Mind Media Awards: The 2011 Presentation, Part Two (The Full Version)

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Dec 022011
 

I Don’t Know Where to Start

So, in the time-honoured tradition of writers everywhere and everywhen (well, it makes structural sense, does it not?), let’s start at the very beginning (/ A very good place to start / When you read, you begin with A-B-C / When you sing you begin with doh-ray-me / etc etc etc. It’s kind of hard not to break into song when something like this has just happened to you).

As you know, I found out that I had been short-listed for this prestigious (to use Mind’s parlance) award back in September. That was astonishing; I know I’ve won awards before, but – at the risk of sounding arrogant, and I really don’t mean to – winning something online, however wonderful (and it is wonderful, and I’ve been truly delighted and grateful for every one) is different to being nominated for a full-blown ceremonial thing like this, complete with short-listers, judging panels, large presentations with hosts and actual, real, tangible trophies. But you must understand, because this is just a personal blog – how many millions of the things are out there by now? – I was utterly stunned to have made it into a shortlist, and truly never thought I could ever win something so huge. Why would I have thought that even possible?

Between learning of the nomination and going to the awards, I had time to look at the other nominees in my category. I already knew Dawn Willis – the fabulous author of News and Views of the Mentally Wealthy, which is not only an excellent blog, but a truly invaluable news aggregation resource in relation to mental health – and seeing her blog alone convinced me that I couldn’t win, because what she does is of much more value than me barking on about taking tablets and ceaselessly moaning about how crap my life is.

Then I looked at the other entries. The Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) is a remarkable charity that is aimed at preventing suicide amongst young men. As noted on their site:

Men are three times more at risk of suicide than young women – in 2010 75% of suicides were men. But while smoking and knife crime make the headlines, suicide is the biggest killer. Most men who take their own lives aren’t in contact with any other agency, and don’t identify with much out there. When asked, what they indicated they wanted was practical, anonymous, confidential help from professionals. Which is why CALM was formed.

Not only does CALM run the website, but they also offer a helpline and ‘zones’ where they work with local authorities to give access to the project to vulnerable young men. According to the above link, they have been in Merseryside for 10 years – and in that time, suicides amongst the targeted demographic have reduced by 55%. That’s compared to a general UK decline of about 20% across the same period. How awesome is that? How and why would or could anyone deem me – a unpaid but nonetheless professional whinger – able to compete with that?!

Next up was the YouTube video on trichotillomania that had been short-listed…and I was bowled over. Wow. Go and watch it. Now. It’s quite long by YouTube standards – but once you’ve been watching it for a minute or two, you’ll no longer realise that, because you’ll be mesmerised under its spell. Go on, off you go. This dirge of mine will still be here for you to peruse when you’re finished.

Beckie0, as video-maker Rebecca Brown is known online, was only 16 (she’s now 18) when she made this short film about a relatively little known mental health issue. That in itself is remarkable – it takes a fuckload of courage to speak out so openly in the way that she has done, especially with the potential demon of peer pressure lurking snake-like around a young person affected by a mental health condition. Plus she has the insight and wisdom of someone so much older – which sounds like a patronising load of bollocks, but I do mean it in good faith. She is also charismatic and intelligent, and the video is technically brilliant.

So, I had three truly heavy-weight competitors. The judging panel was, in A’s view especially, made up of quite a few individuals whose primary expertise lay in televisual media, and to that end he and I both believed that Beckie would win the New Media category – especially considering her entry was so deserving of winning by virtue of its own merits.

I genuinely didn’t mind. I thought, “well, I’ll go to this event, and I’ll meet some cool people, maybe meet some contacts and get my name ‘out there’, blah blah blah”. As I’ve already discussed, it was an absolute honour to even receive the nomination, especially in memory of Mark Hanson.

Mark was a social and new media strategist for, amongst others, the UK Labour party. I’ll admit that I hadn’t been aware of him before I received the nomination for the award in his name, but after that I did look into his work – and it was extremely impressive and wide-ranging. Yet beneath what by all accounts was confident exterior, Mark suffered from anxiety and severe depression, and tragically killed himself in early March.

After his death, his widow Clare Francis and Money Supermarket, for whom she works, ran half-marathons for Mind, raising about £10,000. She wrote movingly about this on Mind’s blog, and I was struck by the strength she exuded in her writing, and that she’d also evidently been exhibiting over what must have been an unimaginable nine months.

Although I didn’t think for any more than half a second that I could win the award, had I done so, I would not have considered myself even remotely worthy of receiving something sponsored by such a remarkable and courageous woman in memory such of a talented and popular man. I still don’t see myself as thus meritorious – but that being said, I feel humbled and privileged that I did get it. It’s a privilege beyond anything I could ever have expected.

This is getting rather long (what a surprise that is). As you can see, in short – I genuinely, honestly did not think I would win. And neither did A – not, he opined, because he thought I was unworthy, but because to him I probably just wasn’t what the judges would be looking for. We also concurred that the amount of cunting fucking swearing on this shittery fuckwipe of a twatting blog found here was likely to preclude me from any real chance of claiming a prize.

A was so confident in these beliefs that he said he’d give me £100 if I did win.

I jokingly replied, “make it a thousand and we’re on.”

“OK,” he replied.

I paused for a second, waiting for him to laugh in confirmation that he knew I hadn’t been serious. However, the expected cachinnation did not duly transpire.

“I was taking the piss,” I explained. “I do not expect you to give me £1,000.”

He shrugged. “I’m not going to, because you’re not going to win it. And if, in the 99.9999999999th percentile chance that you do, then I will give you £1,000. But, again, it’s moot. You won’t get it.”

Believing utterly that he was right, I chuckled and moved on.

That is how much I didn’t expect to win this thing.

Monday – D-Day

I didn’t sleep well in London at all, even though we were staying in a perfectly reasonable and quiet hotel (albeit basic); I was waking about 3.30 to 4am each morning, and Monday was no exception.

So, in that morning’s early hours, I woke to the bleak blackness that only the sun’s downtime can bring. A was asleep, so I couldn’t comfort myself with the television (not that there’s anything comforting about BBC News 24, which is the channel I would have turned to, in this day and age anyway), and for reasons I don’t recall I didn’t check my phone until a few hours later.

When I did look at it, I decided to start my own personal hashtag on Twitter (the more general one being #mindawards) to discuss the awards ceremony; my intention had been to use it for ease of reference when writing a post about the event. It was to be comprised of the intended compendium of live, as-it-happened tweets, rather than this usual tired, ballbag-eric prose. Sadly, that idea fucked up in the end, but I’ll get to that later.

As I lay there staring at nothing, I could feel my muscles tighten, my stomach churn, my breath quicken. I willed fate or providence or the arbiters of bloody space-time to just make it Tuesday morning. Despite ramblings about 10 days ago which described how I was looking forward to the ceremony, I knew I’d be shitting myself come the day itself – but ‘shitting myself’ turned into a full blown oh fucking hell, I’m going to die right here, right now, in a dank underground room in an anonymous London hotel panic attack.

I got up and took a Diazepam. It didn’t work. I got up and took a second Diazepam. It didn’t work. Eventually, A woke up and, duly noting my restless agitation, advised me to take a Diazepam. I advised A that I had already consumed two of the aforementioned sweets pills. A shrugged (presumably knowing that I only take the things in times of great stress, his resultant opinion being that an occasional 15mg isn’t a huge deal) and advised me to take it anyway. I did.

And…lo and be-fucking-hold, it granted me some mercy and actually bloody worked. I don’t remember if I went back to sleep or not – I might have done – but either way, the next clear recollection I have was of going round the corner to get a pub lunch, and being pretty much entirely fine.

Away We Go

I could detail the ridiculous palaver I went through whilst I was getting ready, but if you’re not bored already, then the tale of my struggles to adequately attire myself would surely fucking kill you. So instead, after I had clad myself in my preposterous disguise, off we trotted to the tube. I kept glancing about me, fearfully expecting half the world to be watching the weird woman with the bizarre curly read hair and hat in bemused repulsion – but no one seemed to give a flying duck’s arse. Sometimes I love London – it’s such a diverse city that no one really has time nor inclination to care about someone looking ‘alternative’. If I wore what I wore that day here – and actually, I’d like to, because I was quite pleased with it – then I’d be subjected not only to stares, but to abuse by groups of teenage males who’d be much more amenable to me if they were peripatetic NPCs in Saints Row: The Third.

We took the tube to Borough and headed to a pub close to the Cross Bones graveyard, where Zarathustra (Z) of The Not So Big Society fame was due to meet us. Perhaps this is a good point at which to note that I was able to bring five guests. These were A (obviously!); Z (as noted); Carrie Holroyd, an activist with Young Minds and a freelance mental health writer that I’ve known online for some time; and my wonderful best friend Daniel and his lovely partner Craig.

The Before

To cut a long story short(er), eventually all of us – Carrie excepted, as she met us just before we all went into the auditorium – ended up in the National Theatre for a pre-ceremony drink.

Z asked me if I had crafted an acceptance speech. I looked conspiratorially at A, then turned back to Z and laughed in his face.

“Why the fuck would I?” I asked him, in all sincerity. “I’m not going to win the thing.”

Z furrowed his brow slightly. “I think you have a chance,” he replied.

I scoffed, and if memory serves me correctly, I might even have accused him of being somewhat delusional. Not anything of which to be ashamed, clearly, but still not cognisant of reality ;)

When Daniel arrived, he almost immediately stated that I seemed really nervous. Curiously though, by that point, I wasn’t – or, at least, not consciously. That said, after a 15 minute fight in the woman’s bogs with the fucking high heels that I’d been idiotic enough to think I could wear for an entire bloody evening, off we trotted (stumbled in my case) next door to the awards venue, the Southbank BFI. Here anxiety threatened, briefly, to paralyse me (or catalyse me into fleeing – not that the heels would have permitted that, the evil bastards) – but in the end, I managed far better than I ever thought I would. I was a bit rambly at points, I know, and I’m pretty certain I made a tit of myself, but it could have been a lot worse.

Dan, having detected that perhaps now I was slightly struggling (I’ve known him for over half my life – other than A, I don’t think anyone knows me better), grabbed an angelic glass of red wine as it floated by, and thrust it into my hand. I sipped at it with relieved gladness, and felt myself gravitating towards a table where – although I couldn’t sit – I could at least stand with support and not topple over. Fucking Shoes. Anyway, I’d just stuck some crisp thing or other into my fat gob when a tall gentleman approached me, and asked if I was the person responsible for the Serial Insomniac blog. Trying my hardest – and failing – to swallow the stupid, calorie-laden piece of nourishment I’d just lifted, I responded in the affirmative, apologising to the man for eating with my mouth full. He introduced himself as Matt [Wilkinson], one of the judges, and told me – to my stunned delight – that he wanted to let me know how “brilliant” my blog was. I was really touched that he’d specifically taken the time to come over and tell me that.

Unfortunately, at that point the BFI staff were asking us to move into the auditorium, so I didn’t get long to chat to Matt, but he did tell me that the New Media category had been particularly strong (a statement with which I obviously entirely agreed).

The During

Having found Carrie somewhere along the way, all six of us strode forth into the classy auditorium (or, more accurately, five of us did. I tiptoed, wobbled and tripped my way in. As I did so, I seriously pondered whether I should take off the Fucking Shoes and throw them into the close-by Thames – but I swear the things are malevolently alive. They would have crawled out of their watery non-grave and come to avenge themselves by embarrassing me in front of all the assembled attendees at the ceremony). As we chose our seats, Z suggested I sit on the outside, “just in case” I had to get out to the stage. I rolled my eyes, but acquiesced.

As I said somewhere way, way up above, in the figurative Gods of this post, I had intended to live tweet from the event, but the reception was abysmal inside the plush and comfortable auditorium. I managed to send a few text messages to Twitter – one about the introduction given by Paul Farmer, Mind’s Chief Executive, another about the opening speech from Rebecca Front, the actress and comedian hosting the presentation. By some miracle of telecommunications, I even managed a few messages about the winners of both the journalism and student journalism awards. At that juncture, though, the telecommunication gods decided to withdraw their support. My phone decided it would absolutely not work at all any more, and as I was trying to piss about with the settings in the hope that I could force its co-operation, I dropped the fucker. Predictably enough, it was not good enough for the phone to fall merely in front of me – oh no, it fucking richocheted off the row in front of me and made its merry way off to Temporary Phone Oblivion. So ended my spurious attempts at live tweeting.

I can’t remember the exact order of the ceremony, because it wasn’t in the chronology listed in either the programme for the evening nor the online short-list pages. So, before I move on to discussion of the New Media presentation, let me say a few words (as if!) on some of the entries that I especially liked. Z has written a great post on this over at The Not So Big Society, and I agree with nearly all of what he said (the exception being the bits about me!), but I’ll offer a few views anyway.

