So, I’m no longer a Bulimic By Deed. Where’s the sodding pay off?

Please file this post under, “Too Much Information”.  Yep, bodily functions and what not.  Just imagine me as you read.  Go on.  Imagine it.

Kerist, it is too inhumane to sleep.  Thank you then, little donated Macbook, that you keep me company at this time of exhaustion yet sporadic, “Oh for fuck’s sake” and getting up to stick my head in the freezer.  This room feels like sleeping in a sock of scaly slippery fish skin.  It’s uncomfortable and smelly.  I can’t open the window because those two slender bits of glass are what’s separating me from the ear-splitting parade of the busy main road, which would mean I couldn’t sleep anyway.  I hate to be British enough to moan about the weather but give it a rest, eh.  Sorry to complain, as the summer can be glorious, but bollocks to it anyway.  This summer is so far differing in that I am beginning to abandon the tyranny of long sleeves and am sometimes leaving the house in short ones, or tossing my cardigans into my bag halfway down the road.  I just can’t be bothered shrivelling and itching in a fabric prison while I watch with naked jealousy as people float by on clouds of chiffon feeling the gorgeousness of sunlight on their skin.  I don’t care if people look at my arms anymore.  In certain company, I’ll care, but on the streets, arses to it.  I don’t care about my bruised granny legs either (aha, you have never seen, but I have oddly discoloured, bruised legs).  I don’t want to wear tights all the time.  I want to feel free, to be bare.  For so many summers I’ve craved that feeling.

Thank you for your help regarding the previous post and a “portfolio” of sorts.  As well as kind comments, I have kind e-mails, so thank you.  It takes me a wee while to get back to people due to my general crapness, but I will.

Today, I hate my ridiculous body more than usual.  I wish we could be parted and I could rent somewhere useful and attractive to live in, like, I don’t know, a tramp on fire.

As it stands, it has been: six weeks since I last took a laxative, and over six months since I purposely shoved my fingers down my throat to re-taste my dinner.  I never believed I’d be able to say either.  I have gone from someone who used to vomit everything they ate, up to ten times a day, and who used to shovel laxatives down their throat like they were Smarties (albeit Smarties that meant you had to be near a toilet, manhole or enemy’s house at short notice to collapse in crippling pain and then pebbledash the area) to someone who…doesn’t.  And still my body refuses to act like a proper body should.  I’d fire it if I could.

My eating-disorderliness was rather like the rest of my disorderliness.  It was cyclical.  There were periods of time in which I didn’t indulge in any aberrant behaviour, other than the usual vicious self loathing that’s part BDD and part habitual.  And then there were times in which it was utterly all-consuming.  I hated walking back to my desk at work after throwing up my modest lunch.  Eyes streaming, and so sure I stank of sick and that everyone knew and were whispering about me.  The walk of shame wasn’t a walk.  I felt as though I was some sort of archaic, grotesque creature that stomped and was painfully aware of every single heavy, condemnatory step I took.

It has been years.  Years and years.

When I started taking psychiatric medication (Olanzapine first, which is, as you know, the medication that pretty much makes you gain a stone by even saying its name.  So here, we call it the “Scottish Antipsychotic”- oh bugger…), my eating disorderliness took a step up.  I gained weight on every medication and for the already eating disordered, that was frightening, so, I took the reigns.

I’ve always hesitated to call my eating-disorderliness by its name, which is bulimia (technically, it’s not, though.  I rarely binged.  I just chucked up and evacuated everything I ate).  As sensible and rational as I am about these things, I still have that mental block of, “I’m fat.  And fat people don’t have eating disorders.  All the other eating disorder kids will laugh at me.  They won’t play with me.  They’ll steal my lunch money”.  Saying, “I’m bulimic” seems to give it too much- fnar- weight.  Because bulimia is an actual problem, as opposed to what I had.  I wasn’t bulimic.  I just felt sick often.  (Christ, people thought have thought I was dying I “felt sick” so bloody often).

I didn’t take it seriously- when I needed dental work (nothing serious, just a few thousand fillings for my rotted to hell teeth, and root canal things I have yet to get, because I hate the fecking dentist), spent a good portion of my day feeling like I was going to pass out, pissing blood through my nose, wondering why my hair was thinning and finding myself choking on a bathroom floor, picking scabs from the cuts and bruises on my knuckles- because I was fat.  And I truly was- at my very worst, when I was frogmarched to a doctor and almost begged him to save me- I was edging up past twelve stone.  At my height, that’s big.  And because I was big, the doctor didn’t believe me.  And so, the, “There’s nothing wrong” denial kicked in once more.  People with eating disorders are skinny, gazelle like, delicate waifs and I was, and still am, a short fat mentalist.  Rationally, I knew that everyone, of every size, could have an eating disorder.  But not me.  And oddly, at my worst, I was also at my heaviest (which was nearly 13 stone).  I joined an eating disorder community and half my post was censored, I was reprimanded, so I left.

My eating disorderliness has been as part of my daily life as manic depression has been.  It’s just so much more shameful- it’s dirtier, grimier, embarrassing.  It’s conducted in public disabled toilets and on cracked bathroom tiles.  The disabled toilets are the best friend of a bulimic.  On the occasions that I had to ask for the key, I’d wave my Freedom Pass in their faces to prove that I am technically disabled therefore deserving of their grand facilities.  It’s burning with self hatred at the supermarket queue,  then throwing up pound coins and avoiding checking your bank balance.  And it’s alternating between chemists because your usual refused to sell you any more laxatives.  It’s clandestine and humiliating.  So, I don’t talk about it as much and, whereas the extent of my whole, “Hooray, bipolar disorder!” is clear to everyone that knows me in its irritating obviousness, very few people knew the true extent of eating disorder.

A while back, I lost it and decided that I wanted to stop and eat like a normal person, with the usual normal person neurosis that didn’t translate into feeling as though I was sipping hydrochloric acid for tea.  Not, “Just like that”.  It was a combination of total mental and physical exhaustion (and having been on holiday and feeling a wave of complete shame and defeat because all through the tasty holiday food I had been thinking of how to get rid of it, and there I was, wiping vomit from my mouth with their fancy holiday toilet paper, flushing away the lovely food, leaning against the posh holiday sink to stop myself from shaking, watching tears plop onto the immaculate enamel, then going into the bedroom and lying to Rob about it), watching the toll it was taking on Rob coupled with his love and encouragement to get better and being taken seriously by a therapist that meant I began to ration my throwing up, and introducing food again.

For a while, it was okay.  Difficult, very difficult, but okay.   I “relapsed” a few times, especially when I decided to do the Cambridge Diet to lose weight.  The Cambridge Diet is pretty much liquid anorexia, but I did it for a month, then pretended I did it for another two when I was mostly throwing up instead.  The very same thing happened when I embarked on the Atkins diet when I was taking Olanzapine.   Both diets have so much that is forbidden, to the point of demonisation.  The Atkins diet gave me a complex about carbohydrates that I still have to this day, and thus aggravated my eating disorder.  But hey, that’s okay, I have PCOS, so carbs are bad anyway, aren’t they.

Gradually, however, I began throwing up less and less and eating more “normally”, or whatever passes for normal in this insane, pressured, glossy, judgmental world.

Something strange had happened to my body in the meantime, though.  I was eating.  Not a lot, admittedly.  I have always kept below the recommended amount of calories, but I am short, so I can. But even when I ate more than I’d normally allow, even if I did so for a few days, I didn’t immediately gain weight, as I had feared.  My weight, after a long time on the seesaw, began to stabilise.   And I settled around the 8st 7lbs mark.  Which is still on the high end of “normal”, but I had been almost thirteen stone at my worst.  And here I was at my best, and my weight was normal.  And I wasn’t even really sure how that happened.

Despite psychiatric medication.   I thought it was inevitable I’d be thirteen stone forever because of my medication.  But that stabilised, too.

But I hate, still hate, will probably always hate, the feeling of being full and having food in my stomach.  It makes me panic, and controlling that panic was like a kind of drug withdrawal.  Every time I ate I was assailed by a strangulating fear.  Must. Get. Rid.  Had I the pleasure of owning those kind of beige, battered armchairs you see in gritty British films,  I would have sat in it popping my rigor mortised fingers through the fabric, staring crazily ahead.  It was very difficult to deal with having food in my stomach.

My body was also somewhat, “Eh?” about it and didn’t quite work properly.  So I initially used that excuse to take two laxatives, which, as you know, turned into about twenty a day.  And so I replaced one for another.

Buggeration, then, I was saddled with a laxative addiction.  Laxatives do absolutely feck all for weight loss.  What you lose is water weight that quickly replenishes itself when you hydrate yourself again.  But the feeling of emptiness- a similar one to the almost holy triumph that follows a bout of vomiting- is intensely beguiling to people like me. And I did love hopping on the scale and seeing I was a few pounds lighter.  (I weighed myself, for years, over ten times a day.  After a wee, after a bath, in the morning and so on).

Anyway, eventually laxatives began to take their toll on my physical health and I was tired constantly, due to not absorbing vitamins and minerals and all the good stuff properly.  My social worker mentioned prescribing supplements, and I generally felt like I couldn’t really carry on. I tried- and failed- to go without, but that old panic would set in and I’d be outside the chemists again, rattling the shutters like a dead eyed zombie.

I went to the GP and asked for help and she told me to pick up a healthy eating leaflet.  Wonderful.

When I stopped it was by accident.  I was going to visit a friend and I didn’t want to spend most of my time on the toilet, like I did when Paula visited me. So I tentatively didn’t pack laxatives.  And I didn’t buy any.

Of course, it helped that at that time I had completely gone off food and wasn’t eating anyway, but I digress.

I went a day.  Two, four, a week, two weeks, and now, six weeks.  To my great relief (fnar), my body works.  (It is very strange to have your social worker cheer because you can, y’know, poo).   The whole process (FNAR) was physically very painful, but I have gone six weeks now.

My appetite, however, returned.  And I am raging.

I did all this work.  I don’t throw up.  I don’t use laxatives.  I don’t overeat.  And although I still have the mindset of someone with an eating disorder (Let me be frank.  I hate my fucking body.  I hate my face.  I’d split it in half with a hacksaw and hope dogs ate it I hate it so much.  Although I do have a certain cockiness, the closest I can even imagine getting to living with my appearance is some sort of begrudging truce), I don’t “do” those things anymore.

So where the hell is my pay-off, eh?  I know it takes time, patience and so on, but just by the simple act of eating normally, I seem to be rapidly gaining weight.  At the moment, I am heavier than I was when I was briefly pregnant and found it too exhausted to move (and this weight gain is giving me pregnancy flashbacks, which are upsetting me quite a lot), and I still seem to be gaining.  I keep freaking out that my face is swelling, keep checking to see if my clavicles still show.

I am resisting the urge to resort to my measures again.  But at least then I felt in some sort of control.  Right now, I feel as though I have no control whatsoever, and it’s frightening.  I’m not at all slender and on my 4ft 11″, any weight gain is noticable.  I had dropped under 8st (oh to be 7st, oh the 6st…) when I had lost my appetite due to mixed mania, heartbreak and stress.  I am now nearly 9st.  What the hell?  Why?

I had optimistically hoped that when I surrendered (and it is a surrender, because for such a long time I didn’t want to stop) my eating disordered behaviour, I’d be rewarded with a healthy metabolism that settled at a hopefully healthy weight and healthy hair and nails and a generally healthy body.  Where is it?  Why is it still playing silly buggers with me?  I think I need an exercise addiction or something.  I am rubbish at exercise.  Partly due to laziness and partly due to the bodily exhaustion that taking antipsychotics gives you.  The mood swings don’t help, but that’s making excuses.  I’m not totally physically inactive by the way.  I do walk and my natural disposition is towards restlessness.  You just won’t see me running any marathons.

