

Therapy is to blame (if ‘blame’ is a fair word, which it isn’t), as you – my darling readers – might well have surmised. It is not C’s fault; sooner or later all this stuff had to come to the fore. It has to be processed, to be resolved in whatever way such things can be. I do recognise that my long-term history of mental illness is directly correlated, at least in part, with this (though of course there are a gazillion other contributing factors also).

However, as endlessly detailed here, I do not believe that such psychological processing and resolution can take place in the few months I have remaining with C and I have started to shut down on the matter, presumably to protect myself from further perceived hurt and even more retraumatisation. I discussed this with C last week, something about which I will eventually write, so at least he is aware of things. The nature of this has left me – both now and probably in the future – in a very awkward position vis a vis Paedo and the family at large. How will I deal with them – how will I deal with him?

As you know, I went completely doolally at Christmas time when I last saw Paedo, and that was even before I told C any details about what Paedo had done. After having told C the specifics, and after having attempted to discuss my more visceral reactions to it, I went completely doolally all over again (it was arguably worse this time, as I started to see Paedo, and ‘They’ apparently reserved the right to demand I kill people, the fuckwits). So, if we combine those factors – ie {seeing (the real) Paedo [A]} + {discussing stuff in therapy [B]} (plus {how I reacted to my mother’s voice message on the subject [C]}) – what the sodding hell is the reaction going to be? I fear that all hell will break lose.

A + B + C = A familial apocalypse.

I can’t consistently refuse to go to Maisie’s house because I don’t have an adequate or believable lie excuse to get out of it with such frequency. After all, my mother does not believe (or at least refuses to accept) that Paedo sexually abused me in any way, so it’s not like the truth represents an escape route.

I’m fucked. I can’t not see him, because he’s part of a family that my mother so heartily values, and simultaneously I can’t see him, because I will once more end up a psychotic, wailing, collapsed mess.

What to do?

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One of the greatest things about anti-psychotic medication for me (well, aside from the obvious) has been its soporific effects. For some time, it significantly reduced my (perhaps over-) reliance on Zopiclone – in fact, I still have a few tablets left from a Zopiclone prescription from September, thus indicating how little I’ve taken of that drug in several months. I know that in the case of Quetiapine, though, there is a general reduction in its sedative effects over time. That seemed to have eluded me mostly – a lot of people report this side-effect wearing off after a few weeks, others just over a month. I’ve been taking it since January now, and it’s only in the last two or three weeks that things have begun to change.

If one was not mad to begin with – and of course, I was (am) – then sleep deprivation, chronic insomnia, sleeplessness, whatever you want to call it would surely make you so. Let’s not forget, indeed, that forced insomnia is used as a form of torture. I know some people learn to adapt to life with a significant reduction in the hours they need to sleep, and kudos to them, but even though insomnia has plagued me essentially for years, I can never envisage my getting used to it. I hate it with a burning passion. It’s one of the most horrible knock-on effects of being mental.

It’s that hideous sensation of lying awake in the darkness, eyes firmly fixated on the ceiling as there’s nothing else to view, wanting to move or get up, but fearing that if you do, you will do so just before the delightful escape of slumber would otherwise have arrived. It’s the nasty reality of giving in to the sleeplessness and getting up, only to find that you’re utterly, unbearably alone in the world. It’s looking out the window for some assurance that it’s not just you that is afflicted with this misery, only to be greeted with darkened windows up and down the street, their curtains all smugly drawn, as if sneering right into your face.

Rationally, of course I know there’s an entire community of online insomniacs all available for discussion right now, not to mention the folks across the pond and in other parts of the world who are in their actual waking hours. But insomnia is a paradoxical issue too: the dichotomy with which you are faced is that on the one hand, you’re consumed with the sheer loneliness that the night brings, but on the other, the accompanying exhaustion is so absolute that it seems at best unfeasible and at worst completely impossible to engage socially in any remotely meaningful fashion. And thus you battle on alone.

For any readers that do not follow my Twitter stream, I saw NewVCB on Wednesday and in light of my current problems with fake-Paedo and ‘They’, she has increased the dose of Quetiapine by 100mg (to a daily total of 400mg). Although I hoped and expected that this would have a renewed sedative effect, I was smart enough to request hypnotic medication anyway just in case. Smewhat to my surprise, this request was granted. Result! Hahaha! Up yours, dickhead GP!

Anyway, my instinct was to stockpile the sleepers (Zopiclone, again) for when they were really necessary, rather than to just start taking them with gay abandon right now. To my considerable annoyance, however, it seems like that point of necessity is now. Sleep evades me completely, and has done on nights without Zopiclone for well over a week now. I find myself completely unable to function during the day, and whilst in a sense that doesn’t especially matter what with my being a dolescum and all, it certainly does nothing to assist the maintenance of my precarious sanity.

Besides, another knock-on effect of insomnia is the hold that ‘They’ have over me. Their power – nay, their domination – seems to be worse during these nighttime hours. Perhaps it’s because I am tired beyond tiredness; perhaps it’s because on the face of it there is no one else about at all that can help me fight them. I don’t know. But during the night they’re fighting constantly with me, and if they haven’t yet won the war – well, they’re certainly on the victorious side of the battle.

I took 1/4 of a Zopiclone before I went to bed tonight (last night, technically), but you can see how successful that’s been. I’ve just taken another 1/2 tablet and have every extremity of my body metaphorically crossed that this will actually work. Normally I’m remarkably resistant to medication, and indeed in the past there is no way 3/4 of a tablet would have made me sleep. I’m just hoping that because I’ve been away from Zopiclone for quite a while, and that because it’s now combined with Quetiapine, that I might just get lucky.

But then there’s a trade-off in this too. If it does work, I’ll probably sleep late tomorrow and subsequently be horribly groggy for several hours upon rising. That, much like the hangover effects of insomnia itself, doesn’t do a great deal for one’s mood. I think this way is better, but it’s still far from ideal.

And just to whinge a little more before I sign off: all this bollocks is compounded by the fact that I’ve been sort of unwell for days. I’ve had some rather extreme bouts of nausea, that I initially supposed was psychosomatic, but on reflection I’m fairly sure it’s related to my ongoing IBS. The IBS is playing havoc with my body; I don’t want to be particularly graphic about it, but anyone who has had it will know it’s…changeable. It’s either a famine or a feast, if you get my drift. At the moment, it’s a famine for me (actually, this euphemistic bullshit makes me cringe…but anyway), and I feel all heavy and sluggish and bloated and disgusting. And still nauseous. Eugh.

Right now I am being reminded that I am not alone in being awake at 3.10am – there are several drunken tossers outside who seem to be screaming abuse at each other. Loneliness or not, I think I’ll stick to my own bland company, thank you very much.

Anyway, sorry for whinging and for almost certainly rambling incoherently. In my defence, I am totally shattered and under the influence of conscious-altering medications. I hope, though I will not promise, that something more meaningful will be published here on the morrow (or later today, if you find yourself subscribing to the lure of pedantry).

Good night. I hope.

On Friday night I collapsed in the middle of the street in a tearful dysphoric panic, as fake-Paedo wouldn’t leave me and at least in part owing to his ‘presence’, I couldn’t stop reliving what he did to me.  A scooped me up and took me home, bless him, and Saturday was mostly fine (about which I was very surprised, but also immeasurably grateful).  In fact, the problems didn’t start again until early on Sunday morning – about 2 or 3am – when I was unable to sleep.

Certain things always seem notably amplified during nights of insomnia.  Things that one can just about deal with during the day are things that one is utterly incapable of fighting during the darkest recesses of night, and to that end the flashbacks and voices threatened to overwhelm me completely.  What’s more, my mood plummeted into the depths of a metaphorical abyss too; throughout all the madness of the last few weeks, I had still managed to remain in a passably alright mood, at least during the flashbacks’ and hallucinations’ temporary remissions – but this episode saw a very distinct and definite end to that.  I’m still in a very deep depression, with no interest in anything nor any concentration.  All I have done, and want to do, is sit here and stuff my face with rubbish.  These 300 words have taken me, on and off, about four hours to write, which is unspeakably pathetic.

I’ve been thinking of doing myself in again.  I won’t actually do it, in all probability, mainly because I don’t want to put A through it – but it’s certainly on my mind a lot.  It’s liberating to know that I can stop it all – the depression, the voices and visions, the panics, the delusions, the anxiety and agitation.  All it takes is a bit of careful planning – then I could be free of it permanently.  But then, on the other hand, I’m a bloody wuss too, because although I don’t believe in an afterlife, it would be just my luck if there was one, and it was populated by ‘They’, Paedo, and any other number of as-yet-unknown nebulous nasties.