Josh Jackson, who won the Student Journalist category, had made a remarkably touching and brave film about his experiences of depression entitled Suffering in Silence (which is now available here – go and watch it! I’ll still be here when you get back – we’re only 3,000 words in, after all ;) ). The other two nominees in this category did seem excellent, but the very personal nature of Josh’s piece really struck a chord with me, and I was delighted when it was his name read out as winner. A few whoops from the audience confirmed that I was far from alone in seeing him as an extremely worthy recipient.

Victoria Derbyshire’s Radio 5 Alcoholic GP won the News and Current Affairs gong. As the clip of her show was played, I found even my cynical self genuinely moved by the content, and the implications thereof. Granted, the GP did most of the talking in that particular segment, with Ms Derbyshire only speaking at certain points – but to me that was the entire point. She knew exactly when it was appropriate to ask questions or add sensitive comments, and seemed to have an innate appreciation of how she should handle her words and tone. In her acceptance speech, she said that the team behind the show were still in touch with the GP, and that she was “working very hard.” I’m sure neither of them will ever read this, but just in case, I wish them both all the very best.

The Speech Radio winner was, again, a Radio 5 programme, this time looking at the life of Robert Enke, the German footballer who sadly killed himself two years ago. This too was a poignant and eloquent documentary, and it felt all the more tragically appropriate in the immediate aftermath of the awful news of Gary Speed‘s death. A Life Too Short highlighted the strains inherent in sporting professions, and how living in such a ‘macho’ world make it difficult for those affected to speak out.

And speaking of…well, of speaking out. There was a non-categorised, special award for doing just that, and I think we were all thrilled and delighted when we learnt that it was Beckie0′s superlative YouTube video that won that award. I had actually felt guilty about winning the New Media category in lieu of her, such was the candour and courage she displayed. So this was really well deserved, and I was thrilled for her.

I have no idea if Beckie ever did face any form of intolerance due to her condition – but if she did, I think we can rather definitively say that she had the last laugh.

So You Won It?

Yes. Weren’t you reading the other day?!

The very worst part of the evening, which in a perverse, adrenaline-ODing sort of way was also the most thrilling, was when Rebecca Front said, “…and now to the Mark Hanson New Media Award…”

I felt as if I’d been stabbed with a live wire encumbered with a form anxiety that would cripple even a wooly fucking mammoth. My pulse quickened, my mouth went dry and I could scarcely breathe.

Ohmygodohmygodohmyfuckingfuckinggod.

Why? Who the hell knows? It doesn’t make any sense to me, as – as was extensively discussed above – I thought I knew I wouldn’t win. So why would I be so nervous? It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, especially given that until that point, save for the incident in the early morning, I’d felt surprisingly OK about the whole thing.

Anyway, Rebecca invited Donna Franceschild, one of the judges of the awards and a BAFTA-winning TV writer, to the stage to present the award. As Donna reached the podium, she advised – poignantly, and to my personal smiles – that Clare Francis, Mark Hanson’s wife, was in situ. She was asked to also come up on stage.

Donna then proceeded to read out descriptions of the short-listed entries.

My heart stopped beating.

I heard the terms “beautifully written”, “by turns heart-breaking and hilarious” and “essays” (I loved that one) bouncing about the room without really being sure that they were being levied at Confessions. Of course, there was a giant screenshot of this blog behind the stage, so I don’t really know where my confusion came from; perhaps it was some weird form of dissociative mechanism for dealing with the surge of adrenaline pumping through and suffocating every capillary of my body.

[Amusing aside: Mind's PR company, Keystone, had asked me to send them screenshots several weeks ago. I sent them the profile image from the top right of the sidebar, which was published in the programme - but I also sent them a copy of the header, in which I had removed the myriad instances of words like 'fuck', 'cunt', 'twatbags' etc. However, when it came to the bit, they had taken a more recent screenshot themselves; although I didn't examine it closely - I didn't think to look at the time and anyway, I was hardly thinking straight - it seems likely that the 'dirtiest' words in the English language were visually blared out to the great and the good of the British media. How pathetic is it that I find this amusing? At 28, I'm still the most puerile person I know].

Donna read out the names of the rest of the nominees and their descriptions. I have to be honest here and admit that I don’t remember a word of what she said; my head was somewhere in a cloud-cuckoo land of waaaaghhh! The next thing I do remember, though, is watching – as if in slow motion – her picking that envelope up from the lectern. Time stopped as she opened it, and took a breath in readiness to speak.

“And the anonymous winner…” [my emphasis].

Anonymous. Who else was anonymous, Pan? It must have been someone…

“…of the Mark Hanson New Media Award…”

Maybe one of the others uses a pseudonym and I mistook it for a real name? You stupid cow, how could you have missed that?

“…is…”

GAAAAAAH.

“…Confessions of a Serial Insomniac.”

And time stopped standing still, and everything came into focus, yet simultaneously spinned around me and the world suddenly had colours, bright, vibrant colours, and applause, and people on my left-hand side (A and my friends, despite the former just having lost £1,000!) grabbing my arm and grinning madly and speaking words of excited congratulation. Some automated version of me through her hands over her mouth in a gesture of utter shock as soon as the words had left Donna Franceschild’s lips. I turned to my friends, my eyes wide with delight, with disbelief, with oh my God, did you just hear that, with appeals to their ears in case I had misunderstood what had been announced in some sort of warped narcissistic delusional hallucination.

Somehow, I clambered up from my seat and cautiously made my way down the stairs, towards the stage. Curiously, the only thoughts I recall going through my head at the time were along the lines of, “don’t fall, Pan. Don’t fucking fall.” Which I nearly did on the ramp up to the stage, thanks to the Fucking Shoes. But I balanced myself, and eventually found myself in front of Rebecca Front, Donna Franceschild and Clare Francis.

I don’t remember much about that; I remember that I was asked in whispers if, in recognition of my anonymity, I wanted to make a speech; I confirmed that I did, even though I had absolutely nothing prepared. Sorry for not listening to you, Z – you and Dan were right, you told me so, yeah yeah yeah, I get it. I remember slight confusion over whether or not to take the award and certificate or make the speech first. I remember standing at the lectern, seeing a mass of faces in front of me and shaking – but shaking because of the Fucking Shoes trying to murder me, rather than out of the terror one might surely have expected in such a circumstance (incidentally, I did a lot of public speaking at school, and was one of those rare people that enjoyed talking in front of an audience. I know I’m ridden with social anxiety these days, so it would seem odd if I were still thus comfortable, but strangely, I think I was).

I opened my mouth to speak…

It’s Just a Silly Blog

A videoed my speech. The sound on the camera is shit, but insofar as I could hear it, the following is an exact transcript of what I said.

Um, I have nothing prepared – I genuinely didn’t think I would win this but, um, first of all, thank you, and I must say that it’s a great honour to win this in honour* of Mark Hanson – I know [that] Mark was very well known in the social media world and, er, it’s particularly wonderful to see Clare here as well. Um…yeah. I don’t know why people read it – it’s just a silly blog [audience: polite laughter] – but I would like to dedicate the award to them [my readers] and I’d like to thank my friends, some of whom are in the audience here, and particularly my partner who[m] I love very much and who’s been wonderfully supportive during this rollercoaster [me: nervous laughter at the use of a world I loathe in this context] I’ve experienced…so, thank you all very much.

* I used the word ‘honour’ twice in quick succession, which displeases me. In the second instance, it would have been more appropriate to have used ‘memory’.

Nevertheless, for having prepared nothing – literally nothing – beforehand, it could have been a lot worse. Someone on stage – I think it was Rebecca Front – said that it had been a good speech. A number of others reiterated the sentiment afterwards. A later told me that he thought I spoke well, content-wise, but that I sounded nervous (I blame the Fucking Shoes for that). However, he claims – as he claimed of Beckie Brown’s speech also – that our surprise and justified nerves made our acceptances all the more endearing.

As I left the podium, an award and a tube containing my certificate were thrust into my hands. The award is incredible. Bright, shiny, reflective metal, heavy, perfectly engraved with Mind’s logo and font – and my details. MY details. Wow. Just…wow.

The After

The immediate aftermath of the ceremony was a whirlwind. Daniel, who was in tears, flung his arms around me and waxed lyrical about how wonderful he thinks I am which – even though I already knew that he’s sweet enough to think that, it’s still so lovely to hear. We stood and hugged for ages, before he had to dash off (thanks to the Budget the following day, on which he was up to 2am working. Fuck you, Gideon). I remember hugging Craig too before he left. It was only the second time I’d met him – the first only being the day before – but I like him. He and Dan seem to ‘work’ together, and I really hope their relationship lasts.

People, so many people, they came to offer congratulations, to offer interest in what I write, to chat, to be wonderful. I had to wait around in the auditorium for a few official pictures, and gave what were probably waffly, nervous answers to a number of questions the photographer, along with Clare, Donna and Rebecca, had been kind enough to ask. In my defence, the Fucking Shoes were conspiring to plot my (literal and metaphorical) downfall, and I was still on a nervy-adrenaline high, so if any of the four of you are reading this, sorry if I seemed like a twat!

Back in the lobby, I was advised by someone – I’m not sure who, sorry – that there had been a minor Twitter storm about my win. I felt dreadful that I’d not been able to announce it there myself as I would have liked, and I know that one or two of you noticed that omission ;) I believe that the madness started when Mind themselves tweeted about the result of the New Media Award and, subsequently, about my acceptance speech. As he’d left the auditorium, I know Z intended to announce it too, so even though I failed you, at least you knew :)

I’ve apologised for this on Twitter, but lest you missed it: when I had a chance to check my client, I was completely overwhelmed with @mentions. Seriously, there was something like 100 of them. I know if you’re a celebrity that must seem like an infinitesimal amount even by the standards of fuck all squared, but for me? That was a lot. There was no way I could respond to them all individually so my only viable option was to send a more general tweet thanking everyone, in the hope that said everyone would see it.

I Met…

I met Dawn, who was lovely, gracious, flattering, and so wonderfully enthusiastic about social media, and the quiet revolution in mental health that blogging and Twitter are making. I met Beckie, who is every bit as smart and charming in reality as she is on YouTube. I met Dan from CALM, who was a really friendly and truly interesting guy, really (and rightly!) positive about the great work he’s doing. Watch this space for news of a potential guest post for the CALM site :)

I met Taryn, Mind’s Digital Officer, who’ve I’ve known on Twitter since I reviewed Wendy Perriam’s Broken Pieces for them. She was great – bubbly, charismatic, full of good conversation. I met her colleagues Matt and Eve too – and guess what? They were lovely! I met several more of her colleagues later when I did a voxpop for them – more on that shortly – but I can’t remember their names and I feel awful about that because…yep, that’s right: they were lovely.

I properly spoke to Carrie, who was a delight, for the first time, mainly about the excellence that is Babylon 5 – however, our conversation was cut all too short by something or other, so I suppose I’ll just have to meet her again soon to make up for that ;) I met @YouMustBeMental, who had bravely come to the occasion on her own, but who was easy-going, great to chat to and all-round good craic. I met Mark Brown from One in Four (look out for my article rounding up blogs in its next issue), who was a gentleman. I met Liz Main, one of the judges who, by random coincidence, is married to a (relatively) local bloke that A and I have known on Twitter for months. Small world! I met Paul Farmer, Mind’s Chief Executive, who is nothing like the stereotypical stuck-up Executive type – he was, instead, friendly, congratulatory and thoroughly down-to-Earth. And I met so, so many more – and I haven’t a single negative word to say about any of them. I was convinced that there would be a few pricks who were a bit up their own arses, but seriously, if there were any such people there, I did not encounter any of them.

Perhaps most intriguingly, I also met one of the short-listers – I’m so sorry, but if you’re reading this, I never did catch your name…*blushes*…maybe you can give us a wave?! :) – and learnt some of the inside story.

It turns out that A and I had been partially correct that the language used on Confessions could have been detrimental to the possibility of me winning the award. The (guess what?) lovely girl to whom I was talking said it was actually a bit of a challenge to get the blog onto the shortlist for this reason. However, it wasn’t so much the multitude of ‘fuck’s and ‘cunt’s that were the problem – but more my penchant for what could be considered stigmatic nomenclature. For example, “batshit”. “Doolally” (Paul always liked that one, though). The self-directed commonality of “mental freak” and similar accolades. References to “catching the bus” or “topping oneself”. For the avoidance of doubt, my informant did not give me any specific examples of that to which was objected, but I think it was mainly that kind of thing. It seems that I ultimately got away with it because the references were frequently tongue-in-cheek, used satirically, or were self-, rather than widely-, directed. Also, I address the matter directly in my ‘About‘ page, stating that I can be rather crass at times, but that I do aim to break barriers and fight stigma. In a way, there is part of me that wants to reclaim these terms for the mentalist lexicon; the LGBTQ community admirably did it with, for instance, ‘queer’, so why not those of us that are mad?

