Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli

It's not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.

-John Berryman


I write this from the depths of one of the most unpleasant hangovers it has ever been my privalege to endure. I feel repulsive, like my brain has shrunk a centemetre all round, been shrink-wrapped, and the resultant space between cellophane and skull has been stuffed with rancid cotton-wool. Wandering grumpily down Oxford Street at ten am in search of coffee and a paper I saw a man with elephantitis of the testicle. This was an auger of evil; my hangover has just gotten worse from there on in. I am listening to Palestrina because it is the only thing my poor pickled head had can take.

Actually, I seem to have been hungover for most of this week. That is, in the spaces between being asleep and being drunk. Many of these spaces have been mercifully short. I can't say I have done anything exciting; last night was a rather glorious experience, but the preceeding ones have been in the main solitary affairs, whiskey soaked and angry and sordid. One night saw me on my knees scrubbing the floors at three am, a whiskey and soda my permanent companion. Last weekend I decided to stop eating. An outpouring of anger and self-loathing, a sudden inability to look at myself in the mirror without shame and hate, led to this strange gesture of rebellion; as a result I have been survining on apples and mustard and scotch and black coffee. By yesterday morning, day six of two apples a day, each sliced int thirty six pieces, the second dipped in mustard because the strong flavour kids your brain into thinking you are full, I was so hungry that I couldn't stop shaking. I dragged myself downstairs and drank two glasses of ribena, trying to get the sugar into my bloodstream. I called a friend. He came round with food. I fell on it in an undignified manner and devoured every crumb and then felt like crying. I got drunk instead.

I'd like to say that I don't know where this is coming from, but I do. I know very well. I can trace the process through the days and ways of my thoughts. It goes a bit like this: I don't like that I am not self-harming anymore. I am angry with my therapists. I hate being angry at other people. I turn the anger againnst myself. I stop eating as a way to punish myself and as a petty act of rebellion against the people who are so patiently trying to make me better. It's terribly fucking transparent and I know it's a bad thing in the same way that I know that not eating is a bad thing. I know it's bad but I don't care; for myself, for those around me, for my therapists, for anyone. I am a big bundle of incohate rage and I am using my body as a weapon in a war that no one else is really fighting. I fight it anyway, because it makes me feel strong and safe and seperate, even when I can't walk straight and there are black dots dancing across my visual field.

One interpretation says that I have reached a point of suspension, the moment of weightlessness the runner feels when his back foot has left the floor and his front is yet to reach it. My therapists have patiently unpicked my mind and laid out the pieces before me. They have taken away my old, bad habits, the concurrent circles of thought which I have owned for so long. They have yet to put anything in their place, and so I fall, and, falling, clutch at straws. Without the palliative of self harm the noise in my head is unbearable and I try anything I can think of to quieten it. Food restriction gives me something to focus on, some definite goal, a thought around which all other thoughts can be construced, so that the feeling of infinite chaos goes away. The resurging hunger pains are a testament to my strength. For the rest- I just want to run, and drinking is only a form of mental running. You can run away from yourself through booze in a way that is utterly unique. Besides which, it passes the time, and time seems an infinite burden these days. I'm not sleeping much.

There is another interpretatiion, though- a darker, flip-side. The one in which I am not the shell-less crab striving to find a newer, better set of lviing arrangements, but rather the stroppy and self-sabotaging child. I am self-harming less because the focus of the therpy on this behaviour means that it isn't mine anymore, and there is a large part of me which resents that bitterly, and which has no interest in being treated or cured. A part which is angry as hell with every single person on the planet for what has been done to me. A part which looks on every person it meets and says: you never lifted a fucking finger. This is the thing in me which needs a secret, which needs to claw something back from the world, which is angry because it is also deeply, deeply frightened. As am I- of every person I meet and their capacity to hurt me. There is a large part of me which is still utterly intent on self-destruction by any means possible, and you can't therapize that bit. Therapists can teach me skills but they can't do shit with the bit of me which is determined not to use them.

Self-harm, anorexia, bulemia- it's a cliche that the sufferer gains a sense of control through them. While everyone knows this and excepts it as a truism, I think they rarely consider what it actually means. The control is of a very particular sort, and is something you seek when you simply cannot control or predict anything else. I grew up with an alcoholic manic depressive for a father- a man both intensely violent and deeply kind; a man who was charismatic and fun and dangerous and terrifying. Who shouldn't have been left in charge of a goldfish, let alone a young child. Nothing was predictable. Something which one day would bring kindness would another bring a smack in the face. I grew up with no idea how to behave, which of my actions were good and which bad, with no idea how to relate in an ordinary manner to other people. It's Wittgenstein in action- without consistent responses you simple can't learn. It's not control I was after so much as predictability. By controlling your body you at last find something which is consistent and predictable. If I cut myself, I bleed; if I starve myself, I lose weight. If I drink, I get drunk. The relief this brings is absolute. The world of human interellations is too complicated, is frightening and unitellegable and you never know what will happen next; here, you have found an area in which there is certainty; your actions are finally given meaning. It is for this reason, I think, that as a breed borderlines often seem so self-obsessed. The self, and the manifold ways of controlling the self, is the only context in which our actions gain sense.

So I find myself in a position where my props have been removed, and I am angry and frightened and everything feels too intense. It feels like I have had all control wrested from me. One day I look at myself in the mirror, and I think -you fucking ugly bitch. And I think -I'll show them. And suddenly I am exhilirated. I can do this. The hungrier I feel the more I feel that I am winning; the more I feel that I am hurting other people, and the more I am hurting myself. That's the paradox revealed.

And so it begins again. I am tired and I am fighting myself on more fronts that I can keep track of. I've given up trying to find any sort of philosophical point in all this. I'm not even capable of spinnning a line, I can't give my thoughts a structure and my prose has gone haywire. All I know is that this is ridiculous place to be.

It's not a good position I am in. If I had to do the whole thing over again, I wouldn't.

Shostakovitch: sonata for cello and piano, Op. 40.

God, I love tuesdays.

Individual therapy followed by group therapy. I just love it. All that happiness and friendly camaraderie between the insane. It really perks me up.

The kitchenette of a hospital unit. Tatty sits curled in a chair. Enter fellow patient number 1.
Tatty: hey.
FP1: hello, how are you?
Tatty: pretty glum. You?
pause
FP1: Yup. Me too.
pause
Tatty: Christ. Do you want a cup of tea while I try and think of something interesting I've done this week?
FP1: Okay.
Tatty makes tea and as she does so a companionable silence is maintained.
Tatty: I can't think of anything I'm afraid... Oh... wait... I sat in the corner for a while and sulked.
FP1: I spoke to a new person on msn.
Tatty: yup. That does seem exciting in context, doesn't it?
Enter FP2
Tatty&FP1: how's your week been?
FP2: I'm feeling pretty grumpy.
Tatty&FP1: Yup.
FP2: but I ate a really nice coconut.

The coconut is then considered in great detail. We discuss coconuts We Have Eaten.

