Beethoven: string quartet in A minor, opus 132.

Yesterday, I took a lot of notes for this post. I am something of an obsessive note-taker; a chronicler. I have kept a diary since I was seven, often more than one diary at a time- diaries for events, diaries for reportage, diaries for emotions. It's a way of keeping the thread going, of marking the days. It's a way of making sure your life happened. I have an obsessive and somewhat bizarre fear of disappearing- I will vanish, disolve into nothing, and my life will never have happened. Someone will wake up and it will turn out to have been all a dream. Thinking about it, my decision way back to study philosophy was not unlike a death wish. Given to over-analysis? Bizarre metaphysical fears? Then let's BREAK YOUR BRAIN! Hurrah!

Narrative, I have always felt, is a funny and slippery thing. How do you tell things? How do other people? How can they be so different? If you chose to tell your life another way, would it change what happened? I am very concerned with the truth despite having been, at various points in my life, a near-compulsive liar. Throughout my childhood, my version of events was denied: it didn't happen, it wasn't that bad, it wasn't like that, don't cry, you asked for it. At times I felt like I was going insane; I didn't think I was lying, but these people, this grown-ups, said I was. It's a funny thing about being a kid, but no matter how much damage adults inflict on you, you never stop thinking of them as grown-ups, as responsible, omniscient. As right and true and protective and knowing something you don't. When you stop thinking that, you stop being a child.

Before that happened to me- and the story of how it did is a good old brilliant shit-you-up harrowing abuse memoir isn't that awful oh god how dreadful one, but we'll leave that for another time, another voyeur- my obsession with narrative snuck in. Am I liar? Did this happen? Did it happen like I tell it? If I write it down, keep records, take notes, then I know, I can be sure, that I am not a liar.

Today, my notes can wait.

I felt something when I woke up this morning, before I'd even opened my eyes. A weightlessness, an absence of noise. A breif swoosh as of something uncoiling itself. Today was going to be a good day.

They come now and then, and when they do I remember why I am still alive, and why I bother to drag my sorry ass to therapy for x number of hours a week when frankly I'd rather be drinking or writing or singing or cutting myself or running away or, well, just about anything. I'd rather be eating my own face. Let's not beat about the bush here. Most of the time, I would really rather be dead.

Every now and then I have a day where I feel normal.

From the midst of it all my fears, neurosees, horrors, agonisings, seem ridiculous. I can't believe I ever felt any of these things. And why couldn't I see, at the time, that all I had to do was stop? Get out of the loop, get out of my head, get out of my worry-box and do something useful? Suddenly, for no coherent reason at all, the beast stops torturing me, the constant agonising self-analysis stops, and I wonder why I ever even thought to start it.

If you've ever had backache and had it suddenly stop, out of nowhere, then you know a bit how this feels. It's like all the tensions dropping away and suddenly being able to move without fear of pain. It's like suddenly discovering you know how to fly.

I think, my god, but I'm an annoying cunt sometimes. Jeez. Someone slap me. (Ignoring that faact that I regularly take my own advice and that the short, sharp- very sharp- shock hasn't worked yet).

I got out of bed this morning and got dressed. Felt okay about myself- okay!- when do I ever feel okay? Walked out of the house humming. Drank two cans of red-bull on the way to the station; picked up a coffee when I got there. Caffeine is a beautiful thing when I'm in this sort of mood; it sharpens things, and days like this happen so rarely that I need them sharp, I need to pay attention incase I get distracted and miss a moment of feeling good. I meet a friend for lunch, someone I haven't know for long, and feel thrilled at my capacity to make new friends; I relish the feeling of discovery, of being chosen, liked, sought out for friendship, by someone who could have walked away. I talk and hear myself talking and think, this is so easy, how could it ever have seemed so hard?