Voxy-Poppy

As noted briefly above, at one point Taryn asked me to do a voxpop for Mind’s website, a proposition to which I agreed. This may seem like the most monumentally moronic thing in which an anonymous blogger could partake – but honestly, the disguise was goooooooood. I really looked nothing like my real self at all, so I’m confident that the video taken will not lead to my identification. After all, _why the lucky stiff got away with parading himself publicly for ages whilst maintaining his anonymity, and he wasn’t even trying to hide his real looks. [/gratuitous geek reference].

I felt that I muddled myself quite a bit in the first two questions of the voxpop, although the lady conducting the interview – yet another lovely person whose name I have, to my disgusted regret, forgotten – seemed appreciative of my answers. The third though, as verified by the observing A, went better. The question was something about the profundity of social media in the lives of people with mental illness, and I proffered my sincerely-held view that were it not for Twitter, and to a lesser extent blogging, I would be dead today. Fuck you, Nadine Dorries (not that I said that on tape, of course ;) ). I know I wax lyrical about this all the time, but it does merit reiteration; Twitter is the best support group – and, by dent of that, therapy – that I’ve ever come across. Words fail here, so I’ll offer an inadequate but sincere ‘thank you’ once again.

The After-After

Things started wrapping up towards 10.30pm or so, and off back to the hotel headed A and I, saying our farewells to Z at Waterloo Station.

We got back, drained and exhausted, but thrilled and elated at the same time.

Knowing that I had won this thing, this thing that I didn’t feel I really deserved but about which I was nonetheless genuinely thrilled, was surreal. So surreal, in fact, that I started packing (even though we didn’t leave until Wednesday) and then went to bed, rather than gawking in awe at the beautiful trophy. It was only the next day, whilst sitting in a pub waiting for a brief but welcome meet-up with Dan, that I really felt it. As I said to A, I couldn’t stop thinking about the award and how unutterably and stunningly humbling it was that people actually like this nonsense and somehow see it as being valuable.

Because, Thank God, It Has to End Somewhere

So it ends – almost – here. In conclusion – what an incredible night, and what incredible people I was both fortunate enough to meet, and am fortunate enough to know.

So, as I leave this preposterously-even-by-my-standards post, let me do one more raft of thanks. I’d especially like to thank Clare, Donna and Rebecca for presenting me with the award. Thanks to Keystone – and, in particular, Jenny – for their organisation of the event, and especially for their efforts in maintaining my anonymity. Thanks to Taryn and the other digital folks at Mind for all their hard and valuable work, and to the BFI staff for running around with booze and food for us ;)

Zarathustra, Carrie and Craig – it was an honour to have you there with me, and your support and congratulations were immeasurable to me. Phil Groom – not only are you a gentleman of the…er…gentlest proportions, I know that you were one of the people that nominated me for this honour, and I appreciate that more than you know. I appreciate you more than you know. @bourach – meeting you on Saturday was absolutely brilliant, and when I said this blog would not have existed in the first place but for you, I meant it. You won’t believe me, but I don’t care; I think you’re strong, smart, witty, and just generally terrific. And to all of my wonderful, supportive, passionate, intelligent and ever-entertaining readers – all the superlatives in this post and the award itself are completely dedicated to you. Thank you again. You really are teh absolute r0ck0rz.

If you’re eagle-eyed, or if you’re one of the personnel concerned, you’ll notice some glaring omissions here. Firstly, Daniel. I’ve known him for over half my life now, and although the Irish Sea has nefariously separated us for 10 years, the mark and strength of a friendship – a proper, loving, symmetrical friendship – is its enduring longevity and ability to ‘pick up where you left off’. That could not be more accurate in this case. Daniel, you’ve been a constant in my life for so long, and you have never once let me down. Also, you’re an idiot. A puerile, irreverent, off-the-wall idiot – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love you, you daft sod, and thank you for everything, always.

My mother will probably – by turns hopefully and sadly – never read this, but of course none of it would be possible without her. That she doesn’t know that I’ve achieved this makes me feel full of nauseated regret and woe – but I’d rather that than ruin her life, or even possibly endanger her very existence, what with the dark revelations that so frequently inhabit this blog. But lest she ever does read it, and lest anyone else be in any doubt, I love her very, very much and without her I would not only not be writing, but I would be dead.

And you, A. Thanks for the grand, Mister! (Yes, he really did pay up on the back of my ridiculous joke! Such an action truly makes me look sane). It’ll come in handy ;)

Seriously. There’s no doubt that I’d be six feet under (or lying at the bottom of Beachy Head or something) without you and your unwavering support, companionship, private sentimentality and profound love. Maybe I don’t always show it, and fuck knows I don’t say it often enough – but I know I’m so, so lucky to have you in my life, and I love you to the ends of the Earth.

Over and out. (Finally. Well done to anyone that got this far. What kind of sad life you must lead to have read all of this. Similar to the kind of sad life I lead by having written it all. OK. Enough. Really. Gone now. Vanished. Bye.).

The Secrecy of the Confessional

 Blog News, Life, Random Mental Health Related Philosophising  15 Responses »
Sep 212011
 

I don’t like surprises. They intimidate me, and require me to feel like I have to second-guess a person’s motives and intent – and, at the more extreme end of the scale, they can even feel like shocking violations (and apparently it’s not just me and my eccentricity/oddness/paranoia/whatever, so there).

It reasonably follows, therefore, that I don’t like secrets greatly either. I suppose we all have them from each other to a greater or lesser extent, but some can be big, and it is the covering up of those that I find problematic. I write a good bit about sexual abuse on this blog – that remained a perfect secret between me and Paedo for years, and is only known to a small few beyond that dubious duo even now. That’s big, and I hid it. I don’t like that I hid it. People should have known; particularly with other children exposed to the man as potential victims, it wasn’t really my secret to keep.

But before I go on an abuse-related, potentially self-vituperative tangent, let me hark back to where I wanted to go with this. Putting abuse and some of its related issues to one side, I have a pretty big secret. You know about it (yes, you do). A and my closest friend, Daniel, know about it. But my mother, one of the people to whom I’m closest in the world, doesn’t have a clue (if my investigations have been as smart as I think they have). Another close friend, Brian, is similarly oblivious. My wider family, Paedo and friends included, are also in the dark.

I am, of course, talking about this blog.

Now, on the one hand, you might say, “big deal. You throw (a few too many) words on a page once or twice a week, what does it matter whether they know or not?”

However, even though it is not today what it once was (I write less, less people visit – it happens), this blog is a major part of my life. I have an entire identity based on and built around it, and if I’m entirely honest, a lot of the issues I discuss here feed into my ‘real’ identity too. This blog is important to me; it is a life chronicle, a place to vent, a support network and an adjunctive form of psychotherapy all rolled up into one. There must be the best part of a million bloody words written here, and the site ranks highly on Google for many mentalist searches. For whatever reasons – reasons I don’t think I’ll ever entirely understand – some people seem to actually like it. It has won awards (!), for Christ’s sake, and has nearly 300,000 views (which, after two and a half years, is damn all compared to some big blogs – but which isn’t awful for a personal journal, particularly in such a niche interest arena). And how many (wo)man-hours must I have put into getting things to this point? I almost dread to think.

I’m not trying to self-aggrandise or gasconade here (not any more than normal, anyway..!); I’m simply trying to convey that the blog is a big deal in my life.

I chose the suffix ‘confessions of‘ for the site’s title quite deliberately. I know that the term, in the blogosphere at least, has become clichéd almost to the point of vulgarity, but the thing is, it is confessional for me.

Yet the confessional – a place to admit, possibly to seek redemption – is decidedly exclusionary. My mother, and a number of other pivotally important individuals in my life, haven’t the faintest idea that this even exists.

That feels incredibly fucked up to me. All children inevitably hide some things from their parents but they tend, in the grand scheme of things, to be relatively insignificant – that do you remember that night I was at “the cinema” with x and then “staying over at x‘s house” when I was 16? Yeah, I was actually at a club until 6am sort of thing that we all do – not things of key import, or things that have an enduring impact upon one’s psyche. Mum should know about a big issue in my life, and it feels so dirty and wrong and discriminatory that she does not.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell her or anything. There’s no point in ruining whatever years she has left in this world by her finding out about everything that is contained within these pages (my current obsessive mental intrusions - and I mean seriously obsessive, as in feeding into almost anything – is that she will suddenly die soon. I keep telling myself that her life expectancy can be reasonably estimated to be 80-something ((she’s 69)), given her relative health and our familial history, but reason never assuages my neurosis ((something I should well know from past experience)). Perhaps this latest manifestation of anxiety-driven batshitness is the reason for this very post). Yet, although the secrecy is necessary to spare her feelings – perhaps even her very sanity – it feels odd not to share some of the highs and lows with her. I remember when I won my first award for this blog; my first clumsy, elated instinct was to scream it at A, then to anyone on the internet that was willing to listen.

And I didn’t get to share that magical moment, and others like it, with my mother. It almost feels akin to her not seeing me going to school for the first day, or graduating from university, or having my first legal pint at the age of 18. OK, so these comparisons may sound a little bombastic, but I hope you know what I mean. My mother should (have) share(d) with me moments I considere(d) meaningful, yet in this shadowy part of my life, she has been utterly denied that opportunity.

Nevertheless, I know there are others out there that hide or have hidden their blogs and mentalist/internet alter egos from everyone in their real lives. I suppose in writing this entry I’m wondering how we can reconcile the openness and candour with which we speak on these blogs with the cladestineness that, ironically, said blogs represent in relation to certain personnel. What do you think about that? Is it a necessity for you, or do you like having a ‘secret’? And if you have managed to keep your blog private from ‘real life’ people, how have you managed it, logistically speaking? I’ve got myself in a few dangerous pickles in the past that could have revealed all to my Mum, so I know it’s not easy to keep schtum.

Just random thoughts, really.

—

I was going to write a ‘how things are’ scribble at this juncture of the post, but I can’t be arsed. I might try and do it tomorrow. I might not, however. Suffice to say, life is still shite but my death is unlikely to be imminent (day-long fantasies about long, sharp knives stabbing the living fuck out of my skull notwithstanding).

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How Do You Work Full-Time When You’re a Mentally Ill Seroquel-Gobbler?

 Life, Medications, Random Mental Health Related Philosophising, Work  25 Responses »
Jul 262011
 

Seroquel has tended to dictate that I sleep until at least 10.30am each day, and often much later. When I say ‘sleep’, I don’t necessarily mean that literally, because of course Seroquel regrettably loses its soporific effects over time, and I have an apparent predisposition to insomnia anyway; however, one way or another, the hangover effects of the drug leave me in a zombified stupor the whole of each morning.

Seroquel may dictate that I don’t do anything at all in its wake, but unfortunately of late circumstance has demanded the polar opposite. You may recall that A and I were burgled (for the second time) about a month ago. Two requirements arose out of this: one was the need to urgently repair the damage caused by the tossbags responsible (that being the broken back gate and the door between the kitchen and living room) and the second was, in respect of our probable desire to move, to get the house into some sort of cosmetic order. A and I live in perpetual mess and don’t really give a shit what the house looks like ordinarily. Of course maintenance of a house is a general chore to anybody, but I appear to have a specific phobia of it. Not that I’m using that as an excuse to get out of it, mind you, because I wouldn’t fucking do it whether I had said fear or not. (At least I’m honest, yes?).

Anyway, A’s father and step-mother have a mate who’s good around the house. He paints, tiles, joins, does minor structural work, blah blah de blah fucking blah blah. He’s trusted, being a family friend, and he charges reasonable rates. Excellent. Brilliant. Amazing.

Does that sound sarcastic? It is, to an extent, but seriously – we’re very lucky to have this connection, because of course it would be just our luck, were we to seek out a similar sort of individual via classified ads or something, that the person contacted would be an unscrupulous wanker with a criminal record the length of one of my more…um…exploratory posts on this blog (that’s c. 4,000 – 5,000 words, for current readers fortunate enough to be uninitiated). Furthermore, the bloke in question is a nice bloke; he’s fairly easy to chat to and seems to do a good job.

However. Fuck me but I’ll be glad to see the back of him.