‘They’ like it when I contemplate suicide.  They haven’t as yet considered the reality that it would probably be an escape for me, and therefore a Good Thing; no, they believe instead that it would be the ultimate act of self-punishment that I deserve for being a whore, a liar, an insidious, disgusting, hateful being.  They’d like me to do it painfully, of course – no clever cocktails from The Peaceful Pill Handbook or similar for me, oh no.  ‘They’ want me to drown myself, or alternatively to douse myself in petrol and self-immolate – two of my greatest, Room 101-esque fears.

I won’t do it, worry not.  To be fair to ‘They’ (how ridiculous that clause sounds!), they haven’t been babbling on about me killing myself in an unsolicited way – they only address the subject when I have been contemplating it myself.  So for now at least, I can resist them.  The rest of the time, they just shout at me and remind me how much I deserved to be raped and tortured, whether they do it directly in my head or whether it’s in a more vicarious way (Nick Clegg and Noel Edmonds are two of their latest ‘hosts’, though frankly it serves me right for bothering to watch the electoral debate and, worse again, Deal or No Deal).

Someone keeps phoning me over and over.  It’s some old sales bollocks, I know, and to that end I wouldn’t answer the calls anyway – but my irrational mind is simultaneously convinced that it’ll be ‘They’ at the end of the line, seeking another avenue to abuse me.  So I’ve put my mobile to send all calls directly to the answering machine, supposing that anyone legitimate can leave a message – though knowing my luck, someone legitimate will phone and ‘host’ ‘They’ anyway.

*** TRIGGER WARNING ***

But, as I said, the worst of the lot is the flashbacks.  They’re almost like a psychosis, in that they’re entirely sensual experiences; it’s as if it is all completely real, and happening right now.  I can hear his breath in my ear and feel him inside me, harshly thrusting into me, causing me indescribable agony.  I can see his sweat drip from his hideous chest hairs on to my own exposed (flat, as it then was) chest, I can hear his grunts.  I can feel him choking me when he forced me into fellatio and I can feel his vile, disgusting tongue flicking around my own genitals.

I feel it all physically, mentally and e-fucking-motionally (and in any other possible way, for that matter).  And I feel nauseous to my physical core, not to mention despairing and lost with every neuron that fires through and every chemical that imbalances in my traitorous brain.

I will be OK, I’m sure.  I don’t know how to get through this in the next 36ish hours until I see NewVCB, my psychiatrist, but I’ve managed it for a week without any self-harm or a suicide attempt – and even though it’s getting progressively (regressively?) worse, I’m sure I’ll manage (whatever ‘manage’ means).

It’s just so hatefully exhausting, so overwhelmingly depressing and painful in every way conceivable.  I don’t know how to get out of this vicious little mess, and I therefore I wish I could turn myself off,  even if only for a little while.  There is no ‘off’ switch visible to me, though, which fills me with dread and foreboding.

Yesterday, aside from my anger at the possibility of my family reading the blog, you might have assumed that things were otherwise fairly OK.  Ostensibly, they are.  To everyone I’ve seen or spoken to in the past few weeks, they are.  Even to me, in most ways, they are.  But as stated, I am a consummate actress – so consummate, indeed, that I have it within my capability to fool myself at times.

It isn’t a good thing.  It may sound like a good thing – after all, if you believe all to be well, isn’t that essentially all being well – except that it’s not.  It comes back to bite you on the arse sooner or later.

‘They’ have been harassing me – persecuting me – for about 10 days.  They’re not permanently there, but they’ve been back with much greater frequency than since I started Quetiapine, and with much more intensity too.  They’re in my head.  They’re on the TV.  They’re the DJ on local radio station.  I pick up the phone and the caller is them, even when it’s someone innocuous (mind you, I never answer it to anyone who isn’t innocuous).

Their primary contention is that I am a seductive whore entirely responsible for my own experiences of sexual abuse.  They are right of course, but it’s annoying to have that screamed at me with such determined frequency and resolution.

‘They’ have also been reminding me of the Christmas incident, in which they wanted me to kill Marcus.  I asked them to guarantee that they wouldn’t put me in such an intolerable position again, to which they responded with hysterical laughter.  They will do as they please, apparently.  So I struck a deal with them: I asked if, if they are determined to make me harm someone at some point, would they would agree to that someone being Paedo.  To my astonishment, they did.

So when they left, I made another deal – this time with myself.  If ‘They’ try to get me to kill or hurt anyone, Paedo included, then I will instead kill me.  So far ‘They’ haven’t realised that I have this contingency in place.

As if their persecution wasn’t bad enough, I have been seeing Paedo about the place quite a bit too.  At the time I really believe he is there, which – reflecting on it in terms of my illnesses – is as disturbing as fuck.  I’ve always been conscious in the past of the ‘unreality’ of my psuedo-psychotic symptoms, despite how ‘real’ they seem, so this is an unsettling development.  I suppose, though, that my insight when he’s not there is a good thing…I know, as I sit here and type this, that my sightings of him have been mere hallucinations.

The key thing, though, is that his ‘presence’ terrifies me.  I’m not unused to seeing the man in actuality, and those real meetings may unsettle and panic me somewhat – but I don’t feel the abject terror that these hallucinations of him bring.  I don’t know what it is that creates the fear.  Fake-Paedo doesn’t speak to, follow or even (normally) look at me.  He’s just there for a minute or two, and then he is gone.

He manifests both as a completely independent figure and as a transformation of others.  For example, in our hotel the other day, I walked past Paedo in the corridor…except that, when I looked again, the figure was actually a member of the hotel housekeeping department.  Other times, I see him when there is no one in the vicinity.

I’d been keeping this entirely to myself until last night, when ‘They’ were going completely batshit in my head.  I gave in and told bourach on Twitter, which was kind of selfish as she is dealing with a lot of her own shit at the minute, but she’s the only person I know and trust that has dealt with similar symptoms.  Rather sensibly, she said I needed to tell C.

I didn’t want to tell C, of course, but in the end I did; I shall blog about the session in more detail in a day or two.  He thinks, as do I, that the stress of admitting the extent of the molestation both to him and even to myself has sent my internal psychology out of control.  We talked about the hallucinations and their relation to the abuse for most of the session actually, and although we didn’t really resolve anything vis a vis actually tackling them, I felt supported and, crucially, reassured that he wasn’t going to ring NewVCB for an in-patient recommendation because, “perhaps talking to [him] about this stuff will keep [me] out of the bin.”

I’m seeing NewVCB on Wednesday morning, and unless any of this nonsense abates considerably, I will hope that she’ll increase my dose of Quetiapine, which has mostly been a force for good in my life.  This was something she had mooted for my long-term treatment in our last appointment anyway, so here’s hoping.  I do recognise that these symptoms are mostly stress-induced and probably fairly transient, but firstly, the medication did help to decrease my psychoses before and secondly, stress-related or not, they are highly unpleasant and I want something, anything, to get rid of them, or at least reduce them.

I can only hope that ‘They’ don’t decide to invoke our deal before then, but it’s probably too much to hope that they’ll not come to visit.  So in the meantime, I’ll continue to wear the mask, to act the act, to compartmentalise, to continue as normal.  Because right now, for me, this is normal.

Exit, stage left.

“Well and contented” would be a laughably optimistic description of my current physical and mental status, at least in some ways – but we’ll start with the good things, shall we?  I’ve had the pleasure these last few days of connecting and re-connecting with friends whilst I was on a short break.

TEH GOOD STUFFZ

I have already mentioned K on this blog; it was with great pleasure that A and I saw her (again, in my case) on Monday night, along with her boyfriend N.  We spent several hours discussing BPD, cats, our obsessive attachments to our respective therapists, K and N’s work (both together and independent of one another), the sheer inadequacy of mental health services on the NHS, politics, how K’s and my BPD impacts on N and A, and general life.

The day prior to that A and I met Annie for the first time.  I would have called her ‘A’, but that would seriously confuse issues!  Annie and I have known each other online for quite a few months now so it was great to finally meet her.  We spent a great afternoon chatting about her kids, her pets, our pets, mentalism (Annie has bipolar disorder; her aunt to whom she is close also does, as well as possible BPD), Doctor Who (does anyone else think Matt Smith is fucking awesome?  Pertwee and Baker are still my favourites, but Smith is already vying for third place with McCoy) and Postman Pat (don’t ask).