After that, back to the bin. A bit of a downer, but I'm so caffeinated it doesn't matter. Then in the evening the theatre with someone I have known a while but have only recently begun to spend time with. I like him, am slightly in awe of him. Relish the fact that he doesn't seem to mind me being there, tagging along. Want to giggle just for the fun of it, but refrain myself (don't want to look crazy) The show is a bit shit, but I'm so overwhelmed by the fact that I have sat through the whole thing without getting distracted by my thoughts, without having to dig my nails into my arms to stop the rising panic, that frankly I don't care. Afterwards, I want to skip down the street. I want to stop passers by and say "this is how it can be. This. Just this. Just ordinary. Beautiful. Me with friends. Me, with easy conversation. Me not afraid to go home. Able to say goodbye without trying to snatch that one extra moment of contact before the paranoia starts"

Days like this, everything is transfigured.

I don't stay alive for the things most people cite. I don't stay alive for the successes, the moments or triumph, the wedding, the day I might watch my firstborn sleep, the shlock and sentiment. I could quite frankly take it or leave it. I think the idea that the sorrows are outwayed by the triumphs is just so much wank. They aren't. Fact. I stay alive because every now and then I have a day where my mind leaves me alone, where the cylcle of depression-anxiety-mania stops, and I know that it is possible to exist somewhere in the middle, between ecstacy and pain, between triumph and tragedy. It is possible to just be. And that is worth struggling for. It really is.

Think on that, oh yea un-mads.

Tom Waits: hoist that rag

Yesterday I decided, for reasons which I find it fairly hard to fathom, to wear my scars, or at least those on the lower portions of my forearms, out for the first time this year. A winter spent believing that summer would never come means that they are significantly worse than they were last year. On back of my left wrist is a large red scar in the shape of a trefoil; I gave myself a third degree burn with the iron one tuesday afternoon for reasons I can honestly say I have now completely forgotten. The rest are the long, pink and raised marks of the razor. I look a mess. Still, most people are too polite to comment and I'm damned if I'm going to spend all summer wearing sleeves which reach my knuckles; that'll just make me a sweaty, grumpy, cross bitch. More so than usual. So I decide to go for it.

What I fail to factor into the equation are the rest of the clothes which I have chosen to wear. I dressed in a hurry; I was having a bad morning- hungover, miserable, world-shy. Going to meet an ex-boyfriend over for a few weeks from his new home in Chicago was the last thing I felt like doing. I wandered round the house picking up parts of outfits I knew I'd liked at some stage. A pair of black high heels. Electric blue tights. A gold lace puff ball skirt. A t-shirt which says "DIE YUPPIE SCUM" on the front. A cropped jacket with three quarter length sleeves. Not only did I look mad, I Iooked angry. Let's consider the external signs of being a MURDERING FUCKING PSYCHOPATH shall we? Short, punk hair? Check. Bored expression? Check (I can't help it; it's a musculature thing). Too much black eyeliner? Chheck (I was going for fifties film star. I failed, as always). T-shirt emmblazonned with death threat? Check. Arm full of agressiive looking scars? Ceck, check, and check-a-roo. It's od,, given that I on occasion look like such a nutter, that if you asked me to describe myself I would say- a little odd, maybe, but I'd get on really wwell with your grandparents. I would. Once they'd emerged from behind the sofa. On the tube, people do not sit next to me. I try and pretend that my body doesn't belong to me. It gets worse. I decide to hide behind a book. Unusally for me, I only have one with me- Marya Hornbacher's excellent psycho-cultural memoir of anorexia and bulimia, Wasted. So now I'm sitting there, obviously crazy, reading a book about another crazy. People avoid making eye-contact with me. I try and make eye-contact with people because I haven't eaten for a long time and I'm beginning to feel slightly hysterical. At Embankment a woman comes up to me. -Are you okay? she asks. -Yes, I reply.

I meet the ex-boyfriend for tea. I am horrible to him. I am always horrible to him. I am horrible to him because his care for me is too uncomplicated, too simple, too demonstrative. He is too easy. He loves me too simply; it seems to come as easy to him as breathing. I don't understand it. It frightens me, and I resent it. He doesn't understand, and never did, the complex and convoluted paths of my own emotions, the way I can screw myself round and round until I break, and then lash out at those who try to fix me just because it hurts too much to be touched. Being loved hurts an awful lot; people should, I feel, at least have the good grace to find loving me hard. He never understood the way I ran away from him because I loved him and he loved me and I knew that had to end. One morning, after phoning him at three a.m. and dumping him- again- I cried and cried. I couldn't stop. I was about fifteen; my mother was still alive and living here. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her, and as she held me and rocked me she asked why I had done something which had made me so unhappy. Then, as now, I had no answer for her. The next morning, I bunked school, turned up on his doorstep in floods of tears. His father opened the door, let me in. They put me to bed. I slept most of the day.

