Well…I don’t really hate this blog.  As I’ve said several times, it is in fact my pride and joy – or, at least, what has gone before has made up what I call my pride and joy.  I don’t feel very proud or very joyful at the minute, though it’s not the blog’s fault, obviously; it’s mine.  I keep saying to myself, “you’ve got to write about this,” or “you should say a few words about that,” and then I look at the screen of the laptop, poise my fingers across the keyboard’s home keys – and everything goes blank.

I have two therapy sessions to catch up on and, since I probably won’t write about them before tomorrow morning, a third will probably join them.  I remember the interactions pretty clearly, as I usually do – one pièce de résistance was asking C if therapy was really meant to make you feel worse, which hit a nerve ;) – but I just can’t find any motivation to record them in writing here (or anywhere else for that matter).  I think, letters to MPs notwithstanding, that as things draw to a close I’m increasingly finding our meetings to be utterly futile and to that end, perhaps, I can’t face writing about them.  To do so would maybe be to acknowledge that, this time next month, psychotherapy – my only hope of a recovery of sorts from my perpetual anguish – will in all likelihood be over.  That’s a thought that is both sobering and chilling.  CPN/SW or not, good family and friends or not, I’m not at all convinced that I can keep myself safe from the end of next month onwards.

To go from making what was really rather good progress in therapy to regressing into this barren Purgatory-like wasteland is frustrating to put it mildly.  I don’t know how to articulate my current feelings on the matter beyond that.  Grieving, hurt, depressed, anxious, angry, I suppose – but all of these with a certain degree of measured stoicism; perhaps I am simply resigned to his abandonment of me now.  Overall I feel straightforward but profound sadness and regret.  Sadness for the fact that I will miss him greatly, I suppose, and regret for what could have and should have been – a relationship that had the power, if given the requisite resources, to greatly improve my quality of life.

Even if I had the will to write up the last two sessions – even if I had it right now – I wonder to some extent what the actual point would be, because as I say our sessions are feeling increasingly pointless.  I don’t really blame him, and I don’t really blame me.  It feels inevitable that things would just sort of ‘trail off’ mid-sentence, mid-air, as D-Day approaches.  Just the nature of the beast, methinks.  Pointless, futile, dancing around things and dodging others.  Still, I suppose the reason I started writing such detailed posts on therapy in the first place was for a record…for reasons of mere posterity.  Empty discussion or not, surely it is equally important to discuss the final sessions of this process if that has been my aim.  So I should – and therefore, I have now decided, will – review them, but I can’t say when.

Because the problem is that my current apathy is not just about examining psychotherapeutic matters.  I am finding it excessively difficult to write about anything (perhaps not unlike how I felt two weeks ago and indeed a week before that).  In part (probably in large part) that’s because I have absolutely no life whatsoever.  Yeah, I sometimes go out for a drink with A or to a shop with my mother – but so what?  What’s that got to do with anything?  Who’d be interested in that?  Certainly not me, and since this blog (despite having quite a few lovely followers these days) is primarily my record of these dark times, I’m not going to blather on about stuff that bores me to death (death is more peacefully achieved by other means, thanks very much).

This failure of expression and engagement with life extends to contact with the outside world at large.  I’ve been ignoring Twitter, emails, text messages – everything.  I refuse to return my mother’s unanswered calls, and the only person I speak to is A.    I do go through phases of doing this every so often, but this feels deeper, like it’s likely to go on longer.  I’m in a rut, both in terms of social communication and in terms of the one form of communication I’ve always held so dear – writing.

I thought about taking a brief break from blogging – say a month or something – but as I stated here, my concern, justified or otherwise, is that even the most short-lived of interludes would lead to a situation where I never felt able to once more lift my metaphorical pen.  And ergo you get stupid little filler posts like this one, designed to at least be something, but which are pointless and vacuous in their story-telling and exasperating in what catalysed them.

But that’s not this blog’s fault.  I don’t hate this blog.  I do, however, despise its author.

It is exactly one year to the day since I first started writing Confessions of a Serial Insomniac. Happy birthday, blog!