So the panic has set in again, and right now I have, “3 DAYS 1 ITEM A DAY” scribbled hastily on my hands.  I thought earlier, “Why, it’s such a good idea not to eat for three days, except maybe for an apple, and then I’ll get used to being hungry and lose my appetite thus weight, HOORAY!”  Yeah, great solution, Seaneen. (500 calories has always been my number, which probably seems extravagant to some of you.  It’s what I eat when I don’t want to eat but think I should).   That will REALLY HELP MY METABOLISM.  I’m a silly twat who probably needs a visit to the GP.

It doesn’t really ever go away when you have an eating disorder.  I still obsessively check the calories of everything I eat, still feel a clenching sense of fear when I go to a restaurant and can’t check.  I still scope out toilets with the astute eyes of a seasoned bank robber.  And my teeth are very discoloured and need a good clean.

But I don’t want to slip back into old ways because it would be such a huge step back and honestly, I am a bit proud of myself.  It is a worthwhile-if somewhat fraught- pleasure to sit and have a meal with someone and not have to be thinking of lies to excuse my after-dinner absence as I chew.  It is liberating to walk down a street without the terror of suddenly needing to throw myself in a ditch.  It is glorious to sleep through a night without being awoken by searing stomach pain.  And it is nice, of course, to not cough blood into my hand then wipe it on my cardigan before anyone noticed.

Of course, I shouldn’t care what I weigh, because aesthetically, morally, everything-ly, it doesn’t matter.  I would never judge someone for or by their weight, whatever that weight is.  I consider myself a feminist, and that includes being all about body acceptance and and being actively interested in and reading up on (surprisingly, I have interests outside myself and mental health- one of them is feminist theory) the social, economical and political mechanisms that turn women on themselves and each other.

But I do care and I don’t like that I do.  The only person I’m a body fascist with is myself. I do read websites about skinny celebrities and feel that surge of envy, anger and pity.  And although it sometimes made me furious, I did like it when people complimented me on my weight loss.  It’s not something in myself I admire.  My weight is a struggle.  Partly due to the medication I take, partly due to my metabolism being fucked and partly due to the fact I also PCOS, which makes it that bit harder to keep your weight down.  But it’s one I should fight sensibly, I guess.  OOH SENSIBLY.  There’s words I don’t use often.

This entry then is a retrospective to remind myself that it wasn’t all fun and games being in the toilet so much they could have renamed it the Seaneen Molloy Memorial Suite.  My weight stabilised before when I got a handle on my eating, and hopefully it will stabilise again.   This too, I hope, will pass, and it will be worth it.   I may even get to keep my teeth.

A Plea for Assistance

Previous post is back up!  Sorry, accidentally saved it privately when I edited it.

I’m thinking about setting up a website to collect my writings over the years; One in Four, BBC, interviews and etc I’ve done.  Partly for me to keep stuff in one place because I’m terrible at doing so, partly for interesting reading on mental health et al and partly to say, “Look, I write stuff, would you like me to write stuff for you?”  Will of course have to check first that I have the right to republish- not sure with the BBC but can certainly link, I guess.

But my web design skillz are stuck somewhere in the early 2000s and I’m not sure how to go about any of this.  Would any of you kind souls out there fancy helping me?  I could do with it and would give you credit and stuff.  Am not asking anyone to set up a site for me, just guide me a little.  Though if anyone has free hosting and/or domains I’d love them, as I am skint.

Anyway, if you can or would like to help me, please e-mail me (you can find out how on the contact page).  Thank you muchly.

Paralysis and an Update

Wello there (I was meant to type, “Well, hello there”, but “wello” seems to convey both the meaning and tone).  I’m typing this on a second hand Macbook kindly donated by a reader and online friend, Nicola.  I’m only sitting on the other side of the room, near the optimistically opened window in a bid to escape this hideously oppressive heat, but I am hoping that the ability to write, “on the go” as it were, and have a change of scene, even if it’s the same room, different chair, might shake me out of my paralysis.  Oh, I have been struggling to write.   I have been struggling to write in general and struggling with this blog.  Do you care?  Should I care?  Nope!  But ah well, I’m going to say why anyway.

I haven’t been writing for many reasons.  One is that, true to cliches, I have been “Keeping Busy” and have purposely been filling my time with other people.  Therefore I haven’t had a minute to myself and it’s not polite to bawdily declare in the midst of genial conversation, “Excuse me for a moment, I’m going to fire up my PC that sounds like a hoover and write on the internet about my mental problems”.  As ignorant (occasionally purposely so) as I am to in regards to the nuances of social etiquette, I do realise that such things could be considered rude.

I have been writing elsewhere- there will be another BBC Ouch article from me on the website soon, and I also wrote this on managing mentalism and relationships for the sexy and very highly recommended One in Four magazine.

I hope you enjoy it.  The advice is sound, but here I am, your melancholy hypocrite, as my four year relationship ended quite soon after I wrote that article and partly due to the stuff I wrote about.  Who am I to advise anyone on their relationships?  I guess we did have an excellent four years, however.  I don’t regret any of it, I hope he doesn’t either, and that’s more than a lot of people can say.

And therein lies another reason I have been finding it difficult, and a bit painful, to write in here.  This will sound ridiculous.

After the Radio 4 play was broadcast- and I am very proud of it- a lot of quite sudden attention was focused on this blog, and on myself.  The initial attention was rather overwhelming, in the same glorious and grateful sense that it was when this blog started gathering readers, when I had never promoted it, and expected it to wilt in the corner of the internet. With people watching you, it is harder to let go, if you understand what I mean.  It should have spurred me on, but I was afraid.  A lot of people have said lovely things about my writing, and it paralysed me, because I thought, “I’m Not Good Enough”.  I think I need a dose of self belief.  And to Get The Hell Over It, whatever, “It” is.  I have wanted to be a writer my entire life.  It’s just a bit odd occasionally to be writing about such a personal subject as mental illness.  I enjoy it, am fascinated by it, but am wary of being defined by it, and also in general, if you’ll even believe this, given the narcissistic medium, a bit crap with this kind of thing.  Because, arf, arf, it’s not like I’m doing much with my life, is it?  And christ knows, I need encouragement.

WAHH WAHH WAHH, talking as if anyone cares.  Yeah, it is pretty revolting.  Sorry.  It is a strange self importance born out of lack of self esteem.  And I KNOW this is only a blog, but for me, with my joblessness and unemployability due to being still, after all this time, too unwell for even a part time position, it’s a kind of touchstone that makes me feel that, in some way, I’m using this experience for something when it might otherwise drive me mad.  It isn’t a burden, it keeps me linked in with myself, and I like writing it.  But must get onto fiction aghain

People e-mailed me telling me that I gave them hope for their relationship.  And then I ended our relationship, and I failed Rob (he will disagree, for he is kind, but I feel as though I failed him, and that I should have tried harder, although our relationship itself was wonderful, as he is, and ended on the best of terms imaginable, and it was the right thing to do), and, ridiculously, I feel a little bit like I let people down.  I don’t want to be an “example”- if I want to be anything, I guess advocate is the closest- but when you subject yourself to scrutiny, put yourself in that position, and then it ends, it’s hard.  I felt embarrassed, sad, isolated, because I know my readers and some friends questioned my decision and who could I talk to?  Of course my relationships and my personal life are my own business, but it has been extremely difficult to write here since.    I am very, very aware of how ridiculous it is, so please, don’t feel as though you need to scoff at me.  I also receive a lot of emails that I adore to read, that I appreciate, but that I struggle to respond to, because so many ask for help I can’t give, am not qualified to give.  I feel, once again, like a hypocrite, because my life is not together, and nor is my mind.  I have felt overwhelmed by much, not just this.  It is sometimes difficult to accept for anyone you can do any good in the world, for even one person, and I am in a position where I could cause much harm without meaning to, and I’m scared sometimes.

There is also the fact that I don’t publicly want to talk about such things, which is tricky on a blog as personal as this.  And almost for the duration of writing here, I’ve been with Rob. There’s photos, stories, comments, conversations.  He reads this, has been such a huge part of my life, and I guess, it doesn’t feel the same anymore. Of course life goes on, for everyone, and it could be amazing, but that part of my life- being Rob’s girlfriend- is no longer, and I find it quite painful even logging on here right now, and I haven’t read many entries back for over a month for that reason.

So I have been quiet, and, at times, bittersweet and sad, which doesn’t lend itself to much discussion, really.  Depression might be a public rage, an inertia, a some-sort-of-force I can articulate, because in its nothingness it brings to you conclusions, hurtling despair, to the end, or to the beginning again, but sadness.  Sadness is so private, it is the still silhouette of a city beneath the mornings of mist and fog.  It is harder for me to talk about, and I have little wish to.

Another reason I haven’t been writing much is that mentally, I am actually doing mostly okay at the moment so have no great insights, nor anger, nor much else to talk about other than, “Well, I’m alive”.  Today hasn’t been great.  As long as I keep busy and keep my mind occupied, I can, to some extent, duck, dive and be limbre and tip toed, dodging the rocks my mind so delights in throwing at me.  The second I stop to catch my breath- SMACK! I am flat on my back dreaming imaginative ways to kill myself and fighting the urge the scream, “WHY AM I SO SHIT AND WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE ME?” and other such self-pityist nonsense. (Along with the thought, felt with deep and utter certainty, “No-one would miss me, I am not needed, and I’m not particularly wanted”.  Sigh, why bother with these thoughts, especially on such lovely days!) Alas, in summer, it seems to be my natural and dangerous disposition and I have to fight viciously to avoid succumbing to it.  Summer is my furious season.  Bloody weird SAD or something.  If I make it to October without falling into a deep suicidal depression, then this year will be my greatest victory.  Fingers crossed!  I can’t be arsed ending up in the Drayton Crisis Centre, even though sometimes it’s tempting because they have a cook who does nice meals, and I can’t be bothered cooking half the time.   I could fake psychosis (no I couldn’t, it’s incredibly difficult to fake psychosis) and go get a week’s free dinner.  Nom.  Or not.

Generally, though, I’m okay, with no major crisis to report beyond my underlying mentalism and human melancholy because times are a changing. “Okay” for me, as you know, is quite far removed from “okay” in general given my rapid cycling and general instability, but okay for me it is. My appetite has returned, to some irritation from me.  Although I was a bit worried I had lost the will to eat, now it has been recovered, I have put on a startling amount of weight in a short time as my body clings to anything I give it.  I look bloated and hideous.  So I’m missing my indifference to food a little bit.  Well, quite a lot.

I’m sleeping (albeit less than I should be), getting out of the house, paying my bills, taking my medication, forgetting CPN appointments (whoops),  keeping the cats alive and, well, that’s about it!  I’ve been getting out of bed when I would rather not, and am actively dragging myself forward.  My flat is a total and utter state but I will clean it.  I’ve been reading, a little, which is a good thing for me (my shot, faulty brain killed that particular avenue of pleasure for me.  I can only concentrate on short magazines), I have only had a few crying fits, my moods dip into bleakness but I manage and am living my life, as we so often find ourselves doing by accident.

I’m still by the window.  It’s much cooler now, and I can hear bikes rattling past, people crowding around the taxi depot.  I need a bath, and I need to clean the flat.  I need to be disciplined in writing, and to take medication and maybe have some cereal. I need to go to the laundrette.  Banal things that I need to do.  I am okay.  And hello there and thanks for your comments and emails in the meantime.  I shall be refering to the post where I asked for ideas, and maybe use it as a series of tasks to shake me out of my stasis.