It's ever so boring being this kind of crazy. It's just like an awful lot of primary school wetbreak times, all melding into one another. You know- like you were expecting to be able to go and play football, but then it rained again so you have to sit inside feeling a bit pissed off with that kid who keeps trying to kick you. I got quite excited when they told me that I was suffering from "transient, stress-related paranoid ideation", which is a form of psychosis. I thought, brilliant, at last, some real action. It turns out that it just means that when I get a bit stressed I start thinking that people hate me. Sometimes I start thinking that animals and inanimate objects hate me. Occasionally I have conversations with people which I think happened and then it turns out they didn't, which is mildly embarassing. Oh, and once I thought I was hearing voices, but then it turned out I'd just left the radio on upstairs. Really, on a scale of one to exciting, that's pretty fucking dull. The whole thing is dull. That's the worst thing about it; the constant, knawing ache which is just so unexciting while at the same time filling up your whole mind. Like tooth-ache.

Individual therapy was Like Totally Jokes. I got lots of Brownie points for not having self-harmed all week and then lost them all again by admitting to having eaten a box of ibroprofen, accompanied, garcon, by a bottle of scotch. I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't even a very nice bottle of scotch. It was blended. On the other hand, they were real ibroprofen; not your own-brand Boots shit, so that sort of makes up for it. I don't usually own up to that sort of thing t therapists,; it's just rather embarassing, d'you see? But I am determined not to start lying to this one, because once I have started I wont stop until I am spinning a girls own annual version of my life and everyone is smiling at my seuccess apart from me. So I told her, and she asked why. I don't know why. It seemed like a jolly good idea at the time, and I find those little air-blisters that pills come in just about as compelling as bubble-wrap. You just want to Keep! On! Popping! Also, I have this really good theory that if they sell them in boxes of sixteen, then sixteen can't possibly be enough to in any way harm you, because if it was then small children could buy them thinking they were happy white vacuum packed smarties. Don't tell me that they just count on children not being that stupid and adults having self-restraint. They put nut allergy warnings on packets of nuts. (See, you thought I was going to say peanuts, didn't you, and that you could then cleverly point out that peanuts are LEGUMES, not nuts, but I saw through your little plan and didn't specify what kind of nuts. For I am clever. And I think ahead. Except in matters pertaining to my continued existence on this sainted planet). I don't know why I did it, and that is something which has always scared me about this whole maklarkey- that I could do myself permanent and severe damage and have no explanation better than- it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In fact, the best approximation to a reason for my stupid and pointless act of destruction- calculated, by the way, not to kill myself but just to make myself sleep for twelve hours and then feel like shit for a further twenty-four (an OD of ibroprofen makes your face prickle- did you know that?)- is that it was the boredom. I'm not feeling too well at the moment. I say that to people and they expect me to start talking in tounges or wandering around with my shoes on backwards. Actually, what it means is that I keep being a bit wierd at my friends, I find my thoughts turning rather irritatingly to ending my own life when I am meant to be thinking about the quickest way to get to Notting Hill Gate, I am overwhelmed by the prospect of housework, I can't stand the sight of my own face, and it's taken me three days to read a hundred pages of a fucking detective novel. It's really just quite fucking dull. So I thought I'd do something to take my mind off it. A little bit of entertainment for the chronically sad.

Most of the other women in group therapy are older than me. In them I see what could be my future, or what could have been my future if I was born twenty years earlier, or if I lived in a different place: DBT has only been developed in the last ten years and still isn't offered very widely in this country. In most places the old programme is still adherred to. Borderlines are trouble, they're manipulative, fraustrating and draining and they don't get better, so there's really no point trying. Also, a lot of them aren't very likeable (although I have to say that I've liked all the ones I've met). Therapist after therapist will try and help you and then, fraustated when you don't respond to the talking cure, will give up. Or you'll give up, because it isn't helping and you're bored of treading the same ground week after week. There will be drug therapy programmes started and abandoned. There will be hospitalisations. And then discharges. And then more hospitalisations. And people will look at you without much hope in their eyes, and A&E will patch you up and send you home and wait to see you again, and your doctors will sigh when they see your name, and your life will be one constant attempt to live in a world which you don't understand, and your life will be one long session of not being listened to after another, and your life will be a bit of a chaotic mess because that's what BPD is, and one in eight of you will kill yourselves. Because it is boring. And it isn't what any of us wanted to be when we grew up. But mostly because it is boring; it's so, fucking, tedious, and there doesn't seem to be much hope that it will ever be different, and no one else seems to have much hope for you either. I've seen it when I've been to casualty to get stitches. They look at me and they look at my notes, and they are awful nice after that, but in the hushed way you have with someone already marked out by death. They expect to see me again, and they expect that next time it will be worse.

I lost hope again for a bit this week and re-discovered my inner bored, damp, over-excited play-time child, and ate the damn pills. The tuesday of doom, although not spent in my favorite way, has given me a bit of my hope back. I like the people in my group. I like being able to make jokes about the whole thing to people who get the jokes, not because they are about something slightly taboo, but just because they are about our lives. Funny because true. I can throw my head back and laugh. And when I talk about my fears, people just nod and look a bit bored. I like that.

Otis Redding: I love you more than words can say

In an article in one of the weekend newspapers I came across the following passage:

"A psychiatrist I know says that people who suffer from chronic depression often attempt suicide when they are on the way down. They know they will not be capable oof it once they are in deep depression. 'They see things too clearly.' So they grasp the moment."

A loud chord struck somewhere within me; I had always thought that this was a perverse feature of myself alone. The danger times are not the times you expect, but the times when you are okay but start seeing the signs. It's then that you think- I don't know if I want to go through this again. And again. Forever.

Cleaning out the house recently I found some diaries I wrote when I was thirteen. I thought I'd thrown them out; I've always kept a diary but I rarely feel compelled to re-read them. The act of writing is a catharsis rather than an attempted record, so every now and then I have a sort of purge. These had escaped. In what I have written, I can see all the signs of a major depressive episode. I talk about hopelessness, lethargy, sleeping too much or too little. I talk about being afraid that I am going mad. I talk about ways that I might try and kill myself. Whole pages are given over to wondering if I am just making it up. In the worst bits, the same word is written over and over. This is a trick I still use, when things are very difficult and my mind is not much more than my own personal tourture chamber. When I am so low that I can barely move and I seem to exist in a state of semi-stupour I cease to be able to think of anything to say. Retaining the vague memory that writing helped, I pick a word and write it over and over again, until it ceases to mean anything and whole pages are covered. It was a shock to see this in my own childish handwriting, and to realise that this has always been with me, and probably always will be. It's not a cheering prospect.