My first piece of writing here was the ‘About‘ page, which still retains the same basic structure as it did on 4 May 2009, but has been modified in terms of content as circumstances have changed. My first actual post was written on 5 May, and can be found here (it’s also since become the subject of another page, as I thought it gave a lot of useful contextual information).

Confessions began life at serialinsomniac.wordpress.com. I moved to the self-hosted domain of www.serialinsomniac.com in January this year, as I wanted more control over the aesthetics of the blog. I still have a redirect from the old WP hosted blog, which will run until January 2011.

SIGNIFICANT EVENTS AND POSTS

A lot has happened in these 12 months.

2009

I started self-harming again in May (though I’ve been ‘clean’ since January this year) and was subsequently diagnosed with BPD and bipolar disorder in June (at which point my medication was changed from Citalopram to Venlafaxine). I started hearing a (benign) voice in September, whilst in October the hallucinations became malicious, in the form of ‘They’. It was also in October that I lost my job, owing to my lengthy mental illness-related absence. I completely lost my sanity over Christmas, leaving me in not quite the best frame of mind in which to see the new year. The problems were mainly related to being forced into seeing Paedo, but C’s revelations that he would be offering a curtailed number of sessions in 2010 didn’t help either.

2010

In January, I bit the bullet and did something that I’d been intent on doing for about two years – I changed my (sur)name, thus dissociating myself entirely from my aunt and uncle, Georgie and Merv, not to mention my deceased father V. The new year also saw me receive my first blog award, from the wonderful Mental Nurse, who have also been kind enough to feature me in their weekly round-up of mental health blogging (TWIM) a number of times. Despite these positive developments, I spent the entire month in a depression of epic proportions, and I tried to kill myself in the early hours of the 16th. However, shortly after that, I was allocated a new psychiatrist (Dr M, mostly known as NewVCB) who prescribed the anti-psychotic Quetiapine (brand name Seroquel) on top of Venlafaxine to curb the voices and hallucinations, and also to act as a mood stabiliser. It has really been a force for good in my life. NewVCB later agreed with my self-diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, so I was able to add that to my arsenal of diagnoses. The C-PTSD was mostly in relation to the sexual abuse I went through as a child, the full memories of which came back to me through discussion in therapy, the extent of which I finally admitted to C some weeks later. It is an ongoing psychotherapeutic topic.

A year on from commencement of writing, the importance that this blog now has in my life was underlined by an incident in which it initially looked like my family had found my online home (which would have been a huge disaster for all concerned). I now do not think they have, but my conclusion whatever the case is that I will not be silenced.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As you might expect, there are far too many to list. I would like to thank all that read here, and in particular those of you that leave comments – your interest and support make this project worthwhile (though of course I still maintain the journal primarily for my own benefit). There are a few people that I have to single out though.

Obviously A has been a source of immeasurable support and I’m fairly convinced I’d have done myself in were it not for him throughout the past year. There are no words great enough to convey my appreciation of his unwavering tolerance and care – I can only say that he is treasured and loved very much. CVM, K and Annie (internet friends that I have met or will meet) and my close friends Aaron, Daniel and Brian also deserve my gratitude.

In terms of my online friends, I owe particular thanks to Alix, Splintered Ones, Tiger, Lola, Kim, Wounded Genius, The Same Sky, Bippidee and Phil. I’d like to especially single out bourach, as it was her blog that inspired me to start this one. Thanks also to the aforementioned Mental Nurse for featuring my blather in TWIM from time to time, and for yesterday devoting a whole post (albeit a short one) to my crap

SOME STATISTICS AND TRIVIA

At the time of this writing Confessions has had 48,213 hits. The counter is only updated twice a day, so if you see any disparities (eg. the counter not updating despite you visiting several times), then that is probably why.

The overall most read post is ‘Suicide Attempt Epic Fail‘, which has presently been read 402 times. At the old URL, the most read post was ‘Signs of Childhood Sexual Abuse‘, which is still the second most read overall post with 332 hits. In both incarnations, ‘About the Author‘ has been the most popular static page, with a total hit count of 771.

