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.