OH!  In a recent previous entry someone mentioned doing a week in photos.  Here then are some photos I’ve taken in June, and the end of May (where two of my loveliest friends got married, hurrah), mostly social snapshot stuff, nothing arty nor particularly interesting really… It was my friend’s birthday (no photos on Mac however, boo!), I went up to Newcastle to see my sisters (Michelle is now 27!  Paula is 26!) and didn’t understand half of what she said!  I had my friend staying, and another one (an old friend, recently caught up with, weird but healing.  To be honest, I need all the friends I can get right now so am embracing new/old-new friendships too) visiting London, so!

Identity

A rambling entry for you!

More on the invalidity of psychiatry from the Times.

In the madosphere, I am one of the more pro-psychiatry voices.  It leads to an inbox I sometimes can’t bear to check, in which I am assailed from all corners berating me for promoting a myth and for allowing myself to be a psychiatric victim.  I am not entirely pro-psychiatry.  I don’t, for example, believe in antidepressants as a first line treatment for depression.  I don’t believe in forced medication unless someone is a danger to someone else, and I think that everybody has the right to take their own life, and to refuse treatment.  I think people should be monitored closely and made aware of their medicated side effects, to be allowed to choose not to take them, and I think therapies should be more widely available.  I do think as an industry, psychiatry is deeply flawed, but not as a practice.  But in short, I support the idea that mental illness is not just a sociological label for perceived deviancy, and that medication is not just mindless drugging.

On a personal level, I’ve always referred to what I go through as an illness.  I call it manic depression rather than the dispassionate bipolar disorder, as manic depression as a term is more expressive than bipolar disorder (often shortened to bipolar, which means approximately nothing).  Manic depression succinctly sums it up.

I refer to it as an illness because that’s how I think of it.  And in my own experience, it feels like an illness.  To me, it feels as physical as a descending flu.  Its complete disconnection of my actual life (rarely am I “triggered” and often am I depressed in circumstances that don’t call for it, and vice versa) has meant that I think of myself as someone fighting an outside force.  I have been aware- some may say too aware- of the likelihood that I might die doing so, and that I find it terrifying.

Because of this, some people would argue that it is a case of me not taking responsibility for myself.  Surely if I think of it as an illness outside myself, then I won’t do all those, “lifestyle changes” and I’ll get into the victim role?  Well, all long term illnesses require you to live a certain way.  In terms of my illness, I do live in a different way that other people my age.  More carefully.  And I think if I didn’t think of this as an illness I could fight and treat, I would go mad. This growing, shivering jellyfish of a thing is unbearable in itself, and neatening it helps me.   I wasn’t always of this opinion.  In the past, I was scornful of the idea that people should take medication.  Hence the lateness of me getting treatment.

In terms of my stance and the pro-psychiatry stance, there’s a bit of confirmation bias going on on both sides here.  In my experience of anti-psychiatry, many have cleanly ignored all studies that point to the idea that some mental illness may have a basis in biological, claiming bias in the studies due to the Big Pharma and leapt upon anything vaguely critical.  Likewise, people like me who believe that some (and I do mean some.  I think quite a lot of mental illnesses and disorders are caused by life, such as PTSD) mental illnesses are biological may turn a bit of a blind eye to the psychological studies.  In my case, it’s part exhaustion and wariness at feeling constantly as though I have to prove that it’s okay for me to take medication.  Because I do have that imaginary “illness”, the fight is personal.

While writing this blog I have had to justify not only my belief that I am “ill” many times but also my very existence as a person on sickness benefits and a person who takes medication.  None of you can see me and although I try to describe my day to day, I fail, because I don’t write my day to day when I am feeling less than able to.  I only write when I feel up to it, and recently, for example, I haven’t.

As with anything, the more you must assert something, the more you believe it.  A small issue becomes a big one.  Take, for example, the fact that I grew up in Northern Ireland where I existed in the strange hinterland of having to fight for a national identity.  I identified as Irish because I was raised in, well, Ireland, amongst Irish culture, into a Republican family.  But Northern Ireland is in Britain, so I am technically British, even though I grew up in a place with bilingual street signs and learning Irish. I have found myself in so many arguments where I have been told over and over again that I have no “right” call myself Irish. And even though I find nationalism deeply repugnant, I protest more, and the more I protest, the more it means to me.

Manic depression also has an undeniable cultural image which puts one on the mindbogglingly strange position of being prejudged for an illness that they have (aside from mental illness, the only thing I can think of that has a similar thing are sexually transmitted diseases, by which I mean being ill and being judged in some way personally or morally for it).  But hey, it’s better than having schizophrenia (as some of you do, according to my poll).  At least with MY illness I am a creative waify wastrel and not a murderer.

So, with all these factors at play, as well as the fact that it’s engrained in my life and personality because I became ill when I was very young, manic depression is a part of my identity.

Recently I’ve been questioning whether this is good or bad.  The crux is that it is unavoidable but I don’t think there is an interesting character trait that can’t be explained away by pathologies.  I shy away from describing myself as, “manic depressive” but sometimes- psychiatric diagnosis aside- it really is the most accurate way of describing my personality, which is mercurial in the extreme.  I can’t say if I’d be the same if I didn’t have manic depression because I have no “before” photo cowering in the beaming splendor of the after.  But I do understand now, finally, after years of agonising, that as a person I am just a bit moody too.

There is also the fact that I have made a tiny name for myself in writing about it.  That cements an image of, “Manic depressive writer Seaneen Molloy”.  On one hand, I am so proud of this image.  I hope the things I say and do help, and it helps me because I feel as though I’m doing something productive with my time off work attempting some sort of recovery, and with the pain of living with it.  On the other, I get a bit paralysed these days publicly writing about anything else, because although my main motivation is to express myself, it is also to help, or make people laugh about something that is in some ways taboo.

With mental illness, I think a period of over-identification with it is natural.  As much as it irks me (and I’m sorry if any of you are reading this), people writing or saying things like, “Oh my god, what I did was just SO bipolar/borderline etc” is understandable for a little while.  After my initial RAGE (and it was rage, boiling, blistering rage) and terror at my diagnosis, I felt an overwhelming relief. So that’s why my behaviour was like that.  That’s why I feel this way.  Thank god.  I thought I was going mad.  Okay, so I was, but this madness has a name.

But I think I’m moving after from defining myself by it.  I have been, in recent times, forcibly pulling my life back from the role of being mentally ill.  It doesn’t mean I’m not mentally ill, I am, but to think of yourself totally in those terms is shooting yourself in the foot.  I have been trying to look after myself and attempting, with trouble, to think of my life in the long term (making lists and so on) rather than the short term, because I had pretty much assumed I was going to die anyway.    What also helped was that, although it took me ages, I now (sometimes) believe Rob’s constant assertions that I am not a bad person.  That I didn’t ask for this.  That it isn’t fair but it isn’t my fault, either.

Whereas the illness itself still looms large, I am beginning to think of the treatment in less dramatic terms.  So what if I have to take medication and see a CPN?  Lots of people do.  It’s not that big a deal.  I resent it, yes, but I guess everyone does to a point.  The unexamined life is not worth living but analysing to the point that I do just keeps me in a stasis.

And I am trying to think in my own rational terms.  ”Illness”.  There it is.  It’s a shame.  But there it is.

(This could be by 10 times more articulate but fuck it)

Apologies

So sorry for the lack of updates and real posts; am doing the “life” thing, and also exhausted and blank and haven’t got much to say.  So please excuse me.

PS: Where is There and Back?

http://thereandbacktoseehowfaritis.blogspot.com/

Times Article on “Big Pharma”

Sometimes I feel like giving up and spending the rest of my life sighing.

Some of the theory is sound but it makes me want to flush my medication down the toilet and just chuck a rope over something. Deedee Ramona says it better than I; personally, I’m just incredibly weary at these types of articles.  I appreciate the discussion, I get tired of somehow being refered to in the “”.

Also I am still exhausted and ill feeling and haven’t seen my friends for ages due to both factors.  There you go, detailed entry for you there.

Carry on with the poll tickybox extravaganza!

Label Yourself for My Benefit

I can’t believe I haven’t done this poll before, and if I have, I can’t believe I’ve forgotten it.

I’m rather curious as to what you, my dear readers, may be living with.  I wonder if people reading this mostly have bipolar disorder, or if a lot of people reading are reading out of interest, or care for someone who has a mental illness.

So for my benefit, here is a ticky box poll I’d be grateful if you could fill out.  It has multiple choice for those who love ticking boxes and who might have more than one mentally interesting diagnosis.  I will not pass on your details to the Inland Revenue.

Thank you.  Sorry to be classifying you via such dispassionate little words.  Bonkersfest are going to kill me.

ARGH!  I forgot things like delusional disorder, DID and PTSD and so on.  Sorry!

So I’m not hiding my results from you, my diagnoses are: bipolar I disorder rapid cycling with psychotic features (or, as Jerod would say, being an Uberspazzen), body dysmorphic disorder and bulimia, with a wee bit of avoidant/anxiety stuff that isn’t official but noted.

Ad Nauseum

I’m beginning to repeat myself on this blog.  To be honest, at the moment there isn’t much new to say other than, “Ngh” and, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” and, “Moods, eh?”

So, is there anything you’d like my opinion on, however ill informed?  Or would you like a story about something?  A bit of fiction?  I can write fiction, yer know.

Throw me a topic, I am at your mercy.  It might take me a few days to get round to it considering my head=up my arse at the moment, but try me!  Might take my mind off the pile-o-shite that is my life at the moment.  Would be nice to write about something else here as well.

I hate going to see the GP and rapid-cycling. Hoof.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAH! I’m a minor celebrity in the UK, apparently! Though thank you kindly, Health.com.  Liz Spikol and Bipolar Chica are there too, how marvellous.  The list is worth checking.

It’s difficult to be gracious to much appreciated praise when the subject of the praise is your life-ruining madnesses.  I should wrap wires around myself and lumber across the land and seas like some fizzing octopus with my blog URL tattooed upon my pulsing, luminescent forehead.  I have my photo on here so it’s not unusual that people would know, er, what I look like!  Silly me!

Which all reminds me that I have about ten pages of e-mails to catch up on.  Argh.  I’m sorry.

And thanks for your responses in this post and the interesting discussions!

To be honest, my troubles are few right now, reading about the blogland.  I’m one of the few not inpatient at the moment.

I have the ills, m’dears, both the physical and mental.  The physical ones are sometimes a bit worrying, but usually not.  I’ve been quite unwell for weeks, manifesting itself in exhaustion, bruising, nausea and coughing.  I think it’s just a bad cold that keeps coming back because I’m run down.  My nurse friend has been barking at me to go to the doctors.  However, I, like many other of my mentally interesting brethren, fear the GP more than the reaper due to the offhand assertions that we are being “paranoid”.  That and I’m so used to feeling run down and terrible because of my all-swinging, all-dancing moods means that I barely get myself seen to.  I very rarely feel fine.  It needs to get to the levels of blood-blistering and pustules before I decide to throw myself at the mercy of Dr. Shaft.  (My GP looks exactly like Shaft, and has the same drawling, louche manner about him).

One of my closest friends is a GP, and he’s great at his job, and I would trust him with my life. However, I generally distrust GPs.  I’ve only ever had one that I haven’t wanted death to rain upon.  The others, well.

Dr Lundy is my family GP.  I was banished to him at the age of fifteen, not long after my friend’s suicide and during a very obvious nervous breakdown.  His solution was “the magic coin”.  Flip the magic coin, he says, and… from then on, I forget.  Something about leaving a day to chance.  I have no bloody clue, I had zoned out by then.  I do remember him asking how much, on a scale of one to ten, I wanted to die.  I misunderstood- 1 was not much, 10 was kill me now.  I said three, thinking, one’s a low number, and I’m low.