The post most frequently reached through Google searches is ‘BPD vs C-PTSD‘, which with 329 hits is currently just short of being the second most read post overall.

The longest post, with over 8,000 words, is ‘A (Half-)Life in Therapy‘.

The busiest day on the blog to date was Friday 16 April 2010, when there were 614 visits. The quietest days were, unsurprisingly, last May when the blog was shiny-new. Since then my quietest period was about a week in April 2010 when the aforementioned worries about my family possibly reading the site surfaced. This was due to my efforts to hide the blog from their eyes, but of course had the knock-on effect of preventing others from reading too.

The busiest month so far was March 2010, when Confessions received a total of 10,529 hits. The quietest month was, unsurprisingly, way back in the beginning in May 2009 when there were 824 visits. Interesting point of comparison: this May is only just into its fourth day, and the hit count for it is 1,082 – half as much again in four days than were received in the whole month of May last year.

On the other hand, May 2009 was (ostensibly) my most prolific month of writing, as 23 posts were published during that period. I say ‘ostensibly’ as, as my writing here has developed, my verbosity has similarly developed and increased notably, so in reality even though I may have been writing less posts in other months, I was probably writing more words. The month with the least posts published was August 2009, where I only wrote a total of seven.

The sites that send me the most traffic are BlogSurfer, StumbleUpon and, of course, Twitter. The actual blog that refers folks here most frequently is Bippidee‘s

The most commented-on post was, perhaps slightly ironically, a password-protected post: ‘Things I Know That I Should Not Know‘ has 47 comments.

The most common search terms are variations on the blog’s title, ‘confessions of a serial insomniac‘. ‘C-PTSD‘ (and variants thereof) is currently the second most popular, with ‘i hate my therapist‘ (presumably for this), ‘letter to my therapist‘ (this) and ‘Julian Hendy‘ (this) also featuring prominently.

Some of my favourite search terms are ‘hallucinating gnomes‘ (referencing this), ‘dr bellend‘ (this), ‘dbt is patronising‘ (too many possible posts to list), ‘fuck you therapist i hate our relationship‘ (this again, I assume) and ‘arsecunt‘ (apparently this, which was otherwise fairly innocuous!). There are also a variety of searches ranging from fairly dull to outright weird that incorporate variations on the word ‘wank’ (because of this).

Including this, there are a total of 154 published posts. Including track- and pingbacks, there are 1,572 comments.

A POINTLESS YOUTUBE VIDEO TO PROVE THAT I CAN EMBED THE DAMN THINGS…AND MEH

The following song quite adequately sums up how my life has been in the year chronicled on this blog (and well before it at that)…

Click here to view the embedded video.

…not especially cheerful, I know. It hasn’t been an especially cheerful year. But still, something positive has come out of it; Confessions of a Serial Insomniac is my pride and joy. It might not be the best written blog, nor the most popular, nor useful nor helpful nor politically cor-bloody-rect in any way. But it’s mine – all mine – and I love it, follies and all.

I hath returned, good readers!  I hope this post finds you well and contented.

“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.

I’ve made a few references to the relative anonymity of this blog in recent posts (here and here) and decided I would explore it more. I know many bloggers here in the madosphere write anonymously in order that they may reveal their deepest, darkest thoughts with complete impunity; for example, Bippidee gave a very good account of her reasoning for chosen anonymity, which is along these lines, here.

It accounts for some of my motivation for anonymous writing, but it isn’t really the crux of it, to be honest. There are a few people in my real life that I allow access to this blog, which kind of disallows exploration of some of the most intimate stuff – but then, I’m not sure I’d want to share the most intimate stuff with anyone anyway, anonymously or otherwise, so that doesn’t really matter. Furthermore, I’ve been known to password protect certain posts to ‘hide’ them from real-life voyeurs who might otherwise become party to information to which they are not entitled.

In an ideal world my writing wouldn’t be anonymous at all. I don’t think anonymity adds to the stigma attached to mental illness, but I do think that complete openness about one’s experiences can only help to reduce it (if you can appreciate the subtle, but definite, distinction). I have a lot of respect for what Seaneen (the author of The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive), and Alison (of Genius Gone Wrong) are doing on their blogs, which are almost entirely identifiable with them.