I am lucky in many ways. My periods of acute depression rarely last for long. My moods are extremely labile. It means that I can usually keep it from getting embarassing. If I disappear for a few days, spending them lying in bed staring at the ceiling, then it is unlikely that anyone would notice. The less acute phase of depressions lasts for a lot longer, though;for months at a time I struggle about in the shallow water, occassionally getting engulfed, rising again, splashing about without muc dignity and then being sucked back. I stop being able to smile. I stop being interested in anything. I stop being able to read, or listen to music. Everything is an effort; my mind is steeped in treacle. It's for those patches, which for the last few years seem to have been more common than normality or hyperactivity, in which I think almost constantly of suicide. In the meditations, Marcus Aurelius says "In all that you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your hands", and the thought is a comfort. The knowledge that you could walk out if you wanted to makes it easier to stay. And so I keep it in the back of my mind. The other times- when the depression is acute- I don't think of suicide. I also stop self-harming. Killing yourself takes quite a lot of effort and even more firmness of purpose, and you just don't possess those when you're that ill. Also, in order to kill yourself, you have to be interested in something. You have to care enough about what happens to you to not want it to happen. The same is true of self-harm. You have to have enough of a sense of who you are to want something to keep you going through the day. You have to care. Quite a lot, actually.

The times which are really dangerous are those characterized by a particularly bleak sort of rationality. It is hard to say whether the rationality is real or illusory; whether I am seeing the world through the haze of depression, or if these really are well wieghed decisions. These times often come when I can see things are getting worse, in the very early morning, an adjunct to insomnia, when the world is steeped in the particular pre-dawn light which makes everything appear exceptionally clear but somehow flat. These were hours for smoking in, before I gave it up. I look at my life, and I see it far too clearly. I see that there are good things; that I will get better and laugh again and enjoy the sunshine and so on, in a clinton's card vision of reasons for staying alive. And I see that I will get worse again. Gravitation, innit? It's not that the bad outweighs the good, necessarily. It's not that I want to die, even. It just feels like I have looked at what my life might hold, and I don't want it. I am too tired, too buffetted. I decline politely. Thank you very much, but this just isn't for me.

Often, thoughts of actually really truly ending my own life are prompted by something rather trivial, which is a bit embarassing. Showering is a common one. The thought that every day of my life I am going to have a shower, only to get dirty again, seems so exhausting, so redolent of futility, that I just think- no. You do it if you want to, but I''m not playing this game.

The triviality of such reasons makes writing suicide notes rather hard. I know, because I've tried. One doesn't want to not leave a note, you see. That would be rather rude, when all these nice people have let you stay in their lives for a bit. A social faux pas, like not folding the towels after yourself when you go and stay with someone's parents. On the other hand, you don't really want yourself to be remembered for the rest of your life as "that girl we used to know who topped herself because she was too lazy to wash". Neither do you want to lie, not in the last document of your life. Also, I don't like cliches very much. "Good bye cruel world" just isn't for me, and I don't want to say "I can't bear it any more" because of course I can. People can bear just about anything. It's just that I don't really want to. The moment of your own planned death is a really bad time to be suffering from writers-block, but I wonder how many of the world's famous literary suicides left notes? And did they proof-read them? Proof reading your suicide note is the sort of thing that makes you feel rather self-conscious about dying by your own hand. Someone should probably make a template for notes and sell them ready made in batches of ten, like a particularly morbid thank you letter. Accompanied by a government health warning (suicide can seriously damage your health, perhaps, or Death is forever, but probably not Death can lower your sperm count because the morbidly depressed don't care much about procreation) they could probably sell just as well as razorblades.

I'd always thought that this habit of mine of contemplating suicide most when things are reasonably okay was just a strange feature of myself. Coming across that line in the paper made me realise that it isn't. And also that suicide isn't the violent and desperate act people tend to regard it as. If it isn't an act of bravery then it is at least an act of resignation. It is the result of a decision. People often make the mistake, when trying to persude you not to think about topping yourself, of ennumerating all the ways in which life can be good. The subtext is- think what you'd be missing. In effect what they are doing is showing you the cost of your action. Would-be suicides aren't stupid, though. Most of them will have worked out that cost more precisely than you can ever hope to do. With a certain sort of clarity they will have looked at the good and the bad, added them up and subtracted the one from the other, looked at the result and asked themselves if they are willing to pay it. And they have decided that they are.

I don't think suicide is wrong. I think what it does to other people is very wrong, and that has stopped me, mainly- that and a fair degree of ineptitude. I can pay the price for myself but it seems hardly fair to leave other people with your debt of guilt. Selfish it may be, but irrational it isn't. And I think that acknowledging the possibility that one might choose not to live transforms the act of living. I am here because I have chosen to be. I am not alive because sometime about twenty four years ago two people got jiggy. I am here because, sitting on the side of the bath this morning and contemplating the particular sysiphean cruelty of personal hygeine, looking at it in the rational light of yet another dawn, I decided that I am willing to pay the other price. Things will get worse again. They always do. For now I'm willing to deal with that.

Bonnie 'prince' Billy: grand dark feeling of emptiness

It's a beautiful morning. The sun is shining. Children are playing; I can hear them. My bedroom window is open and I can smell cut grass and fresh toast. I am having trouble recognising the substance of this, though. It's a less good day; a day which is more reminiscent of the bad days, when I feel further away from other people and from the corporeal world they inhabit. I feel distracted, caught up in a place with different rules.

There's something about assuming the mantle of depression which is like stepping sideways into a different world, a feature excacerbated by the concurrent presence of a personality disorder. Although it is a world which is mainly made up of big spikey lumps of PAIN it is not without its appeal. The other world, the one you've left, ceases to mean very much to you. It is strangely one-dimensional and although you can see people's faces moving you have to concentrate very hard to hear what they are saying, and then you don't really care. When I had to go and do things in the real world outside the door it seemed alien- a mixture of dream and fantasy and reality, in which people had strange faces and odd sounds came from their mouths, and things were at once too close and too far away, and everything seemed to be disconnected. When I stepped through the glass again, into the new quiet place I had found, nothing in that world had any power over me, and I was free.

In the new world, everything is black and grey. Everything is a thousand times as large. Gestures are vast. This is a world in which determinaton by fate holds absolutely. You become in your mind a sort of doomed hero, a bit part from ancient greece. You are doomed and there is nothing you can do about it. You stop trying to remove yourself from difficult situations and start trying to endure them. The ability to endure pain and suffering gives you a feeling of power. In the new world, there is no need, there is no loneliness, there is no requirement, no connection to unpredictable others; there are no daily tasks to drag yourself through. There is only self-subjugation, martyrdom, and ultimately a glorious end. You are self-sufficient. You need no one. You become oddly weightless.

There's a downside to all this, even from the point of view of someone so buggered as to actually think it is a good idea to live in such a plaace. In this new world, the one behind the mirror, you are on your own. There isn't anyone to see how amazingly strong and in control you are. No one praises you, and you want praise, because you are doing so well, you are becoming so strong. There isn't anyone to walk by your side and join in your games. Self-destroying games, although you can't see that. And so you turn to books, or songs, the vast literature of depression and glorified human misery and you find what you are looking for. Me, I found John Berryman, Robert Lowell, John Donne. Partly, you just want to know that you aren't the sole inhabitant of this brave new world; but it's more than wanting company. You want the words to express what you can't fiind a way to say, but it's more than wanting to tell people where you are. You have fuck all interest, to be honest, in telling people what you feel, because feeling is exactly what you are trying not to do. You want the words to tell people, not how you feel, but how fucking exhillarating it is here. How fucking marvellously free and defiant you are. You want the words to say "I am not coming back". You'd sing it from the roof-tops if you could. I've escaped, i've left, and I'm not coming back.