I have a routine. An inane and, perhaps paradoxically, fairly un-regimented one, admittedly, but something that suits me nevertheless. I get up when Seroquel allows me to get up. Then I write, read or occasionally watch the pointless but inexplicably addictive rolling *ahem* news (read: sensationalised bullwank) on BBC News 24. I sound like a work-shy fucker, I know, but even in these not-so-heady days of pseudo-”recovery”, this is genuinely all I am capable of. I don’t like lying in half the day, and I don’t do it through choice. I do it because the medication forces me to do it. In turn, the threat of potentially dangerous psychosis forces me to take the medication.

Our builder-joiner-decorater-Everythinger, and his penchant for showing up at eight in the bloody morning, has screwed up this seemingly idle but oddly workable routine on an epic scale. I haven’t felt this chronically and soul-destroyingly fatigued since I was plagued with literally months on end of insomnia. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it takes me back to when I was still at work full-time and plagued with literally months on end of insomnia (God, that’s a vile memory. I would lie in bed, awake, all night – every night, for months. I’d get up at 7am and almost throw coffee beans down my throat. Then I’d go to work for 8am, stay there to 6pm in a futile effort to wear myself out, come home, stare blindly at the TV for a few hours, then repeat the whole hideous cycle for another day, and another day, and another day. And this was before my 2008 breakdown came a-callin’. How the fuck did I do that every day?).

It’s the Seroquel’s fault, of course. I would probably be tired if I wasn’t taking it, but I don’t think I’d be so completely devoid of any atom of energy whatsoever. It’s the drug that demands that I rest (if you can call existing in a stupefied Seroquel hangover ‘rest’) so much, and when I don’t do its bidding, it punishes me, like some embittered monarch lashing out at a traitor.

Anyway, whilst I’m on the themes of Seroquel and working both, herein lies a huge issue. Last month, Differently left the following comment on my rant about knobend MP Philip Davies (who, incidentally, was one of the ones to question the Murdochs and Rebecca Rebecka Rebeckah Rebekah Wade Grant-Mitchell Brooks over the News of the Screws phone-hacking allegations – how the hell did Parliament let him on that committee?):

…realistically I’m unsure that I’ll ever be able to work full time, since a combination of my experiences and the meds I take mean that managing 2 weeks at 10-4 left me looking physically unwell, pale and tired and feeling horrendous, thereby meaning that I hope to work part-time…

Seaneen, who is presently working full-time, has also alluded recently to how much Seroquel has inhibited her at work in the mornings (and she has, as a consequence, withdrawn from it).

I had been thinking, much to my chagrin, that part-time employment was becoming my own only realistic option as far as future return to work goes, but I kept trying to tell myself that eventually that wouldn’t be the case, that eventually I could back to working full-time. But this exhaustion-debacle with the Everythinger has left me seriously questioning that feigned optimism.

I cannot function without devoting most of the morning to a complete state of bleugh. I just can’t. Not whilst 600 daily milligrams of Quetiapine addles my entire system. So, if I continue to take the stuff – certainly at this dosage – there is no way in hell that I could work full-time. It is simply impossible.

I keep looking at other people (especially, to my personal feminist frustration, other women) – randoms in the pub, the street, whatever – and I silently ask them, how – how?! - can you possibly work eight hours a day, five days a week? How is that even remotely physically feasible? And then I remember that I too did this – for years, some of it whilst doing a sodding postgraduate degree – and I shake my head in stunned disbelief. How did I do that? How was that even approaching possible? Was I an imposter in my own body? (I do love a bit of ((self-directed)) Capgras). I am certainly not that person now. Was I ever that person, really? Who was I then? Who am I now? How did it all change? (And, you might ask, who fucking cares, Pan?).

Those that are masochistic enough to regularly read this blog may be remember that, at my last psychiatric review, I asked NewVCB if I could consider reducing my dosage of Quetiapine. You may also recall that she was potentially amenable to this, citing a maintenance dose of 300mg.

This could help, and I might notice the difference more markedly after coming down from such a high dose, but my recollection of taking 300mg in the past was that it was still very – if not quite, as currently, absolutely and unequivocally - debilitating the next morning. Besides, I’m not convinced that 300mg adequately functioned on the psychotic features of my illness. It sated some of the voices a little I suppose, but it was only when I started ingesting a daily whack of 400mg upwards that they actually shut the fuck up (and random, probably stress-related delusions are notwithstanding).

So, herein lies my dilemma. You all know I don’t buy into anti-psychiatry ideals and (conspiracy?) theories. Seroquel works. I know I whinge about weight gain and have launched a virtual diatribe against the stuff in this post, but it has truly made my life better. As long as I have my get-over-the-hangover routine, I am fine. Venlafaxine at a high dose has worked wonders – well, quasi-wonders, anyway – in terms of my mood; Quetiapine has probably aided in that too, but the key issue with it is that I am almost entirely without psychosis at the minute, and have been (bar that one episode the other week, as linked to in the previous paragraph) for aaaaaaaaaaages.

But, much as I don’t want to be normal in what seems to be the standard, societally accepted version of the word, I want to be able to do the things I always wanted to do. In other words, I want to work. A career – not a job, a career - was all I ever really wanted. Thus far, mentalism has denied me a career, but has periodically at least allowed me to have jobs, which may have – in another place and time – led to careers. Is being mental now going to rob me of both possibilities? Will I be a dolescum forever? Are part-time workers actually commonly sought by employers? Besides which, why is it fair that A works full-time (fuck knows how he does it) and I don’t?

Bah. I don’t know. It looks to me like I have a choice between relative sanity and full-time work. Please don’t tell me to kick the Seroquel, by the way. It isn’t going to happen, at least not in the short to medium term. I’d rather not live with a bunch of nefarious fucktards telling me to kill myself (or, worse, others); I’d rather not live with Paedo following me about the place; I’d rather not have to make sense of contemptuously vicious peccaries and stupid fucking gnomes randomly harassing me; I’d rather not live convinced that cameras are watching my every bloody move. Waaah waah waah, whinge whinge whinge, ad infinitum.

We could argue the toss about the true roots of psychosis all we might like – Paul of course held (and, presumably, holds) that psychosis is an entirely logical response to severe trauma, and he may well have a point – but I don’t think I’m ever going to go all R D Laing/Robert Whitaker on this. At the risk of being infuriatingly repetitive, Seroquel, for me at least, works. It does exactly what it’s indicated to do. (Or, as I mistyped, tindicated to do. Geddit?!!!?1?!!!?11????!!eleven?!?! It does exactly what it says on the tin? Tindicate? No? Meh. Sorry. Humour ain’t my strong point).

So, sanity or full-time work. Full-time work or sanity. Why is nothing ever simple or easy in this enforced existence that the fabled they (not my ’They’ ;) ) smugly refer to as ‘life’? Why do we always have to make choices, to compromise, to ‘make do’?

Am I an immature little brat for being irate that mutual exclusivity exists in this context? (Actually, don’t answer that).

Anyway, enough.

(And yeah, by the way, I have sold out and stuck PayPal begging buttons on some posts and on the sidebar. What can I say? I’m a slave to a capitalist world, a traitor to my fellow benefit claimants, a betrayer of my lefty principles, a self-serving money-whore of evil, a rabiator of [insert hated multi-national conglomerate of your choice here] proportions, a twat, a dick, a __________, a &%$(“($, a…yeah, you get the idea. A few of you also did ask about it, in my defence ;) ).

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Day of Ridiculous Paranoia and Panic

 Moods, Traumatic Stuff, Triggers  14 Responses »
Jul 142011
 

OK. I privatised two posts, but am feeling a little calmer – and therefore less paranoid – so have decided to post them here in summary, and with a brief update.

Post One: Night Terror

Published c. 1.30pm. Hidden c. 2pm.

I’m going to publish this utter rubbish, but don’t be surprised if it quickly disappears or gains a password…

—

  • 11.30pm: Go to bed. After a number of nights of insomnia, for once can’t keep eyes open to concentrate on book. Sleep.
  • 4am: Waken. Completely. Dick around with phone for a minute or two. Become bored. Pick up Kindle and see that this morning’s Guardian has already been delivered. Read it.
  • 4.30am: In an effort not to wake A, keep trying not to laugh at Rupert Murdoch’s deserved and long-time-coming misfortune. Grauniad has devoted thousands of words and an entire section to this.
  • 4.35am: Complete Rupert Murdoch section of Grauniad. Go to next section. Do not pass ‘go’, do not collect £200.
  • 4.35am and 10 seconds: Freak out. Picture of GCHQ building in Cheltenham is staring back at me from Kindle screen.
  • 4.36am – c. 4.39am: Read GCHQ piece with growing trepidation. Article is actually about whether GCHQ, MIs 5 and 6 should face greater scrutiny from MPs and peers.
  • 4.39am and 30 seconds: Start having heart palpitations. GCHQ is complaining they do not have enough “internet specialists”. Try to rationalise that this means they’re not watching me; according to this article, they simply don’t have the manpower. Fail to thus rationalise. That this is in the media means they’ll soon have more relevant workers to spy on me.
  • 4.41am: Hide under bedclothes, convinced that the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee have kicked this story off as they’ve found out that GCHQ are after me and need more people to keep tabs on me. Further convince self that ISC has put out this story to lull me into a false sense of security.
  • 4.42am – c. 5.00am: Scour bedroom with eyes, trying to find evidence of government (or, indeed, any other) cameras. Do not find any.
  • 5am: Get up and go into bathroom to try to pull self together. Find disgusting and fairly unique-looking spider in the bath. Freak out even more. Scared of spiders anyway, but this is shaped oddly; it has a long, elongated body, rather than a round one. Could spider actually be a tiny hidden camera?
  • 5.01am: Spider doesn’t seem to be a camera because fucker is clearly alive. Surprise myself by having ability to stand there watching it slowly circle towards, and eventually into and down, the plughole – rather than the more common practice of screaming the house down.
  • 5.03am: Return to bed. Spend what must be nearly an hour arguing with myself about GCHQ. I say I’m paranoid and narcissistic. Story about GCHQ is just a normal politics scoop about the funding and accountability of government agencies. Someone, however, laughs scornfully, and tells me I’m doomed. Cannot work out whether this is ‘me’ being irrational and completely self-obsessed, or if it’s someone ‘else’. Not reminiscent of ‘They‘, Tom, peccaries, gnomes or Paedo. Is female. Probably just me countering myself. Not sure.
  • c. 6am: Suddenly don’t care whether GCHQ are watching or not. Stick two fingers up to room around me and without speaking advise GCHQ, if they’re there, that I am just going to go about daily life anyway. Pick up Kindle again, deliberately ignore rest of Grauniad, read book instead.
  • c. 7am: Suddenly pass out into deep sleep.
  • c. 8.20am: Re-awaken. Converse with A, only giving fleeting thought to cameras/GCHQ.
  • c. 8.30am to present: Get up, eat, do some stupid puzzles to wake mind up, wonder why I became so terrified during the night, accuse self of narcissism, don’t believe GCHQ have cameras watching me (at least not to crippling extent of the early hours). Debate whether or not to discuss this with Christine tomorrow. Do not want to change medication or end up in bin.

    Conclude incident in the night was mere paranoia without logical basis precipitated by FuckBitch Aunt of Evil’s presence, and my uncertainty about her intended movements. Decide this is some bizarre, psychotic form of transference. Am transferring AoE’s unpredictability and sheer fucking nosiness about me onto GCHQ, because I know GCHQ technically can (though probably don’t) read/listen to/see me/my stuff. Very unlikely that AoE has the requisite surveillance knowledge or equipment to do so.

    Decide, therefore, that episode was a one-off, mainly caused by AoE but also partly catalysed by sleep deprivation. My sleep patterns – or insomnia patterns – go in cycles. This is period of the latter. Am reminded that I named this blog what I did for a reason. Mood is still OK, so a brief bout of evil/insomnia-induced mentalness can’t be that bad…right?

    Given the above, decide to hide information from Christine. Don’t need bin nor stronger anti-psychotics. Need AoE to go away (which she will on Tuesday, yay!) and Zopiclone (of which I have plenty).

So. Yay. Good. All is fine. I only wrote this for posterity, not because I’m concerned. Sorry for the crap writing, but it’s partly due to (a) the stream of consciousness bullshit that I wrote ‘live’ on my phone as events progressed and (b) I can’t be arsed switching on the laptop or PC, so am still writing this from via the iOS WordPress application.

I’ll try and catch on more therapy reviews next week. For now, it seems this bollocks is my only blogging contribution this week. Probably a good thing if I’m being this narcissistic ;)

Post Two: I Am Actually Going Mad

Written c. 3.30pm. Not published.

This is new. I cannot recall paranoia on this level. I am absolutely petrified, to the point where I’m shaking, hiding in a corner and throwing up.