However, such openness – in certain circumstances – can be profoundly inhibiting. Regardless of whether or not we all should be more open, on certain themes it can be desperately difficult to actually do so. I think one of the key things I’m thinking of here is sexual abuse.

Anyone who’s read the archives or followed the blog for a while will know that I’m quite open on the general points of what Paedo did to me when I was a child – but if you look closely, I’ve never gone into the specifics, the hideous minutiae of the various incidents. I would like to do so, but I’m too weighed down by a disgusting overwhelment (spot the made-up word) of shame and responsibility for it. I know rationally that I am not to blame, but in some ways this is the point I made above; I know that discussing specifics is maybe something that I should do, but it’s just so fucking hard. If it’s hard without you knowing who I am, how much worse would it be if you did?

Anyhow, metaphorical blocks to openness and honesty are not the main crux of my need for anonymity. The choice to write under a pseudonym is predicated upon the need for protection. Not self-protection, oh no. It’s about protecting the myriad of people that would find themselves mentioned here.

In reality, if any of the relevant personnel somehow happened upon this blog, they would know the identity of the author instantaneously. However, fortunately for them (and me), most of them (with one possible exception) are very, very unlikely to come across the online home of yours truly. Were I using my real name, though, it would be thousands of times more likely that this would happen.

It is essentially an agreed part of my psychotherapy that I anonymise references to it and specifically to C here, after this debacle. I could reveal my own identity and not reveal his, of course, given that there’s only a few in my ‘real life’ that actually even know his full name – it’s just never really come up with anyone else. For the record, C is the only person that I’m protecting here that I think could easily find the blog.

The anonymity also protects A in a sense; although I’ve allowed two of his close friends (W and G) to read it, as they are people to whom I am relatively close myself, I fear that some of his other mates and, in particular, his family coming across this site would be disastrous. Everyone knows by now that I’m mental, but it’s a small few that know about the self-harm, the dissociative episodes and the psychoses. I don’t care if A’s parents know…well, no, wait. Who am I trying to kid?! It would be mortifying if A’s parents knew the seriousness of my conditions. I know that’s something I shouldn’t think, given that I don’t (shouldn’t?) feel shame about my illnesses, but there you go; that’s the way it is. But allow me to at least retain a fickle veil of altruism: out of tact, A’s family / friends may say very little to me about the more ‘difficult’ facets of my madness, but I fear that he would have to tolerate a lot of earache, and he gets enough of that from me!

I do protect my friends through my anonymity here, in a tangential sense at least. For example, my best friend D is a very well respected business journalist – I can’t imagine that in his cut-throat industry and sector of employment being the best friend of a known and certified nutjob would go down that well. My second closest friend B, when afforded the opportunity, turned down the opportunity to read the material here, as I suspect he was worried about how much of it would disturb him (bloody normals!).

But most of all, those that I need to protect are my family. As you probably know by now, I really don’t hold that many of them in particularly high regard, but that’s mostly irrelevant as, despite our significant differences over the years, I love my mother very much. Her family – her illusions about certain members of her family – are all she really has left in this sorry world. OK, she has me, and of course she has a wide circle of friends too – but she, unlike me, strongly subscribes to the idea that blood is thicker than water, and to that end my aunts and uncles and their various descendants are of supreme importance to her.

My mother is mostly unaware of how serious things have been, and I want to keep it that way whilst still being able to discuss them openly in some sort of supportive arena. She knows I’ve heard voices / seen things, she knows that I’ve cut myself and she knows that I experience periods of dissociation – but she has no idea as to how serious these incidents have actually been. Why not tell her? She’s my mother after all, she’s meant to be the most supportive person in the world to me. That matters not, because she would worry. It is as simple as that. I suppose it’s self-evident to say that she worries as things are – how could she not – but she does not need the additional and profound concern that would be caused were I to divulge exactly how grave things can often be.

