Magnetic Fields: all the umbrellas in London

I'm ill again. Sitting on the sofa (sober) surrounded by a detritus of tissues, orange peel, bits of weekend newspapers, locket wrappers. The fact that my immune system seems to have wholly packed up (this being the second cold I have had in three weeks) is slightly concerning me. I'd put it down to anaemia but I haven't been doing anything to cause anaemia- my habits are healthier now than they have been for three or four years but I seem to be getting more and more ruun down. My anxiety gave way to bitterness fairly quickly- that I should not be reaping the rewards of my attempts at health and happiness. I am using my ill-health and general snotiness as an excuse to be a shamefully self-indulgent miserablist for the day.

I've been leading an odd, peripatetic sort of life in the last few days, walled up in an artificial hole of ipod and sunglasses, trying to avoid humanity, wandering around bars and cafes. Truth be told, it's been a fucking odd few days and it's left me with both the desire to get immensely, inhumanly, unforgivably drunk, and a feeling that, yes, all the umbrellas in London couldn't stop this rain. Not that it's actually raining. That was metaphor, innit.

It's a well known fact that crazies attract crazies, the damaged find the damaged, like reverse brownian motion, like somehow all the damage and desperation just makes us sticky. Magnetism. Static electrictiy. Like attracts like and somehow I attract the worst sort of lunatics of them all. Most of them aren't even that crazy; they're just a bit wet and, you know, sad. This is possibly a varient of the principle on which the vulnerable attract abusers, people who will take advantage of their vulnerability, of their inability to draw a veil over their weaknesses. There will always be that sort of manipulative cunt out there, and hell knows I've met a few; this is just why the cylcle of abuse is, well, cyclical. That's not the prnciple I mean, though, quite. I just mean that people seem to be able to smell my instability from ten paces, or maybe they recognise my desire for connection, or maybe, as I was once told, I just have an open sort of face.

Walking back from a rehearsal on friday, a slightly sinister man tried to follow me home. I was angry and frightened, a bad combination for me, particuilarly when it's men I am dealing with, because I will do most about anything to make them go away and stop freaking me the hell out. In this case I gave him my number, too discombobulated and disconnected to make up a false one, thinking only of how to get him to leave me alone on that dark street in that moment. He's called me about every half an hour since. Part of me is quite impressed. It's been, you know, three days now and I haven't answered any of his calls except one at half past fucking eight this morning, when I was too damn asleep to press the reject button. I shouted at him and put the phone down. In the next three quarters of an hour he called me fifteen times. Fifteen! Christ alive. Does't the man have anything better to do? It's not as if he could even see me that well; it was dark, you know, and I was wearing heels and he was quite short, so that what light there was could have afforded him a view of, at best, the insides of my nostrils.

This has added a slight and anxious edge of unreality to the proceedings of the weekend. Which have been bizarre. Some girls get left for another woman. Some girls get left for another man, Me, I just got left for the catholic church. Oh yes. This man didn't realise he was gay, he didn't realise he wanted to emigrate, he didn't even realise that he didn't much like me; he realised that he was a Catholic. I have been stood up for God. That's right. God. Worse, I had to go and watch. Would any of your exes invite you to and see them consumate their relationship with their new found, better, funnier, sexier and, oh yes, deffinately more powerful, love? And would they expect you to be proud? And go for lunch afterwards? If they do, you are crazier than I am. Oh, and there's nothing like realising that as a result of that wonderful institution, confession, the priest taking the service probably knows more about my sex life than I disclose to even my nearest and dearest. Hell, he probably knows more about my sex life than I do, since I tend to blank these things out if I can help it at all.

He was a nice chap, this soon-to-be-Catholic. I don't think I thought it was going anywhere, but I fall in love like nothing on earth and he was kind to me, and he stayed all night sometimes, and that's a pretty lethal combination. I thought he was a bit odd, but then, you know, I think anyone who expresses an interest in me has to be a bit odd- the scars, you know, and the funny hair, and the fact that I can't see why anyone would really fancy me much. I had a sneaking feeling that he was taking advanntage- that he didn't really want to be wiith me either, except I was there and easy. I can't explain how comforted that made me feel, and I'd rather not explain why. I have to admit that the Catholicism came as a bit as a suprise. He's thirty-seven. That's quite old for a young man's conversion and not quite old enough for a death bed one. I sat in the church on sunday morning and wondered why these things always happen to me. I also, it has to be said, considered the fact that I may well be the last person he has sex with- unless his (ex)wife dies- and that I can't imagine he enjoyed it all that much. Shades of my past and all that. I'd quite like to appologise for that, but I wouldn't have thought it would go down that well.

Possibly the oddest thing of all was that it happened in Croyden. Not an auspicious place for a road to Damascus moment.