Now, he makes me aloof. I am supercillious, hurtful, my words tart, slightly bitter, tasting of coffee-grinds as they roll out over my tounge. It hurts me that he loves me. I want him to stop. At the same time I want him to take me in his arms and care for me like a child. fuck knows what I'd do if he tried. Hit him, probably.

The hard thing about BPD- particularly for those dealing with BPD in others- is the way that we hurt the people closest to us. We lash out at people closest to us, just to get in there first. Feeling certain that people will leave us, we make them leave us, just to prove ourselves right. And then we tell ourselves that we didn't need them anyway. When being alone hurts too much, we rattle to the other extreme, become like babies, incapable and made prostrate by blank, faceless Need- for touch, for soothing, for kindness, for love. Which will be withdrawn. And so the cycle starts again.

I can see myself being cruel. I can see myself being fraustrating. I can see people patiently try to explain things to me- how emotions are valuable, how they can tell you things, how people can leave the room without it being abandonment. I feel myself not understanding. The words are made meaningless by the screaming, whining, utterly engrossing cycle of my own emotions. I hate myself for being cruel. I hate myself for being needy. I hate myself for not being able to understand. I fraustrate myself. Living with my emotions is like living with a body which wont move when it is told to, or which moves wrong; it's the emotional equivalent of a severe physical disability. You know what you want your mind to do, but how in god's name do you make it happen? It's fraustrating, it makes me furious. There is nothing wrong with my intellect, but I have simply no control over my emotions; they are like a foreign body in my mind, a black bear to which I am shackled, which will not obey me, which is determined to hurt and sometimes to kill me. I can't run away from it, because it is there, inside my skull. I see people bemused by the way that I smile benignly and talk about the principles of utiitarianism as blood drips softly from my forearms. I must seem like a retarded child sometimes. You can say what you like to me about emotionality and human interation and love and need and kindness; I will smile blankly at you, nod, tell you I understand (because I do, intellectually) and then retreat to the bathroom and keep on carving up my skin. No wonder people leave us. No wonder therapists don't take us on. No wonder hospitals dread us. The only way to have sympathy for us, to understand why we behave so erratically, so capriciously, so loving/hating, so kind/cruel, would be to try being inside our heads. And I really wouldn't recommend that.

Talking Heads: born under punches

Last night, at the end of a rehearsal, as I put on my jacket, a woman I don't know very well points at my stomach. My t-shirt has ridden up.
-Jesus, she says, is that a pair of tights or is that your skin? -uh... I reply, wondering what the fuck made her think it might be a pair of tights, it's my skin.
-what happened to you? she asks, a highnote of horror in her voice.
I do what I always do. I look away, say -it's a long story, and then go out and get plastered. Something which was especially easy last night as I hadn't eaten for eighteen hours. I tell a lie. I'd eaten a mandarin. And felt pretty guilty about it afterwards.

Holy motherfucking shit but I'm hungover now. I still haven't eaten.

Why do I hurt myself in this way? I wasn't starving to get thin. I was starving to punish, shrink, expurgate. I wasn't drinking to have fun; I wasn't even drinking to get drunk. I was drinking to make myself feel bad, to prove to myself that I was the awful, out of control, disreputable person I knew myself to be. The degree to which I hate my body astonishes even me. It isn’t the belief that I’m ugly. I do believe this, and have done as long as I can remember, not aided by the fact that I was, even objectively speaking, a fantastically unattractive teenager. Those glasses- what was anyone thinking? And that hair? Jesus. Someone should have taken me aside and said somethiing to me. I would like to be able to say now “I have grown into myself and am in fact not unattractive, despite what my mind says”. I am unable to say this. I know that I am not beautiful. Beyond this, I can’t say. My belief in my ugliness is absolute. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I balk. Heavens above! How can I leave the house in the morning, looking like this? Sweet Jesus, how can I live?