There’s a few further strands to this, of course. Mum is well aware of some of my disdain for my family, especially her sister in America (Georgie) and to a lesser extent, the McFs. However, with the exception of Georgie, I maintain a pretence of relative tolerance towards the rest of them, as I have no wish to argue with my mother over their respective characters. Here on the blog I can bitch and whine and rant about the bastards all I like, with almost absolute impunity. In this sense, my reasoning for anonymity does more closely align with that of some other bloggers – ie. that one’s deepest, most disturbing thought processes can be discussed with no comeuppance.

Finally, of course, is the issue of Paedo. Partly I don’t want my mother to read about him because she is happy in her illusion that he is a decent person, even though she has been made well aware of that of which he is guilty. Moreover, though, if my name were connected with the revelations on this blog – well, the implications for Paedo are enormous. I don’t want him to be prosecuted, as I don’t believe it would achieve anything whatsoever. Even if I did, I simply cannot ruin the family unit to which he belongs. They may piss me off, but they don’t deserve such a hideous, life-ruining shock as this would be. Certainly my mother doesn’t, and despite all that she has done (or perhaps not done), I believe that she would take my side in any battle with the McFs; even if my revelations ruined their lives, I do not believe that they, in a hundred-million years, would ever believe the truth.

So there you go. I cannot be ‘me’ here, because I cannot ruin my family, a family that I mostly don’t even like especially. Hey-ho. What I can be made to be, however, is a more personal entity than someone who writes under the handle of ‘Serial Insomniac’. I am a serial insomniac, and I do ‘confess’ on this blog, but I am more than just that; I’m a person. A real, living, breathing person.

Thanks to the 45 of you that voted in the poll that was at the link in the last paragraph. Here are the results.

As you can (hopefully) see, the single most popular vote at 31% was to keep the moniker of “SI” despite the fact that, as alluded to by Differently, Lost and Sanity, quite often that acronym is linked with “suicidal ideation” or, more frequently, “self-injury” (though to be honest I quite enjoyed that inherent ambiguity). However, that means that the majority – 69% – voted for something other than “SI”.

As I said in the original post pertaining to this, the title of the blog is, was and will continue to be Confessions of a Serial Insomniac. However, if you’d like, you can now refer to the specific author of it as Pandora.

It was the most popular choice amongst the suggested names (at 24%), and while I like the metaphor of my evil insidiousness being released on the world as in the allegory of ‘Pandora’s Box’, allow me a rare moment of sentimentality – as Fatally Doubting and Faithful Reader pointed out, at the end of all the horrors Pandora released, that most fabled of concepts, of human emotions – hope – also finally emerged from the ether.

Week 42.  Week 42.  How can this be?  I look back through this journal, and see prose referencing sessions as far back as week 10.  I read through said posts, and remember clearly the discussions, the facial expressions, the tones of voice to which I have alluded.  It all seems like yesterday.  How did we get so far, essentially without me even noticing it?  And now, with abject horror, I remember there will only be a total of 59 sessions with this man (unless there’s some sort of miracle), and four of those are about drawing things to a close.  That means a mere 13 weeks of actual therapy remain.  How – HOW – did things get to this point?  How is that even possible?  I don’t do anything.  My life doesn’t consist of anything.  How can time pass so quickly, through this sheer nothingness of an existence?  How can I now be teetering on this precipice of therapeutic abandonment, when it seems like seconds ago that I was settled in a stable and helpful, if asymmetrical, relationship with C?

He is off this week, which is why I’m writing about last week’s session on what would normally be my Therapy Thursday.  I miss him.  I miss him very much.  On Tuesday I had a moment (read: quite a long time) of utter desolation pertaining to his absence, accompanied by my old friends of depression, self-loathing and suicidal ideation.  If my inability to cope without him is so acute and all-consuming after a matter of days without seeing him, what – in all seriousness – are things going to be like when the 59th session has been and gone?  I can already see myself falling into an abyss of, at a minimum, abject depression.  I have contingency plans, of course, but can they ever be the same?  I’ve seen something like nine therapists over the past decade.  C was/is the first and only one with whom I really connected.  How long will I have to wait, how many more people will I have to see, before I can find a relationship with someone else that even approaches the quality of this one?