Then I was sent to Dr. Cupples, who I subjected to a passionate diatribe about how I felt my world was falling apart, that, appallingly, was liberally sprinkled with dashes of “fucks” and “shits”. Her only comment, delivered in that severe, toneless voice of hers, was that I was an intelligent girl who swore too much.  When I was finally referred to a psychiatrist, I sat in the waiting room desperately trying to appear nonchalant because I thought they had cameras trained on me, and they were keeping me waiting so they could watch my reactions in another room and laugh at me.   This was around the same time that I thought Satan was living in my bedroom wall.  Ho ho ho.

I had a social worker and was an outpatient for a little while as a teenager.  It was a horrific experience.  Why on earth they thought to put the teenage outpatients in a ward full of skeletal dying old people is anyone’s guess.  It was one of the most soul-destroying times of my life, and I lied my head off to the doctor just so I never had to go back.  The social worker clearly thought I was an attention seeking little madam anyway, so no love was lost there.

There was another doctor who congratulated me on gaining weight since my last visit.  I was at this visit because I was desperate for help for my bulimia, which had made me pass out with my nose pissing blood not long before.  An attractive sight, I’m sure you’ll agree.  The next doctor I talked to, not long before I ended up in a mental hospital, refused me a sick note and told me going to work would make it all better.

On other occasions, even when I’ve gone for totally unrelated matters, I’ve watched with dismay as, under, “Concerns”, “Obesity” pops up.  And that’s the main concern.  Here for bulimia?  LOSE SOME FUCKING WEIGHT AND THEN WE’LL TALK.

Indeed, on my last visit to the GP, wondering, hey, is there anything I can do for this epic laxative abuse I’m undergoing?  I mean, I take twenty of the fuckers a day, you should be congratulating me for sitting in this chair and not skidding down the corridors on a brown tidal wave.  It had taken me months. I could have told Jo, but I wanted to know, multivitamins, diets, can I see a nutritionist, anything?  I was told to pick up a healthy eating leaflet on the way out.  Oh, and congratulated for my now almost five stone weight loss, which, ahem, might have been partially achieved by throwing up and taking laxatives.  But gold star to me to watch that “Obesity” marker disappear.  Maybe now they’ll take me seriously.

Anyway, I find it difficult to see the GP.  Now it’s somewhat better for mental health matters because I can wave around my little psychiatric letters like Charlie’s Golden Ticket.  I get admission into the, “Give a Fuck” suite.  Hurrah for me.

It took me a long time to even open myself up to the possibility of seeing a doctor.  I’d had terrible experiences as a teenager, and part of the reason I unceremoniously skipped the country was because a referral letter plonked itself on the door mat, ordering me back to outpatients.  I felt as though I had been discovered, and that they would take my life into their hands.  As desperate as I was in those lonely years for some sort of solace that I wasn’t losing my mind, I wasn’t ready to hand it over to people I didn’t trust or like.

When I was finally diagnosed I asked for a few other opinions, because, in my paranoia at the time, I thought they were lying to me in order to control me with pills.

So, that’s why I haven’t seen the doctor yet, even though I have felt suitably physically terrible enough to postpone visiting my sister in Newcastle and to be semi-delirious.

As for what else is going on, just a quiet unfolding of my mind.  You have probably by now guessed that me and Rob have parted ways.  I don’t want to go into it here, because some stuff is proper private.  It was mostly my decision, though, right in the long term, horrible in the short term.  I love him deeply, he is incredibly important to me, my best friend and has been for years.  I am very sad.   Even though-

In four years:  I have been thrown into a mental hospital, diagnosed with a mental illness I have no idea how to live with,  attempted suicide seriously once, spun through the mercurial and unpredictable hells of never-ending mania and depression, lost my father, my grandparents, my best friend and then made the choice to lose something that could have become my child.  And he went through it all too.

I don’t regret it, any of it.  It is hard to cope with and it did hit me at once, along with the need to release him, to make him realise he is important, he matters, and to find myself, learn to cope, be a young person- so much bad happened in those four years, but most of it was the best times of my life and I will miss it.  I want us to be friends.

It sounds so facile because there are no words that can do justice to Rob and loveliness.  He has been a life changing force. I am very sad about it.  I can’t even articulate it all to be honest.  I don’t want to here, nothing can do it justice.  And I feel like I’ve abandoned him when he didn’t me.

Anyway, it feels cheap to discuss it here.  Hence why I haven’t approached the subject head on, it just feels fucking cheap when it was a huge important part of our lives.

Rapid-cycling returned to my life last year after the overdose, and I guess stress has intensified it.  My moods are indescribable right now, swinging from one to the other.  I am coping, just about, though extremely confused and dazed by it all.  By everything.  There is a lot going on right now and my head is somewhere up my arse.  I just don’t know anymore.

I’ve talked here before about a desire to escape my manic depressive identity.  It’s certainly true that it is part of my identity, but the temptation when one is diagnosed with something that gives them, in some sense, answers, is to immerse oneself totally in it.  Which I think I did for a while, and which I am trying to undo. It is my own fault I am perceived the way I am.

I don’t regret this blog or being open about it all, but somewhere it has become so public that everyone keeps tabs, everyone tells me, sleep more, take your medication, do this, not that, are you this way because you’re manic, are you this way because you’re depressed… and so on.  Which is a beautiful thing borne out of love and care but it can be exhausting and sometimes demoralising to not have your very own judgements trusted, when you are an adult.  Naturally there are valid reasons sometimes to not trust my judgement, and certainly at the moment I’d be the first to concede that I’m not all “there”.  But, I consider myself to be ill but sane.  I trust my own judgements.  I am thinking rationally, for the most part.  And, for the most part, I think I manage my illness quite well.  I do nearly always take my medication.  I do nearly always try to sleep.  I do attend my appointments, I do maintain some self awareness.  Being told off for what I don’t do can be quite a kick in the balls given the gravity of what I do do.  Especially at the age of twenty three when hedonism is on the menu, and I refuse it for my health.  I’ve never done the drugs thing, but don’t you think I want to?  I’ve never done the, “Fuck off somewhere pretty and don’t tell anyone” thing because there would be red alert instantly.  And when I do indulge, or fuck up, I’m human.  It isn’t the happiest state of affairs for me to be in.  I resent my medication and treatment because it means I can never truly let go without becoming, as I inevitably do, ill.  I loathe the exhaustion, weight gain, confusion and blanded out days of living on antipsychotic medication that does nothing but cap mania and make me sleep.   I want to scream sometimes.  I don’t like being so careful all of the time.  I dislike all of it as much as I dislike having this useless frigging illness.  But I continue swallowing the pills and my pride because I was a lot worse off without them.  But some of my recklessness, stupidity and impulsiveness is down to my personality.

I’m not having a go at anyone, I’m just saying that the balancing act between taking care of yourself and living your life is sometimes very difficult and being cut a bit of slack would help me occasionally.  Me moaning about it is counterproductive, though.  I’m just irritated at this very second.  For the most part, I welcome my little kicks up the arse.   It’s only that right now, as I struggle in my suffocating little identity, it reminds me of what ails me, when I would so desperately like to forget.  Everything feels conditional because of it.  I expect love to dry up if I become ill.  How many times can people take it?  And will I be blamed for not doing enough to stop it happening?  It’s sad, it’s tiring.

I am, in short, an ungrateful bitch.   I should be fucking praising the heavens that anyone even wants anything to do with me anymore, but instead, I moan.

End on a high, er, watch this.  Indicative of times to come.  I don’t really talk about politics on this blog, but fucking hell am I ashamed to be from this place right now.  Not just Britain, but Europe in general.

I’m off to listen to Ivor Cutler.

The cracks are showing

“DON’T FADE ME OUT YOU…BEASTS.  I INTENDED TO MENTION DISAPPEARING TIGERS AND COMMITMENT.  COMMIT ME MAMA! THEY’RE TRYING TO COMMIT ME!  COMMIT HIM TO THE GARDEN MAUDLIN…”

“From the depths”.

Well, that took forever and a question

EDIT:  Hooray!  Purnell is gone!  

Read what my friend Nev has to say on the matter.

You’ll be pleased to know that my housing benefit has finally been sorted out.  It’s amazing what a pushy social worker and a midgetty mentalist with an unnaturally detailed knowledge of housing benefit can do.   Best part is of course that instead of me oweing them money, they now owe me money for paying me the wrong rate for three months and leaving me struggling with my rent.  The Kinder Eggs are on me.

While I’m here, I have a question.

Some people fear medication because of its ability to alter your mood, behaviour and so on.  What I’m curious about is, how do you view depression, manic depression, schizophrenia and so on within the context of being “natural”?  Do you see it as something that’s part of you, therefore taking medications for it puts you in an unnatural state?  Or do you see it as an illness outside you, that’s an anomaly, therefore the medication is attempting to return to you a natural state i.e without symptoms of mental illness?  

I get caught between the two.  The worries about creativity and medication for me have proved valid.  I find I write far less on medications than without medications.   I only take antipsychotics but it’s bad enough. I don’t know whether I see my having manic depression as just a part of me that maybe I should leave alone and let be, or as an outside force that shouldn’t be there.  It does lead to a shaky sense of identity, and it is strange to actively suppress a part of me.  In my case, and I suspect yours too, I’ve just weighed up the benefits of medication vs the effects of my illness and for now, taking medication is the lesser of two evils.  And strictly speaking, all medical intervention is “unnatural”, and natural doesn’t mean good, no matter what aspirational chocolate companies would like to lead you to believe.

I do often wonder if my medications are just keeping me in a state of stasis.  Because of my illness, I’m told that extremes are bad.  It also means I have no idea why I feel a certain way.  Is it me, or medication?

What do you think?

Anyway… (Updated)

Let’s not be downhearted.  I am okay- well, no that’s a lie.  I’m going through seismic changes, I guess, painful ones.  As is my life right now.  I know I am not alone, but I feel very alone, just because there are so many banshees in my head, and I’m so scared of the future, I don’t know who to talk about it to or how to talk about it.  I feel guilt very acutely, and I am struggling with it because I have hurt people that I love. I did talk to my CPN who thinks my rationale is sound but my behaviour is possibly not, and that I am probably going through a hypo/manic episode, with a vicious edge of depression.

On my restricted blog (yes, I have one that only friends can read), Crikey, I was being funny.  I have a Livejournal. Brain_opera if you’re interested.  It’s for day to day crap and my friends in London to sort social stuff out. I made a list of things I need to do.  They include:

• Start eating properly.  I tallied up my daily calorie count as an average, and for three weeks, I’ve been averaging out at about 600 a day, sometimes slightly more, sometimes slightly less, sometimes nothing at all.  I am going to force myself to eat at least three things a day, even if they’re tiny.  This isn’t deliberate; mixture of stress, grief, depression, mania and exhaustion.  I have been on the verge of collapse quite a few times and my manic energy means that I need to be eating more, not less.
• Sleep.  Because I haven’t been.
• Keep the place tidy. Whoops.
• Try not to start caning the booze.  I’ve been drinking but not an awful lot and I have stopped drinking home alone.
• Stop dodging my CPN appointments.
• Properly discuss therapy which I think I desperately need.  Problem with it is that I need to be more stable in order to engage.
• Stop skipping medication doses.  Yep.  I’ve been afraid of going to sleep (hate sleeping alone, hate waking up alone) so sometimes have been skipping doses.

Basically; start small by trying to take care of myself a bit more.