I consider myself a highly fortunate person to have met such wonderful folks online such as these two.  And I’m meeting CVM next month too.  And then there’s all the lovelies I haven’t met, primarily but not exclusively from Twitter.  <3 you all.

TEH SHITE STUFFZ

Following on from that point, last week a situation emerged wherein the support of such people as aforementioned was so profoundly welcomed.  As soon as I made others aware of the problem emerging, I received lots of supportive comments, tweets and emails, for which I am eternally grateful.

It made one thing brutally clear to me: this blog, and the people I’ve met through it in one way or another, mean more to me than nearly all of my entire family.  Family-orientated individuals may find that an outrageous and utterly callous statement, but I don’t care.  It’s true.

What happened was entirely my own fault.  I didn’t do anything consciously if that in any way mitigates my actions, but I was remiss – even reckless – in my accidental use of this online persona, one that is meant to be almost entirely disconnected from my offline one.

I had a couple of pictures on my iPhone that I wanted to share with my mother, so I simply emailed them to her using the built-in mechanism on the phone.  For those of you unfamiliar with the device, it lets you send photographs without the need to actually open your email client.  Unbeknownst to me, though, when you do this, it defaults to a particular email address of which I have three.

If you don’t know already, you can guess the rest.  When I checked my emails the next day I was horrified beyond description to see a response from my mother to the aforementioned email in my serialinsomniac.com accoount.  F.U.C.K.

A and I were due to head away for a few days that day, but I decided to call with my mother under the pretence that I needed to borrow something.  The plan was to get A to distract her whilst I went in to the PC and permanently deleted the email from her computer.  She’s not especially technical, so we reckoned we could just blame its absence (if she even queried it) on the fact that Microsoft is a pile of steaming horse manure (I’m a Linux girl ).

It was straightforward to accomplish this mission, and for a few minutes A and I breathed a mutual sigh of relief.  As if on cue, though, my mother then declared that she had forwarded the email on – to two of my cousins in the McFaul (McF) dynasty.

FF UU CC KK ad infinitum

This rendered the matter completely out of my hands.  Fuck fuck fuck.  I wasn’t so worried about one of the recipients – her being an internet novice even more than my mother – but the second person would have the potential lack of stupidity to Google the term ‘serial insomniac’ had she noticed it or cared about its relation to me.

So, my first instinct was to password the entire blog, as you can do with blogs hosted at wordpress.com (as I used to be).  However, since I now run the blog myself, this option does not exist; I assume that WP’s supposition is that you would not pay for a domain and hosting if you didn’t want people to read that which was on the domain and hosting.  Instead I looked for a plug-in (a third party application that adds further functionality to WP) that would permit passwording of the entire site, found one, and installed it straightaway.  A and I left to head to our destination, feeling that the problem was temporarily solved; all my regular readers could visit essentially as normal, random voyeurs who might be my family could not.

When I arrived I was distraught to note that the blog was totally inaccessible; the plug-in had completely fucked it up.  It wouldn’t allow you to get to a page where you could enter the password and I couldn’t even get into the administrative pages, so I couldn’t delete the damn thing.  It was stuck on an endless loop of blank-screeniness.  My original concern of having been ‘found’ was replaced with a new one – that of having lost everything.

The first few hours of our break were therefore devoted to looking for a wireless network so as A could download an iPhone FTP program and access the site directly, independently of WordPress.  I was crawling up the walls with crazy.  I don’t know how many words I’ve written during my time on this blog, but I have something like 125 posts – of up to 8,000 words each (as seen here) – chronicling, so far, one of the most difficult years of my life.  Not to mention over a thousand comments of wonderful feedback and support.

In those few hours I made the realisation that I cared more about the preservation of the blog than I did about the potential discovery of it by my family.  If all hell broke loose – well, it just did.  I didn’t (and don’t) want it to, but that is actually preferable to being silenced or hidden.

The long and the short of the story is that Lovely A rescued the blog, and I password-protected certain key posts rather than the entire thing (I’ve since removed all passwording except the original four and the family tree).  Over the next few days, I monitored closely search terms that were getting here (after initially revoking search engine access, I later asked myself why the bloody hell I should do so.  Those few days have adversely affected my stats, but onwards and upwards, eh?) and what posts were being read, to see if there were any suspect or anomalous referrals.

TEH OUTCOMEZ

In my view, some of the search terms leading here and some of the reading patterns were kind of unusual.  Disproportionate numbers seemed to be searching for “serialinsomniac.com” or “serialinsomniac”, rather than “serial insomniac” – in others words, it looked to me like someone was Googling the actual URL rather than the blog name (as if having seen the URL in an email).  This isn’t unknown in the past, but it’s not been terribly common.  In all probability, I’m being over-sensitive, but one never knows.

I’ve started making an effort to change some names.  You can see some of the key ones on this page, and others are already changed in the archives which you can look at it if you need context.  I’m abandoning many of the old initials completely so if you need clarification on who a new name refers to, you’ll need to contact me.  I’ll try to add to the ‘Emsemble’ or family tree page with names that weren’t previously included as soon as I can.

I’m also monitoring the geographical location of people finding their way here.  I’d like to assure you that if you are outside a very tiny geographical triangle of Northern Ireland that I will pay no attention whatsoever to where you are, what your IP is, etc – so normal, genuine readers should not feel discouraged from reading.  Please, please don’t stop reading and commenting!

TEH AFTERMATHZ

To the Family:  If you’re from the McFaul family (or any other part of it for that matter), with the IP tracking site I will see you and I will block your IP addresses, rendering you unable to access this website.  I don’t care if I have to pay a fortune to maintain that; you have no place here.

If you are concerned that you recognise yourself, then grow the fuck up.  Everything has been, and will continue to be, anonymised.  The lengths that I have gone to to protect you should be appreciated, not condemned.  And if you don’t want to become aware of matters about which I write then don’t fucking read what I write.  Think I’m lying about Paedo?  I don’t give a shit; what I’ve had to go through thouroughly and utterly trumps any disgust you may feel at what I’ve revealed.  Think I’m being unreasonable about how manipulate and oppressive Paedo’s missus is?  Then you’re deluding yourselves.

In short, I won’t go into a closest for you people, and I don’t care if you don’t like it.  Try and read if you want to, but I will stop you; I’m not going to be in the position where I have to try and pay lip service to you here, on my own fucking diary, as well as in ‘real life’.  This journal is my pride and joy, my own little corner to bitch and whine with impunity about my illnesses, to rant and cry about what all of my family have done to me at various points in my life, to explore the weird dynamics of therapy.  And everything else in between.  And it’s staying as it is.

To everyone else:  So I’ve joined the ranks of mentalist bloggers that have been found by real life.  I know I’m in a long-line of such people…how did you handle it?

There’s a good bit more to report than that which has been detailed, mainly in reference to the aftermath of recent discussions with C, but I’ll leave that for another post.

I’ve been absolutely shite at replying to comments, emails and even tweets recently.  I am genuinely sorry for this, and hope you don’t think it means I value each and every one of you less, because I love you people.  I do.  I know I haven’t met most of you, and I don’t even know most of your ‘real’ identities – but it doesn’t matter.  Your feedback, empathy, advice and wonderful support has meant so much to me over the last 11 and a half months.  Here’s to the next 11 and a half years.

If you have:

• any sense
• an aversion to cursing
• a belief in blood being thicker than water
• a hatred of gratuitous, not-really-emphatic bolding
• or if you generally hate me for whatever reason

  then you probably shouldn’t read this.

If, however, you are my Aunt of Evil, Georgie, then you most indubitably SHOULD read this, cos I COMPLETELY despise you. OK?

Nothing pisses me off more in the world than my family in the United States. Not because they’re in the US, obviously – I just use that as short-hand to distinguish them from the other lot of twats here. No, they piss me off just because they are complete and utter cunts from hell.

The arseholes were not content merely to rob me of the money in my father’s will, nor has it been enough for me to tell them to piss the fuck off. Today I have discovered they’ve not only kept up a running commentary on me with my bloody mother, but they are responsible for something about which they lied to my face more than once when asked about it.

Well, specifically my Aunt Georgie – the Aunt of Evil – is thus responsible.
I have specifically told my mother, and I told Aunt of Evil (AoE) in the email I sent her telling her not to contact me, that they are not to discuss me nor my mental illnesses with each other at all. They’re my mental fucking illnesses. Short of circumstances under which I could be sectioned, it should be me who gets to decide those individuals that are party to the sordid details. Both of them said they would respect my wishes in this regard (though admittedly my mother tried to put up a fight first). Yet they have continued, sometimes in considerable detail.