A doesn’t think attachment to a therapist is good.  I know some others, including mental health professionals, don’t either.  Personally, I don’t think it is ‘good’ either (in the sense that it is a difficult position for the client to be in), but as a somewhat-proponent of the psychodynamic school of psychotherapy, I believe that some form of transference – and, if it is vaguely positive, therefore attachment also – is necessary.  As research consistently finds, the most important aspect of successful psychotherapy is the therapeutic relationship.  I have a good one, and yet it is on the verge of being brutally severed.

But enough with my pointlessly whiny ruminations.  42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything, apparently.  I’m not sure that C: Week 42 was necessarily the answer to my life, my universe and my everything, but then – just like in the Hitchhiker’s Guide – I’ve never been entirely sure what the precipitating question was or is.  I merely have had and do have the awareness that many things have been afoot in my world.

Anyway.  The first thing that struck me was, once again, the beard.  It is still there.  I have nothing against beards – on people who suit them.  C suited his erstwhile goatee reasonably well (he looked a bit like Derren Brown), but this full beard makes him look like a walking statue of Christ.  What was of particular note last week was that it was perfectly trimmed.  It was so exact that it must have some mathematical or scientific use – perhaps it could be used to plot planetary movement around stars or something.  I longed to leave, drive to the nearest petrol station, buy some fuel, return, douse the beard in said fuel, and light a match.  I don’t want to cause him any pain, but really.  The beard needs to go.

As ever he tried to find out where I wanted to start our discussion, and as ever I stubbornly shrugged and claimed not to know.  Luckily – in a sense, at least – he had planned for this, and reminded me that in the previous session, we had agreed that we would spend some time talking about the various incidents that took place with Paedo when I was a kid.

In all honesty, I don’t remember a great deal of what we discussed.  In fact, in the end a lot of what we covered was related to my mother’s reaction to my revelations to her about the sexual abuse (see bottom of the page of the link in the previous paragraph).  I do remember telling him that I was absolutely able to be open and frank about what happened in writing (namely, here, on this blog), but that I simply couldn’t manage to get the words out to him.

Of course he wanted to know what I thought he would think about me if I did say what needed to be said.  I couldn’t think of the word at the time, but what I think I was trying to articulate is that he would be ashamed of me.  My own shame, my anxiety about uttering the word ‘rape’ to him and my utter inability to actually eventually do so would seem to confirm that.  It was like there was a metaphorical stopper in my mouth; every time my lips tried to form the word, or my vocal chords tried to convey it, something stopped it from being enunciated.  Maybe some ethereal presence put its hand over my mouth and silenced me.  Utterance of that word, and the specifics of the incidents, was impossible.

Without putting it in so many words, I basically conveyed to C that I had a supreme difficulty in verbally declaring some of the stuff that I should be discussing with him.

He reminded me that a few months back I had put together a range of material, largely garnered from my writings here, that I had wanted him to read.  He had refused, to my considerable disgust.

“What of it?” I inquired.

“I’m not sure exactly what that stuff consisted of,” C acknowledged, “but I believe that you were trying to reach out to me in preparing it, that you were trying somehow to tell me about this stuff.  But…[thoughtful pause]…but I think we need to get you to say it.  To say it out loud.”

I’d always suspected that at least part of his reasoning for refusing to take the myriad of pages I’d printed that day was related to the fact that he wanted to hear me actually verbalise this shit.  I still fervently believe that it was mostly about his refusal to have anything to do with me beyond my allocated 50 pathetic minutes, of course, but I did and do believe that his secondary motivation was to get me to actually speak.  I just wish he’d bothered to have told me that at the fucking time.  I would not have been so out-and-out furious had he done so.

Back to what I thought he’d think of me if I did speak of these experiences: I told C that I felt like a filthy whore and to that end provided him with the details of my complete knobbery from a fortnight ago, where I endlessly castigated myself as a slut of evil (we both agreed that I need to take care vis a vis alcohol whilst taking Quetiapine).  I also confided in him that in huge, angry letters the word ‘SuzanneUT’ is etched, permanently, across my lower abdomen (along with its kindreds of ‘HATE’ ((the second incarnation thereof)) and ‘DIE BITCH’).  ‘SuzanneUT’ is the most dramatic, however, and seems to have been the deepest of the various mutilations (all garnered, if memory serves me correctly, on the night I tried to kill myself last month).