Afterwards I went to meet some friends, and told the story like it was jokes. It is, in lots of ways, but I would have liked to say something else. How sad I felt, and how much I felt that this is something which just keeps happening, and how, sitting in the church, I had wanted to start to run, and to run and run and never stop. How the only thing I wanted to do after the service, after fighting the urge to run or vomit, was to go up to the man who so recently lay naked in my bed, next to me, making small talk, and lay my head on his chest, and try and make myself feel better and feel close to someone, and put up with it just being for five minutes or a night, because I know and always did know that I am not really who he wants or what he wants. I'd be willing to compromise. I wouldn't make demands. I'd be quiet, and let him fuck me if he wanted to, and then I would go home and not call him until he called me.

Maybe it's like this for everyone. Maybe it isn't. For me, I can't see it stopping unless I manage to get the lonliness and emptiness which accompany BPD in check. Which are the bits which are the most painful and pitiful and which I find most difficult to control.

If other odd people stick to me then it's just as true that I stick to them. Because, in some sense, anything is better than nothing and I can't help but feel that I deserve nothing. And, even more, because the alternative to crazy, half-arsed fuck-buddies most of whom I can't even tell my friends about at all (not being particularly suitable for jokes, you see) is me telling the truth about myself to someone, and quitting the jokes, and trying to get over myself and accept that I'm not lonely and I'm not empty.

Do people actually do that?

Fuck me.

Maybe they do.

Doesn't sound like fun.

Maybe I'm better off just staying sticky.

Nick Drake: Pink Moon

A word to the wise: when you crack open the Nick Drake, that's when you know that the self-pity has started with a vengence.

Sunday evening. I'm curled up under a duvet on my sofa, the by now presumably inevitable glass of cheap booze by my side. I maintain that I am not in fact an alcoholic, but that's an argument best taken up with my therapist, I feel. I quite hate sundays; mondays have nothing on them as far as I'm concerned although as I believe I have explained before, I do also not like mondays. Not quite as much as I don't like Tori Amos, who, as far as I can see, has no reason to dislike mondays at all and is therefore talking about something she knows nothing about. Sundays so often seem full of the sad; something to do with the closing down of the week, to do with exhaustion and a slight aftertaste of faliure. Did you have plans for the weekend? Did you look forward to them? Were they ever as good as they seemed before they happened? I thought not. Summer sundays are the worst. The day hangs around, its organs shutting down one by one, slowly but surely, until it's dark and you can't prolong the inevitable any longer but must go to bed and then get up for yes, another bloody monday. Perhaps this is true for everyone or perhaps it's just that for most of my youth the main feature of sunday evenings was maths homework and now, in a feat of pavlovian conditioning, as soon as the five 'clock news is over I start to feel panic and incomprehension.

It's been quite a week. It's had everything- highs, lows, laughter, tears, hangovers, song and dance numbers and even something which we could charitably call a bit of a love interest, a rare thing in this particular show and so cause for some excitement. It even had a job interview in it, which, if possible, is an even rarer thing than a love interest- photo finish, though. Photo finish. The job interview was the cause of quite a lot of the hilarity, actually. I have a friend sort of staying with me at the moment- a fact which is good for my soul but unspeakably bad for my liver. Apart, we are two intermittently self-loathing miserablists, the only difference being that he has a job, talent, and a girlfriend whereas I have cats, a house, and a mental health problem (swings and roundabouts). Together, though- together, we are two halves of a finely honed drinking machine. The night before the interview we stayed up drinking white wine till three. As a result I awoke scratchy in mind and brain and compensated for this by consuming a potenttially lethal amount of caffeine in various forms, the final error being a can or two of red bull- think of the e-numbers, people. And I was high on fear anyway because I hate interviews and hate new people and hate having to dress smartly and just hate, really, in an unfocussed and mildly repulsive manner. By the time I got to the interview I was high as a kite on legal speed and full of a sense of my own power and glory. The interview was for a job at the Hayward gallery. Their current exhibition is on Battaile and the subversion of surrealism. They asked me about it. I got overexcited and gibbered about the relationship between eroticism and violence in Bataille's pornographic novel the Story of the Eye, and then in porn in general; I don't know much about porn, having never actually seen any, but I am yet to encounter any gulf of ignorance I can't traverse by leaps of blind faith and logic. I waved my arms around and somehow got on to performance theories of modern art and thence on to choral music, my monologue by this time taking on its own aweful momentum. I found myself completely unable to stop talking, partly because I didn't want to put anyone in a position of having to respond and partly because I just didn't know how to wrap up. The expressions on the three faces of the interview team (it had three bodies, too, but they were hidden by the table) turned from amusement to bemusement to actual fear. After a while I ground to a halt mid sentence and giggled. They asked me about sales technique. I attempted to compensate for my philosophic loqucity by answering in polite mono-syllables. It occured to me that I possess few social skills unless I am pissed, which I wasn't, it being only mid-day. I tried to make some jokes, but they didn't get them or possibly they just didn't laugh because the jokes weren't very funny. On the way out, I fell over my left foot. Needless to say, I didn't get the job, a fact which I was informed of by letter. I think they may have been too frightened of me to phone.