I know this because today I read a chain of emails between my mother and Aunt of Evil. Nosy? Clearly so (*vilifies self half-way to death*), but then my mother should not leave her fucking email client open at the fucking email in question when she knows I am going to be using her PC, should she?

At one point, AoE blathered on about how she had been thinking of sending me a birthday “note” back in November. Her hustwand, rather sensibly and accurately, opined that doing so would “irritate” me so AoE said that (for once) she was taking his advice. Oh, and that my mother was not to tell me. (She didn’t incidentally. I wouldn’t give a fuck one way or another except that when I have asked her not to share stuff with this old bint, she has gone and done so anyway! Having said all that, I’m not angry with my mother. I wish she wouldn’t do these things – it exasperates me utterly – but she means well and doesn’t intend to cause any harm. I love her and feel sorry for her, so am not angry with her. Just cunty AoE Bitch of Satan).

Then AoE states that she “regrets” her and her hustwand telling V, my ‘father’, to send me a birthday card when I was 21, as “it seemed to do more harm than good.” (A surprisingly accurate assessment).

That may seem relatively benign, but long-term followers of this blog will be aware of the fact that my father was a complete cockhead who chose never to have any contact with me, preferring instead to contact the bottom of a bottle several times daily. I was mystified as to why, then – almost 20 years after I’d last seen him – the old dick would remember my birthday. I challenged AoE when she was next in Northern Ireland, and she looked into my fucking eyes and denied that she and her hustwand had anything to do with it.

Cunts. Absolute cunts. They profess themselves to be Christians, but they are the most hypocritical, self-righteous, thieving, patronising, “we know best and you’re just the stupid bitch we know better than” group of self-obsessed fuckstains of evil bastardry upon whom my eyes have ever set (and upon whom I hope my eyes never set again, unless it’s when we’re all burning in hell).

I had a good, very productive session with C (during which I told him!!!!! Blog on same to follow) this morning which left me in a good, if slightly self-satisfied, mood. The continued revelations about these cunts served to annoy me in the extreme and slightly spoil that, though I have mostly gotten over my frustrations by now (still wanted to rant though; they are still fuckheads). I had the most beautiful dream this morning that I was literally rearranging my aunt’s face. How prophetic it turned out to be.

A and I were conversing about this matter a short time ago, a discussion in which I concluded that it was blithely amusing and perhaps ever so slightly strange that I hate Georgie / AoE more than Paedo (of course as you know I don’t particularly hate Paedo, but presumably I should). It does indeed seem bizarre. Here we have a woman who’s patronising, self-righteous and who encouraged the theft of my money. All bad, yes, but that’s up against sustained, long-term, systematic child sexual abuse. The latter, on paper, seems worse, yes?

But really, nobody has ever rubbed me up the wrong way (if you’ll forgive the unintended but possible pun-esque play on words vis a vis recent mention of sexual matters) in quite the way that this woman has – and, crucially, can. I’m not sure about this, but I think I might actually hate her more than anyone else I’ve ever met.

I want that to desist, however. I don’t hold to all the usual old bollocks that hatred is destructive and whatnot – my twisted mind tends to find it quite entertaining and amusing. It is a source of creative and wry energy for me most of the time. However, the fact that I hate her with such a profound and burning passion demonstrates the fact that, regrettably, I give a shit, if only in the most twisted and negative of ways.

I want her to be a matter of utter indifference to me. In my view, complete and utter indifference is the biggest insult you can give another human being with whom you are personally familiar. That would be wonderful. But how is this ambitious state achieved? Gaaaaaaaaggghhhh!

Sorry for this rant, but then it’s my blog so I suppose I am allowed to vent on it should I wish to do so.

My ineptitude left me in a pretty awful frame of mind post-therapy.  One minute, I’d be quite happily getting along with whatever; the next, I’d just burst into tears.  I cried so much at one point on Thursday night that when I lifted my head, everything around me was covered in blood – the force of my tears had induced a major nose bleed (the worst I’ve had in years).  I also ended up driving home (and beyond) that evening in an unforgivably reckless fashion, in what I suppose was an attempt to weed out my frustrations.  I was in tears throughout most of the drive and at one point realised I was doing over 100mph.  Not good at all, for my car and for other road users.  It didn’t matter about my life, of course.

Anyway.  Enough of the “woe is me”.

Because Mr Director-Person hadn’t had the courtesy to copy C in on the letter he’d sent me, I took C a copy of it.  I told him that although it hadn’t been my intention in session the previous week, that I was now going to reply.

The discussion around this stupidly went on for maybe 15 or 20 minutes.  I admitted that my key motivation was to piss off Mr Director-Person and friends, and C kept asking me why I wanted to act in a manner as “destructive” as that.  There was the usual rant from me that if the bloody NHS had acted properly rather than throwing Fluoxetine in my face when I was 14, then maybe I wouldn’t have even needed to meet C (as my mentalness might have been adequately dealt with when I was a teenager, thus negating at least some of the need for therapy now).  There was a load of Trust-defensive rhetoric from him, plus a pile of questions designed to investigate my “true” motivation in replying.  He contended that I must want something other than to annoy Mr D-P.  He also seemed incredulous at my reaction to Mr D-P’s letter; what was it that I actually wanted from him?!

What I actually wanted was Mr D-P to take my case seriously and agree that longer-term psychotherapy was required, but what I told C was what I had wanted was something that actually fucking meant something, which is also true.  Mr D-P’s letter did not say anything in its 700 odd words.  It just threw a few dates at me and expected that to satisfy me.  Preposterous.

There was no animosity between C and I during this discussion, but I was pretty assertive and didn’t hold back.  I called Mr D-P “stupid” and accused him of “patronising” me.  I told C that “everyone but [him]” agreed with my decision to respond.  He was actually slightly amused by the fact that he was so outnumbered.

He eventually made the wise decision to cut that topic short, presumably with a view to continuing our discussion of the sexual abuse.  However, I butted in and started going on about my appointment with the psychiatrist the previous day.  I babbled on for a bit about the medication issues then told him that NewVCB agreed with my assertion that I am afflicted with C-PTSD.

C was a bit annoying over this.  He pointed out that C-PTSD is not included in the DSM or the ICD nor is it going to be in at least the DSM’s next incarnation (facts that I knew), and that all the research he’d read on borderline suggested that people with that diagnosis had been abused as children.  He must have been reading different research from me, because whilst child abuse is common in those with BPD, it is not universal.  Anyway, the implication was that I had no need to seek a diagnosis of C-PTSD as BPD was perfectly adequate.

I protested saying yes, some people diagnosed with BPD were badly abused as kids, but that it was still the disorder that everyone loved to hate (he agreed that it “doesn’t have a very good rep”), and I went on to point out that at least having recognition of some form of PTSD was important to me as it shifted the focus to trauma, rather than personality.

“You mentioned trauma,” he said after a few minutes.

“Oh, here we go,” I whispered, rolling my eyes slightly.  A few minutes later I was aware of the physical stance that I’d taken; arms folded across my chest, head bowed, shoulders tense.  He commented on it, saying that it was in marked contrast to the assertive me of a few minutes previously.

We discussed the conversation we’d had the week before, and I told him – still omitting specific details – more about the flashbacks.  I quietly admitted that I’d been highly disturbed by the visions of what happened beside the old kennel particularly, as it had gone by the time I was five or six.  My conscious perceptions had always been that this stuff happened only much later in my childhood.

I’m not sure exactly how things progressed, but whatever the case he eventually asked if I would find it less difficult to start describing some of the more ‘minor’ incidents.  I reckoned it would, so I agreed.

Wrong!  I kept thinking in detail about numerous times that Paedo had stroked my thighs in what I think he though was an alluring fashion (!), but I couldn’t even articulate that to C.  Fucking pathetic me.  Stupid bitch.  Every time I went to speak of it, something held the information in my throat.

“It’s almost like it’s somatic,” I told him eventually.  “I can feel a blockage in my throat that’s preventing me from telling you about it.  I feel like every nerve in my body is on end.”

“You can get up and walk about if you like,” he offered, which struck me as unusual as any time I’ve so much as stood up in the past, he has questioned me on my motivations for doing so.  At any rate, I shrugged and told him I’d be fine.

More silence ensued, and eventually C asked me what was going through my head.  Not that I could manage to tell him about the thigh-stroking bullshit, of course, but my mind was also engaging in its usual internal dichotomy of Me-That-is-Irritated-by-Me versus Pathetic-Child-Me.