“It’s ridiculous,” I admitted, finally.  “Of course I’m nearly as far from a slut as it is possible to be [not quite perhaps, but largely]; I see that rationally.  But I still believe that I am one, whilst at the same time believing that I am not.”

He referred back to schema models, about which we have talked on several occasions now.  He said that the part of me that felt that my belief that I’m a slag is ridiculous was, in many ways, an example of a healthy adult; she is rational, and can see things in a sensible, evidential sort of way.

“However,” he went on, “your healthy adult seems to have become rather merged with your punitive parent.  You can be very logical and whatnot, but when you do so, you’re very critical of the more child-like, emotional sides of yourself – not that you’d use the word ‘emotional’ [he added dryly] – in this case, you use the word ‘ridiculous’, but on other occasions you’ve been even more disparaging.  You would agree that that’s punitive, I take it?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“So there is hope there, in the expression of the healthy adult,” he said, “but we need to separate that punitive side from her…”

“Well, as you know,” I interjected, “I don’t ‘do’ self-compassion especially well.”  He has consistently told me that having some genuine compassion for myself would be a major breakthrough.  I have to say that in all honesty, this still seems as unlikely to me as it did when he first mentioned it months ago.  I feel sorry for myself at times, I think some of what I’ve gone through is unfair at times – but I never feel what I would call ‘compassion’, and frankly that applies to others as well as myself.  I have tried to develop some sense of it – I’ve read the stupid books and I’ve cried (admittedly rarely) under C’s watchful gaze.  But it still isn’t happening.  I don’t think years of psychotherapy can induce this supposed quality in me.

Somehow the dialogue progressed to an analysis of my mother’s response to matters with Paedo.  In particular, I told him how outraged I had been with her comments to the McFs in the immediate aftermath of my last therapy session (see the last few paragraphs of here).  Cue much questioning along the lines of the inveterate “how did that make you feel?” type.

I felt physically sick, not something common in my mentalness.  Struggled not to throw up.  Despondency followed.  Which was later subsumed by a raging inferno of anger.

I’m sure I’ve told him before (well, I know I have), but I felt compelled to outline again that my mother had initially said that I had “misinterpreted” Paedo’s actions, which – when I stupidly admitted the true extent of things – was later replaced by an accusation of outright lies, which were apparently fuelled by my desire not to see my family.

I didn’t get particularly angry in relaying this information, but nevertheless, the picture I painted of my mother to C was wholly negative, and at some point or another, I became acutely aware of that.

“I make it sound as if she’s a terrible person,” I sighed.  “She isn’t.  It’s just…this.”

(Actually, it’s not just ‘this’; I’ll have to introduce C to the tales of how she would viciously beat me up, leaving temporary but significant bruising, almost daily during periods of ((my)) intense depression when I was a teenager.  But I’ll leave that for another time…not that I have that many ‘other times’ remaining).

He responded by saying that he was well aware that, broadly speaking, I presently have a good relationship with my mother and that I didn’t see her as a ‘bad person’.  He shrugged.  “We all have different facets to our characters, as well you know.  She’s made mistakes in this regard, but just because you’re highlighting them to me doesn’t mean that I necessarily think that that’s representative of her entire personality.”

“I wrote a rant about her behaviour last week on my blog,” I murmured, absent-mindedly.  He asked about the content of it, and I said that it largely mirrored the information that I had just relayed to him, except that it was furious and bitter.

He nodded thoughtfully for a minute, then asked about my audience here.  Was the blog open for everyone to read?  How many read it?  Who, broadly speaking, might my readership be?

I told him that I do password protect the odd post, though if I am honest I probably gave him the impression that I do it much more than I actually do (this is my 121st post; out of all those 121, only three are password protected.  Two of those three are about C, if that reveals any deep psychological insights).  I said that the majority of my audience seemed to be others involved in various mental health systems, mainly but not exclusively from my side of the couch.  And that there were, at that point, in the region of 20,000 hits.