I'm not kidding about this. That world is very seductive. It's hard to explain, just because all the reference pints are the same, how everything seemed (seems, still, most of the time) different to me. To other people I was perhaps a bit of a worry, an odd and irrational being, intent on a series of petty and grubby acts of self-destruction which escalated a bit too far. II don't honestly know what other people thought; people were unfailingly nice to me, long beyond the point at which they could have walked away, and it is only occassionally, in a chance comment, that I get an inkling of what I must be like to watch. To me, I was... what? Not quite human. I was shimmering. I was in control. I was pure and strong as steel or bone and I was laughing at everyone from the other side of the mirror. Well, I was bonkers, obviously. Except that I wasn't, not from where I was standing; my behaviour had an absolute logic to it, a perfect simplicity and order. The only way I can explain it is that I had stopped being real and started being a part of a game which I had constructed for myself. And I was winning. Well, you know, obviously I was winning- I made the rules. What's the point of inventing a game you aren'tt supremey good at? Admittedly, it was a game with shifting goal-posts. Everytime I got close to what I was trying to achieve, I had to raise the bar. But from such a self-contained and self-controlled world, why would I want to come back? Why would I want to start living in a world where the rules were proscribed by someone else and required abiding by such incomprehensible pronnouncements as "thou shalt eat three meals a day" and "thou shalt apply antispetic to thy wounds". Oh, I know that it was nothing cleverer than running away, a sort of abnegation of all reponsibility. I know it was childish and rubbish and self-indulgent and annoying. But it felt grander than that. A lot like emo, in fact- a depth to which I have always tried not to stoop.

I am coming back, now. The real world has started to take on a more solid aspect. I think I will always live with one foot in either place. I wont ever see razors in the same way; will still think of injury in the language of desire. I don't know if I'll ever be able to view my body as wholly mine, or as somethiing to actually like. I think I will always be too ready to dismiss need. I am coming back, though. I do things I wouldn't have done before. I am more enthusiastic for mundanity, less eager for grand gesture. I care more about other people.

The trouble is, although I am coming back, I miss it, particularly on days like today, when things are difficult and I feel ucomfortable in my skin and can see nothing good in myself or the world. Lonely days. I know all the reasons I can't live there, but then it isn't really a place where you live; it's a place where you explode in a glorious burst of colour. It would be so easy to slip back. I want to. I really, really do.

JSBach: violin sonata no.1 for in G minor

I am oddly calm and at peace with myself and the world this evening. The shades are coming down; extraordinary cloud formations in dark kinds of grey float across the patch of suburban London I can see from my window. The dafoldils in the vase on my desk are coming out of bud. In the kitchen, I am making soup. I have had a shower and a whiskey and soda; I'm in my pajamas with another of the same. Listening to Bach. It isn't feeling that all is right in the world, nor some kind of Pangloss-esque optimism. I don't mean redemption and I don't even mean all will be well and... Out of nowhere a passage from Romans comes into my mind- chapter eight, I think. Paul claims that "all things work together for the good of them that love the lord", and I presume he means by all things not just the nice ones but the really bloody nasty as well. Out of the terrifying chaos of good and bad comes something solid and true. A thought which has returned to me often over the last few days: that out of all the good and bad- out of the particular, unique combination of good and bad- I came, and that without the bad I would have been something different altogether. There is a sort of reconcilliation that comes from accepting that even the trully horrific bits of your life played their part in your own self's fashioning.

Tonight, my perceptions, my sense of peace, have the particular clarity which comes only from having been buggered in the head for a while and then having it stop. It's not unlike the feeling one gets when a heavy load is put down- an inner sense of weightlessness. It's been a hard week. I spent the weekend with my grandparents. I love my grandparents. In many ways I think they are the sum total of the ways in which my family are good. However. Spending time with them is a little wearing. My grandmother is obsessed with my lack of boyfriend. -So, darling, Do you have a boyfriend? is her usual opening gambit. After this has been answered in the negative, she will talk about something else for a while and then, when I am least expecting it, she will fire out -Why don't you have a boyfriend? -Well, I, uh... After this we have -Do you want a boyfriend, -Is there anyone you would like to be your boyfriend, -Why don't you get yourself a boyfriend, and, if I am really lucky, -so, then, darling, do you have a girlfriend? No, nanny. I don't. And I don't know why. It's not a moral thing, if that's what you're asking. In the words of Johnny Cash, I guess things just happen that way.

I am a constant disappointment to her, and have been for years, with respect to my lack of boyfriend. Sometimes I am tempted to make one up. A peer of the realm, possibly, or if not that then someone wholly and utterly unsuitable- a plumber, perhaps, or a peadophile. I would like to see how far I could push my powers of invention without making her suspicious. The only thing that stops me is that she would ask to meet him. She's a forceful woman, despite being about five feet tall and having severe Parkinson's. I'm quite scared of her. I'd have to get someone to pretend, and it's just one step from there to Victorian farse and men disguised as women pretending to be other men hiding underneath tables. I am resigned to being a faliure in her eyes.

My grandfather, on the other hand, is a quietly pessimistic supporter of the UK independence party. He likes Wagner. He likes watching opera with me. This time, he made me watch Strauss' Elektra at ten a.m. on Easter Monday, an act of such unusual cruelty that it ought to be part of basic routine in the Guantanamo Bay area. After the full, unbroken two hours of the film version I felt like I had been beaten about the head with a big stick and then had nasty, insanitary objects inserted into my brain via my ears. The odd thing is, I did quite want to see it. Just not in the morning. On a monday.

All this, and they remind me so painfully of what it is like to have a family. There are photographs of my mother everywhere. I try not to look, because it is too paainful to see her face. I can't think about that. Not now. Not yet. I can't deal with mmy grandmother saying how proud she would have been of me. I don't think she would haave been. Not now. Not here.

I took the train home yesterday in a mood of utter bleakness. I dislike trains intensely. It's something to do with being suspended between there and here; where you have come from and where you are going. You shed identifying marks and for a while you exist in transit, in a vacuum, no longer part of the lives of those you have visited, nor yet a part of your own. I am afraid that I will forget who I am; that somehow I will be lulled by the rhythmn of the wheels and the passing fens, and I will stop being myself, and continue for years, one train after another, dark sea to dark sea, broken only by strip-lit platforms with cigarette butts. The alternative is to return to my life, which, seen from outside, seen from a seat on the WAGN intercity service from Ipswich to London Liverpool Street, seems to be so empty as to barely exist. A small and tightly bound routine all that keeps me from floating freely into negation.