“One side is saying, ‘it’s only words you stupid bitch, just tell him,’” I said.  “The other is whining, [cue childish voice] ‘noooo, I can’t!’”

“What if…” he began, standing up.  My eyes followed him in a kind of confused curiosity.

He pulled the chair from his desk away and put it in the middle of the room, then removed his bag from the spare chair next to me and pulled it towards the other.  There were now four chairs, including his and mine, in a nice little circle together.

He sat back down on his chair, and I raised an eyebrow at him.  The empty chair technique?  Gestalt therapy?!  When did this become part of our work together?

He asked me to imagine that Child Me was on the chair closest to me, and that the more Punitive Me was in the remaining empty chair.

“What would you say to them?” he asked.

I ignored the two empty chairs and said, to him, “I’d tell them both to wise the fuck up.”

C threw back his head and laughed.  It was the first time I noticed what nice teeth he has.

“Don’t worry,” I continued.  “The inherent irony in that statement is not lost on me.  I’m being punitive towards both of them, when I’m supposed to stop one being so punitive.”

“Can you think of another way to talk to them?” he enquired.  “And can you talk to them – not me?”

I faced the two chairs and eventually made some trite statement that the bully should see how difficult things are for the child, but that the child should see that maybe the bully had a point, even if she had an undesirable way of expressing it.

The two faceless chairs freaked me out.  That sounds ridiculous; they are chairs.  But somehow C had succeeded in getting me to project aspects of my personality onto them.  It was incredibly disconcerting, and I told him so.

“Why?” he pressed.

“They’re watching me.”

“And what are they saying or thinking?”

“They hate me.”  And I really felt that they did; the malevolence emanating from these two inanimate objects was, to me, hideously and suffocatingly palpable.

By this point, it was near the end of the session, and in fact C later pointed out that we’d overran (this delighted me as it meant he didn’t have another patient coming in straight after me.  I can thus maintain my wretched illusion of him being exclusive to me).

He said that he knew I found the empty chairs unsettling, but he asked how I felt about it as a useful aid to the therapy.

I didn’t like it, obviously.  However, I thought – as I’m sure so did he – that the exercise had been telling, even if only subtly so.  I therefore told him that I thought it had some merit.

He nodded, so perhaps that is something to look into again in the next few weeks.  He then turned the subject back to housekeeping-esque issues, telling me that whilst he knew it was important to me, he wondered if we could maybe focus less on the crap with the Trust in the next session.

“Sorry,” I replied mournfully.

As stated, he immediately leapt to my defence, reminding me – correctly, in fairness – that he’d fully engaged in that conversation too.

Whatever the case, he wants to use the next session (tomorrow) to go on about this sex abuse stuff.  Fuck.  I am horrified in two ways – one, it is my instinct to avoid this and two, tomorrow is week 45.  To negate the effects of one, I have printed out extracts from my post about the session a fortnight ago, in which I detailed the flashbacks of severe elements of the abuse.  I’d told him in this session that I’d considered bringing him such written information, but advised that I had decided against it as I thought he’d want me to verbalise the stuff.  He does, apparently, but thought working around written stuff would at least be a start.  Good.

As for point two, there is no way to combat it, excepting miracles from Mr D-P or someone.  I only have 59 weeks in total, and look how much time I wasted this session.  I was so raging with myself for doing that, but that rage pales into insignificance against the the dread I feel regarding the end of the relationship – a dread that threatens to completely and utterly overwhelm me.  I was telling one of my online friends during the week that thinking about the end of things with C is akin to contemplating the death of a loved one.  C will effectively be dead to me after week 59.  I will, in all probability, never see him again after it.

It’s too much.  I cannot cope with it.

False Memory Syndrome (FMS) is not included in the DSM nor any other official psychiatric text, and is considered a controversial ‘disorder’.  In fact, the FMS Foundation sound, broadly speaking, just as mental if not more so than those of us that they seek to diagnose.  Nevertheless, as the Wikipedia article says…

Human memory is…highly suggestible, and a wide variety of innocuous, embarrassing and frightening memories can be falsely created through the use of different techniques, including guided imagery, hypnosis and suggestion by others  (From aforementioned Wikipedia page)

…so there is every possibility therefore that my memories could have been created.  I do not trust myself to have recalled this accurately.

On the other hand…

[Doctor, therapist and child sex abuse expert Charles] Whitfield states that the “false memory” defense [in child sex abuse trials] is “seemingly sophisticated, but mostly contrived and often erroneous.”  He states that this defense has been created by “accused, convicted and self-confessed child molesters and their advocates” to try to “negate their abusive, criminal behavior.”  (From aforementioned Wikipedia page)

and he continues that

Child sexual abuse is widespread and dissociative/traumatic amnesia for it is common.  (Source)

…which I can accept at an intellectual level, but – as stated – I still don’t get why, if this stuff is true, why I remembered parts and dissociated others.

One thing I’ll say in my defence is that no one seems to have elicited these memories in me, as the theory of FMS posits.  C has never been suggestive about this material; it was me who brought up the issue first, and as a strand that has developed in the course of psychotherapy, there has never been anything more from him than reference to the last point I made on it.  I did see a hypnotherapist a few years ago, and hypnotherapy is one of the means by which false memories can be created, argue proponents of FMS.  However, in the end the hypnotherapist and I really didn’t touch upon the sexual abuse topic to any significant extent; I avoided it in all but the most tangential of ways because the therapist knows, and is known to, the McF dynasty.  So I don’t think any form of therapy is guilty for these ‘creations’.

Furthermore, there are little details in the memories that would surely be irrelevant and thus not present if they were fabricated by my wild imagination.  If you have seen the excellent sci-fi-cum-cop-drama Life on Mars, you may remember a scene at the end of the first episode between Sam Tyler, who believes he’s in a coma-like dream state, and Annie Cartwright:

SAM:  What’s that on your hand? Grit…
ANNIE:  Sand.  I was running up here and I fell against the fire bucket.
SAM:  Why would I imagine that?  Why would I bother to put that kind of detail in?
ANNIE:  You wouldn’t.  There’s a real sand bucket and I really fell into it.

(Source)

My version of the sand of which Sam and Annie speak in the above scene is stuff like:

1. the sensation of the wood of the dog kennel and the angles at which the splinters broke from it
2. the holes or gaps between the stones that they have in their yard
3. a single bead of water running down the garage wall, having escaped from the drainpipe above.

Little things like that.  Meaningless things.  Why would my mind create them?  What would the psychological function of that be?

The evidence may be in favour of the memories being (at least mostly) real, but I cannot escape the horrors of the severity of the allegations that I am making.  I am talking about sustained, systematic child sexual abuse.  That is Very, Very Bad Indeed.

If you met my uncle now, you would find him to be (mistake him for?) a benign, inoffensive man.  I don’t remember what I thought of him as a child, but whatever the case, he certainly does not seem to me now to have been capable of these heinous acts.  Even though this will not go further, in the sense that I will not bring the matter to prosecution or whatever, the mere act of making these accusations – however confidentially – when there is the slightest chance he might be innocent fills me with self-disgust and, frankly, terror.  Such allegations as these are surely some of the most offensive than could ever be made.

When I told C this on Thursday, he essentially told me that I’m clutching at straws.  He said that because I now see Paedo as a relatively benevolent figure, that I am going out of my way to justify this position and seek to defend him.  It is easier to blame myself (in the form of accusations of false memories) than it is to blame Paedo, because I cannot reconcile my present “he’s alright really” thinking with the apparent knowledge of the evil of which he is truly capable.  I would add to that, objectively speaking, that surely it is easier to believe I am a falsifying liar than someone who went through such systematic sexual torture as a child.

The worst thing about this whole thing is the bloody uncertainty of it.  I want to know what happened to me as a child, and I simply have no way to establish the level of objective reality of most of the specifics.  I can hardly walk up to Paedo and ask him; he’d deny any of it, I’m sure, and I would know that claim at least to be a falsehood.  Maybe C and I can work through it a bit more, but I am left with the feeling as I type this that I may eventually be able to say that on the balance of probability this happened or that didn’t – but that I’ll never have real, definitive answers.

That profoundly fucking sucks.

Those of you that subscribe to my Twitter feed will have read several tweets despairing of things she said to or about me this weekend. I did my duty, and took her out on Friday night for the accursed occasion of Clinton Cards’ Day, otherwise known as Mother’s Day. Think that was a good turn? Think again, apparently.