“But it’s all anonymous?” he checked, which irritated the fuck out of me, as we already had this conversation, leading to a particularly fraught interaction between us and a horrible few post-therapy hours for me.

“Yes.”

“And no one in your “real-life” reads it?”

“Not ‘no one’.  There’s a few, but they’re a select few.  It’s definitely not for my mother’s eyes.”

“And maybe you think it’s not for my eyes either?  Maybe you’d feel uncomfortable about me reading it?”

Oh for God’s sake, C.  Not this crap again.  “Why, have you?” I challenged, looking him straight in the eye.

He too had been looking directly at me, but as he replied, “No, I haven’t,” he tellingly lowered his eyes.

I don’t believe he is lying, but I do believe the statement was a half-truth.  It would be hard for C not to find this blog, given some of the Google terms he is likely to be searching for in his line of work; therefore I believe that he’s probably come across it.  He would have recognised me after having read a mere few lines though, and in his defence he is a professional, so is unlikely to have read any further.

I told him I didn’t care if he’d read it or not, as there was nothing contained within these pages that I wouldn’t say to his face.  He was about to respond when I interrupted, saying that technically that wasn’t entirely true, as I was fully able to discuss the issues of child sexual abuse on the blog, but not with him. (Specifically, I can write ‘rape’, but not say it, at least not to him.  Look, see: RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE.  The day I do that in therapy with particular allusion to myself is the day I eat the contents of a 14th century latrine).

“But you know what I mean, I hope,” I continued, and he confirmed that he did.

There was a lull for a few minutes, then C noticed that I was laughing softly.  Naturally he asked why.

I had been thinking about the fact I have an entire alter-ego here through this blog.  My material is searingly honest and intensely personal at times, and yet it’s a very tiny fraction of my readers that know to whom this intimate information really belongs.  As things stand now, that’s an unfortunate necessity, but it doesn’t keep it from being ever-so-slightly odd, and hence vaguely comical (at least to me).

We had a brief conversation about how the cloak of the internet allows one to accentuate particular parts of one’s personality.  In my case, in this guise at least, the accentuated part has been my madness.  I’ve had other guises related to other specific parts of my personality, of course, but relatively few that have been about ‘me’ as a whole, whoever she even is.  Anyhow, this was part of the reason why I felt that I should consider giving myself an actual name on this blog, even if it’s still not the ‘real’ one.

This saw the end of the session.  C said that we have a lot of material to work with over the coming weeks – well, my friend, isn’t that a shocking surprise! We still won’t grasp it all, though; we can’t in the time we have remaining together. As I departed, he wished me all the best.  Little things like that make me feel pathetically good about our relationship, perhaps because it gives me the impression that he cares about me, however tangentially.

So, no strong revelations as to my life, my universe and my everything in week 42, but as he says, there’s material to work with for a while.  Can we find the ultimate question?  Moreover, can we find it in the small window of time that remains?

I know some of you follow the insightful and informative Mental Nurse blog, written by…er…mental nurses. As regular readers of it will know, each Saturday (usually) they publish a review of that week’s musings in the mental health blogosphere, terming their summation ‘This Week in Mentalists’. I was featured once, with the child sex abuse post, catapulting it to the most read spot on my blog.

Anyway, at the end of the year Mental Nurse let their readership vote on the best blogs in given categories, and this year’s winners and runners-up have just been announced. No, yours truly has not won anything, as in I have not come first or owt like that…but this blog did come joint third in the Personality Disorder category.

First place in the category went to the very worthy winner of Genius Gone Wrong, whose blog I follow and whose comments I have had the honour of having here. Second place was Becoming Hannah, and my fellow third-placed contender was Writing in the Margins of My Mind. I shall look forward to reading these blogs, plus other mental health blogs that were featured as winners.

Thank you to all who voted for this blog. It was an honour to even be mentioned as a possible contender, never mind to be actually placed. I really do feel very honoured.