I’m not around tomorrow and my sister is coming on Wednesday so I shall be quiet.  My friend Nick told me I should make a list of why people care about me, and what’s good about me, and in it maybe I’ll find the reasons to carry on.  I shall, but for now, my lovely readers, I pass the tasks onto you.  Tell me five good things about you.  If you please, and if you like, and if you don’t want to, then it’s okay!   Even if you’re just proud of the way you do something, tell me.

I’ll tell you two things I am proud of (I can only think of two right now, alas): I am proud of the Radio 4 play, even though I got rabbit in the headlights about it and had to run away for a little while because, although I was proud of it, it’s quite strange for even more people to know me for being manic depressive.  I’m also proud of the fact that, for the most part, I give people good and sincere advice.  So there you go!

 

EDIT:  Excuse the shouty bold, rather irritated.  

Dear Intrusive Thoughts

FUCK OFF.

I haven’t felt like writing in here lately because my life is kind of falling apart, and I’ve been desperate to appear less pathetic than I feel, and also to regain some form of control over my own choices and health.

I’ve been at my friend’s wedding in Brighton and had a perfectly lovely day but got utterly drunk, which always turns the volume up of something that exists perpetually in the background.

I want to talk about this before I go to bed (I just got back in), in a way, I guess, to exorcise them.

First off, you’ve probably guessed that I never forgive myself anything.  I know I’m incredibly, inhumanly hard on myself.  If I feel I’ve done something wrong, acted like a twat, I have the urge to somehow “punish” myself, which is one reason why I’m covered in self harm scars.  I am prone to bouts of massive self hatred that I try very, very hard to control.   I don’t like myself, and I find it hard to believe that other people do.  I know there are good things about me.  I’m kind, I’m loyal, I’m funny.  But also so very many bad things!   I won’t list them, I’ll be here all day.  And love, I find that even harder.  I can be nearly callous with people’s feelings simply because I fail to understand how they can have them for me.  This is partly due to mentalism, and partly due to the fact that when I was younger, people who I thought loved me turned on me very abruptly.   It was my fault, but it’s instilled me with the feeling that love, when it comes to me, is fleeting, shallow and utterly conditional.  So if I fuck up, it’s gone and I find it difficult to appreciate, or accept, depth of feeling for me.   I can be passionate when expressing my own feelings, but it’s often in a rushed way precipitated by alcohol, which gives me the bravery to express them.   And then I regret it, because it’s such a huge weakness that could be exploited.  I am the master of the pre-emptive strike.  And rather than love or anything like that being something I celebrate, it’s something else I use to kick the shit out of myself with.

Deeply fucking dysfunctional, eh?   More trouble than I’m worth.  Another reason I had to end my relationship with Rob, because I really need to sort my strange emotional weirdness out.

And stuff in my life is tearing me apart right now.  Such as the Rob stuff.  Because none of it was out of lack of love.  I am completely incapable of being in a relationship right now.

I am fighting the urge to totally isolate myself.  I know I shouldn’t, but I am dealing with so, so much right now that I feel is just making me intolerable to be around.  At the moment I feel like I’m teetering on the verge of complete emotional breakdown.

OR my life is changing and it’s scary and I need to deal with it better.

When I’m trying to be a Normal Person- i.e stupidly getting pissed, acting my age and attempting to forget being mental- there is one thing, one crippling thing, that always reminds me.  Intrusive thoughts make me feel like I’m insane.  They make me feel like I am losing my mind, and I deal with them every second, of every day of my life.  Sometimes I can turn the volume down, but if you see my drifting off, my eyes averting, if I look like I’m not listening, it’s the volume turning up in my mind, and me desperately but silently trying to turn it back down, throwing facile ideas, trivia at myself. 

Intrusive thoughts are why I say I know how this will end.  And part of the reason I can’t be in a relationship right now; I am more trouble than I’m worth, I find this part of my mentalism incredibly difficult and painful to talk about.  Because there is no rationalising it.  There is no comfort anyone can give me, no way to talk it out of me.  How can I even ask someone to try?  How can I ask someone to live with it when I can’t?   It is blind terror and you can’t give that responsibility to someone- “Please don’t let me die”. 

I HATE that they remind me constantly that my brain doesn’t work properly.   I have been desperately trying to scrabble away from my manic depressive “identity”, but the truth is, I am manic depressive, and I don’t have it mildly.  I have it quite severely and I think, for the most part, I cope with it.  I act like a twat sometimes, I can be stupid, like anyone else, I suffer savage depressions, hypomanias; the same seasons as everyone else, just more extreme. I haven’t been in hospital for a while, I’ve come a long way.  But intrusive thoughts are the thing that makes me feel I am ill, that threads the knowledge of it into my being, that I can’t escape from, no matter how much medication I take, no matter how much arch and humourous self awareness I may have.   They make me want to scream and rage and say it isn’t fucking fair.  Because it isn’t.  They make me hate myself because I can’t get rid.

They are, to me, the same thing being repeated over and over again, the same violent, killing voice that makes me feel as though I’m locked within a mind that is actively forcing me into total self destruction.  It makes me feel desperate with panic.  I am surprised sometimes that I haven’t turned to drink and drugs to block it out.  Instead, I try to cram my life with activity.  It is, I guess, one of the reasons I sometimes fear being alone, especially at the bad times.  I spend most of my life alone, I viciously guard my free time, I struggle to ask for help, I refuse the cadences of my friends’ voices, but sometimes, in the night, when I am afraid to lie down in darkness, my hand worms across the bed to my phone and I want someone, anyone, to lie in darkness with me, and fill my mind with a voice other than the one that wants me dead.   I want the touch of human skin to get me out of the terrifying realities of my mind.

I don’t ask for help because I want to be strong, I am alone now because I want to learn to be stronger.  I don’t want to be a charity case to be taken care of.  Even if sometimes I might need it.  I live with my own worst enemy.  My mind is supposed to be my ally, and it isn’t.

They’re another reason I’m covered in self harm scars; it seems like a lesser evil than the all out destruction my mind wishes on me, a little hurt, instead of a big one.  And it’s to calm me down and distract me.  I have been very much struggling with it lately, and trying to qwell the urge to hurt myself.

Intrusive thoughts have always been with me, in degrees of severity.  The last time I suffered badly from them, I acted on them in order to get rid.  The thought was taking all the pills in my box, which, of course, resulted in my massive overdose last year, part suicide attempt, part exorcism.  And it worked, for a while.

The thoughts now are ones that, if I act on, will kill me.  There is pretty much 0% chance of survival with these ones.   I try to calm my impulses, because they are dangerous.  It’s one of the reasons I control my drinking, although I failed utterly at it today and am wreathed in shame and worry.  But it is in my head, all the time, “Do it”. 

I’m going to tell you.  I think I need to write this down, share it, make it less dangerous as it is in my head.  I have only told two people about this, and even then, not in great detail.  This might be graphic and upsetting, so it’s going behind a read more.  It’s mostly for my benefit and you don’t have to read it. It might help you understand what I live with, and why sometimes drunken, ridiculous abandon is tempting.  It truly drains the joy out of my life.

It Pours

I had a post to write, but it’s been kind of blown out of the water by the news that my granny Kane has just died.  No, not even this granny, Granny Molloy, who is hanging on.  The other one, which was somewhat unexpected to me as I didn’t know the extent of how ill she was in hospital.

I wasn’t close to her, but I didn’t dislike her.  I was far closer to my Granda Kane, her husband, who died last year.   And aside from my uncle Brian, I despise everybody in my mum’s family because they are poisonous, manipulative, loathsome human beings.

I’m still saddened by her death because it feels like my family is being wiped out.  And so last Christmas was, well, the last, and will end a tradition of a lifetime.

Mostly, however, I’m just worried about my mum.  She’s not really well (mentally) and has been looking after my granny almost since my dad died.   I worry that this might be a catalyst for madness, and I don’t want to lose her.  On the other hand, I’m hoping it gets her away from her ridiculous siblings and she begins, maybe, to live her own life. 

I’m not going to be able to attend the funeral due to my current benefits-what? situation, and also that one of my best friend’s weddings is on Saturday and I have already shelled out for train tickets, so I’m too broke.  I feel guilty about it (she deserves to have her grandchildren there, and I want to be there for my mum), but also slightly relieved, as I’m exhausted by funerals, exhausted by death.  I have watched too many people go into the ground in the past few years.  It isn’t how I want to remember them.

My granny wanted to go, though, and did so in her sleep.  She has been heartbroken since granda died.  They really loved each other.  So I am happy, in one sense, that she’s no longer in pain.

There goes the plateau of calm and peace I had reached today, anyway. Ah, what a sodding mess my life is right now.  Alas.

Regrouping.

The Spiky Sea Urchin has been trying to claim me.

“The old brag of my heart- I am, I am, I am”.

Okay.  After a good ten days of my activities mostly consisting of thinking of inventive ways in which I can hang myself (”Do you have a plan?” Oh yes.), chainsmoking, wanting to throw myself out of a window because of guilt and grief and crying, it’s time to regroup.

I haven’t been answering any correspondence and am seriously behind in…everything.  Many thanks for people who’ve written to me but coherant thought has not been forthcoming.  I have been really ill for a while, waaaaaaaaay more than I have let on, and it’s coming to a head.  The abortion, which was a decision I had to make because of this stupid fucking illness that I didn’t ask for, kicked me over the edge. I’m off to be gently chastised by my CPN (and strongly suspect that it shall be suggested that I’ve been suffering from dysphoric mania, because I have) later in the first appointment in a month that I’ve not ingeniously dodged.

It’s funny, that the more I rebel against my illness and my treatment, the worse my illness gets, thus entrenching me even further in the role of Seriously Mentally Ill Woman, a role I have been desperate to shake off, hoping that if I did, then it would all disappear, and I wouldn’t disintegrate with the despair of another 12, 20, 40 years having to live with this horrendous life-ruining, beauty-destroying “bipolar disorder, y’know, the artist’s one, the one it’s cool to have,  the one that’s killed people, and is killing me and that means nobody trusts a word I say and some are afraid of me or disgusted by me or just gets plain hurt by me.  That one”.   I have been trying desperately to escape it.

I’ll write about it all later.  I need to come back to life.  That’s what all the changes have been for, but christ, it’s so difficult when life has been hurling shit at me endlessly, and I lost the will to live and the ability to.  I am going to live, I am going to make my life better and not make anyone else’s worse anymore.  I will not let this illness destroy something beautiful and break my heart ever again because I’m going to fucking deal with it, proper.  First stop: oh ye gads, I’m asking for therapy.  Me and therapy weren’t friends, but let’s try again.

I’m not thinking really straight at the moment.  I’m going on gut instincts, which may mislead me, but I am trying, very hard.

BUT!  I have been keeping myself busy, social and also a bit drunk, so have not slid into despair.  And I am very aware of how fortunate I am, have been, to be loved.

Oh, and my benefits still aren’t sorted.  I was preparing myself to go and sit in the housing benefit office for an hour today, then I coughed so violently I vomited over myself.  Maybe I should turn up like this, and point to my greening top and say, “You make me sick”.  Har.

Apologies

Going through horrendously painful and difficult emotional time right now.  Back soon.

Oh for god’s sake.

I shouldn’t be weighing myself (I was keeping the scales for my friend, I forgot to give them to her), but I have, and I’ve now dropped below the 8 stone mark, the lightest I have been in my adult life.  Despite being my little eating disordered self, I am not jumping for joy.  This is not deliberate; I have completely and utterly lost my appetite due to immense emotional stress over the past few months which have forced me to rethink my life.  The last thing I ate was at 11am yesterday.  