There were three main insults. It started over dinner in a local restaurant, during a discussion of her refusal to strike during the Ulster Workers’ Strike. I (admittedly quite flippantly) commented that I loved a crisis, to which my mother sneered, advising me that I have “never experienced a real crisis in [my] life.”

Well, quite. As far as you are aware anyway, Mum. Or wait! Were you not made aware of certain crises through which I have gone? Let me think…dum de dum….thinking…processing…aha! YES, you fucking were made thus aware. The only reason that you have failed to capture that awareness in your psyche is that you do not think I am worthy enough of your trust for you to accept the crises about which I have told you (see the latter parts of this post and this one for some details. Of course, the sex abuse incidents are not the only crises I’ve experienced, but they probably are some of the greatest).

I sighed and quietly submitted to her, letting her bang on with whatever wank it was that she wanted to bang on about. A engaged her in conversation, but I remember drifting away from their dialogue, fixating instead on the water feature in the restaurant we were in. The soft, gentle sound of it comforted me, as did the peaceful sight of its rippling along.

Dinner progressed, and eventually ended. For some reason, as the three of us walked home, a conversation regarding BMcC, one of A’s friends, developed.

This requires a bit of context. BMcC is also mental; in fact, he is mostly completely psychotic. He has periods of lucidity, but generally he exists in a complete fantasy world that he regards completely as real. Examples include his contention that he (a republican) invented the Northern Ireland peace process by convincing Sinn Fein to engage with unionists, and that he has been stalked by Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair and minions. Apparently he managed to intimidate Mad Dog and Friends into not shooting him, using the shockingly intimidating weapon of a plate. Hmm.

There are many other delusions and hallucinations of which he has spoken, but the problem is, of course, that since he genuinely believes all of this stuff, he doesn’t think there is anything wrong with him and therefore does not seek medical intervention. My mother has met BMcC on at least one occasion, and although I don’t recall him expressing any overt psychotic thinking at that point, he did exhibit aggression, some paranoia and behaviour inappropriate to the circumstance.

So, anyhow, we discussed BMcC’s probable illnesses, how when he has insight that he is quite an intelligent man and, crucially, what may have caused him to lose his marbles.

A explained that at one point, BMcC had subtlety hinted to our friend G that he had experienced some sort of trauma in his childhood. As most readers of this blog will be well aware, childhood trauma is very frequently linked with certain adult mental illnesses.

My mother’s reaction shocked even me. She said, “but if he went through something bad when he was a child he should have been over it years ago!”

Sorry, Mum, I had completely forgotten that you are an internationally acclaimed psychological philosopher. Through your own adult experience of trauma, you are of course qualified to speak with consummate authority on the effects it has on everyone else who is unfortunate enough to have gone through anything else that comes under that umbrella term.

A and I both immediately leapt to correct this ridiculous assertion. I had a copy of Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery in my bag, and fought against the urge to pull it out and scream at her to educate her ignorant, prejudiced little mind. I didn’t, of course, because then she would ask why I had such a tome. Sometimes I am tempted to tell her the full ramifications of things – but to be honest a lot of my reasoning for doing so would be to spite her, and why rock the boat over something so destructive?

Perhaps I’m hypersensitive at the minute owing to matters in psychotherapy, but for whatever reason I took this comment very personally. She had been looking at me as she said it; I’ve convinced myself that that is a highly significant fact. She wants me to know that if – and it is a major ‘if‘ to her – I did experience any trauma as a kid, that I should be over it now. It is entirely possible that I’m overreacting to this, but that’s my current line of thinking anyway.

So I ranted about this on Twitter, as obviously I couldn’t rant in front of her (though when she left the room I levied ‘V’ signs and mouthed expletives in her general direction). My dear friend Splintered Ones responded, describing my mother as ‘toxic’.

At the time, although I appreciated why that was thought, I disagreed; my mother was tactless, misinformed and willfully ignorant, yes – but surely not ‘toxic’? Whatever the case, I eventually gave up trying to deal with her and went to bed – but I couldn’t stop ruminating on her remarks and how much they had cut me to the bone. It’s irrelevant whether or not she was deliberately being so nasty; the fact is, one way or another, she was.

A told me that he felt he’d found her more backbiting and snide on other occasions, and maybe in general terms he had a point. However, I can only surmise that because therapy has recently been bringing one of my biggest traumas to the fore, that I feel any invalidation of my experiences very deeply and acutely.

Because my sleep had been so non-existent for most of that night, I slept relatively late the next morning. I was awake for a good while before I got up, and heard mumblings of A and my mother in conversation over breakfast, though I didn’t think much of it.

The morning went without significant hitch. She made one or two quietly scornful comments, but this is par for the course. If she didn’t provide such pass-remarkable commentary, I would be concerned for her health. A and I managed to escape about 1pm, and headed home.

I was still pissed off thanks to the night before, and thus a discussion between the two of us about my mother ensued. A told me that prior to my getting up they had had a conversation about my mentalism; in fairness, this mainly consisted of lamentations about the inadequacy of the Trust’s mental health services – but as you may well have guessed, my mother had one or two other choice words to offer.

On this occasion she flat-out denied my having any traumatic history to A, and accused me instead of having a deficient personality that had made me mad. Granted, the term ‘personality disorder’ can be misleading and pejorative, but I have tried to educate my mother about the realities of borderline. If she has failed to take this information on board, then that is her failing, not mine.

When Splintered Ones, in response to a tweet about this, reiterated her position that my mother was toxic, I found myself sadly agreeing.

Even if my mother refuses to believe what I have told her about Paedo, how she can deny that I’ve experienced trauma of at least some description is beyond me. The very knowledge of what my father was really like is traumatic; his willful long-term abandonment of me and decision to deny me anything in his will builds upon that. The effects of the way my first proper romance ended have been long-lasting and profound. Being bullied at school wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. She is quite well aware of all of these things.

She would argue that Shit Happens, and one should just get over it. Objectively speaking, I can see that rationale; however, two things strike me. Firstly, unfortunately the nasty things in my history did not at all exist in isolation. If I had ‘just’ been bullied at school, for instance, maybe it would have been much easier to overcome; alas, that was not the way my life panned out. Secondly, BPD (and other psychiatric conditions with which I am diagnosed) are thought to exist in individuals with a biological predisposition to them. In effect, this means that what might seem like a relatively ‘minor’ incident to one person elicits in the ‘vulnerable’ amongst us a much deeper and prolonged reaction.

In any case, there’s a certain irrelevance in this information. The fact is, for whatever reason, I am suffering and have suffered. Should her instinct – biologically, intellectually and emotionally – not be to protect me, rather than invalidate me at every juncture? She bangs endlessly on about how ‘blood is thicker than water’ – a statement with which I disagree fundamentally, but if she believes it, why does she consider Paedo more worthy of her trust than me? He is her brother-in-law, after all; I am her daughter.

C thinks that part of my inability to verbally articulate some of the stuff that happened with Paedo is attributable to the fact that my experience of talking about it has been to have it rejected and thrown back in my face. He knows that I know he believes me, but thinks thanks to my mother’s assertion that I was a liar that I nevertheless unconsciously can’t bear the idea of such denials once more. I think he has a point.

I have always failed to live up to her expectations. I am not the child that was wanted; in a way, being fathered by my father, I never could have been. But even with that disability, I was still expected to achieve everything she wanted me to achieve, to do everything she wanted me to do, to be moulded into the exact dull type of philistine that she wanted me to be. In her tunnel-visioned eyes, I was meant to be a popular, happily married barrister with 2.4 children and a devotion to her extended family.

Instead, her not-so-precious offspring is a childfree, jobless and reclusive headcase living in sin and who wishes her extended family would disappear in a black cloud of smoke. Very well educated, maybe, but that’s about the only thing I got right – and even then, only when it suits her. “Oh, Pandora should have got her PhD – but she couldn’t be bothered.” (An assertion that ignores the serious breakdown I had whilst trying to obtain my Masters degree).

For the record, my mother is far, far from as bad a parent as many I’ve heard of, and in many ways I therefore do count myself lucky. I think my annoyance develops from the fact that she thinks she has all but done nothing wrong, that every complaint I register is simply reflective of me and not her. I really believe that that is simply not the case. I have long since given up trying to point it out, though, as I am not sure how much more criticism and bile I can cope with from her.

I know she’s horribly traumatised, and I regret that very deeply. If I could erase the atrocities levied against her by my father, I would in a heartbeat. I love my mother. She is mostly a good person, and she did not deserve any of what happened to her.

By the same token, though, I do not believe that I deserve to be punished for V’s evil.