Worries:

  1. Mother is dead;
  2. Aunt of Evil is going to come here and confront me;
  3. GCHQ;
  4. Burglars, rapists, GBHers and murderers;
  5. Debt – creditors are going to put me in prison;
  6. A will also die on the way home from work;
  7. But I can’t go out in the car to collect him or see if mother is OK because I will have an accident;
  8. Stupid decision to publish last post because if the people discussed therein find it, then they will bin me;
  9. Christine tomorrow in case she bins me because all of a sudden I’m really, really not sane.

Tried trich to calm down. Didn’t work. I don’t want to cut but I’m scared, I need some sort of release. I am going to try Valium, but that won’t stop my current persecution complex; it’ll only numb my response to it. I thought that maybe splurging out shit here would be cathartic but it only fuels my perception that everyone is out to get me.

I keep hearing noises outside and am convinced that it’s someone coming to get me. It’s not. It’s people going about their bloody business. But is it though?

Oh God.

I’ve turned up the TV so as I don’t hear them but my concern there is that then they know that I’m in here and if I don’t let them in by legitimate means then they will get in by other methods.

What has happened? I was so fucking well for a while there and no one was out to get me. Now I’m not and they are (well, I retain some insight that says they’re not, but I can’t believe it). It feels like a psychotic mixed episode. I don’t want this. Why has it happened?

I hope my previous assertion that this has been induced by insomnia was correct but I don’t believe that right now.

My IBS is out of control today so I might not even be able to run away should I need to do so. Not that I do, I know. But yet I might. Fuck, I don’t know.

Don’t know what else to say. This is not good. I’m such a fucking idiot.

Now

  • Mother is not dead. I stupidly advised her that I was mental, but luckily she hasn’t shot over here to see if she can make me saner, because I assured her that A would be home soon.
  • No one has tried to force entry.
  • AoE is staying with my mother, and is therefore not (nor has been) here.
  • A could be dead, but I seriously doubt it.
  • GCHQ have no interest in me. Why do I keep thinking that they do? If they happen to come across any of this, I bet they’re laughing their bollocks off.
  • I am not particularly behind in paying my creditors. A little, but not enough to be of major concern yet. I’ve already considered bankruptcy if it comes to that.
  • I could be murdered, raped, GBHed or burgled, but hopefully the statistics are presently in my favour. I mean, two of those have happened several times already; could I really be that statistically unlucky?
  • There are no voices but my own.
  • IBS continues, but that’s a several-times-daily thing that I should not have taken out of context.
  • I am mortified about all of this but am going to publish this post as a warning to myself.
  • I am very grateful for the support afforded to me on Twitter today. Thank you.
  • I am fine now. Please don’t worry about me :)

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An ‘I’m a Lazy Bastard’ Post

 Meh  13 Responses »
Mar 072011
 

NOTE: If you don’t like gratuitous swearing, don’t read this. Ta very cunting much.

—

If LittleFeet can succumb to the lures of a meme, then I happily can too :) So this is my ridiculous take on the ‘A – Z’ interrogative delight that is currently floating around the blogosphere. It’s got me out of writing a proper post, and ergo I am quite enchanted with it. (That said, I intend to get back to proper writing tomorrow. I want to catch up on things with Paul – I have four fucking weeks to catch up on, and I want it all done and dusted. If you don’t see anything on Paul here by midnight tomorrow, don’t just feel free to berate me, please actively do so. Thank you, lovelies).

—

A = Age: 27. Though I routinely forget this information, and have found myself frequently asking A, my mother or friends what age I am. For someone as smart as I apparently am, I can’t even always work it out when I consider my birth year either – though, again, I’m quite wont to forget the year of my birth too. It’s probably a good thing, really. Being on the slippery slope towards the age of 30, especially when you’ve achieved fuck all of any worth in your existence, is wholly depressing. That said, I want to get my 30th birthday the fuck out of the way and then see if the following decade can represent something approximating the fabled state of ‘fresh start’-ness. I am not, however, considering this prospect with any significant optimism.

B = Bed size: Double. I do live with my Mister, after all, and it doesn’t seem entirely fair to relegate him to either a sofa or a floor – as a general rule, anyhow. Of course, once upon a time the minute spare room contained a bed, but that bed itself usually contained my brother-in-law. Since he has now become an alleged adult and got his own house and mortgage, his former quarters have become a study-cum-music room-cum-’let’s throw all the rubbish in here so we don’t have to think about it’-space.

C = Chore you dislike: All of them. I almost never do any, and don’t have any intention of starting to do so this side of 2098. I don’t mind living in what objective observers may call a ‘mess’. What’s wrong with living in an untidy house? Who cares about a layer of dust here and there? I genuinely have no understanding of why these issues are considered to be of any worth to any person.

D = Dogs: What about them, other than that I do not have one in my current possession? I like them and would love to have one, but the house is very small and dogs need attention. To these ends, I have ultimately settled on cats for my non-human companionship. The cynical fuckers take care of themselves, for the most part, meaning I merely have to throw food and water in their general direction now and again. It’s a mutually convenient relationship.

E = Essential start to your day: Faffing about for 80 years, trying to convince myself that remaining in bed all fucking day is not a particularly good idea.

F = Favorite color [sic]: Purple, black or blood red.

G = Gold or silver: Silver. Proper silver, mind you; I’m thoroughly allergic to non-precious metals.

H = Height: Odd you should ask, actually, as in the course of mundane domesticity in the form of a cunted fridge, I had the tape measure out today. I’m an inch taller than I realised: 5’4″.

I = Instruments you play(ed): *shudders* I was coerced into attempts to play that most childish and pathetic of instruments, the recuntcorder, in my first year at grammar school. I was so tremendously terrible at it, and I was so utterly petrified of the demon-like teacher, that I developed musicitis on most Tuesday mornings, coincidentally (!) the time allocated for music for our class. Either that or I was highly strategic in allocating myself doctor’s or dentist’s appointments.

Ironically, I later joined the chamber choir, which was trained by the same teacher…and grew to be rather fond of him.

A has tried to teach me the guitar, but I don’t really have the patience for learning it (or any other instrument) any more, if I ever even did.

J = Job title: Useless Dolescum Mentalist Trampcunt.

K = Kids: Do you refer to those four-libmed things that emit high-pitched, irritating sounds that also run around the place flapping their arms about for no discernible reason, yet which manage not to get sectioned? *shudders again* No. Please keep these things away from me.

Seriously, even if I liked children (which, obviously, I don’t), I really don’t think it would be a good idea for me to have any. Mental illnesses are frequently observed in the offspring of headbins like me, and whether that’s due to genetics, environmental factors or both is almost irrelevant: the statistics are clear. Furthermore, A has a congenital eye impairment, so our poor phantom offspring would run an elevated risk of being both blind and mental. I don’t think it’s fair to inflict that possibility on it.

Disclaimer: that is not to say that all mentalists should remain childfree or childless. If one is stable, and if you’re not the selfish cunt that I am, then more power to you; I’ve no doubt that such people can be excellent parents. Ditto blindness – most of the blind/VI people I know lead very full and ordinary lives. The combination just doesn’t work for us, and even if it did, we don’t like screamers children.

L = Live: NORN IRON LEEK (translation: I say, dear chap, I must confess to residing in the disputed constitutional territory in the North-East corner of the island of Ireland, a fine and upstanding place for any gentile individual to frequent, har-har!)

M = Mom’s [sic] name: Mother. Mum. Yer woman indoors. YER MAWH! (Seaneen may understand. I don’t know if the rest of you will, sorry).

N = Nicknames: Pan. SI. There are also one or two that relate to my real name, but these are only used by my mates – A and Mum never are never heard to use them.

O = Overnight hospital stays: Three. One of which was when I was born, so arguably doesn’t count particularly. The other two were medical (as opposed to psychiatric) hospitalisations for the effects of overdoses; one, oddly the more serious of the two, was for one night only whilst they pumped the living fuck out of my stomach, and the other was for three nights. In the case of the latter, I have absolutely no idea why they kept me in for so long. I had inflicted almost no serious or lasting damage on myself, and didn’t even require stomach pumping.

The first night of that hospitalisation saw my best friend Daniel stay with my mother (he had been present when I took the overdose). Unfortunately for him, my mouse Freezing had escaped from his cage, and was latterly found to be inhabiting Dan’s spare-room quarters. I am grateful to him (Dan, not the mouse) though: he saved Freezing’s life. My mother ran about threatening to stand on the poor wretched creature, but Dan refused to allow it, and Freezing lived to fight another round of let’s-break-out-of-the-cage (at which point my mother returned him to the pet shop :( ).

P = Pet peeves: The following construction: It happened Tuesday. NO, IT FUCKING DIDN’T. It happened ON Tuesday! Jesus! ‘Tuesday’ is not a fucking adjective!

Other abuses of grammar. Reactionist wing-nuts. Holier-than-thou types. People who live in wilfull ignorance vis a vis mental illness and/or mental health issues. Politicians. The demonisation of legitimate benefit claimants, especially when weighted against the apparent legitimacy of pissing the world economy down the sewer and then being rewarded for it. Phones. Microsoft Windross. Spidey fuckers and other pointless human miscellany.

Basically – most things.

Q = Quote from a movie: No idea. I don’t watch enough films to find inspirational quotes in them. One quote that I love that was in a film – but which, if memory serves me, was garnered straight from the original book of same – was How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? It came from Alex, the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange (one of my favourite novels of all time), when he encountered an enemy gang-leader. I thought it was a hilarious insult, and I have employed it in verbal discourse frequently since I first came across it.

R = Righty or lefty: Mostly right-handed, to my regret (I do so love to be different), but I do have some tendencies towards ambidexterity. w00t!

S = Siblings: None. And I prefer it that way.

T = Time you wake up: At whatever time the previous night’s 600mg of Seroquel permits.

U = Underwear: None, normally, because I don’t leave the fucking house often enough. I sit around wearing trampy dresses with nothing under them and plod about all day like that. When I do venture outdoors, a t-shirt bra is a necessity. I’m ambivalent about cunt-coverers. If they’re clean, they’re suitable.

V = Vegetables you don’t like: FUCKING lentils. Fucking, fucking, fucking lentils. They are the spawn of Satan himself. Lentils are evil. E.V.I.L. They are disgusting and fetid and shouldn’t be allowed under the European Convention on Human Rights, as under Article Three of the aforesaid, they inhibit my right to be free from torture. The mere thought of the cunting curls of bastardry is decidedly torturous to me. In fact, I may consult a Human Rights lawyer on this matter. Lentils need to be made extinct, and we need to act now.

W = What makes you run late: Usually the cats dicking about, but also mentalism, claro que si. I used to be late for nearly everything, for which we can generally blame the epic failures of public transport. However, at present I am almost always early for appointments and related shit, because I have a marked tendency to over-estimate just how long it will take me to drive to them. Then I sit about in my car like a dick with no point for four years, trying to think of something more productive to do than vituperate about my poor timing on Twitter.

X = X-rays you’ve had: Two, or so I recall anyway. When I was 14, I fell on the stair and completely twatted my knee – 13 years later, I am still afflicted with the frustrating malady garnered back then. One night when I was maybe 15 or so it (my knee) went completely mental (metaphorically, you understand), so my mother took me to the Big Local NHS Shithole Hospital, where we sat as our minds slowly but surely atrophied out of our skulls for something like eight hours. Then some ‘oh look at me, I’m a Junior House Officer and I’m soooooooooooooooooo fucking important’ braindead bitch glanced at it for about three nanoseconds, sent it for an x-ray at the absolute behest of my mother, glanced at the x-ray for about half a nanosecond, then sent me on my not-so-merry way.

The second time was about two years ago, when I was having a pile of gastro-intestinal issues. I was sent for an x-ray at Big Private Hospital, where I was treated courteously and respectfully. A consultant in the area and a senior radiographer took time to analyse the x-ray (which, in the end, showed no blockages) before I was allowed to be discharged. In the wake of this, a kind and friendly nurse presented me with tea and a tasty scone with butter and jam.

Y = Yummy food you make: Curry with a capital arsekiller. I make ‘em hot.

Z = Zoo animal favorites: Bats! I fucking love them. Also penguins; they’re so cute and friendly.

At the other end of the scale, I loathe and despise cows with even more fervour than I hate lentils (see ‘V’ above). The only purpose of cows is for them to be well-grilled on my plate. I bring their existence up because as teenagers, Daniel, my then-boyfriend Neil and I went for a walk on a route that circles the perimeter of a zoo. Even this zoo, fairly basic on a world scale, was not so inadequate that it required livestock as exhibits; however, we decided to confuse the punters about this. We hid in the bushes and cried “moooo! Moooo!” in the deepest, most bovine-like manner we could muster, and sat back in delight as all the little attending kids started shouting at their parents for “not taking [them] to see the cows, Mummy/Daddy!”