I have felt beautiful precisely twice in my life. Both times were responses to the early stages of relationships. On both occassions it happened that the men I was with didn’t try to fuck me. Sex isn’t something which makes me feel beautiful. In both cases what made me feel beautiful was a degree of intimacy, a taking care. A man stroking my hair and saying something kind. Both times I have seen myself through the eyes of another person. As a thing to be considered affectionately. On both occassions what I fell in love with in these men- and boy did I fall- was something fatherly. It’s not freudian. It’s just true. I wanted- want- someone to see me through rose tinted spectacles and say- my darling girl. Both men left me because, not believing that it could be true, I pushed their affection to the limit. -Prove it, said my mind. -Prove this isn't some kind of joke. The truth is no one can prove that they like you.

Ugliness doesn’t lead to hate, though. What leads to hate is the multiple betrayals my body has inflicted on me. My body betrays me by taking up space, by being a physical object in the world, by being beyond my control. I leaned early in my life how to remove myself mentally from a situation. Much of my childhood is remembered in the third person; I see from the other side of the room a small figure hunched and trying to absent itself from the screaming tirade, trying not to cry, trying not to exist. I see it. Failing. The rest of my childhood I simply don’t remember. I know it happened from the aftermath. I remember the bruises but not how they happened. I remember the fear, but not why I was afraid. I remember my mother hiding from my grandmother, screaming to my father, “how can I face your mother whan I’ve got a black eye and hip broken because her son threw me down stairs?” Although I know I must have watched, I don’t remember seeing it happen. I remember broken objects- my bedroom door, my favorite mug, the glass in the kitchen window- I don’t remember how they were broken. I remember blood on the bathroom walls and trying to clean it up before my mother got home. I don’t remember whose blood it was or how it got there.

Although I could remove my mind I couldn’t remove my body, and that was the first betrayal. My body betrayed me by growing when all I wanted it to do was shrink. It betrayed me by laughing and talking and putting its hand up in lessons. Later it betrayed me by responding when it was touched. This isn’t an uncommon sentiment among those sexually abused as young children. There is a part of you which suspects that you might, deep down, have asked for it, and even enjoyed it. Long before the one violent act of rape I was in contact with men who didn’t know where the boundaries ought to be with a young girl. I think, now, that much of it was unintentional, not designed to hurt or damage. In the gardens of many seedy pubs men told me I was pretty and bought me lemonade. They put a hand on my thigh, shoulder, as yet unformed breasts. Some, less concerned with innocence, put a hand up my skirt. All of them laughed at me. I believe truly that it was meant with affection, for the most part. I was on a level with the obligatory pub dog- basically nonsentient but occasionally prone to do amusing, almost human things. What I felt was humiliation. My body was there for them to laugh at, and I didn't know why. I didn't understand the jokes. But my body was the reason for them. That was betrayal.

My body feels, is saddled with emotion. I have always aspired to the true, the needless. The factual. To need, to want, to desire, to love, to feel: these seem like monumental weaknesses. I have never been able to subjugate them, although I have tried. In the last few months I have achieved something I have never thought I would be able to do: to admit to desiring, to liking, another human being. To be able to say something as childish as "I have a crush on Thomas". I have been saying it a lot, relishing the words in my mouth, relishing the image of myself as someone capable of desire. I have almost, almost, been able to believe that the response of others to this sort of comment is not to think, behind their unreadable eyes what right has she to fancy someone? Can't she see that no one will ever desire her? Can't she see that this sort of thing is not for the likes of her? Can't she see how she is HUMILIATING herself?

Self-harm springs in many ways from this. There are the complicated, the cultural, reasons. There are the philosophical reasons. And there is the reason that I feel, somewhere in my gut, above all others, simple and keen. I want other people to know that I hate myself as much as they do. I want to show them that although I can't stop my body taking up space, I don't for a moment think that it is a space I deserve. By showing on my skin how hard I am trying to overcome need, I want people to give me leeway for trying, even though I fail. I want to show people that I am not delusional. I know that my body is just an object. I know that it is just something to laugh at. I know that it is just something to be used.