Fuck it. I am a disappointment. I am a failure. I admit it – nay, I accept it. But it actually shouldn’t matter, should it? I am her daughter. What about the fabled experience of unconditional love that other parents so openly and happily talk about?

I received a text message from my cousin Sarah early this afternoon to report that her daughter, Suzanne, has given birth to her second son (Marcus’s baby brother).

Another son.  Not a daughter, as I had feared and (inexplicably) expected.  Maybe there is a God.  Paedo might not touch Marcus and As Yet Unnamed New Baby because they are male.  He might not have touched either of them anyway, but it’s stupidly reassuring nevertheless.  Not that I will be any less vigilant in the company of him and his two great-grandsons, having said that.  As I’ve said in the past, if I suspect he has done anything inappropriate towards them, I shall act.

Why won’t Paedo just hurry up and die?  His life sucks horse bollocks anyway, so remaining alive isn’t exactly doing the miserable old sod any favours.  I believe I said it before; death would be a mercy to him.  It wouldn’t make any difference to me from the perspective of my abuse at his hands, but it would put an end to my worries about the possibility of him trying to fuck his underage descendants, and that would be a major weight of which to be rid.

Anyhow, I bring this up as, perhaps unsurprisingly given the subject matter of recent therapeutic sessions, shit with Paedo was the main crux of what I discussed with C on Thursday past.

I don’t remember a tremendous amount of the dialogue.  I do recall that I whined and whined and whined that I was a fetid, disgusting whore and that C kept asking what evidence I had for that, and that I responded that it was a clearly ridiculous statement but that that didn’t keep me from believing it fervently anyway.

I told him that one thing I couldn’t bear people calling me was a slut, and how I had reacted very viciously on the rare occasions that anyone had done so.  “And yet,” I went on, “it’s exactly what I think of myself.”

He asked if I thought it was ever appropriate for an adult to have a sexual relationship with a child, and I responded that of course it wasn’t, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t find (make up?) evidence justifying what Paedo had done to me.  In other words, in other cases one can never justify child sex abuse, but it is perfectly acceptable to do so in mine.  Thinking back on this statement, what hideous kind of inverted narcissism am I guilty of?!  How dare I make myself out to be such a special case, even if in a twisted sort of way?

At one point C very gently asked me if I could actually describe some of the stuff that happened.  I wanted to tell him.  In fact, I fucking longed to tell him.  But every time I went to open my mouth, a pathetic groan or muzzled whimper was all that emanated from my mouth, and absolutely nothing of any substance was forthcoming.

I am so ashamed.  So ashamed.  So dirty and filthy and vile.  I am damaged goods.  If I tell him what happened then he will know all that and he will be repelled by me, so filthy and horrible am I.  Shockingly, I told him that I thought this, and then went on to admit that although I do not agree with it in the least anymore, that I was brought up with my mother telling me that sex outside of marriage was a bad thing.  Ergo, I was a slut for having a sexual relationship wth my uncle.  I wasn’t married to him, at a time when I was told I had to be for it to be ‘right’.

What, for me, was most curious about this session was that for what was probably the first time, I felt the full force of a flashback.  I have ‘seen’ images of the abuse in fleeting moments on plenty of occasions, but on Thursday, with C, I felt it physically too.  I cannot believe I am about to type this, but I felt pain and what I can only describe as a nebulous but ghastly sensation in my genital region (I just went to thesaurus.com looking for an alternative word to ‘genital’.  The very act of typing that word fails me with shame and horror).  I felt the physical sensations of his hands on me.  I heard his laboured breathing, and felt my own chest constricting as I tried not to breathe in the futile hope that what was happening might just go away.

And yet, the imagery remained largely third-person.  I saw him push me down as if I had been a bystander, and yet nevertheless I was so strongly feeling the sensations of all that had happened.  There’s a book I saw on Amazon called The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment.  Clearly my body does remember…certain things, anyway.  But, I ask myself, does my mind?

Well, the answer to that seems to be a definite “yes” and “no”.  My mind must love ambiguity; it knows I hate it and it wishes to torment me, I should imagine.  As C and I sat in his office silently with these physical sensations and third-person images battering my psyche, I was suddenly flooded with an abject barrage of other gruesome images, in tiny flashing bursts.

The concealed alley-way beside the garage.  A laybay off a road behind their house.  Beside the old dog shed, which was only there until I was about five making it especially fucking troubling.  Their living room.  The back of my wendy house at my mother’s house.  My darling grandfahter’s house and outhouses

Penetrative vaginal sex.  Forced fellatio.  Fingering.  Other touching.  My reluctant acquiescence versus my attempts to fight him off.  His ‘gentle’ attempts to get his way right up to his brutal forcefulness causing searing pain that shouldn’t be experienced by a child.

It all smothered my consciousness in a racing deluge of awfulness that, despite the considerable scope of it, could only have lasted a few seconds.

I looked up at C in horror and told him, omitting specific details, what had just happened to me.

“It’s false memory syndrome, isn’t it?” I begged him.  “Mum would certainly think it was and she would be right.  These memories can’t be true.  Can they?”

“Look at the filing cabinet,” he said, nodding in its direction.  “The memories that our minds use to build up our conscious recall, our personalities, relationships and whatnot – they’re normally filed coherently in our brains, just like files are put in there in an orderly A – Z fashion.  Trauma memories aren’t so easily categorised.  Because they’re so difficult to deal with at the time, as you know many people find themselves dissociated to a greater or lesser degree, so the memories are completely fragmented.  Even when the person doesn’t dissociate, the memories tend to fragment anyhow, in order that the mind may cope with the trauma.  So if you open trauma memories in the filing cabinet, it would be like seeing a load of files or documents just being thrown in there haphazardly, with no order to them.”

He said, “because of the fragmented way in which the mind stores these memories, recall of them is complex.  Something may just suddenly trigger them; they may simply come back over time; they may not come back at all, but still leave their impact on other areas of the person’s life.”

“So you don’t think if I told you about this stuff that I would be a fucking liar then?” I asked, appreciating what he was telling me but doubting my mind’s capacity for truth-seeking nevertheless.  I accused myself of having an overactive imagination.

C replied by saying that in a sense it didn’t entirely matter if what had invaded my consciousness was an 100% accurate depiction of the sex abuse.  “In the first instance,” he explained, “none of us remember events 100% accurately 100% of the time, whether those events are traumatic or otherwise.  And secondly, if your mind is storing this information, then it is clearly bothering you – whether at a conscious or unconscious level – and that’s the most important thing.”

I don’t think he ever said it in an outright fashion at any particular juncture, but I distinctly got the impression from him that he felt that the memories were (at least mostly) accurate.  Maybe it was his gentleness, his empathy – I don’t know.  In part I wish he’d shouted at me and said that yes, I was indeed a horrible little slut, and that my lies were unspeakable and abhorrent.

Maybe then – just maybe – it might not seem to be true.

I have this enduring and recurring image of watching, from my perspective on the chair opposite C, a (faceless) little girl climbing into C’s lap, curling up and burying her head in his chest as he puts his arms around her, strokes her hair and gently soothes her in softly spoken words that I can’t quite hear.

I assume that she’s me.

Writing this makes me cry.  I am so ashamed and horrified and disgusted about all of this stuff, and today should be a happy day because it saw the release of Final Fantasy XIII.  I’m not sure that there was a great deal more of substance in the session anyway, so I’ll try to conclude.

The long and the short of things is that I still didn’t describe any detailed aspects of things with Paedo to C, either from the stuff I recall clearly or from the ‘new memories’.  To that end I accused myself of “capably playing yet another game of avoidance.”

In actuality, even though I thought that, I still thought the session had perhaps been a step in the right direction, and when he refuted my claims of avoidance, he seemed to agree with that assessment.  He actually claimed to think that I’d been very open and that if I was unable to verbally articulate certain things, then that was really not surprising at all, and shouldn’t be something over which I beat myself up.

I said, in that laughably child-like and black and white way of which I am so often guilty, “so, is this good?  Is it good that I’ve told you what I’ve told you?  Has this session been good?”

He replied that if that was the word with which I felt most comfortable, then yes, it had been “good”.

Oh, give me a star medal!!!

He had, at the start of the session, asked me how strong the impulses to kill or harm myself had been since the last time I saw him, and I’d said that whilst I still thought about those things with great frequency, that I hadn’t felt the same compulsion that I had last year or in the earlier part of this one to act on those thoughts.  He’d been encouraged by that of course, but given how much slightly-under-the-surface-bubbling a mere reference to any of this wank had caused me before, he was concerned that such candour as I’d apparently expressed on Thursday would drive me back to hurting myself.  He practically begged me to find something to do to occupy myself in at least the immediate aftermath of the session.  I told him I had been intending to go for swim and a coffee when I got back into town.