I got home. I sat for a long time just inside the doorway as a patch of light from the window moved slowly across the wall. I sat in the waiting quiet next to a pile of unopened mail. I got up, poured myself a drink, and sat back down again. It's as close to killing myself as I've come for a whille. Unfortunately, at some point during the last week I threw out all my blades. Every single last one; every beautiful, glorious piece of pressed steel. I don't quite know why I did it. There wasn't a moment of truth, a revelation or a turnin point. No ceremonials, no fanfares, no ray of light across my face as I consigned them to the rubbish bin. The opposite of these things. I did it because for the first time in more years than I care to count I felt that I had the choice.

The upshot was, though, that feeling bleak and feeling empty and feeling like I didn't want to resume my life but didn't want to run away, and feeling more lonely than it is possible to describe, and feeling like there was no where I could turn and nothing I could do to just. make it. fucking. stop. I didn't even have the means to kill myself. No blades. No pills. No rope. I sat on. After a while, I got up and went out.

And now peace. In the time it's taken me to write this the evening has settled to night. The candle's burnt down a bit. The soup is probably done, although to be honest I have no idea how one knows when to stop cooking soup. I feel calm and resolute and in a silent far off way I am glad to be alive. If I hadn't thrown out the blades, I wouldn't be here. If I hadn't felt like dying I wouldn't be here. That doesn't change either event. The bad is still bad and the good is still good. I don't believe in that sort of redemption. But you work with what you have to hand, and with what I had to hand this moment is what I have made.

(I am hoping that this principle holds true for soup).

Blind Willie Johnson: dark was the night

Last night I passed someone in a pub doorway. Poking my memory a bit, I realised that it was a woman I recognised from the waiting room of the psychiatric unit. She was the orange hair and rouged cheeks sort; the sort I hope I don't become but worry, when I catch sight of myself in the mirror with blusher up to my eyebrows and my hair sticking in all directions, that I am already.

Recognising people like this is an occupational hazard (if you can regard being a member of the psyche services as an occupation, which is debatable at best). It's also supremely odd, and another indicator of how uncomfortable we still are with mental illness. It feels, sometimes, like we ought to have a code; or like, perhaps, we already do- too much rouge, a battery of scars, eyes that dart from side to side and never quite settle, collar bones protruding just that bit too much. The trouble is, although it allows us to recognise one another, it also allows the perfectly and unthinkingly sane to recognise us. And, then again, why would we even want to recognise one another? Mistrust doesn't polaraise us simply into the mad and the non-mad. Waiting to be seen in the psyche building I find myself looking sideways at people, trying to work out from their behavour what they are there for, wondering if they are sort of okay, like me, or if they are one of the really bad ones. My first few sessions in group therapy, aside from spending most of my time recasting the Breakfast Club from those around me, I was repeatedly reminded of a line from Casablanca. Captain Renault says to Rick: "I've often speculated why you don't return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator's wife? I like to think you killed a man. It's the Romantic in me." My eyes slide sideways to those around me and I think -what are you here for?. Did ya kill a man? Did ya? It's the impish bit in me, the perfectly sane bit with the slightly distrurbed sense of humour, which makes me want to ask, and makes me want to chat blithely. I try not to; I am supposed to be crazy, after all. I have my reputation to think about.

I think there is a lot to be said for challenging the notion of illness as applied to the mind. In my own case, those character traits which, beyond my control, cause me such difficulty, when brought under my control can be not just okay but rather wonderful. I like my capacity for throwing myself absolutely into something or someone; I like my capacity for sponteneity and for generosity. Learn to control them, and my personality, despite containing all the same elements, would no longer be "disordered". In fact, I think "disorder" is a bit of a misnomer. My personality is fine, thank you very much. What it isn't is necessarily in my control. It's like a big and unrully dog which pulls me every which way; it is too strong for me, and so veers from one extreme to another with frightening regularity. So the method of treatment I am going through is this: to use drugs to make the etremes of mood I suffer from less severe. And then to teach me how to manage my own mind.

All this also ignores the fact that a lot of time I, and many others with similar and even radically different diagnoses, are fine a lot of the time. A person with bipolar disorder is not always up or always down. The schizophrenic isn't always hearing voices. Sometimes, when you tell a new person about your disorder, your days spend in therapy, they look at you like you have cheated them. All this time they thought you were acting normally, and all this time you have actualy been crazy! Crazy I say! Oh, you may have been hiding it well, but it was there, under the surface, looking out through your eye-holes. It doesn't work like that. It doesn't underly everything I do. When I am well, it isn't hidden, lurking and unpleasant but cleverly masked; it just isn't there. My mind, then, is in one piece, whole and unsullied and as sane as any of us.

As for the rest of the time. Well. I'm not so scary to look at.

I admit it. I'm a fraud. Most of the time, I'm not that crazy at all.

Fiona Apple: the way things are

And the moral, ladies and gentlemen, is that rum, anaesthetic post-rock and a depressive personality don't mix. Or, rather, they mix excellently, but shouldn't be allowed to. In this respect they are not dissimilar to, for example, the components of a long island iced tea. It's not wrong, exactly; it's just a very, very bad idea.

Today has been a day of faliure, mostly. I failed to remember that it is good friday and the doctor's would be shut, which means I couldn't pick up a prescription and I will spend all weekend enduring the early stages of peroxitine discontinuation syndrome, which is rather unpleasant. I failed to get my boots reheeled, because they are, apparently, too far buggered. Which is a shame, because they were nice boots. I have been quite successful at eating chocolate and reading trash fiction, which means I am also now being successful at feeling rather sick. Other things I might have done successfully: abandoned all last vestiges of my intellectual integrity.

I don't know what it was that made me equate intellectual goodness with a sort of cold-eyed anti-emotionalism. I'd like to say that I got into the wrong crowd at university. I don't think that would be true, though, although it didn't help- if my friends had been fluffy eyed medics and students of the natural sciences, perhaps, instead of a bunch of english students with a love of gallows humour- well, perhaps I wouldn't be sitting here writing this. Perhaps I'd be married and living in suburbia. More likely I would be dead of despair and fraustration and a broken neck. Alternatively, it may have begun in a teenage period spent listening to radiohead, drinking gin, and reading Eliot and Pound and Plato and Euripedes and cutting myself up with razor blades when really I should just have read Sylvia Plath and be done with it. I did read the Belljar when I was about fourteen, between, I seem to remember, Anna Karenina and the rather sinister We. I thought she should just get a grip and a smile and be done with it. It smacked, to me, of a lack of willpower. Anna Karenina, now there was someone I could identify with. Proud. Strong. Dead. That sort of thing.

It would be much too easy to say that this intellectual position is a manifestation of my disorder. It's a tempting inferrence to make, but one which, I think, hints at too much time on the therapist's couch. You could say, though, that my fear and mistrust of emotion, my equation of emotion with weakness, faliure, and getting beaten up, has led to this liking for the clear-eyed, the cold-eyed, the icy-hearted. The modernist. The nineteenth centuary as a concept has never realy appealed to me. I don't like the music, the art, or the writing. I've always been an eighteenth centuary sort of girl- earlier, perhaps- the renaissance and all that came with it has always appealed to me. The triumph of reason, the mind unfettered, all this sitting easily with a sort of thoughtless brutality.