That I still find that anecdote amusing proves that I have never, and am unlikely to ever, grow(n) up.

—

THE END.

I Love My Mum

 Important People in My Life  16 Responses »
Feb 242011
 

I seem to spend half my time on this blog and on Twitter criticising her for her occasional bad points, but I so rarely acknowledge the goodness in her. My father tortured her for over 20 years, and her life hasn’t been a bed of roses since either, not entirely but at least in large part down to me.

I never know how to tell her that I love her. She’s nearly 70 and I don’t think she knows. Sometimes I wish I was more tactile and ostensibly ‘feeling’ so as I could tell her, but it seems to beyond my grasp. How pathetic.

She deserved a better life than my father gave her, and she deserves more appreciation from me for who she is and for what she’s done. Life is finite and I spend half my own existence in a state of raw terror every time I phone her and she doesn’t answer that she’s dead. That’s bad enough, but it would be me that would have to deal with the hideous consequences of it. I probably couldn’t do it, but that’s another matter. But what wouldn’t be fair to her would be for her to die and not know much she was loved, valued and appreciated by me.

I hope I have lots of time left with her, but I don’t know if I can ever be the person that I should be – the person that is capable of genuinely expressing my love to her, because that’s all she’s ever really hoped for in return for all she’s done for me.

But I’m pathetic.

The Infinite Stations of Disgust – Paul: Week 12

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff  20 Responses »
Feb 092011
 

Week 12 was very, very difficult. It’s got to the stage now where Paul, quite fairly I think, has been trying, trying, trying to push me as far as he can. To force me into remembering, to force me into feeling. Every fibre of my being rails against this, and attempts almost any method of divergence from what Paul wants, but he is good at not letting me away with that. It sucks. It is profoundly hateful, and I pretty much run out of the crappy little room every week to nurse my metaphorical wounds, something he’s picked up on (not that it’s subtle, mind you). All that said, though, I believe that the worst work is, in the long-term, the most productive – so despite the horror of it all, I think he’s doing the right thing. Maybe one day we’ll get somewhere.

I hadn’t seen Paul for a fortnight when this session came round, owing to being ill one week, and off whizzing round the country the following. To that end, I was greeted with a, “it’s really good to see you again,” when we sat down. I was touched, insofar as a cynical misanthrope can be said to be ‘touched’. As ever, we talked around things for a few minutes – how had I been feeling in general (depressed), how had ‘They‘ been (pretty silent), la la la. I ended up telling him about the peccary hallucination and some dreams I’d been having, the latter occurrence not being something I’ve mentioned here recently. The main theme of these dreams was one of danger. The example I cited saw my mother and I in a house out on what are probably best described as moors, in a violent storm. The setting was ethereal and sinister, and laced with menace. The ‘menace’ eventually materialised when I turned round and saw a terrifying figure at the door. I tried screaming for my mother, who had left the room – but I was only able to manage a useless ‘mmm, mmmm!” over and over again. At that point I was woken by A, as I had, apparently, been making the ‘mmm’ noises audibly, showing him that I was very distressed.

It sounds stupidly non-frightening as I type it, just as it did when I told Paul about it. He shrugged at my slight self-castigation, and said that dreams were all about context.  ”I had one client who used to dream of children singing,” he said. “She’d wake up screaming each time.”

He thought for a minute or two, then asked me if I thought that the hallucination and dreams were indicative of a memory wanting to come out. I admitted that that had been my conclusion.

“It’s something you don’t want to think about, isn’t it?” he mused. “Yet it’s part of you, you know. But the more that you repress it, the stronger it comes out in external ways – namely, psychosis.”

So began a resistance of an extent not seen since the Nazi occupation of France. My first response was amusing in retrospect; “what the hell am I so terrified of? This isn’t a fucking H P Lovecraft novella.” Realising that he may not be familiar with the wonderful works of everyone’s favourite anglophilic horror author, I qualified it by saying that “my life is not a horror novel.”

“It was,” he responded without pause. “It was the worst horror novel of all time.”

Well, at least you got the novel (ie. fiction) bit right, mate. But anyway…

“The monsters you encountered back then may have been human,” Paul continued, “but they were still monsters.  They possessed and penetrated you in every conceivable way.”

I was silent for a while. I didn’t want to have this conversation – but then, I asked myself, why the fuck would I be in therapy in the first place? Good question, my mind responded. After all, it was just sex!

Quite so. “OK,” I started, “I know – obviously I know – that adults are not meant to have sex with children. But really, Paul, it was just sex. What’s the big deal?!”

“I suspect the child didn’t see it that way,” he said, which was a reasonable response with which I could not argue. “Neither was it a ‘game’ – to her – when they went around threatening to cut your fingers off either. You reacted with horror and terror, just like you have to the recent dreams and hallucinations. The thing is, they come about because you can’t bear to accept the reality of what happened. It’s easier for you to say, ‘bah, it’s just sex’.”

My next awesome piece of strategy was to point out to him that resignation had been one of my over-riding feelings in what might have objectively been seen to be one of my worst abusive incidents, ie. the gang rape (not that I termed it ‘gang rape’, oh no. It was “the incident that involved more than one person,” sad cow that I am). “I don’t remember being outrageously scared. Just…accepting of it. This is what had to be done, the end.”

Paul understood that, but still banged on and on about ‘feeling’. He believes that I ‘disconnected’ during that incident because I “couldn’t bear to feel it.”

He tilted his head after a few minutes and said, “it feels difficult to reach you today. Like there’s a gulf between us.”

Paul is, in my view, a highly intelligent and perceptive man, and a very competent psychotherapist. This observation, however, could have been made by an elderly donkey, zoned out on 80mg of Valium.

I admitted it, and sighed, choosing once more to vituperate against myself. “Why can’t I just do this? Why do I always batten down the hatches?”

“I threaten you,” he offered. “I bring the scary monsters and all that is related to them into the room to you.

“The thing is,” he went on, “it’s like you’ve put the little girl in a cellar. She’s safe there; the monsters of the past can’t reach her. However, neither can anything else. What would help her, Pandora?”

I did the dutiful (and, to be truthful, the honest) thing and said, “comfort.”

“And she can’t get that in the cellar,” Paul replied. “You know of attachment theory I’m sure [of course]. I was reading a good example the other day; a little boy falls in the playground at school and cuts his knee quite badly. He keeps a stiff upper lip about it all day, until he sees his mother at the school gate. Then he crumbles. He can only be vulnerable when there is someone trustworthy to ‘catch’ him.

“[Aurora] never had anyone to catch her. Thus she was unable to acknowledge her need to be vulnerable, and to be comforted – if she had, she’d have disintegrated completely.”

It was an accurate but bleak analysis. To my surprise, I felt great sadness that I had had to suffer for so long in silence, taking care of myself, growing up before I had time to even understand the concept of the mythical state of childhood, learning to mentally fend for myself no matter what. I assume that this sadness is meant to be ‘good’.

After much rumination, I finally told him in a small voice of the sorrow I felt. He nodded and said, “in my view that bit’s almost as damaging as the physical abuse. Perhaps even more so. You had no idea of what ‘safety’ meant, and my reckoning is that you still don’t. Every time you start to feel safe, something holds you back.”

He exemplified, to my surprise, by bringing up C. His point was that just as I was starting to trust C, in came ‘They’ telling me that C was a “cunt”.  (To be fair to ‘They’, they turned out to be right. I should have said to Paul that just as I was beginning to trust C, he told me to fuck off, which actually had far more impact on my view of the man than anything ‘They’ had to say about him).

“So,” he continued, “it seems like I can judge how much you trust me by how far you run away.”

It doesn’t feel like a lack of trust to me, though. I think I do trust him, though how deep that runs I don’t know. I don’t know how deep my trust for almost anyone runs.  Anyhow, I reported that it felt more like I didn’t want to be vulnerable in front of him, because “I don’t want to appear pathetic.”

“‘Pathetic’,” he repeated, thoughtfully. “That’s a very derisory word. In what possible way are you pathetic?”

I shrugged in response and looked out the window behind me at the ordinary people outside going about their ordinary lives in their ordinary clothes in the ordinary street.

“I don’t think you’d consider another abused child ‘pathetic’ for appearing vulnerable,” Paul was saying. “Your perception of yourself like that is just another way for you to hide.”

Maybe so, but the statement irritated me slightly. I hate “emotion”. I hate crying. I hate tactility. I hate it all, and I hate it a lot.

“I was an emotionless droid even as a child,” I said to the window.

“Of course; emotion requires a trusting, containing environment,” Paul was heard to say from the other side of the room. “Your first abuse wasn’t a rape [wince] per se; it was the abuse of the trust and safety that you rightfully expected.”

I continued to stare blankly out the window. There is a little church on the right. I breathed in its beautiful architecture, and wondered if people really found the solace they sought within its walls. Where is my place of solace? With Paul? And if so, how can I help myself to get to it with him?

As I ruminated thus, images of many abusive incidents invaded my head. There was nothing new, but they were interesting in that they were all in the third person. I shook my head – as if I was literally trying to shake them out of my brain – and mentioned them in passing.

“But you’ve bitten them back now, haven’t you?” he noted, drolly. I sighed, and nodded. I want to connect with it all, and yet I really, really don’t. I don’t want my mind to continue ‘protecting’ me. But yet it does so utterly unabated.

“How do you deal with emotion now?” he randomly asked. “You’re in a long-term relationship, after all.”

“I’m not sure that either of us would use the word ‘emotion’ in relation to it.”

He tried a different tactic then. “Are you in love?”

That completely took me aback. Oh, fuckery shit and cuntsacks. What a question to have posed. For a few minutes I turned my face back to him and stared at him in questioning horror. He stared back, steadfastly refusing to withdraw or qualify his query.

“I…well, yes, I suppose we are,” I said, eventually.

He raised an eyebrow quizzically and was about to respond, when I said, “I’m reminded of Prince Charles’ epic quote: ‘whatever love is‘”.

Paul visibly winced, and duly took his turn to look horrified. I looked at him defiantly.

He considered my response for a few minutes, then shrugged. “OK, then,” he said. “Whatever love means. What does it mean to you?”

For fuck’s sake! Does he have an answer to fucking everything?!

As I looked away in thought, he added, dryly, “I’m expecting the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the word.”

I laughed quite a lot at this wittily acerbic comment. For someone who sees me only for 50 minutes a week, he certainly knows me very well.

After some consideration, I proclaimed that love was “about friendship, companionship and affection.”

“That’s not exactly Mills and Boon,” Paul replied.

“Thank fuck for that,” I returned.

He laughed and conceded I was right to deride those so-called novels that demean the world of fiction. “But you know what I mean,” he added. “You don’t mention…passion.”

“What, sexual passion?”

“No – powerful, overwhelming feelings.”

“There were such feelings – I mean, in some circumstances of course there still are – but to me ‘love’ is what’s left when you get over the first flush of romance. It happens in all romantic relationships; it’s just life. If you still want to be together after those first months or years, when the honeymoon inevitably ends, then that’s the indicator of the strength of your feeling. That’s love.”

I felt hideously uncomfortable having a discussion about love with Paul. I chose my words carefully; I was measured, but honest, and hoped that would encourage him to move on. To almost anything.

“Who would you go to if you tripped in the street on the way home?”

“A.”

“Would he be able to take your pain?”

“Yes.”

“Who took it when you were a child?”

He must have known that was a cul-de-sac of a question. I said that I didn’t know.

“There’s only one occasion on which I remember crying at [Hotel California],” I said, somehow reminded of the incident. “I think I was about eight. I twisted my ankle on one of their sunken flowerbeds. [Suzanne] even remarked that she’d never seen me cry before.” I continued by telling him that I “pulled myself together” as quickly as the agonising pain shooting through my leg allowed me, and then made a big joke of the whole thing. I then went on to describe a time (again, I was about eight) where Mum and I were in the local park, and she told me to correct my posture whilst walking. This skeletal divergence from my norm caused me to fall, and actually injure myself quite nastily. I haughtily advised my mother that if she had not been so concerned with kowtowing to societally accepted ideas of physical stance, I would not have fallen.

“So instead of showing that you need a hug, you show yourself to be defensive,” Paul mooted.

“Well, I can cry, I just don’t like to normally. I skidded in the car when we were on holiday last week [stupid fucking Irish road system], and shortly afterwards pulled over and wept. I don’t want to see my car hurt. That upsets me.” Even thinking about it made me agitated. My poor wee car :(

“Something safe to cry about,” he noted. I once again turned my gaze to the outside world.