My friend Sarah came around bearing bread, which I’ll get around to eating when food feels more appetising than the cat’s litter tray.  Although I tried to entertain her by making my belly talk to her.  WHAT DOES IT SAY?  ”Hello…Sarah…”

edit!  Sarah’s bread is bloody delicious!  I am eating it all!

Last week I almost fainted from lack of food and had to be physically steadied.  I need to get a grip and force myself to eat.  I have yet to get to bed.  I couldn’t face my bed, the pillows. Because if I sleep, then I have to wake up. I’ve spent the past seven hours crying on and off as four years of my life hurtle towards me in equal amounts of joy and agony, that I am losing, and although I am trying to do what I know in my gut is best, healthiest, happiest for everyone in the long term, to not lose everything, in the short term, in the now, I feel profoundly alone, stockpiling all my affections to try and get rid of that horrible feeling, and full of rage and grief and sadness and self abasement for not being strong enough, good enough as a person, trying hard enough, for letting people down and wishing so very violently that things had been different, with less endless crap to wade through,  so that the purest thing of all wasn’t stifled and changed, so I was less restless, disconnected, and knowing that I could keep trying, but it wouldn’t work, and I would always end up back in the same place, with the same grief which would hurt more and more, still 23, still with no clue who she’s meant to be (and now I am crying again).  

My head is killing me and feels gigantic and swollen.  I’ll lie down soon.  I want a bath, want to clean my flat, want to feel semi-human again.  I had a dental appointment at 11am that I can’t be bothered to go to.  I’ll get back to looking after myself properly.  I’m a big girl, I can do it.  I can stand on my own two feet but sometimes like everyone else I stumble to the ground and it is hard to get up.  I do look like a lady of the sorrows right now with my cried out skin and bombed eyes.

I’m not mentally unwell at the moment, not more so than usual.  People have been questioning whether I might be slightly manic due to my lack of sleep and lack of eating.  I don’t think I am. It is pure stress.  I am a bit more impulsive than usual but this is a culmination of, everything, to be honest, and kind of losing my rag a bit and knowing that I need to shake myself out of a coma before I become a dead dear at twenty five just staring, paralysed.   I’m not depressed.  I am incredibly, incredibly sad in a human way (nothing I want to discuss).  

I will feel better, just not right now.  Instead of doing my usual dusting myself off in that English way I have being an Irish person in England, I’m just allowing myself to bawl.

Ah, sweet self pity, eh.  I’d like to thump myself on the head.

Anyway, enough ranting.  

I am also stressed beyond belief.  My DLA didn’t go into my account- I am on zero benefits.  I have no money.  I went to sort out Income Support yesterday but everything else has been messed up.  It feels like nothing I’m doing in my life, in all respects, has an iota of positive impact.  That I make people miserable and even the benefits office seem to have some sort of vendetta against me and are determined to see me scavenge in the bins of the slightly better off than the underclass like me, which, at times like this, is exactly what I feel like. Right now jumping off something high seems attractive because I’m so sick of it all.  I could jump and wrap a letter from the DWP around my neck like an attractive bib with the word, “THANKS” scrawled on it.

Now I have to wait for the fuckers to open their phone lines.  At least the DLA people are somewhat more helpful than Income Support as they seem accostumed to old dears rather than rambling young whippersnappers like me.

Yes, Radio 4 listeners.  FEEL THE TEDIUM OF MY LIFE!

Absent friends, here’s to them

Excuse my status as an absentee blogger- I wasn’t in London for most of last week, and to be honest, I’ve had little to say for myself, other than I’m thinking about learning how to use a crossbow so that I can personally acquaint myself with the staff of the DWP.  Emotionally, I’m going through a bit of a difficult time right now, and it’s nothing I find particularly easy to share. 

What I have wanted to say, though, while trying to avoid being sentimental or corny, is thank you to everyone who has emailed, commented and found me on Facebook to say lovely things about the play and to share with me their own stories.  I have been totally overwhelmed by the response.  The night before it was broadcast I couldn’t even sleep due to the dread that I’d be sought out and headbutted by the irate listeners of Radio 4.  So thank you for proving me wrong on that count.  I have thrown out my special helmet. 

Please be patient with me when it comes to responding; I have a few hundred e-mails to get round to at the moment.  I’m rubbish at the best of times with e-mails due to my appalling lack of organisational skills and my equally appalling memory.

When I live my dream, please be there to meet me, let me be the one to understand.

Three years ago today, this happened.  

Rant

Benefits rant, excuse me.

Mind Campaign- Get it Off Your Chest

MEN!  What do you think of this?  There have been many similar campaigns that have been largely ineffective, so I wonder if this one will have any impact.

In other news, don’t breed.

Edit: Don’t want to write a new entry; just to say I am very behind in my e-mails so give me a couple of  days to reply.

Tonight I’m going to party like it’s 2006

(There are lots of new people reading.  It’s a bit weird for me so excuse my strange tone).

I had my housewarming yesterday, which would have been more fun if I hadn’t thought a few drinks wouldn’t hurt, y’know, it is my housewarming, after all, and I was nervous nobody would show up.  I ended up getting completely drunk and then downed tequila, which, like absinthe, is one of those drinks that makes me go mad.  I woke up this morning and wasn’t at all surprised to see a series of cuts on my left arm.  It’s been over a year since I self harmed.  Only one of them is deep but I still feel horribly disappointed in myself.  That’s my general consensus right now.   I feel like I’ve stopped making progress and that I’m peddling backwards.  I keep missing my appointments and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was discharged from the community mental health team because of it.  An entire hour of sitting  talking about it feels difficult.  I stare at the clock and can’t wait to get out of there.   There’s never anything new to say.

Edit: I should clarify here.  I’m a LOT better than I was- it’s just that things have happened recently that have sent me into a mental tailspin, hence my boozing, cutting, etc- stuff I didn’t do until lately.  I will get over it, it just annoys me that I’ve reacted this way.

I’ll consider my housewarming my last hurrah in terms of that and try very hard not to get bogged down in my little drunken pit of self loathing, wondering what embarrassing things I said and did and just how much people hate me for it.  I don’t really know why I do this to myself when I know how badly alcohol affects me.  Especially given the medication I take, which means I become drunk and lose awareness really quickly.  I guess I haven’t been coping with recent events that well.  But you knew that. 

I’m still stressed out, although my skin is returning to its normal, less terrifyingly zombie-esque colour.  Islington council are still underpaying my housing benefit, despite me giving them all the documentation they need.  I.  I’m going to end up ambling down there with a bag of clothes and chucking everything I own at them.  I’m not sure dirty pants are good as payment but it’s worth a go.

In short, the summer is so far shaping up to be like all the other summers.   I need to keep an eye on myself, I think.  And stop messing around with pills and my CPN.  Sorry for the boring post!  Minor miracle I’m awake enough to write it; if I miss doses of Seroquel, as soon as I start taking it again it’s like how it was when I first started taking it.  Fifteen hours sleep a day and struggling to lift my head in my waking hours.  I’m trying to summon the motivation to get out of the house and cycle and do other active things but bloody hell, it’s tricky.  

If I lower my doses of Seroquel, even by 100mg, in order to be awake and aware, I become hypomanic, in the extremely twitchy, panicked, paranoid way (see: last week).  But on my ordinary dose, sometimes I can barely get myself out of bed, and I strongly suspect that my medication may be making depression worse, because sleeping too much will do that to you.  I set four different alarms every morning, and they don’t often work.  When I do wake up, for an hour or two I’m really happy.  I’m so dozey and drugged that the world around me feels like cotton wool.  If I navigate myself to my appointments like that, I almost get knocked over and killed about five times but I sit in my little blue chair giggling and rambling.  

We have adjusted the doses countless times, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a happy medium.  Bugger.

I have Stuff to Do, so need to be functioning. I have to go out and find a pair of stepladders to fix my bathroom light.  At the moment, there’s only one very dim bulb burning above the toilet.  Every time I go to the bathroom, I feel like I’ve stumbled into a film noir.  ”Bonjour, est-ce que tu m’aime?” he says.  Smoke curls around his mouth.  ”Ah, oui, oui,” says she, raising one gloved hand to her beret.  ”Mon amour est pour toujours…”

And relax.

Right, now I need to sleep for the next few days!  I’ve been barely sleeping through this exhausting week because I had been sneakily not taking my medication to get myself through it.  As usual, my body’s decided to strike me with The Plague to remind me so I’ll be under a duvet- emerging only to graze upon cornflakes-until the exotic shade of purple on my legs subsides.  (And for my flatwarming, which I’ll sleepwalk through).

Thank you to everyone who listened and took the time to comment, email and cajole yesterday.  I’ll  be able to respond when I’ve had a bit of rest.  Sorry for being rubbish!

In the meantime, have a lovely weekend! Here’s something for you- and how I wish I could walk into a room and find these people in it…  Even though Peter Cook just stands there and is still somehow funnier than anybody else.

And I love Stephen Fry for many things, but for this most of all, I think.

Lucky old heaven, indeed. 

Oh, and I want to headbutt everyone at Islington council.

“Dos and Don’ts For the Mentally Interesting”… on today at 2.15pm on Radio 4

Edit:  Hello Radio 4 listeners!

Anyhow, I was just unsubtly reminding you that the play is on this afternoon, at 2.15pm on Radio 4.  You can listen online, or catch up on BBC iPlayer.  I do think iPlayer can be accessed outside the UK.

(Listen again: here is a handy link)

It was Radio Choice in the Guardian today, and the Times, so that’s nice!  Although the Times review was strangely morbid…

Afternoon Play Radio 4, 2.15pm Seaneen Molloy describes herself on her sumptuously appointed MySpace page as “a tiny Irish writer” (she’s 4ft 9in). Since 2007 she has also written a blog called The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive, parts of which have been adapted for Louise Ramsden’s play Do’s and Don’ts for the Mentally Interesting. “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry,” Molloy (played by Séainín Brennan) writes in her first entry. “If you’re bipolar, you’ll probably do both at the same time.” And, yes, you laugh ? because when Molloy is up she can be very funny ? and you’re spared the really dark bits because when she is deeply depressed she can’t bring herself to write at all, she’s too busy trying to stop herself killing herself.

Just for the sake of journalistic integrity: I’m 4ft 11″, I gained two inches, which are very important as it means I’m nearly 5ft”, which is almost the size of a real person.

I’ll be listening with you (and my family), and will update this entry afterwards to say hello to people who’ve drifted across!  I hope people like it and find it helpful/hopeful/funny/deplorable/erotic etc…

You can read this if you like- it’s about the play and contains some background information that explains some things and puts others into context.  The Posts I Want You To Read page is also a good place to waste an hour…

Edit- slightly embarrassing emotional blathering and thanks…

 Bloody hell, this is surreal!  It’s a parallel universe version of me and Rob!  I’m listening to it via my Sky box and Lou and I have our names on the screen.  Some of it is quite painful, so, yeah, it has been a bit difficult at points.   Parts about our dad made me tearful, but I’m glad he’s in there, that people know he existed.  I’d been texting my big sister Paula the whole way through who was reassuring me, as well as laughing at me and Rob.

My mum rang me in tears saying she was proud of me and now I’m all weepy.  I think I’ve made my mum cry about three times in my life.  She’s been in Belfast all this time and hasn’t even known some of what went on.  So that’s what has made me a bit, well, weepy.  I was partly dreading it because I couldn’t quite bring myself to listen to it in its entirety before, because it’s close enough to reality to be upsetting, so it was somewhat emotional hearing it properly.

Many many thanks to Louise Ramsden.  She is a brilliant writer, so thanks to her for being so completely respectful, supportive and genuinely being totally ace.   It is her play.  Also a billion thanks to Fiona Kelcher, the producer, who wanted to do the play in the first place and whose sensitive handling of the issue was the reason that I agreed to it. She has also been fantastic and lovely and so have  the cast, especially Seainin- right, will stop the speech now.  But we got a shite AND a bollocks on Radio 4 after the Archers! Hurrah!