It's on the level of a preemptive strike. No one can hurt me as badly as I can hurt myself. That's power, of a sort. Preemptive strikes rarely work, though, for proof of which c.f. the gulf war mark 2. Perhaps I could use my skin as part of an anti-war propoganda film. Look! I tried to beat them, but all I ever did was beat myself! There is a lot of talk in psychotheraputic communities of the internalisation of the abuser. If the people who you were told loved you (your father, your mother, rabbit and all rabbit's friends and relations) bully, beat and hurt you then it becomes the case that you learn that the only way to love yourself is by enacting the same sort of behaviour upon yourself. This may be true. It is true that after cutting myself I feel comforted, surrounded by protection, loved. But I don't think that is how it started. It started as an attempt to beat the fuckers at their own game. You think I care that you hurt me? Your hurt is nothing to me. Look at this! This is how much I can hurt myself. I don't even notice your hurt anymore. You withdraw yourself behing scars. They keep your from harm; they protect you, just as your skin is meant to, from invasion. My skin has never been strong enough, even with its armoury of scars.

I have cried precisely once in therapy. A woman I saw once a month for a period of about six months, the first woman to recognise that I was not just a fucked-up twenty-something finding the transition to adulthood hard, but a seriously disturbed young girl, asked me when I knew how to stop cutting, when the damage I had done was "enough". I told her, quite simply, that I stopped when I knew that I needed stitches but wasn't going to get them. She looked straight at me and said, with compassion and sorrow in her voice I had never expected to hear, -you really hate yourself, don't you. I couldn't answer, but I cried- real, true, grieving weeping. Because it's true, and I don't know how to stop.

Anti-pop consortium: dead in motion

Monday morning. This I hate.

All around me the city drags itself alive, dusts itself down after the weekend, squints in the mirror and pulls a face, dons a suit and grumbles its way to work. By rights this should be my lot, but I am not one of the socially acceptable, the acceptably contributory. I am part of the army of the incapacitated. Monday mornings smell to me of shame and the humiliation of having given up. After years of keeping the bits of my mind in one basket through a multi-cloured universe of bizarre behaviour, I've finally admitted defeat. Well, hell, it was always a losing battle really; my doctors knew it, my therapists knew it, my friends knew it. Seems that I was the only one that didn't, holding in there like a soap-doctor performing CPR on my functionality long after it was feasible, having to be dragged off: "it's time now, just let her go".

So the process of DBT begins. Dialectical behavioural therapy, designed and masterminded in America by Marsha Linehan, the first treatment for BPD which accepts us as struggling human beings, not, as we are usually characterised, manipulative, because frankly a borderline is too incapable of interpreting the behaviour of others to manipulate them. Too shit to manipulate. It is also the first treatment programme to really have faith iin our capacity to heal. For years, decades, ever since Freud first identified a group of women existing in the hinterlands between hysteria and psychosis, exhibitiing features of both, and coined the term "borderline" for us, we have been consisdered hopeless. Unresponsive, untreatable, exhausting to work with. The dross of the in-patient wards, coming back and back, eaach time a bit more anger and a few more scars. Linehan recognised us for what we are- desperate and unhappy people doing our best to live in a world we don't understand.

The mind of the borderline builds itself wrong. A childhood of abuse, neglect, amotional deprivation, the "invalidating environment" and "emotional enmeshment" so beloved of the text books leads to a warped and stunted growth. Essentially, you learn to build between yourself and the world a shell of protective normality. As a child, you seem precocious; serious, grown-up. As an adult you often seem functional and people have trouble reconciling this with your obvious bonkersness. This shell is fragile, though, and beneath it your mind remains largely unformed. Your coneption of self iis almost non-existant, and your capacity to distinguish between what is in here and what is out there is faulty at best. The world is a constant shifting mess of abandonment, need, incomprehensible pain. A constant shuttling between painful opposites.

DBT aims to break down that shell and build your mind again from scratch, like an adult remaking a child's mangled toy. First you have to give up the pretence of functionality which has sustained and tortured you for so long. Then you sttart to learn the skills which other people were taught from birth. The process of regrowing your personality is painful and humiliating. It also has its moments of humour.

