A shit two days, and your experiences with citalopram

The past two days have been shit. No poetics, they’ve just been very emotionally draining and I need to get into some sort of sleeping routine.

Today I’ve done almost nothing but sleep and cry (and ate a piece of cake in a cafe Robert took me to, but I was crying while I ate it, so it was 60% sobbing, 40% tiramisu. All my cigarettes have been 90% tobacco, 10% tears). I’m writing this largely to distract myself from crying, as within the gaps of doing nothing, I start to cry again. Which is why, “Come Dine With Me” is minimised in the background, ready to go. It’s necessary crying, it will pass.

Yesterday was an absolute mess that serves me remind me what a joke I am as a human being. I had wanted to be at my shiniest and most damnably charismatic at my Birkbeck evening. Instead, I was forty minutes late, I noticeably smelled and I spelled my own name wrong three times. In the end, I choose the natural course for me: access to nursing and health.

I had had eight hours sleep in the past three days, which, after some weeks of sleeping too much, was supposed to lift my mood. It did, at first, but yesterday I was chaotic and utterly confused, as well as rampantly irritable from sheer tiredness. My speech kept getting messed up and I locked myself out of my bank account online because I couldn’t remember my address. I was near-immobile but also agitated, which is not fun. The crisis team showed up at 4.40pm, when they were supposed to come at three. I know that they have other jobs, but I wish someone had let me know so I could have had a bath. I rang at 4.10pm to ask, and, when the nurse who visited me left, he rang me, saying they were on their way to my house, not realising, for a good few minutes, that he had just been with me and it was me he was speaking to. I wonder whose house they were going to? My behaviour when the man were there has probably cemented my borderline diagnosis. I was belligerent and extremely ranty, but it was down to stress, at needing to leave the house and total exhaustion. He was nice, but I didn’t feel like talking because I needed to get going, or at least get properly dressed or washed. I didn’t have time in the end so went looking like a tramp.

On my way to Birkbeck, I got completely lost. I just couldn’t understand the map when I looked at it. I finally got to it and stank. I sat down next to someone, and a look of distaste passed their eyes, before they edged away from me. I shrank with shame and then briefly considered wiping my armpit with my hand then rubbing on their face for a laugh. I hadn’t washed since last week, and that was only because I threw up on myself. A very jovial and kind-faced woman was giving a presentation about how great it is to study. Then we had to fill in forms and look at the timetable. It’s a one year course that would only put me out one evening a week and the occasional Saturday, but there is a lot of study and work at home. Then we had to write a personal statement explaining why we wanted to do the course and how we’d fit it into our life. I wavered over writing, “I don’t have a life so I could easily fit this course in to my packed schedule of fuck-all” but instead wrote I have no idea, because my brain was jumbled up. Something in spidery scrawl anyway. I had already written a far more articulate statement on my enrolment form a few weeks ago, so I hope they read that, too, and decide I am capable. I can’t keep bitching about my shit life and not do something about it. As much as I want to sleep for ten years and flip the world the bird, it’s not worth it. I’ll find out in a few days.

I had been fairly keen to meet someone afterwards, just to deflate and chat, but both people I asked were busy, so I was very happy to get a text from my friend Simon saying they had half an hour in a pub on my road before they went to a gig. I dashed there, received three giant hugs and had a pint. I didn’t want to go home yet, so I asked one of them, the one I know least, if she’d like to hang around after Simon and Jenna went to the gig. So we had another nice pint and some pizza. It was good to sit and chat to her, and get to know her a bit better. And by that time, I had been awake for 26 hours and had gotten my second wind (I had slept the day before after 40 more hours awake). It was very nice to see all three of them. I was told I looked really well, which means the smelly, skanked-out, badly dressed, fat look works for me. That is a bonus.

I got home, desperate to wash, and found that my cats had decided to poo over the last clean towel in the bathroom. Right room, wrong species. I found an unclean towel and finally cleaned then took Seroquel (by that point being too buzzy to sleep naturally) and went to sleep, sleeping all the way through my alarm and my appointment with the crisis team in Highgate, which will no doubt be marked down as non-compliance.

I have an appointment tomorrow with them and my social worker to be discharged, I hope. I really do feel like a tit being an unemployed 25 year old under the care of the crisis team. It didn’t seem so bad when I was 21, but now, I just want to not be in services anymore. It’s been too long. I know I’m being prescribed Citalopram- no mood stabiliser, by the way- by the psychiatrist. So, your experiences would be helpful, please.