In order to try and combat my excess of self-hate and absolute lack of self worth, my lack of compassionate feeling towards mysef so extreme that I can feel compassion for myself only when I can see myself bleeding, my therapist gave me a set of affirmations- mantras, if you like. There's a large zen component to DBT, a huge element of what they call mindfullness but is in essence a form of practical meditation. When she gave them to me, I stuffed them in the bottom of my bag, slightly embarassed. I showed them to people at a dinner party, held them up for ridicule. What toss, I thought, what embarassing nonsense. They are along the lines of "I promise to treat you like a special loved friend; I promise to care for you through sickness and despair; I promise to stop comparing you to any other living soul; I promise to recognise your talents; I promise to give you your freedom." It makes me feel slightly queezy. This is the sort of thing in which I do not believe. It is the antithesis of everything I hold good- of rigour, objectivism, clarity, control. Strength. Panic rises. It is the opposite of strength.

Last night, I got it out again. I looked at it. I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could actually believe any of these things? Wouldn't it be nice if they were true? I thought, maybe the rigour I apply to myself has gone too far. I thought, maybe emotion and lack of control are not the same thing. A few weeks ago, as I protested once again that the world wold be just much bloody better if we didn't have emotions, my skills therapist rejoindered in exasperation that this just wasn't an option. I didn't have a reply to that, because it was a new thought. I have always believed that with enough self-control, enough selfflagellation in the face of perceived weakness, emotion would just go away, and leave me pure as bone, and clean, and strong. I did a quick strawpoll of some of my friends. They're all good rigorous people not given to embarassing outbursts. Suurely they aim, as I do, to negate emotion entirely? But no, it seems they don't. I am puzzled. I put the thought aside.

And then last night I look again at the mantas and get the thought back out. And I think -why not? It suddenly occurs to me that, whatever I am doing at the moment, it isn't working. My emotions keep bubbling up like tree roots through badly laid tarmac, leaving cruel lines across my skin. The resurgance of the natural. Get the symbolism. I go back to Eliot and flick through, read Gerontian again, and for the first time see not the complex network of allusion, the clever footwork, the technique, but what the poem is trying to express. It isn't devoid of emotion. It is a well crafted vehicle for it. Perhaps- perhaps my intellectualism too has been misplaced. Well, not misplaced. I'll always be more Dorothy Parker than Sylvia Plath- a raised eyebrow, a martini and a joke so dark it's almost invisible. None of this soul-baring nonsense. But perhaps I have been liking the things I like for the wrong reasons, or for only half of the possible reasons. Liking the application of technique without trying to understand what the technique was for. The great morass beneath the words- the space, the darkness filled with unnameable feelings- that terrifies me. So I didn't look. I kept my eyes on the surface.

Suddenly, I think- maybe it is possible to allow emotion and to harness it, to not be out of control, to not be weak. Maybe I could allow myself to feel. Just a little bit. Maybe that wouldn't be weakness. Maybe my mind has been right along. Maybe I should give it some credit. Stop weighing it in the balance and finding it wanting. Perhaps I could try making a few of those promises. Because what is so wrong with liking yourself? Where is the weakness in that? And what is so wrong in listening to your needs, instead of punishing yourself for needing? I look at the mantras and think -fuck it, why not? Maybe I could try liking myself for a change. If it doesn't work, I can always stop.

I pin the sheet up in the bathroom. While doing so, I make a mental note to take them down before anyone comes round. I may have lost my intellectual integrity, but I still have some pride.

Meanwhile, back in communist Russia: Cusp

Five minutes to midnight. Drinking rum.

Today seems to have been one long conversation about love (which would make a lovely title for a play, or is possibly already a short story by Raymond Chandler). After dinner, a friend says something about falling in love easily. I wince inwardly. Falling in love easily is my stock in trade; seems to be particularly pronounced these days. I fall in love like I breathe, or like I sleep when I am well. Suddenly. Completely. Unthinkingly. Deeply. It's almost a running joke. Another friend says I should stop falling in love with everyone who is nice to me. This is slightly unfair. I don't fall in love with everyone who is nice to me. What I fall in love with, automatically and unfailingly, is anyone who is nice to be when they don't have to be; when they don't want something or need something from me, when they have no reason to court me, when their small act of kindness is wholly unwarranted. That is what makes me fall, and keep on falling.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because it is easy it isn't real. It isn't a passing whim. I don't easily forgoe the kindness. I don't easily fall out of love. I don't ask for much in return (and there's the rub). It's just that I can't belive that anyone would like me, be kind to me, for who I am, and not for what they can get from me. For the same reason I have always mistrusted those who professed to find me attractive; my first thought is- what do you want from me. Actually, that's not true. My first thought is often- how could you do this to me? A profession of attraction seems so much like a betrayal.

But. Today has been a lot about love. In skills training they say something I find incomprehensible. They tell me that a typical BPD trait is to decide that you like someone and then, in order to make them like you back, to give them anything. To give them everything. They ask me if I recognise this. I laugh. Of course I fucking do. My belief in the power of the gift is absolute. The most important thing on earth is that people should like you, and so you do what you can to make them happy, to make them safe, to make them.. yes... grateful. And that;s where it would seem like manipulation if it wasn't so deep, and so desperate. In skills training, they tell me that this is wrong. They say that if you try and fulfil someone else's needs at the expense of your own then it will lead to them feeling put upon and you feeling resentful. Something slides into focus. I am shocked. How could something so simple have eluded me for so long?

I have found it difficult for so long because the whole thing seems impossible and not for the likes of me. Parallel to my belief about the power of giving is the belif that I am just not the kind of girl people fall in love with. I'm difficult. I'm ugly. I'm angry. I'm crazy. . My gut reaction to falling in love- to someone kind- is to do anything and everything they ask so that they stay kind, so that they don't remove the chameleon mask and start hurting me, because hurting is what other people do to girls like me. It's what I was born to, if not what I deserve. I fall in love easily and when I am in love I want to give all. For what is love if not a willingness to give all? And in my frightened, disordered mind, there is no difference between the willingness and the actuality.

On the tube home, I feel cowed by the easy consonance of flesh on flesh. All of London seems to be in love; perhaps it's the time of year. Spring has this effect. The friend that I go for dinner with talks of his partner in easy terms. I wonder. This sort of confidence makes no sense to me. The knowledge that someone will be there when you call. The knowledge that there is a person who cares for you, whom you care for. But perhaps it isn't spring; perhaps it is just growing up, because everyone seems to be making it at the moment- not love, but the more important, the relationship, the shared history, the mutual care, the kindness. I fall in love with anyone kind, but I cannot imagine being sure of finding kindness in return. I cannot, after all this time, imagine being in love with someone who is in love with me; I have forgotten what it feels like to be desired, to be liked. If I ever knew. I wonder if this will ever happen to me. If there will ever be a person who doesn't make excuses six weeks in which parse as you're too crazy. Who isn't deterred by my scars. Who is as willing to teach as I am willing to learn. I wonder if all this love is just not for me.