Tuesday afternoon, mindfulness group. A bunch of embarassed and largely socially inept women attempt to learn how to control their attention; we ought to have learned this one between the ages of two and seven, but better late than never. We do exercises- breathing exercises, mindful sitting, eating a raisin slowly and with absolute focus. Mindful walking. When you walk mindfully you walk slowly, focused entirely on the feeling of the ground under your feet, the way you legs bend and streach. You try and feel the breath circulating your body. Locomotion becomes a bizarre and halting process, as a person engrossed in the feel of carpet under shoe pauses and wiggles their toes. You look lobotomised. You just do. Try it; you too will look like you are missing a chunk from your frontal lobe.

The room we practice in is small. Too small for eight women to mindfully walk simultaneously, and it doesn't really work doing it one an a time; you feel a bit of a prat when people are watching you and that breaks the concentration. Someone has the bright idea of going outside. And so at four thirty on a greyy and blustery tuesday afternoon eight mad women fan out across the lawn outside the mental hospital and start to walk slowly in a kind of buggered impression of Brownian motion. I have truly never seen a tableau more reminiscent of the popular stereotype of the mentally ill. We walk slowly and haltiingly, hunched over and looking at our feet. It is obvious that none of us are going anywhere particular. A nurse, actually unconnected to us, stands by the main entrance smoking a fag, watching us without concern. It could be a short story by Beckett. It could be a play abut the sadness of lunacy. It cold be a Daily Mail reader's wet dream about the faliure of care in the community.

Afterwards, we drink tea and eat biscuits. We try to avoid eye-contact, true, because that is what borderlines do and anyway, we're all a little bit embarassed. Every now and then someone sniggers. You can be sure as hell that we all get the joke.

Bob Dylan: buckets of rain

I spent the afternoon sitting in the Pride of Spitalfields, trying to bring a friend down. Turns out he went to a reggae party in Brixton last night and took many worming pills, the active agent in which is some distillation of black pepper. The effects of these turned out to be suprisingly long lastting; by eight pm he was still buggered and I had to admit defeat and send him home, as he was starting to scare the punters in the Pride- quite an achievement given that the Pride's usual clientelle are elderly coockneys with fists of steel and probable members of the BNP. Half way between a conversation about Angelina Jolie (I'd do her, he wasn't sure) and the wisdom of re-reading the Wasteland every april (in general a good idea, but I should be banned from reading all Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Beckett and anything even a little bit Russian- and that means you too, Nabokov- until I have shown that I can be trusted to behave myself in a manner befitting my age and status) he said that it was a fucking mercy I've never taken to drugs. He's right, of course. The utter dedication I have shown to the cause of self-destruction means that if my forces had been chanelled that way I'd be dead by now, my old school tie in my teeth, a needle hanging out of my bicep. Or eyeball.

After saying good bye I sway gently towards the station and return to a question which has bothered me for years- why, of all things, did I light on self-mutilation as a way to deal with my disintegrating mind? Part of me thinks that if I could answer this question- if I could understand why selfharm rather than cricket, say, or smack- then I would have the key to controlling my desire to destroy my body.

It wasn't like I didn't try other things. I toyed with promiscuity (when, at the age of fourteen, I had my first consensual sexual encounter, with a twenty-three year old physics student whose name I can't remember, he asked me with some suprise where I had learned to kiss that way. I answered in all seriousness that I'd learnt it round the back of the Brixton Academy), over-eating, self-starvation, bingeing and purgeing. I was, to be honest, a bit crap at all of them. The trouble with promiscuity is that you can't be promiscuous on your own, and no one fancied my gauche and bespectacled teenage self. Over-eating left me feeling repellant and I had better things to spend my pocket money on than white bread and nutella. I'm too lazy for anorexia, which requires a dedication and self-discipline I utterly lack. I still think I could have made an ace bulemic, but sadly my body was against me on that one; I just don't have the gag reflex. My throat will bleed before I vomit, and there's nothing more unpleasant than a bleeding throat.