“I’m putting a lot of pressure on you today,” Paul said. “Everything is sticking in your throat.”

That was a fair comment. I’ve mentioned before that I’m always clearing my throat in session with him, and it was particularly notable on this occasion. I voiced my agreement and apologised.

He said, “words bring up feelings. You can’t bear that, so your last line of defence is to physically resist. The words have trouble coming out.”

I was suddenly really, really frustrated with myself. “What am I so ashamed of?!” I gasped. “What is so wrong with feeling? Why do I want to smash people’s faces in when they demonstrate that they feel things?!”

He once again suggested that I felt threatened by it. “And in here, I am asking you to face something that you don’t allow yourself to face.”

“I don’t know how to deal with it,” I despaired. “I don’t know how to comfort, or to reassure, or to counsel. I can’t deal with it!”

I was reminded briefly of an incident when I was – 11? 12, maybe? My mother and I were visiting the eldest son and daughter-in-law of Maisie and Paedo. Their daughter, now Student McFaul despite having graduated, would have been six or seven. She and I were watching ET together, and towards the end, she started bawling her eyes out.

I sat beside her in baffled alarm. Should I get her mother? Should I get my mother? Should I ignore her sadness? I knew that decorum dictates that one is supposed to put one’s arms around the person and spew out meaningless platitudes such as the inexplicable, “there, there,” but it just wasn’t me to do something like that. In the end, I did put my arm around her a bit, but it felt dreadfully uncomfortable and utterly faked. I felt like a waxwork with a wind-up mechanism.

Anyway, I continued to whinge on about how I can’t deal with other people being “emotional”. And so it came to pass that I began to tell him a bit about the circumstances surrounding my not-quite-step-father’s death. I’m well aware that I’ve hardly ever mentioned that event here; it’s just never seemed relevant. I wasn’t his biggest fan, nor he mine, but we tolerated each other. One day when I was 10 he randomly dropped dead in a shop, thanks to a massive heart attack. It’s massively significant in that it added to my mother’s trauma, but I have to admit that it didn’t (seem to?) unduly affect me.

Me being me, I took the death in my stride and behaved in my usual clinical fashion. I’m not sure if this led to behind-my-back gossiping amongst the assembled adults, but one day when I was in my mother’s room for something, Maisie asked me to sit down, and then spent about half an hour patronising me about how it was OK to cry for not-quite-step-dad. I didn’t feel like crying; I did, however, feel like rearranging the fat bitch’s face until she looked like – well, until she looked better, which would have taken a lot of rearranging.

Back in Paul’s room, I suddenly flew into a rage at this. “Her. She had the fucking audacity to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do, and how I should and shouldn’t feel. Her of all fucking people!”

Paul seemed pleased at the anger, and let me rant for a bit. The rant inevitably led somewhere relevant; in the aftermath of not-quite-step-dad’s death, Maisie and Paedo stayed at our house for several weeks to support my devastated and traumatised mother. For all my criticisms of them, it was an action done with the best of intentions. It spoilt me, in a way, because Maisie would have a nice cup of coffee and a biscuit ready for me upon my return from school, right on time every day, without fail.

Of course, Paedo had some plans for me of his own. If I were to tell you that I had a wendy house in the garden, which had a well-concealed passage behind it, you can guess what the craic was. It didn’t happen often, admittedly; as I told Paul, being as I was nearly 11 then, I was probably too old by then to properly cater to Paedo’s tastes.

For some reason, I went on a monologue along the lines of, “get up, get dressed, go to school, come home, have coffee, head out behind the wendy house, come in, have dinner, watch TV.”

When I looked at Paul, he was quietly shaking his head. When I asked why, he asked if I remembered the story he’d told me a few weeks previously, where a woman who’d witnessed the rape of a child had been particularly distressed by the fact that the child knew what she was doing. I did thus recall. In fact, the tale had haunted me.

“To get to the point where you just regard it as such a nonchalant part of normal life requires an incredible amount of protection,” he told me. “We’re trying to undo that here, but it’s a hell of a task to break it down.”

“I’ll fucking well undo it,” I seethed maniacally, in a sudden rage once more. “Filthy, shameful, disgusting slut of hell!!!”

Paul’s eyes went wide. “Welcome, emotion,” he murmured, wearing a slight grin. “Whose words are those?”

“Who cares? I’m fucking repulsive, repugnant, vile, disgusting…” I stopped, mid-sentence (or mid-rant, if you prefer).

“No, no, no,” he urged, “don’t shut down. Tell me what’s going through your mind.”

“Having sex with someone so much older than you when you’re that young is fucking disgusting,” I ranted. “Especially when he’s married. And my aunt was being cuckolded. It’s so seedy and…well, again, disgusting.”

“It is seedy and disgusting,” Paul said encouragingly, “but you’re directing that at yourself – you’ve got it the wrong way round.”

I closed my eyes and visualised an incident that took place behind my wendy house. “It doesn’t feel that way,” I said to Paul. “I feel defiled and…oh for God’s sake, you’d think I couldn’t speak English…disgusting. But it’s all about me. He’s almost an irrelevance: a means to a twisted end, if you will.”

“Oh yes,” Paul satirised, “you defiled him, you made him do these horrible things. You seduced him. You’re responsible.

“You were a very powerful child,” he concluded. “Am I safe in this room with you?!”

Perhaps some might find his joke in bad taste, but I appreciated his lightening the tone slightly, finding myself able to giggle a little.

“Look,” he began, “all these words and excuses you use – they’re his words and excuses.”

“Whatever,” I said, waving a hand about dismissively. “What kind of a freak has sex with her uncle?”

“What kind of freak forces his niece to have sex with him?”

See what I mean? Answer to everything.

“Two things especially strike me,” he said. “One: you had no choice. Two: in order to survive this, you had to be able to do it. It doesn’t mean you wanted it, or you liked it, but it means that you had to do something to survive. I have a client who became very good at performing oral sex, as it meant her abuser didn’t penetrate her.”

“I understand that, and I didn’t want any of it,” I sighed, deflated. “But I feel like I should have actively hated every single second, rather than just borne it all.”

“How could you have done? How could you have tolerated that in any way?”

“I suppose I’d have ended up in a paediatric bin.” I smiled at the idea, but with little humour.

“One of our biggest tasks in therapy is to get you to a point where you don’t hate [Aurora], where you can feel empathy and sympathy for her. The only reactions you show to her at the minute are anger and hate, and I think that’s very sad.

“It’s time to finish,” he noted, finally. “This has been tough for you, hasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s probably going to get tougher. You do appreciate that, don’t you?”

I pulled on my coat and said, “my view is the tougher the therapy is in the short-term, the more helpful it is in the long-term.”

“Which is an easy analysis for you to make as you run out the door,” he smiled.

I grinned back. “You’ve got me there,” I admitted. “But I do think it’s true.” And I do.

As I was opening the front door to leave, he stopped me and said, “it’s really great to see you again, Pandora.”

I said, “you too, Paul,” and left.

I must be a demanding, difficult client, and his work must be shocking and horrific at times. But it’s good to know that he really does seem to care about his clients, and indeed about me specifically.

It is therefore obvious that he has never worked in public sector healthcare.

The Fourth of October Plan – A Date With Death – Paul: Week Three, Part I

 Important People in My Life, Life, Paul, Psychotherapy  16 Responses »
Oct 192010
 

***Suicide Triggers***

You may recall that at the end of my first session with Paul I briefly alluded to the fact that I had intended to do myself in that day.  It was 4 October 2010.

I had written a post on this issue independently of Paul’s involvement, but chose not to publish it in the end because it read horribly.  Still, I was going to re-write it eventually and it might as well be here as, to my considerable surprise, Paul opened our third session together by bringing the issue up.

He said that at the time it was first mentioned he had wanted to discuss it with me, but that as it was at the end of the meeting, he’d obviously been unable to.  Then  Week Two was for the most part a history lesson taught by me to him, so an opportunity to discuss the matter had not arisen therein either.

For the sake of context, let me take you back a little.  The decision to kill myself was made about the end of July, a time blighted by the dark shadow of therapy with C coming to an near-imminent end.  I could not imagine a future without him – it sounds so utterly pathetic to consider killing myself effectively over a man I never really knew, and I suppose it is.  However, in relative fairness, it was a case of a straw breaking a camel’s back.  I’ve lived with being mental for so long.  As I’ve previously argued, I’m still not convinced I’d flick some sort of figurative switch to rid myself of it all and be some sort of cheery Mary Poppins instead; I despise the idea, and in any case I’ve never known anything different to madness ergo making it an absolute immanence to my sense of identity.  I am comfortable with that in and of itself, although obviously I want to be able to manage my symptoms – but all that said, it’s so exhausting.  Put simply, I don’t (didn’t) want to live with this at the levels to which I have been so horribly used.

From this you can probably surmise that the 4 October Plan was something I thought about deeply.  As Paul noted as I spoke, it was not a rash, indiscriminate, sudden whim: I honestly considered all my options, and thought suicide was the least worst.  One of the most ‘dangerous’ types of suicide attempt – the calculated (Paul’s spot-on term), considered, planned on.  I decided upon it; I didn’t just randomly do it in a fit of smothering bleakness.

I thought about it again, and re-decided upon it.  In desperation for the sake of A and Mum, I revised the evidence and circumstances in front of yet again – and still decided it was the right thing to do.

Having set my mind on it, I went about determining a date.

There were certain criteria affecting this variable of my intended death:

  • it had to be sufficiently far from the birthdays of both my mother and A that neither would associate those occasions with my death
  • I had to have enough time to consider my exit method and to purchase any necessary ingredients
  • despite the previous two factors, it still had to be relatively soon.

4th October is a date set pretty evenly between the birthdays of the two aforesaid, and although that date in the Year of our Lord 2010 seemed like a million miles away from my despairing, screaming-inside July self, it was at least within a foreseeable future.  It was also a Monday, and right at the onset of the most miserable time of year.  Perfectly depressing.

I set up a blog and a Twitter account to ‘chronicle the last days of my life’.  I have no idea why I did that, and am in utter shock about it as I sit here now, because the utter narcissism of such behaviour is appalling even by my benchmark-level standards of same.  I suppose I was probably trying to convey, in an oddly individual manner, my pro-choice on suicide stance.  Incidentally, I still hold to that ideal despite the fact that I didn’t go through with it.  I don’t necessarily think that it’s a good idea, but I do think it should be an option available without condemnation to the most chronically desperate individuals.

I decided I was going to do it one of two ways.  My initial intention had been to jump, and I researched relevant options for same.  There are a number of possible venues in this vicinity – all highrise buildings – and even though I knew I’d be shit scared when I got to the top of one of them (I suffer from vertigo, which perhaps makes suicide by jumping an apparently stupid thing to do, but remember that vertigo is not acrophobia), I planned to mitigate this with an overdose of Zopiclone, Quetiapine and booze.  I planned to sit at the edge and consume these drugs, then hopefully pass out and fall off the side of the building.

Two problems presented themselves, however.  One was that I couldn’t find any information on how I’d reasonably get onto the roof of one of these buildings at all, never mind doing so without arousing suspicion. More importantly, all of the buildings in questions house civilians, whether residential or business premises.  I figured it wouldn’t be very nice for them to walk out of their homes/offices and find my brain and un-co-operative-whilst-alive bowels splattered all over their garden(s).

The back-up, then.  Helium.  If properly executed (pun intended), helium is a peaceful and relatively quick method of catching the bus.  Advantageously, it’s also fairly easily obtainable, unlike many poisons.  Body discovery in this case would be by police personnel, as I planned to undertake the suicide in my car in a remote location, having sent a time-delayed email to the local copshop (or, perhaps more suitably, the local KFC).

There’s a certain surrealism and black humour in all of this, looking back.  It’s hilarious to think of someone running a helium canister through price comparison sites.  I mean…it’s just ludicrous!  And what did its cost ultimately matter, given that I would be dead?!  Whilst other people were checking the respective prices of Wiis or DVDs, here I was attempting to calculate the best available price for death.  Perhaps I shouldn’t find this so terribly amusing, but I never said I had anything approximating good taste.  As I imparted this information to Paul, tears of laughter rolled down my cheeks.  He laughed himself at one point, but I haven’t yet worked out whether it was genuine, or merely polite response to my own cachinnations.  Perhaps I am a uniquely twisted fucker.

Anyway, helium best price identified, onward I went to purchase the goodies.  This was, I think, on Thursday 23 September.  I added the canister to my ‘basket’, filled in the address and name details, and even put in my debit card number.  All set.

I pulled the on-screen cursor over to the ‘purchase’ button, and (given as I was and am using a laptop) lifted my finger away from the pointer to press the left mouse button, which would finalise the sale.

