Sleeping in the rain

Oh dear. My window has opened itself again and my bed is covered in rain. There’s a few stray leaves skirting over the pillows. The weather outside is inside.

It’s been a very quiet day blogwise; today has seen the smallest amount of hits in months. Was it something I said?

Anyway, I feel better today than I have done in some weeks. I talked to Rob last night about some of the Things I’d Like to Forget. His reaction was anger, not at me, but at the people involved. Anger is the last thing I tend to feel at someone. But I realised that I should be angry. Today I took a deep breath and decided to let go. It’s stuff I won’t discuss here, it’s far too personal. But I need to, at some point, acknowledge how ill I was then and move on. I’m not the same insane fifteen year old. Now I’m a periodically sane twenty two year old and some people really do not deserve my thoughts nor forgiveness. I paint myself in the worst light and everybody else with beautific halos. But some people treated me extremely badly; it wasn’t just my madness that set the motions of ruin. I can’t keep blaming myself for something I had absolutely no control over.

So. I had another appointment with the new CPN today. It was meant to be to discuss a support letter for my Income Support claim, but I ended up rambling. (Most of you have never, and will never meet me. Those of you that have probably know that my style of communication is long rants and raves punctuated by staring at my feet). We talked, or rather, I talked, about past madnesses. I also reeled off the list of jobs I’ve lost in the past year, mentally humming the Benny Hill theme tune as I spoke. It is that level of farce, a revolving door of employment. It is just short of walking into a job with cocky, misjudged confidence only to be kicked out again the next second. Rub your arse and wink at the camera.

I also mentioned my problems with eating, which veer from starving myself (not intentionally, at the moment, I have completely gone off food) to throwing up. I didn’t think I’d ever mention this stuff ever again after the Locum. We skirted over it, mostly. I am still not really up for discussion about that kind of thing. I feel ridiculous saying I have an eating disorder when I am three stone overweight.

Benefits are the order of the moment, though, and number one priority. At the moment I have zero income and bastard landlords, who are now trying to say that I didn’t pay my rent last month. The temptation to make them live in this icicled hole for a week is overwhelming. They keep coming into my room while I am out, so I stuck a very passive aggressive note on the door, which has mysteriously disappeared, probably to the fabled land of the bin, that very special filing cabinet that I suspect Islington council has stored most of my claim forms.

I would love a home. I don’t feel as though I have one. I am quite nomadic at the moment. I spend a lot of time at Rob’s, one because I love him, but also because this place is so cold and windy that it feels like I’m typing from a cliff face. I don’t feel comfortable here. I think I would spend more time alone if I had somewhere I felt happy and comfortable in. Most of my life I have felt that home has been a bad place. When I lived in Belfast, home was a horrible place to be. I’d open the front door with dread, steeled for the crescendo of screaming and slurring from my parents. As Jonathan and I’s relationship soured, I hated going home to that quiet place. When I’ve lived in house shares, I’ve been very unhappy. The pressure to perform, to be normal and hide all your mental problems is intense. I was happy living with Rob, who didn’t mind if I was quiet or if I talked non-stop for hours. But he lives elsewhere now with our friend and it’s a lovely flat he’s happy in. I need to learn to live alone. I need somewhere else to live.

The under 25 rule may scupper me still, and I am worried about that. I envy people who have somewhere warm to live. The other day I went walking in Crouch End with Rob and looked at our old flat. It has a new door and has been completely redone. It’s white, a change from our warm red. This time last year, it had a fluffy white Barbie Christmas tree that the cat kept chewing on. Yes, it was overrun with cockroaches, but it was ours. I miss that, that feeling of somewhere to hang your coat. Here I live in my coat and hat to keep warm. I’ve turned the cooker and the electric heater on to no avail.

I like my CPN a lot, she’s proactive and funny and I feel part of a team, rather than I am doing it alone, like I have been for a decade or so. I feel much more hopeful about the future than I did with my old CPN. We talked about a time in the future when bipolar disorder might not rule my life. At the moment, I can’t imagine that. I find the energy to write these entries but it takes ages. It really has dictated my life for such a long time that it’s almost frightening to think of life without it. How I feel about it is that I very much doubt I will ever been completely stable. The extent of my rapid cycling becomes clear when I sit back and take a look at it. It’s been quite extreme. But maybe over the years I will learn how to manage it. I’m very shiny and new as far as treatment goes. Reading over my own history makes it abudently clear that I am actually manic depressive. I smiled though as I remembered being told I was manic when I left hospital and how passionately I protested this while physically shaking and pacing around.

I often forget I’m ill at all and fall into the old patterns of feeling like it’s my fault. I always believed it was, after time and time being treated like a teen tearaway desperate for attention.

I am also starting to feel something I never have done before; a grudging pride in myself that I am still here and chose to fight rather than give up (the latter has been very attractive so many times). When it’s all out on paper in front of me, I realise how much I’ve gone through at this age, and how much I am still enduring. There are people who have been invaluable and with me on the way, but it is mostly myself. The sheer fact that I still live in London nearly five years on puzzles me. So much has happened. So much of it nearly knocked me down for good.

I still find it very difficult to talk about my dad. I think therapy will be useful there. It’s hurtful, the words stick in my throat. I miss him desperately. On the walk back from my appointment today, I felt warmed by the Christmas trees and lights hanging like new fruit from the lamp posts and windows. I peered into the windows of flats and saw people making their dinner or watching TV. Then I remember it’s another Christmas without my dad, and I feel sad.

But this Christmas I don’t want to be the wreck I was last Christmas. I am trying very hard to keep depression under control. I don’t want to be the mad relative in the corner dribbling with wide eyes fixed in fear, scrabbling in her bag for her antipsychotics. I need to do a passable impression of a normal human being.

In other news, someone else with mental health problems has killed a load of people in America. Expect hysterical articles about how he should have forced into hospital and how these mental people are ruining society. He was gentle and loved animals. Lock up your pets.