Self harm, though. That was something else. My first time wasn't elegant; we didn't know one another that well; we hadn't started out with the little scratching foreplay and then worked up to going all the way- it was dirty and sudden and without the grace of introductions- perhaps I should have waited; I didn't even hold out for an implement I loved. I sat on the kitchen floor and hacked at my forearm with a steak knife. I seem to remember reasoning that if it was designed to cut steak then it would be perfect for cutting me, for what am I if not steak? Fucking tough steak is the answer. The whole episode was ignominious in the extreme, but I remember thinking "I can do this. I have found what I am good at." And oh, christ, but I was good at it. I threw myself into it as into clear water, as the starving man falls on bread. I was infatuated, overcome, bourne away. It wasn't just that it was right; it was that it was perfect. Between me and the razor there was the sort of dead-on click that usually only exists in hollywood romances of the old school; the eyemeet, the half smile, the knowledge, simple and pure, that this is where you were always meant to be. Even now, years later, I could almost cry when I think of that moment. There's an echo of it every time I pick up a blade; a sudden certainty, an indescribably sweet feeling of being where I belong, but it never matches that first time looking down at an arm which, previously simply a lump of flesh, had suddenly and unexpectedly been claimed as my own.

I still don't know why self-mutilation and not some other thing. I am sure that there is a key in the mental disorder from which the need for this behaviour springs. Although borderlines often have, as I do, an unhealthy relationship with food, a degree of impulsivity with respect to spending, sex, fast driving, fags and drugs and booze and anything else which you were warned against in school, the vast majority of them come back not to these things but to the purity of razor on flesh as their first love. There must be reaons. There are, or at any rate there are for me; they're complex and shifting, and hard to pin down, rooted in the complex interrelation between self and world, mind and world, and both with the body, the skin, placed between subjective and objective as territory to be fought over. I'll come back to them, to my theories- peppered, I hope, with jokes.

For now, though, I wonder this- if I could go back to that first time, to my younger, as yet unscarred self, sitting cross legged on the kitchen floor with my left arm resting lightly on my thigh, would I tell myself to stop? Would I stay my hand and take a different path? What scares me most, more than the possibility of death, more than pain, more than the sight of my naked body in the mirror, is the fact that I wouldn't. I wouldn't miss this love for the world. Now I am faced with the task of giving it up. I have to, if I want to survive beyond the next year. I truly don't know how I will live without it, but in some twisted, fucked up, bat-shit crazy way I believe that it iis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Joy Division- She's lost control

Today has been a symphony in normality. Luch with an ex-boyfriend; afternoon listening to music and vaguely searching for a trench coat which doesn't make me look lumpen (consider this search: abortive). Dinner with friends. Tube home. Lechy comment from the bloke in the hairdressers, on his own way home. Now, sitting on the sofa in my pajamas, bottle of scotch, laptop balanced on my knees. A week ago I had planned to kill myself tonight. Lying awake in a friend's spare room last sunday I had determined that this whole life malarky really just wasn't worth the effort, frankly; an advertising con on the scale of Sunny Delight. I've been stock-piling pills all week, but I have no desire to take them, now. I don't just feel okay, I feel fucking brilliant. Happy.

It's this sort of dichotomy that builds the life of the borderline. I do nothing by halves. My world is built on opposites- I love you or I hate you; I am exstatic or I am desolate; I am impervious to criticism or I am paranoid. There is no middle way and the swing from one to the other can happen in seconds. No wonder people find me hard going.

Sometimes, though, I realise that it's possible to feel something which has nothing to do with my illness; is, in point of fact, just a person with a feeling. Case in point- my "magic powers" story. It is my secong appointment with a psychiatrist. My first, I was a gibbering pile of mad. This was the appointment I'd fought for desperately for so long. After years of trying to second guess myself, work out if I was "ill" or just attention seeking, I'd finally found someone who would take me seriously, and was willing to see my self harm and depression as unmediated by my intelligence and achievements (the mentally ill cannot be academically successful: bullshit). It didn't help that my psychiatrist had a beard. I have a bit of a thing about beards. I prefer to ignore Freud and regard it as an aesthetic quibble. Beards are unpleasant looking, they smack of laziness disguised as a style choice, and they give a girl stubble-rash, a condition so reminiscent of adolescent eczema that it will bring anyone out in flashbacks. None of this made for a happy first consultation. I was scared, triggered to flash-back, paranoid, determined to present myself well, and absolutely unable to second guess. My brain took the obvious route out and dissociated. I spent most of my first psyche appointment watching from the other side of the room as I giggled, made inappropriate jokes, waved my arms around, and eventually ran out of the room and hid in a small corner of the corridor whimpering. I had to be coaxed out with tea. Humiliating? Oh yes.