Obviously some people won’t like it which is okay, but I hope some find this helpful and that they identify with it, and that they find it in some way hopeful.  And that it does help get the idea out there that people with mental illness are just people, and that the experience of living with it is a human one.  And thank you for listening.  (And thank you to the people who read and comment, too).

Anyway, blathering over!

One more thing- my psychiatrist knows that this play has been broadcast.  I anticipate a little something extra in my next prescription.

BBC Ouch podcast and the lovely man known as Rob

Hello!  

Edit: someone commented on an old post (I think) a few days back, and they turned on email notification for a response- I can’t find that comment so whoever it was, could you e-mail me?  Thank you!

And while I’m here,  since I forgot to unsubtly plug this the other day: Mark’s (of mental health magazine One in Four) Guardian interview. Go read it!

(Apologies for these promotey posts- I haven’t been seeing my CPN because my mood has been “hmm”, and when my mood is “hmm” I’m not very talkative..)

I was interviewed by Kiruna Stamell and Mat Fraser on this month’s BBC Ouch podcast, which lives here.   I was knackered and ill so forgive me if I sound like I’m going to pass out.  In it, I talk about the play, the blog and mental health in general in a slightly rambling manner.  One thing I did mention were the differences between two years ago (when the play is set) and now- they basically amount to still ill, but in a less “crazy” fashion.   I haven’t introduced myself to anybody as Jesus for a little while.  Nor have I manically propositioned a stranger in the street.  Progress!

I was fidgeting like a toddler due to the very strong coffee I’d been drinking to perk myself up, which is why Mat explains that I’m wearing bracelets.  I’d also not heard the play at this point so it was extremely weird for me when it was played back to me.  Mat and Kiruna were great, though.   I was complimented on my voice, which always takes me aback somewhat, since I’m Northern Irish and everything I say sounds like a threat.  I wander into pubs and shout, “HELLO!” and people disperse as if I’ve just chucked a grenade into the room (which, of course, being that I’m from Belfast, I did).  If you’re in a hurry, I start my blathering at 21 minutes in.

Much love to BBC Ouch, as they’re very good to me and let me write for them and everything.  Here we are!

Not looking my best there but I like Kiruna’s come hither face and Mat’s evident delight at his close proximity to our bosoms.  

I finally listened to the play two days ago.  I’d been worried about it due to the surreal, “argh, that’s bits of my life” quality.  I got myself into an objective frame of mind and really enjoyed it.  Lou did me proud.  I really, really had to distance myself from it or else I wouldn’t have been able to listen to it; too weird and surreal.  I hope my family are okay with it!

It’s just occured to me that, although I mention him often here, you don’t know very much about Rob.  Given that there’s a portrayal (which is very much a portrayal, he isn’t particularly like the “character”) of him on Radio 4 tomorrow, I thought I’d quickly tell you a little bit about who he is.

Excuse how badly written this is, it always makes me feel a bit shy to write about other people and therefore my sentences stop and start like a faulty car…  I might end up putting his behind a cut for his modesty’s sake, but for now…

Rob is a musician (his ex-band are Luxembourg, his current band are “novelty punks” The New Royal Family and his fantastic solo stuff is here) and cartoonist, amongst other things.  He has an obsession with Ghostbusters that verges on unhealthy,  he likes music, films, books, computer games and animals.   He’s thirty years old, says the word, “bullshit” a lot and sometimes wants to be a hybrid of Brett Anderson, Peter Venkmann, Bruce Willis in Die Hard and Ash in the Evil Dead.  Given that he’s a tall, shaven headed indie fop who uses sarcasm as much as other people use the word, “and” and has vivid dreams about mowing people down with helicopter gun fire, I don’t think he’s far off.
 

And us together:

Note to Self

Edit:  This was a very embarrassing post to write so don’t take the piss or else I’ll get drunk and kick your door down and steal all your pens.

Right, my little rebellious streak needs to be nipped in the bud. Like many other people I have been drinking a lot to cope with recent trauma.   Not even socially, I’ve been buying beers and drinking them at home to “unwind”, mistaking myself for a normal person who didn’t have a past history of alcohol abuse and who doesn’t have manic depression and who isn’t taking antipsychotic medication.  I am coping, I am getting through the day, but I haven’t just sprung back from it totally unaffected. I’ve been depressed, incredibly sad, self doubting and generally dragging my arse around like a scolded dog.

 I’m not happy at all right now,  and I have just wanted to forget.  I know it’ll pass and that I need to just deal with it and for it to be okay for me to be sad, but I’ve been using alcohol to make it pass quicker.  I’m very aware that I’m  that I’m acting a bit out of the ordinary.  I’ve been doing and saying crap I regret and I’m just seriously not myself at all right now. I’ve been closer to cutting myself lately than I have been for over a year.  If I had the choice I think I’d just curl up on Rob’s knee and sleep for a month.  

I was so proud of myself for quitting booze last year and I feel like I’m undoing my hard work.  What’s worrying me more is that it’s taking increasingly less alcohol to blast my memory, and I keep forgetting what I said and did, which leads me into the ever beckoning shame spiral.  I went up to my neighbour’s last night and have no clue what the hell I was on about, and today feel like a prick because of it and want to bash my head against something.  I feel so embarrassed and it makes me hate myself.  I shouldn’t drink because I regret it, every single time.  I talk utter bollocks.  I need to be in control of myself because it takes very little for me to lose it.  When I drink I feel like I’m letting down all the people who cheered for me when I stopped drinking.  

Please assist me in my egomania

Hello lovely readers, why, you’re looking smashing today!  Is that a new blouse?  Your eyes are sparkling!  Are you taking a new antipsychotic? It suits you!

Can you do me a favour?  I completely forgot to buy the Radio Times and all the Sunday papers with the radio listings in them.  Could any of you who bought them (The Observer et al) pretty please take a photo/scan/post any mentions of the radio play to me?  I’d like to keep them for posterity, since the chances are I shall never be the subject of a play on my beloved Radio 4 again (unless I fulfil my life’s ambition and become a sniper).  As it stands, I have nothing!

It’s one of the Stages radio choices for this week, which is lovely.  Anybody enjoying it really reflects on Louise rather than me, but it’s still nice!

Many thanks and sexy winks to anybody who can help me.

I’m going to finally listen to it tonight.

Also many apologies for these kinds of posts- I do have something vaguely worthwhile to post but I also have racing thoughts so need an icepick in order to pin down a thought…

Forever and ever

Quick post!

Blame it on the sunshine

Edit:  I’ve just checked my post, and have graduated from a Solo debit card to a Maestro debit card.   Solo cards are the debit cards given to people too irresponsible to breathe.   Having a Maestro card now gives me the freedom to make drunken purchases on STA Travel that I will later regret and then have to explain to my overseas friend who didn’t want me to come visit in the first place.  HURRAH!

A Maestro card officially makes me HUMAN, as opposed to the inconsequential wift of smoke I was back when I had a Solo card.  If I ever get a Visa, apparently my urine becomes a stream of glittering liquid gold.  If I ever get a credit card, then with everything bowel movement I make I get 10% splashback.

ANYWAY!

Firstly, I haven’t updated you on my granny.  She had an operation they thought would kill her but she was out of intensive care within two days.  Now she’s back at home, with people caring for her.  My granny is great.

And…

Oh dear.  Everybody’s cheering for the impending summer.  Hooray! reverberates around the country.  The Divine Comedy wrote the hand-clappingly exuberant, “Pop Singer’s Fear of the Pollen Count” about it.  Everyone is lovingly unwrapping their wicker hats and jelly sandals.  Except for me.  I do love the summer, in theory.  Even the asphalt jungle of London takes on a kind of benevolent beauty during these cherry blossom months.  The streets, which ordinarily gust the stink of piss and burgers into your face as soon as you leave the smoke-stained sanctity of your flat, begin to smell of flowers and saplings, and other subtle but no less beautiful scents that catch you off guard, as would the unexpectedly exquisite perfume of a passerby.  

In theory, I love the summer.  In practice, the summer months are the most dangerous for me.

For some unknown reason, I tend to suffer from vicious depressions during the summer. Occasionally, I’ve had terrible manic episodes in the summer, too, but the rule of thumb seems to be that whatever episode I get struck by in the summer will be hellishly severe and last for months.  This time last year I was under the care of the Crisis Team due to an incapacitating depression that got so bad that I tried to off myself.  The year before I was very depressed.  In fact, almost every summer for the past twelve years I have become a cuckoo.

I seem to have a kind of reverse-SAD.  As with the rest of the world, I do sometimes feel terrible during the winter months.  The days are short and worthless, life practically has to be strangled out of them.  The skies are grey, the trees are grey, your floating face in the mirror is grey and if you had the energy to disembowel yourself, a long grey slippery rope would slide out.  But, to my memory, which, lets be honest, isn’t that reliable, I’ve gone through my worst manic episodes during winter, and my worst depressions during summer.  For a lot of people with manic depression, the opposite is true.

I have a few theories why this is.  The first is Sod’s Law.  Outside, the desirous hoards laugh and laze in the sun, everything feels so much easier, the world, more free, life, more hopeful.   My mind hates me and actively conspires against me.  So, it strikes me with a depression that keeps me separated from this carnival.  It conjures a force-field that surrounds me, keeping me in a gloomy stasis, where all coherent thought withers down to just the one; “I wish I was dead”.  Ha ha, Seaneen!  Now another four months of your life will go to utter waste and you’ll struggle to remember a single detail of this time that doesn’t involve googling the fatal doses of painkillers!  In your face!

The other is that it might be my fault, a little bit.  The summer nurtures my ever-present rebellious streak.  There are plans, things to do, and because the summer always feels such a rarity that everything is as though it is without consequence because all can be excused, I start to slip.  I embark on many picnics and pub outings with friends and throw caution to the breeze- if my friends can drink, then why can’t I?   Then a late night in which I forget my medication, then I forget the next night- and I don’t want to take it anyway, I’d  rather be unsleeping than sleep to three and miss the glorious mornings,  I can’t stand months of mediocre afternoons, so why should I even take my medication at all when nobody else I know has to deal with this, it isn’t fair, I want to be like them…

Alas, my medication does little for depression anyway, but missing doses is enough to kick me into an unstable paranoid hypomania that turns into a heavily negative mixed episode, and drinking makes me feel depressed.

The summer can exacerbate pre-existing “Ah bugger” feelings, too.   I can’t wear short sleeves because of my scars.  I could but it would make me feel exposed and I’m paranoid enough about my appearance.  So my clothes become suffocating (and I tend to overdress to overcompensate for my paranoia), my scars itch and burn and I feel ridiculous and apart, and that depresses me.  I’d love to be one of those woman in short dresses, I imagine what the gentle sunlight feels like on their skin and imagine how it feels to live within a bodysuit that’s so smooth and only bears the human marks of bumps and childbirth and childhood accidents, and not the obviously deliberate scars than mine bears.  It makes me feel crap to be in long sleeves all the time during the summer.

Maybe this summer I should experiment with,”Fuck Off and Die” chic.  As in, if you look at me strangely because of my scars, you can Fuck off and Die.  I did do the whole short sleeves shebang one summer in supposedly liberal and groovy Camden and people got up from my table and walked away when they clocked my arms, whispering about me.   But now my scars are far less shocking than they were, so maybe…

My raging depressions, and having this illness, pisses me off because I’m not unhappy.      The fact that nothing really seems to be wrong in my life exacerbates my feelings of helplessness, because I don’t know what to change.   It’s intensely frustrating.  It all feels very physical to me, and it always has done.  The sensations of falling into darkness, and the skin-crawling agitation and the feeling of slipping out of control all come from inside, not outside.  Pain in the arse, I tell thee.