Barber: agnus dei

It's easy to turn a good line, and I almost had myself convinced back there. Unfortunately I ommitted to add the caveat- that simple isn't the same as easy. I have it on good authority (a mathematician Phd with a penchant for irish folk music, since you didn't ask) that very high level pure mathematics has a certain elegant simplicity about it, and I'm sure said mathematician would laugh at the simplicity of the differential equations I turned myself inside out over at school, but I can tell you with a fair degree of assurance and a battalion of bad exam results behind me that simple it might be but easy it bloody well isn't.

Now it's sunday. I'm communing with my cats, my sofa, and my hangover. The air in the house has the metallic tang of blood and there is a weakness about my knees which says that although blood may be present, it isn't where it ought to be, viz., in my veins. I feel moderatly disgusted with myself but, more than that, I feel ashamed and disappointed. I've failed again, and I was doing quite well there for a while. I know what happened- I got too ahead of myself, ran too fast again, and then fell, bump, onto something sharp. I should learn to more quickly mistrust that glint in my eye.

I'm feeling pretty fraustrated with DBT. I'll tell you why, and I'll admit it's quite petty. I'm fraustrated because I'm not very good at it and I hate things that I'm not very good at. I'm a reasonably bright lass; there haven't been many times in my life where I couldn't understand, where I wasn't moderatley able. We're discounting sports here, because obviously I was shit at those. I've always been reasonably good at therapy, for the certain values of 'good' that therapy takes. I'm cooperative, I show willing, I talk, I see the links and profess to renewed understanding every now and again. The fact that I've never really got anywhere never really put me off, because deep down I thought I didn't really need it. What were they going to tell me that I didn't already know or couldn't read in a book? It was an intellectual exercise, and I would be able to do those standing on my head, if I could stand on my head, which I can't because, like I said, I'm shit at sports.

Now I find myself in the same position I did when I got an unclassified in a maths exam and realised that I had reached the point where blagging wasn't going to help me and, scary as it seemed, I was going to have to do some fucking work, much of which would consist in staring at a list of letters and funny signs and wondering what the shit I was supposed to do with them. I never did understand how you could change the direction of gravity in mechanics problems. Surely gravity just goes, uh, down? All through my life I have felt that human interaction was some sort of mechanics problem; it has rules, but they don't make sense to me, and I can never keep them in my head long enough to be able to apply them adequately. No matter how hard I try, I always get the direction of gravity wrong and get in a mess and yes, I do know that golf-balls can't travel faster than the speed of light but that's the answer I keep getting.

Now, someone is willing to teach me all these things I ought to knowbut don't. For two hours a week I go to skills training and a woman with a white board patiently explains to me about the necessity of balancing your needs with those of other people; how to tell when demands have to be tolerated and when it is appropriate to make demands yourself. She draws a picture to illustrate to me what happens when you put people on a pedestal. I'm good at that, because in my head each new person is clean, frash and unsullied- a talisman for me, the person who is going to make me normal. People aren't talismen, though, and so each new person fails and I am the one who gets hurt and angry because all that is broken is my skewed view of life. Again.

I sit and listen, and I want to cry. I want to have an all out tantrum like you haven't had since your first day at primary school- the rolling on the floor hammering your fists on the ground and refusing to get up sort of tantrum, because I just can't fucking DO this. Every neuron in my brain screams out against being forced to work in new paths. I come up against a stark and unpleasant truth: that my intellect and my emotions are out of kilter. The former compensates almost entirely for the latter, and now, for the first time, I am forced to put weight on my emotions. As a child I had a lazy eye and I used to wear a patch over the good one to make the lazy one work, and it hurt, and I couldn't see properly, and I looked like a prat. This feels the same.

If someone breaks your back then the muscles on one side grow large to make up for the wasting on the weak side. Other people might not notice; you can walk straight, just, and only you know the pain you are in. Pride and the fact that you are mannaging, sort of, stop you getting help. If, for some reason, you are eventually forced to go to physiotherapy, your props will be removed. You will be stripped bare and all the weaknesses of the damaged part will be exposed. They will make you fall again and again. You will be unable to walk; you will be like a child again and you will be so fraustraed that you will want to leave, because your body willl just not do what it is told. I want to leave. I've managed to opperate normally for years, hiding the things that I'm bad at behind repartee and an ability to talk about the theory of psychoanalysis. There was no conversation I couldn't turn to the general, to some area which I could deal with according to my intellect. And now I find myself faced with a woman asking me how I felt before I cut myself, and although I can give her psycho-social chapter and verse she just repeats the question and I can't answer her, because I don't know. I am wordless. I can't name even one emotion.

Simple isn't the same as easy. Simple is being able to follow the theory through with my mind and know the answer. The other bit- the living the theory, the putting weight on my emotions and hoping against hope that they grow stronger because this just hurts too damn much- that's hard. If it was maths I could walk away. I could walk away anyway, but, oddly, it is the very difficulty which makes me stay. Because I'm stubborn. Because I'm a persistent bitch. Because I'm buggered if I'm going to be beaten. And, mostly, because I know- have known all along- that the weakness is there, and covering it up has exhausted me, and I don't want to do it anymore. There have been so many times when I wanted to tell someone, but I have never known how; I don't have the words and I find it hard to cry, and I was desperate, and self harm was the only thing I could think of, and mostly people discounted that, too, because I'd pulled off the charade so well- don't I seem so bright and in control?- surely nothing could really be wrong? There is a particular horror in being voiceless; I dream about it a lot- about screaming and not being heard. I didn't know how to tell people how scared and desperate I was. Finding someone who can see that- who can see through the smoke and mirrors I've erected to live, to the bit of me that is essentially a bit shit- is humiliating, fraustrating, and cross-making, but it's also a releif. In the dark hours I have wanted nothing more than to be helped. Now there's a woman with a white-board who says she knows how. What have I got to lose? Apart from my dignity, and that was, truth be told, pretty sullied already.

Nick Cave: easy money

I'm reposting this- it's from a few days ago, and doesn't seem to have worked properly the first time. I'm really a bit not very good when it comes to computers.



I'm sitting in my attic with the lights off, laptop on my knee, looking out through the skylight at the city, lit up. Drinking wine, smoking illlicit cigarettes. Listening, as the title of the post suggests, to Nick Cave.

I feel intensely sad tonight. I have nights like this; ones where I feel that somewhere along the line I have lost my skin, and my nerves are open to the wind and the air. Sometimes, looking out at the city is the sadest thing there is. I seem to see a network of people struggling to be human; people cutting and burning and starving and drinking and fighting because they are trapped inside their minds and don't know how to get out. Each man an island, bounded by his skin. Every person fighting for something. A fight of desperation; a silent screaming of finger nails and teeth and bared souls, and not kowing where to turn; being backed into a corner and each of us so trapped into our own worlds that we are unable to reach out and touch one another, even when that brief touch is all that we need. All across the city, men are beating their wives. What I am learning is that at the last account the only one you fight is yourself.