My second appointemt was better. It was a good week. The beard wasn't going to take me unawares; I was prepared for the beard. I was, strange to say it, happy. Fucking happy. I'm a borderline; like I say, I don't do things by halves. I sit in the waiting room trying not to hum out loud. It's an okay habbit usually but you really don't want to exercise it in the waiting room of a psychiatric unit. They tend to lock the doors on you. I get called into Dr F's office.

Tatty: Hi.
Dr F.: How are you feeling?
Tatty: Good! I'm really good. I'm feeling really happy.
Dr F. Oh? really?
Tatty: yes, it's great. I'm really cheerful.
Dr. F: Do you feel like you are glowing?
Tatty: Well, you know... yeah, a bit... I'm, you know, happy. Glowing. Yeah.
Dr. F. (face serious, concerned): Do you feel like you have magic powers?

I laughed. How could I not? Dude, this isn't psychosis, this is good cheer. But that's what you get for joining this gang. I can't be happy anymore. I have to be having a manic episode. Give over. This is just a fucking good day. I'm not insane. I'm just liking the fact that it's spring again.

Sometimes I forget that you can feel something spontaneously. That it isn't a side effect of a drug or your childhood, a coming to terms, an uncovering, an "inevitable response". That people do get happy because someone said a nice thing or smiled, because it's the first day of spring or their friend just passed their driving test.

I need to remember that. Perhaps I should get a sign.

Donizetti- l'esir d'amore

An extended saturday morning. Sitting on the sofa trying to kill my hangover with strong black coffee and Italian opera. It doesn't get much more self-indulgent than this. One of my cats is looking at me pityingly; I guess I probably have mascara smudged over my face. When will I learn that you can't enter the adult world unless you get yourself a proper beauty routine? But a penchant for black eyeliner and clumpy lashes is my one concession to mad-chic; well, that and the stringbag full of catfood tins and the constant under-the-breath muttering. No, I tell a lie. It's just the makeup. The rest of the time I look [i]just like you[/i]. Or just like you would look in a lacy puffball skirt and a pair of black high-heels (I think you'd look pretty fucking good actually). Scary huh? I'm a genuine bona fide (certified) nutcase and there's a chance I might end up sitting next to you on the bus, contaminating you with my disease, breathing the same air, thinking my crazy thoughts. In the old days, you could tell the crazy from the sane by the fact that the crazies were rocking and hitting themselves in the face and dribbling, had frontal lobotomy scars and, oh, yes, were locked up where they belong. Now, they're everywhere. I expect they're even breeding. Thatcher has a lot to answer for, I tell you.

It's okay, though. I've got a piece of paper which says I am no risk to children. No, seriously. They do actually give you one of those. I laughed so much when they gave me mine I almost fell off my chair.

I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a while now. I was finally swung by a conversation I had last night with a friend. Half way down the second bottle of cheep red booze, after a discussion of breasts in general (horrid) and the breasts of the barmaid in particular (amazing), she turned to me and said "you aren't crazy". It was one of the purest moments of my week. It's easy to lose a sense of self somewhere between therapy, psychiatric consultation and group. My disorder- my fissured personality- becomes the sum total of myself. I don't want that. And if I can't see myself as anything other than my disorder, how can I expect others to? Particularly when the disorder in question is one which rules relationships with such a cruel and capricious hand.

Later, defending the humour in Sarah Kane, I realised that it was time that I started this. I've been wearing a drunken hat for mad rights for a long while now; it's about time I tried to form my defence coherently.