He liked that, then asked if I could occupy myself after that until A got home with the X-Box or a walk or something.  I agreed, though in the end I went to get some groceries instead, and I was still quietly pleased that he (ostensibly, anyway) gave enough of a toss to care about what happened after I left his room.

He asked if we could “park” the sex abuse discussion until next week, and discuss a few practical matters.  Unsurprisingly, one of these was the stupid letter from the twatfaced Mental Health Director.  I was taken aback to learn that C had heard absolutely nothing more, and was merely wondering if I had.  If I were C, I would find it professionally unacceptable that he had not been apprised of the ‘progress’ of the issue.

I hadn’t read the letter in detail at that point, so outlined it in basic terms only, telling him that I found it an amusing waste of time.  He misunderstood, thinking I meant that my whole complaint had been a waste of time, and very earnestly and reassuringly said, “I don’t think it was a waste of time.”

Apparently I have flagged up just how inadequate services are in my Trust area for conditions of the ilk that I present.  He suggested that not only had it been good for the head office twatheads to learn of this, but it even aided his immediate bosses in Psychology.  He thinks I have done A Very Good Thing.

I let him think I was completely letting it drop, which was at the time my broad intention.  I will let him know this week, out of respect and courtesy, that that is no longer my intention, and I will show him the pathetic letter that I received to demonstrate why indeed it should not be.

As I left he told me to enjoy my coffee which, wretchedly, made me want to hurl my arms around him and cry.  Why am I such feeble, pitiful bitch?  To add to that sentiment, what has pervaded the forefront of my mind since seeing him has not so much been horrid flashbacks, though that is not to say that they have not been in evidence at all; they have.  But what has played out mentally most commonly, what has dominated my psyche, what just won’t go away no matter how much I try to distract myself, is that sad, prevailing image of a damaged child seeking some sort of comfort or solace in the safety and reassurance of C’s lap.

EDIT: Literally about fifteen minutes after publishing the above, Sarah sent another text message to advise that Suzanne and her husband are calling the baby after Paedo.  This made me feel utterly physically sick and mentally horrified.  Even whenever Paedo does die, the child will always remind me of him and what he’s done.  Fuck.

Alas.  These evil bastarding illnesses don’t disappear because one has a few less shit days.  I had a very productive session with C on Thursday (blog to follow, mais oui), but it left me thinking about some shit that I don’t really want to think about, mainly about the stupid fucking sex abuse (like that’s the only difficulty I’ve ever faced in my life.  Why the hell am I fixating on it?).  Moreover, my mother – I am not unconvinced deliberately – made a particularly insulting comment vis a vis same a mere few hours later (details in the forthcoming C post).  Consequently, this stuff has been swirling around in my psyche for a few days, though I thought I was handling it quite well, as my mood remained on the less-shit-than-completely-and-utterly-shit level.

Or, more accurately, it did ostensibly.  However, beneath the surface the madness bubbles smugly in its little cauldron of neurons and silly levels of dopamine and eventually, when you least expect it, it attacks.

I made the stupid decision to go on a drinking bender yesterday.  Well, I say ‘bender’, but by comparison to some piss-ups I’ve frequented, it was actually relatively subdued.  Nevertheless, one should not be consuming alcohol when taking anti-psychotics.  I’ve always ignored rules on alcohol and medication, and have never encountered any noticeable side-effects, but then all of these tablets are different in how they interact with one’s personal physiology.

Anyway, all was going well up until the point at which A and I met G, our friend about whom I blogged on the DBT philosophy post.  Not that there’s anything wrong with G; he doesn’t act as some sort of intellectual trigger or something.  No, the reason it went wrong at this point was that it is the last point of which I have any recollection.

I woke up this morning in my own bed, fully clothed.  I must confess that I wondered at the time if I’d done anything mad…but I didn’t think it would be quite as bad as it turned out to be.

My party piece had apparently been to pass flat out in the disabled toilet.  Classy, SI.  A had begun to think I’d slit my wrists in there, and ergo G asked the barwoman if she would check the toilets to see if I remained in this plane of existence.  Unfortunately I did, but was lying there, flat-out unconscious.

I have to admit that in retrospect, this seems amusing – albeit in a twisted sort of way.  Stupid cow had too much to drink and fell asleep in the pisser, chortle chortle!  But it’s really not so funny when I actually think about it.  I have never passed out owing to alcohol before – and as I say, some days gone by make yesterday look fairly tame.  What’s more, I’ve never experienced such long-term memory loss like some people do as the result of pissing it up.  A few details get lost amongst all the murdered brain cells, certainly, but not hours of material.  It’s like an entire chapter has been ripped from a book, and the only thing that I really feel I can compare it to is the amnesia from a severe dissociative episode, like some of the fugues that have been my absolute joy to behold.

The story continues.  A brought me home, not unreasonably.  And there I really, really lost it.  He doesn’t recall most of the specifics exactly, but whatever the case I lodged a barrage of completely ridiculous and unfair allegations and insults at him.  Subsequent to which I levied them at myself – I’m a fetid, disgusting slutty whore, apparently.  Well, at least I got something right during this epic rant of stupidity and vicious pointlessness.

I am reminded somewhat of the behaviour that gave rise to this post, though at least my mind has the common courtesy to allow me to remember what happened in that incident.  Last night’s events were not as serious as that, and as far as I know there was no overt psychosis involved, but nionetheless – the stream of abuse that came out of my grotesque little mouth is simply unacceptable.  More lines crossed.  More boundaries of common fucking decency transgressed.

My current self-view is that I am a evil, utterly vile, indescribably despicable bitch of Satan.  Not, as a committed atheist, that I believe in Satan’s existence, but you take my point.  Oh yeah, and the fetid whore thing still rings true.  A said that my apparently unwavering belief that I am a slut is something that needs to be discussed with C in therapy.  Well.  Quite.

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about all this is that despite my complete self-disgust and total horror at what I’ve done, I’m actually still in a (relatively) favourable frame of mind.  I’ve gone about punching myself as punishment, but I don’t feel that overwhelming need to self-harm that one does when the strength of one’s depression is crippling.  I’ve actually managed to have a relatively non-shite day with A despite his revelations about what a complete twat I was.

So anyhow, I apologised to him and then started deriding myself a la the last-but-one paragraph.  He accepted my apology and refuted my blather of self-disgust, though I am clueless as to how he can hold me in any positive regard whatsoever.  And then…this is the best of it…my appalling behaviour was rewarded with breakfast in fucking bed.  I am a lucky girl.

My assessment as to the causation of the blackout is that it must have been attributable mainly to the combination of alcohol and Quetiapine, though I do think I must have been unconsciously harbouring some major stress.  Certainly, the outbust thereafter would indicate that – the actual catalyst might have been booze, but the content of the rant strongly speaks to me of underlying and unprocessed psychological bullshit.

However, that simply isn’t an excuse.  A may defend me on the grounds that I’m “mental”, but I don’t think that – or anything else – is a valid defence.  Being mental does not give one carte blanche to scapegoat the most important people in one’s life for things in which they were and are absolutely uninvolved.  No, the only human characteristic that deems that permissible is one that is strongly in evidence in my personality: that of being an abject cunt.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck it all,
My fucking life.
Suck, suck, suck, suck, suck it all,
My fucking dick.

Here is my apparent equivalent in prose. Hilarious.

—

Fuck my existence.

Fuck therapy.

Fuck C.

Fuck (New)VCB.

Fuck the NHS in general.

Fuck V.

Fuck Paedo.

Fuck my entire famly except my mother.

Fuck my ex.

Fuck the school bullies.

Fuck the school fucking teachers.

Fuck university.

Fuck the Troubles.

Fuck politicans.

Fuck the Social Security Agency.

Fuck the government.

Fuck religion.

Fuck secularism.

Fuck human relationships.

Fuck feeling.

Fuck heat.

Fuck cold.

Fuck the UK and Ireland.

Fuck Earth.

Fuck the solar system, galaxy, local cluster, universe and multiverse, should the latter exist.

Fuck medication.

Fuck getting washed and dressed.

Fuck getting out of bed.

Fuck prejudice and bigotry.

Fuck the beautiful people (forgive irony vis a vis last point).

Fuck this blog.

Fuck my “life”.

Fuck everything.

That is all.