This is a truth I am struggling to understand at the moment; which comes to me as something new and startling. So bare with me if it doesn't make much sense.

I long ago lost faith with the rock-bottom solution to woes. The idea that eventually you hit rock-bottom and then there is nowhere to go but up. I lose track of the number of times I have been at the lowest point there is. I can give you a selection from the comedy array. Three a.m. a week before my mum died, cutting up my legs in the cublicle of a hospice toilet. Passing out through hunger and blood-loss the morning of one of my final exams. Spending seven days scared shitless that I was going to die because on a drunken whim I'd eaten thirty paracetamol and a bottle of cheap red wine. Perhaps each time I've been temporarily spurred on to something: to seek better help, to try harder in therapy, to go cold turkey on booze or fags or razor-blades. Truth be told I wasn't spurred I was scared, and fear never lasts for long. You sober up, your wounds heal, your kidneys stop complaining, and you say you won't go there again, but here isn't there, even when here is just a few cuts and a few pills and a few drinks and a few lies away from a gibbering heap on the floor and the ignominy of hospitalisation. Rock bottom is nothing but a series of foothills you can traverse for years.

After I had abandoned hope in the moment of truth cure, I put my faith in therapy. I have believed for so long that someone could say something which would cure me; which would make the pain and anguish stop, which would transfiguure the past, put things into perspective and give me an incontravertible reason for getting well. I have thought that this is what the difficuly series of hours in treatment rooms was working up to; I was playing along until the magical denumount. The denumount whch would turn everything around; make my past vanish and my present into something brave and new. When that happened, I would stand up and say that I was cured, no longer subject to the random grabs of all the world can chuck at your head. I have been waiting for years for this.

I am beginning to realise that it will never happen. I don't mean that therapy doesn't work. I firmly believe tthat it does. That if nothing else it gives you an etiology; you learn to understand how you ended up here, in order that you don't end up here again. You can learn skills, and you can examine yourself and get a degree of self-knowledge which allows you to be useful to yourself. In the end, though, this is all that it can give you. It can't make you stop breaking yourself. There will never be a reason stong enough for that.

I can talk for hours about the reasons for my self-harm. I can say that it gives me power over myself and the world. I can say that it gives me comfort; that it allows me to feel compassion. I can say that it regulates my ooods. That it is simply something that I like to do. All these things are true, up to a point. But in the end, I can either face or not face the fact that the only person I am hurting is myself; that the only life being damaged is my own. I can go on being proud of that damage, or I can put down the razor blade, walk outside, and go and play in the sunshine. At some point you come face to face with the truth that the choice is yours. The sunshine will always be full of voices, ghosts and demons. The light will always be an overlay on darkness, one step away from fear and pain and disintegration. That is part of what it is to be human. I am coming to understand that what I am doing to myself, ultimately, doesn't change a fucking thing. If it proves a point, then it proves a point only in the illusory world of mirrors I have built to avoid the real hard one outside. At some stage in my life, through a whole set of circumstances, I chose to pick up a blade. At some point I can chose to put it down. Just as there was never really a reason strong enough to make me start, there will never be a reason strong enough to make me stop. Perhaps it's about coming to terms; perhaps it's just about growing up. Perhaps it's about giving up my fascination with pain and death and all the shades they come in and developing instead a fasination with what life can give me. With what I can get by turning away from myself and facing the world. Just as nothing made me pick up a blade the first time and apply it to my skin, nothing can make me put it down and walk in the dangerous air. It's as simple as that.

Which is not a simple thing to understand.

The Meters: handclapping song

I bought an i-pod today.

I drank a lot of coffee today.

I did many, many things today.

Yesterday, something tipped me over the edge from 'feeling quite okay actually' to 'manic as hell'. I say something. I mean individual therapy. After an hour I felt like I had been hit around the head repeatedly with a brick. A very big brick. Maybe a brick the size of a TREE or a HOUSE. Maybe a brick the size of MANHATTEN. I don't know how big manhatten is or even how you spell it but I am thinking that being hit round the head with a brick that size would kind of hurt. So. That is how I felt. Like someone had turned my mind inside out and scraped at the lining ever so, ever so thoroughly. Like I had been given the mental equivalent of a smear-test.

So I did what I always do when things get hairy, when things start to hurt. I ran the fuck away. My mind somehow split away from the pain and ran laughing and skipping to somewhere less real.

All day I have been running running running. Talking nineteen to the dozen, laughing, waving my hands in the air oh yes oh yes oh castles made of thought and breath and imagination. Ignoring the obvious truth, that sure as eggs is eggs my girl what goes up must come down and you no wot I meen. I don't know when the downswing will hit me. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the day after. But soon. And it will hurt; it will hurt like a bitch and it will hurt more than last time or the time before or the time before that because every time I have more invested in it, and every time I am running a little harder, and every time I think [-this one will be different].

I applied for jobs. Ignoring the fact that half the time I am not well enough to drag myself to the hospital, let alone put on my good face and go to work. I went to see people. So many people. So much time to make up for. I must see people, I must show them that I am well, that things have changed, that this is a new start, look, a new beginning, I am going to take up running and I am going to live on oranges and I am going to learn latin and I am going to read Foucault and I am going to repaint my house and I am going to get an ipod and I am going to have a party and I am going to learn to play the piano and I am going to do my garden and I am going to...

In the end, it is sheer exhaustion more than anything else which drags me down. You can't run that hard, that fast, without your muscles filling up with acids. And you can't run from yourself without it catching up with you and kicking the shit out of you through sheer fucking spite. Afterwards, when I am back down again, I will hate myself for this, for being too much. For talking too loudly and laughing too often and waving my hands too wildly and making too many promises (and breaking them) and having plans which are just too, fucking, grandiose. It will feel uncannily like waking up with a hangover and remembering, bit by bit, what you did and said and who with and to whom. I will have the same sense of having been out of control, out of my mind. Not quite there. At the moment, though, it feels like running down a hill too fast. I remember doing this as a child- helping at harvest and then in the evening running down the newly stubbled field, and running too fast, and then the moment in which you are neither running nor falling. Your legs are fighting to keep up with your head and if you stop you will fall and so you have no choice but to go faster until, in the end, you come crashing down, hard and hard, over and over, and your knees are bloodied and your chest is aching and you feel you will never stand again. That is just the cycle I go through. Right now, I am neither running nor falling. Soon, when I am going as fast as I can, and still trying to go faster, I will fall.

This feeling of intense, bubbling, over-flowing well-being is illusory.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that, conversely, the depressions are real. I have long ago ceased to romanticize that blank, that desperate darkness. I don't want to be this happy, and I don't want to be that sad. Neither of them are real. What is real is somewhere in the middle, some form of compromise; I might be the only person who aspires to mundanity. To live a life not in black or white but in all the glorious, beautiful, intermediate shades of grey.

Hell, though, at least I've got an i-pod out of it. And I tell you this. It's fucking beautiful. And they don't come in grey.