Anyway, providing that I don’t die of Swine Flu first, I have to be careful this summer if I want to get to see my birthday in September.  Of course, I could be being characteristically fatalistic but my mood’s already quite messed up, in the sense of “hypomanic energy and irritation coupled with the, “Right, I’m going to hang myself” thoughts.  It’s nothing serious and I’m okay but at this time of year, things seem to get bad very quickly for me.

I’m utilising my usual mostly ineffective tactics to keep me out of the ground.  Trying not to temptingly isolate myself (I’ve been out recently, and had a lovely night at our local a few days back, except I got a bit tipsy and started ranting at my friends about good porn on the internet)  or to carry on getting pissed (I have had a horrendous couple of months and revisited my old friend The Booze to cope with it, and now I’m trying to go back to being teetotal, because giving up the booze was so fecking hard that I don’t feel like having to do it again),  trying to sort out my sleep, attempting to keep busy and productive with writing, trying to answer emails, although I “epically fail” at that, as tha kids would say, and trying to eat.     I do eat and keep it down, which is the important part, and I force myself to eat even if I’m not hungry.  I could genuinely subsist on coffee and tea at the moment, with a slice of toast if I’m feeling decadent.  Although I’m fairly fat so not eating wouldn’t do me much harm, it just, y’know, psychologically would.  

I still haven’t signed up to join the swimming pool but that’s mostly due to the fact that I just paid my rent and finally got a cheap external hard drive to save my ailing computer. I haven’t got enough left over membership fee and first month.  However, I have another trick up my wizard’s sleeve, which is not a euphemism for my vagina.

It is dull and exhausting having to be a careful person.  I’m fairly responsible and all, I mean, I am an adult, not an adolescent, despite my adolescent passions and impulses.  I pay my bills and that (I’m so grown up that I’ve decided to change supplier to save money), I’ve taken care of cats and they have yet to die on me.  It just gets really bloody tedious having to keep such a close eye on yourself and to accept the consequences/telling off when you don’t.  I’m not very exciting.  I’m not a daring harlequin cat burglar.  It’s tumbleweed all the way.  

I shall at least be having a restful weekend, as I’m visiting Rob’s parents and Hobbes, who reside in the bosom of the tiny Leicester village, Frisby on the Wreake.  It’s one of those rather pretty little villages that has one pub and whose shops close promptly at 4pm, so if you want a Twix you have to drive the required ten miles.  Rob is from another tiny village nearby, whereas I’m from West Belfast.  His hometown has lovely, lyrical street names and actual real life thatched cottages.  My council estate translates from Irish to English as, “The Green Hole”.  It’s certainly a hole.  It should really be called, “Cars Burnt Out, Shitty Mispelled Graffiti and Dog Shit Hole”.

I’m never quite sure how to behave around all that undisturbed greenery, and I have spasmodic attacks of guilt every time I stub a fag out in the grass.   It makes me feel like some sort of character in an American sitcom.  The garish hooker that is hired to pretend to be someone’s girlfriend, that’s me.   

I’ve also received the recording of the Radio 4 play but have yet to listen to it, I can’t seem to gather up the bravery to.  I will do, I’m just bracing myself for how strange it may be to listen to it.  

Before I go, here’s some photos I took on Wednesday that you may find FASCINATING! but most probably not.

I got dressed up like a tramp in cat hat and duvet Manicsfan coat (it was raining), took my camera to my desk, flat, and my immediate surroundings- nowhere more than five minutes away, to find interesting things that are around me everyday. Unfortunately! My battery died before I had the chance to ghoulishly snap Joe Meek’s Offing Palace, but I did get to the peaceful graveyard that is pretty much my back garden, my favourite newsagent and local cafe, and the farm that is five minutes walk from my flat, in Holloway, Zone 2, which is quite strange to me, and I can sometimes hear the roosters in my kitchen. Even though I got drenched, I enjoyed my three hour day trip to the five minutes around my flat. There may be some rubbish photos as I cannot be arsed to go through photobucket and delete things.  They’re big so stretch the page.

Anyway, have a lovely weekend and think of me wandering around fields trying to avoid flicking fag ash over startled worms.

Photos after the imploring, “Read More” tag.

The Bell Tolls

I love spring.  Even though I can’t wear short sleeves, I still feel the breezes tickle my skin.  I like gallivanting in the sunshine and listening to ear-splinteringly loud music as I tip my imaginary hat at the people who pass me by and wonder why the hell I’m tipping an imaginary hat.  

I gallop downstairs in the morning, or afternoon, it depends when I wake up, and check my post for cards, money and crack.  Instead, I find the renewal forms for Disability Living Allowance and a letter from Islington council illustrating that they are paying me the wrong amount of housing benefit and leaving me scuppered to the tune of £90 a week.  

It kind of kills the “spring has sprung” joie de vivre and puts you in a terrible mood all day.  I want to go and buy a pack of Malteasers but money woes mean that eating anything feels like swallowing coins.

Sorting out the housing benefit should be easy enough although they’ve left me absolutely buggered this month and £300 short of my rent.   All I need to do is go down there and shove my proof of benefits into their belligerent faces and in, oh, thirty years or so, it should be sorted out.  I am not panicking.  I have become an expert at this.

DLA, on the other hand, that I’m panicking about.  It seems to be one of those arbitrary benefits where the decision lies with the person marking your forms (and it is marking, rather than reading).  Mine doesn’t run out until October but in the meantime I have the rather disconcerting task of writing essays about my bad days.  Currently, I’m on middle rate care and lower rate mobility due to mentalism and the need for people to sometimes assist me with my mentalism.  If I drop a level, say to lower rate care, everything falls apart for me.  My housing, for one thing.  I’m under twenty five, so technically, I’m only entitled to the rate of one bedroom in shared accommodation (which is what they’re paying me now).   Because I live alone, and because of my DLA rates, I get a payment called the Severe Disability Premium, which renders the under twenty five rule null and void.  This means I can live alone in a one bedroom flat, which I do now.  Should the DWP decide I am not entitled to middle rate care (which I am, by the way), then it’s back to the paranoid hell of sharing and bedsits.  ”How…not awful”, I hear you cry.  It very much is awful if you’re someone like me who not only suffers from crippling body anxiety and panic but also paranoid episodes of mania and depression where nothing feels sacred or private and I wonder if the person in the next room is listening to me with a glass.

I have a lot of help from the community mental health team.  I see my CPN every week and if they make a decision that jeopardises my mental stability, then she swoops in and says, “Hang on a minute”.  But I still hate filling in the sodding forms.  It’s a long exercise in, “Bloody hell, I am incapable” and rather demoralising.  Nobody likes being on benefits, despite the populist image that we all sit on our arses all day drinking cider and watching Jeremy Kyle.  It’s a horrible experience, having to rely on handouts to survive and feeling ashamed of yourself because you can’t work.  And because I live in London, my benefits don’t get me very far in the first place.  It’s a precarious existence, knowing that that help could be stopped at any moment.

I have my old CPNs forms for DLA here, which she filled out.  It includes my three official medical diagnosis, which are the mouthful- bipolar 1 disorder, rapid cycling with psychotic features, body dysmorphic disorder and bulimia.  Under duration, “10 years”.  Jesus.  And that was nearly two years ago.

The forms go into embarrassing but necessary detail about the things I sometimes need help with, such as not burning down my kitchen, getting dressed, eating, washing, tidying, being understood for the first few hours after waking up (I slur) and being outdoors during times of paranoia.  It’s all true but it is galling to read.

I had an appointment today where my CPN commented that my mood seems to have escalated again, which it probably has.  I talked to her about coming off medication and the fact that I feel almost brain damaged.   I really do, but she pointed out that it’s probably more down to my illness (it seems to be at least that repeated episodes erode your memory to the point of nothingness) than the medication.  It is intensely frustrating and embarrassing to be a twenty three year old woman with such appalling, appalling memory and who has trouble with her speech.  I can’t get my mind to work properly and sometimes I want to scream.

She pointed out that my medication doesn’t actually control my mood swings.  I seem to be, she says, treatment resistant.   Some people are, and I probably am because I went a long time without treatment and developed rapid cycling, and antidepressants only make me worse.  It is a source of constant annoyance to me. I still suffer from rapid-cycling moods.  The only thing that medication has helped me with is my sleep, and it caps the severity of the manias and therefore keeps me out of psychosis.  But, I guess, it’s better than nothing and has the least side effects for me, so we stick with it.

Rationally, I know that if I did come off my medication, I’d have to do it very slowly and pay intense attention to my moods.  The latter bothers me because part of the reason I want to come off my medication is because I’m sick of the intense attention I have to pay to my moods. I’ve come off the medication before suddenly and have become ill, in terms of paranoia and mania, extremely swiftly indeed, within days.  But, aha, would it pass or just get worse?  It’s a bit of a gamble.  It could all go disasterously wrong and I could find myself back in hospital.  Who knows.

My friend Jack came up to visit for a few days recently.  I have not been myself lately (it has been a traumatic two months), and have been wandering the wilderness for such a long time that my social skills seem to have deserted me, so I had no idea how to act around him, and act I did.   It takes me a little while to learn how to relax around people.  I spend so much of my time alone.  I ramble a lot but am often hypervigilant about what I say, and slip into a little analytical coma.   We were both in our own worlds, really, which aren’t the best conditions for visiting.  It was fun, though, and maybe the next time I see him I’ll feel more like myself again.

I’m trying to ease into sociability.  When someone visits you, it’s mandatory, you have to be social.  Otherwise, it’s your choice.  I’m going out tonight and tomorrow, and slowly beginning to reply to e-mails again.  

My body is returning to normal (despite- too much information- a week’s bleeding recently) so on Monday I’m going to join my local swimming pool to get in shape for the coming apocalypse.  My exhaustion and pregnancy weight gain means I have jellified.  I can be poured down drains, twisted round fingers.  I am soft, I will always be soft, but I want to be stronger.  I have always wanted my physicialty to reflect my mentality.  I’m very short, but not at all waiflike.  I don’t look like one of those vulnerable women so adored and protected.   You know, beautiful madness.   The fact that doctors and nurses think it’s so much more horrible for the mentally ill to be pretty and young.  Because I’m young, I’m supposed to be pretty and delicate, too.  And the tragedy is that illness and medication destroys it all.  How droll.

I’ve never wanted to look like that.  Because I have breasts and self harm scars and I’m a woman,  I have the appearance of someone you might be slightly afraid of.  I’ve always wanted to look like I could kick my way out of an inferno.   So I’m setting myself a little goal- to get physically stronger.  Swimming might not be the way to go, I should do training, but I hate the bloody gym and all its elastic people.  I feel lumpen and stupid there.   I used to love swimming but stopped going because of my scars and cuts.  Now they are fading.  So I can swim again.  It used to make me feel so free, but that was as a child, with floats and fun and games.  I used to sink to the bottom of the pool and kiss boys there.    I jumped off a diving board in a lake in New Jersey and was screamed at by my carers for flirting with boys while playing Marco Polo.  A chubby twelve year old, I was incorrigible.  I hope adulthood hasn’t squeezed the fun out of paddling in water.  

I used to wear swimming googles in the bath then submerge my toys underwater and pretend I was the daughter of a king, the king of the sea.  I’d let my head drift from side to side so it looked like seaweed, then be disturbed, and leap from the water, at the banging of the door, shivery, and shocked, clutching the Royal Family.