And…I stopped dead (yes, more punning intended).  My right index finger wouldn’t co-operate in the simple act of pressing down on the button, thus failing to secure my canister delivery.  I willed it to move.  I willed my mind to act, to overrule the double-crossing digit.  But I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t go through with it.

In an instant I was flooded with guilt about A, Mum and my friends.  Engineering my death so that it wasn’t associated with someone’s birthday was hardly going to make up for the fact that I permanently wasn’t there. As I relayed this to Paul, he noted quite drolly that upon hearing of my demise, their first reaction was unlikely to be “oh well, at least it’s not my birthday.”  I couldn’t help but laugh again.

I told him how and where I’d intended to do it and how, when NLTWFN rang me to say that an appointment with him had come up on that particular date, I’d smiled internally at the irony.  The start of a process designed to help me live my life better on the day I was supposed to die.  If there is a God, He/She/It has definitely got a sense of humour.

On that point, although I don’t believe in fate, providence or anything of the like, I suppose that humourous irony is also rather poignant, if you look at it sentimentally anyhow.  Instead of dying on 4 October 2010, perhaps I could maybe start living on 4 October 2010.  *imagines flowers, sunsets, waterfalls, bunnies and life perfection*  Hmmm.

Just to spoil that lovely sweet moment, of course I didn’t start living.  In fact, my life remains a minuscule and infinitesimally unimportant splatter of diarrhoea shat irritably out by the fed up cosmos.  Still and withal, Paul has so far been a positive and encouraging development, and our first ‘proper’ interaction was on that date, so it was at least a happy coincidence.

As 4 October finally arrived, I sat watching the clock on my mobile phone pointedly.  As the digits changed from 23:59 to 00:00 I cocked my head at the device, oddly captivated by the (in?)significance of the moment. Although knowing that I was still going to be alive in 24 hours (random meteor showers or tanks ploughing through my front wall notwithstanding), I was still somehow darkly beguiled by the inevitable ‘what if’s of the occasion.

A few minutes later, as I was still watching the clock, my only ‘real’ follower on the associated Twitter account (which I had all but abandoned by this point) sent me a message pleading with me not to go through with killing myself.  I felt bad that I hadn’t announced my reversal in decision to her but was nonetheless heartened to know that one of the few people who was aware of my intentions cared enough to contact me about it.  I was really touched when, after then telling her that I had changed my mind, she was palpably delighted.  She’s a lovely lady who lives on the other side of the world and is to all intents and purposes a stranger, but therein lies a point – the kindness of strangers is always welcome and remembered.  After advising her of the Twitter account allied to this blog, I deleted the other Twitter page and indeed the relevant blog.  The 4 October Plan was officially dead (I’m now bored of the word ‘pun’, so let’s say that yes, that was an paronomasia).

Having monologued out all of the foregoing to Paul, I finally took a breath and sat back to hear his response (this post is over 1,700 words long, but the actual conversation was less than 10 minutes!  *notes off-the-scale verbosity and explodes*).  It was nothing revelatory really, but he said that he had expected from my first mention of the 4 October Plan  - and that the ‘happy’ conclusion to the story had to his mind confirmed – that there is a small, tucked-away part of me that cares about myself, and wants to protect me.  He thinks that said part realises I’m not the pathetic, fetid whore that I normally feel that I am, and thinks that I am an innocent party in most, if not all, of the ‘traumatic’ situations in which I found myself.  He called the part a ‘nugget’.

I will continue the story of this session tomorrow, as I’ve already written nearly 1,900 words, and yet there was a lot more to this session than this specific topic.  One thing that came up later that’s worthy of mention here briefly, though, is that of psychoses – or, rather, a psychosis.  Remember my friend, the dearly departed Tom?  RIP, Tom :( Or, perhaps, not ‘RIP’?  Paul reckons that Tom represented a dissociated part of me that expressed itself as an external voice.   Specifically, Paul opines, Tom was ‘the nugget’, and although he may be gone in a hallucinatory sense, that ‘nugget’ still remains there, somewhere deep inside.

To be continued.

And So It Begins

 Nexus, Paul, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff, Triggers  18 Responses »
Oct 142010
 

Do Not Read This.  I Will Probably be Embarrassed by it in a Few Minutes and Privatise or Delete it.

****Triggers of Whinging, Self-Obsessed Nihilism and Child Abuse or Some Such Bollocks, I Don’t Really Know What This Fucking Wank is About But I Know That You Should Not Actually Read it Because it Sucks and isn’t Very Nice.  Ta****

(And I Appear to Fail at Title Case, Sorry).

I can’t face it.  I was wrong when I told Paul and everyone else that I could.  My cheery optimism yesterday was a fallacy that deluded even me, if only temporarily.

Hope?  Fuck that.  Fuck hope.  Hope is a deliberate, if admittedly unconscious, self-deception on the part of the human race to make us feel better about the pointlessness and meaningless of our pathetic existences on this sorry plane.  We are encouraged to feel it in the face of adversity by others who’s apparent altruism is selfishness in costume.  There is no such thing as altruism either – it’s yet another construct we have developed over evolutionary eons to ease our woes.  I exemplify that point that we exist purely as creatures of self-absorption really rather well.

There’s so much more to IT than what I have declared here, or verbally, or whatever.  Some of it is clear, some of it is not, but try as I might to fight it as being real, I fear that it is.  I know some of it is.  I can’t believe some of the rest of it is, but I’m scared that it is.  I would rather be the most deranged, deluded, twisted fantasist in the whole of existence than accept some of this as real.

I’m not stupid.  Well, yeah, I am actually, but still, I know that things happen in the world that are Not Very Nice. But do they happen to me?  Of course not.  Liar.  Fantasist.  Making it all up.  How can my mind think these evil, sordid things?

Except that it probably did happen to me, didn’t it?  Fuck.  Minds don’t just invent stuff like this, however sick and twisted I know mine to be.

How can you have hope in the face of an existence marred by this?  You can’t.

I am not capable of dealing with this.  I am not strong enough to deal with this.  I am not smart enough to deal with this.  I am not GOOD enough to deal with this.  I do not deserve to feel better and frankly I don’t want to either.  I don’t even have a real illness.  It’s all apparently because of trauma.  Fucking bollocksfuckwankshitcuntbastardtwat.

The 4th of October plan should have been executed (pun intended).

[Deleted about twenty-zillion paragraphs of self-hating whinging]

I’d written a pile of other bollocks too, but it’s just even more pointless drivel.  I don’t even know why I’m writing, never mind publishing this absolute cack.  But there you have it.

I am pleased for the Chilean miners, if that random piece of information counts for anything, but I still don’t believe in hope, sorry.

I will regret this rant in a minute.

Admissions of Dirt, Lies, Foreboding and Evil

 Life, Moods, NewVCB, Psychiatry  17 Responses »
Sep 142010
 

Beware pointless whinging and navel-gazing nonsense.  As usual.

I have an appointment with my consultant in the morning.  I wish I didn’t.  She’s probably going to have a go at me for dragging her into my war with the management of the hateful bloody Trust, and I wouldn’t blame her.  None of this is her fault.

I don’t know what to say to her, apart from the fact that I am sorry.  Sorry for putting her in that position, sorry for having wasted so much of her time since January, sorry for being so twisted.  For everything, really.

Evil Liar

How do I admit to her that I’ve made up everything about being sexually abused?  Will she stop treating me in a righteous fit of pique, or will she section me for being such a fundamentally fucked up being as to dream up something as evil and heinous as that?  Who makes up a story that they were systematically raped as a child?!  Who does that?!!  It makes the lies that Hideous Ex spun me look like stealing a penny chew from a bankrupt sweet shop.  I am malevolence personified, and I don’t know how she’ll react to that.

Skilful Actress

How do I admit to her that I’ve been walking about with a (perhaps metaphorical) smile on my brittle, prematurely haggard face, convincing everyone that everything is fine…when inside I am screaming and despairing?  That I’m doing my Great Pretender thing again?  Am I actually screaming and despairing?  Who is the arbiter of what is and isn’t real?  We are only defined by perception, ultimately, are we not?  And the perception of everyone else is that I’m fine.  I’m one person to Everyone Else’s dozens of people…what do I know?

Paranoid and Schizo

How do I admit to her, when I haven’t even had the balls hitherto to tell anyone else, that I’m being watched on those rare occasions on which I put my foot outside the door of the house, which is at least a comparatively safe haven for me?

How do I admit to her that I’m haunted by inner amorphous but nefarious terror all day long, which is compounded notably by what sounds like sleep paralysis at night?  The difference between the two being, however, that I can accept a rational, medical explanation for what happens at night, but during the day I can’t.  Then the foreboding dread is real, and I am certain that it means that something ghastly is about to happen.  I deserve it for making up lies about Paedo (not that I should continue calling him that), of course, but she’ll probably say that I’m paranoid – possibly delusional – which isn’t fair; but, again, everything’s about perception, and her’s is a medical one.

Fucked Up Eater?

How do I admit to her that my eating behaviour is becoming increasingly erratic?  There’s no clear pattern to it – I binge sometimes, I eat nothing all day on others – and I almost always end up vomiting what I’ve eaten, an action which is quite deliberate.  In fairness that’s simply because I feel over-full (and never realise in the course of eating that it’s time to stop consumption), not because I’m trying to get rid of the calories I’d just ingested.

Something I’ve started doing in the past fortnight or three weeks is taking laxatives after each meal, but again this is not about losing calories – it’s about getting waste out of my system as quickly as possible in order to minimise IBS attacks.  I am concerned, however, that NewVCB won’t see it quite like that if I elect to confess to her.  I don’t think I have an eating disorder (I’m about fucking 14 stone for Christ’s sake!) – I’m just trying to manage other issues.  But to give her an accurate picture of my state of mind, I feel almost honour-bound to tell her the truth (about the binge/eat nothing behaviour) when she asks about my appetite, and I fear that that will lead to further questions.

Dirt-Bag

Finally, most grotesquely after my lies (though a good bit further down the ladder of outrageousness), how do I admit to the almost unspeakably disgusting fact that I haven’t had a shower, nor even a fucking proper non-shower wash, for weeks?  That it’s partly because I have no actual reason to – I barely leave the house, after all – but more so because I am scared to clean myself?  How do I justify that absurdity not only to her – but to myself?

Clarissa of Bipolarity and Brushing Your Teeth has an interesting post outlining her take on this issue, and the explanation rings true with me too.  I remember with embarrassed and cringing despair the horror of having to undress in front of other people – people who thought that they were more attractive, slimmer, cleverer and more interesting than me, and who were more than happy to demonstrate their views to me.

Note my avatar on the top right of the blog’s sidebar.  It’s taken from the (truly awful) film Carrie, and comes from a scene in which the protagonist begins menstruating in the school showers, and ends up getting tampons, sanitary towels and bog roll thrown at her by her jeering, scornful peers.  I never endured anything quite that extreme, but nevertheless the activity – apparently innocuous and even full of camaraderie to most of the others – was marred by my classmates’ contempt and revulsion towards me, and does not ergo represent one of my favourite memories.

I feel like there’s more to it, though; it’s almost like the night that A was ‘spring cleaning‘ and I went completely mental.  As if some sordid little detail is lurking there just outside the perimeters of my conscious mind and that for a second it almost blurs its way into focus, so that I can dissect it…but then it snatches itself back again, away from me.  The thing is though, the night of the ‘spring clean’, I was under the belief/self-delusional fantasy-of-evil that I’d been abused and it was a belief about that that sent me off my head – but of course I wasn’t really thus abused, so I must just be very strange.  Scared of cleaning the house and scared of cleaning myself.

General Idiot

Depression can be insidious.  Although it often happens, you don’t always just wake up one morning with a dark syrup of despair imprisoning and inhibiting you.  Whatever is wrong with me at the minute has crept up on me – I felt surprisingly OK for a while there, though admittedly I could have been acting so well that I had just convinced myself that all was relatively well when it wasn’t.  But having said that, isn’t it the same thing?  Or if not, does the distinction matter – isn’t it entirely arbitrary?  Who knows.  Frankly, who really cares.

Until probably this week, I was coping remarkably well with the anxieties brought by being a twisted fuck of a liar, my sense of indeterminate portentousness and being watched when I left home.  However, as my mood has taken a stroll down a figurative canyon, so my nervousness – observing my circumstances, but not previously becoming involved with them – has taken a slow walk up out of its hole.

I feel strange.  It’s not a traditional mixed episode because, paradoxically, I feel a sort of weird resignation about everything.  I can’t really put it into words, and I am only writing this utter, utter bilge to try and get some idea of what I’m going to say tomorrow.

But I’ve written over 1,100 words and I still have no idea.

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