Other highlights of the week included many rehearsals and a rather ropey concert. In the front row was a woman in a bad hat who waved her arms around a lot; I smiled at her as often as I could, because I felt she was my kin. When I am old, I will be like her, unless they cure me first, although I am feeling far from cured right now. I cut myself last night for the first time in six weeks or so. I have a few cuts on my shoulders and two deep slices on my right arm which wont stop bleeding. The action itself had little or no effect on me; pehaps this was a last fling and perhaps it wasn't- it may take longer and a few more slips before I realise that this isn't for me anymore- but what it has demonstrated is that self-harm has lost it's romance somewhere and now seems just as sorded and petty and self-defeating as in fact it is. A fact which itself is sad. That something which has been for so long mine, for so long a part of myself, my solace and friend, has deserted me, leaves me feeling both exposed and lonely, as though a girl who dazzled me has suddenly revealed herself for a shallow bundle of expensive clothes and north london confidence; not the ethereal glory I took her for but a clay-footed moron. How could I have been so stupid, and how could I have been so deceived?

Most bizzare, it seems to me that I have lost an integral part of my personality. Who am I, this being gone away? No longer marked out by wounds I must face the fact that I am just like anyone else, and cannot hide behind madness and self-mutilation to excuse my excesses and my faliures. The truth is, I didn't get the job because they didn't think I was the best candidate, not because I was crazy or because I was different, not because I was damaged or wounded or hurt. Perhaps this is just a part of growiing up- being able to see the humanity in yourself or others as something complicated and difficult, rather than in terms of angels and devils. I got an email from my father this afternoon. In it I found, against my will, nothing but humanity. It wasn't written by demons, by a nightmare figure, by the myth I have created. It was written by a man who hurt me, who I hurt in return, who is trying to make amends although he doesn't know how. He says "I know so little about your life that I have nothing meaningful to go on. I would love the opportunity to spend time with you and get to know you again; to find out what you have been doing, thinking, and feeling all this time. To find out what it is like to have a daughter again. To go over past mistakes. To talk about Sarah. All of that, of course, is up to you." I want to say no, that I don't want to see him. Because it is easier to hate him than to learn to see him in perspective. It is easier to blame him than to see that things are, as always, more complicated. For so long I have wanted an apology from him, and now I see that this is the best I am going to get, but also that it is better than an apology. It is the statement of a desire to atone.

I talk alot about revealed complexities. About self-harm being a way of hiding. In a way, that's okay. I can hide if I want to, and I do miss the simplicity and the romance of razors. As long as it's only myself that I caricture then it's only my loss, but I find myself, lost in my cartoon-strip version of events, doing the same to other people, and that isn't what I want. I want to try and find the truth in others. I want to try and feel again. I want another chance. Now, at a time when I am coming to terms with my culpability, I am being offered the other chance, the chance to see my demons as men- and I find that for all my big words I don't know if I can. Scrap that. I find that I don't know if I am brave enough. In the literature of depression, seeing things as they are is the ultimate buurden, the four a.m. lucidty and the trigger to suicide, but I am learning to distrust that. Seeing things as they are is seeing people as other creatures and yourself as one of them, your hurt unexcused, whether inflicted on yourself or others. Life's so much easier in black and white, I find, and life is so much easier if someone else bears the blame, and complexities are reduced to a rubric of archetypes.

Vaughn Williams: mass in G minor

It's raining, thank fuck. Never a fan of hot weather, I've been in bed for a week with a foul cold, getting hotter and hotter from the inside out and the outside in. This last in a series of unpleasant lurgees confirms that I have indeed killed my immune system dead for once and for all, the only suprise, that it lasted for so long.

I walked to the off lisence through the rain, rejoicing through my coughing at feeling cool and clean again. Now I'm sitting with only candles lit, a half of scotch and a bottle of soda by my side, the breeze smelling of gardens after rain- jasmine and lilac and earth. Vaughn Williams goes remarkably well with rain. A lot of english choral music does; it's something to do with the harmonies and the spaces. You could put it down to the climate, but I'd argue it's more to do with a latent streak of gothic romanticism in our religion, most english choral music being religious. It's written for college chapels and cathederals, for twenty-four boys and men by candle light and somehow the image is only perfected with the addition of an engulphing rainy night- fellows, commoners and congregation shaking rain from their foppish hair as they enter. I can sympathise; it was running through a dark court, forcing my arms into my gown, chapel bell tolling my lateness, skin proclaiming my dampness, to shelter from the rain in the chapel porch as the chaplain said the preliminary prayers that, at Cambridge, I felt most beautiful and most like a cliche. I, too, have a streak of gothic romanticim, but mine is less latent.

I digress. This evening, what with the rain and all, and no longer being laid low by fever (hem hem), seemed like a good time to break silence. I haven't written for a while. The paranoia has had me by the throat. It would have had me by the balls as well, but, you know. Being a girl and all. It's a strange, lanky, whispering thing, the paranoia. I've always thought of it as the poor brethren of Descartes' evil demon. It too sits on my shoulder muttering lies, but Descatres' demon decieved him about the whole of reality, and I have a fair amount of respect for that- the grand deception, you know, the big lie. Mine just tells me that I am a Bad Person. It tells me that people are looking at me, and that they are thinking Bad Thoughts. It tells me that I am the centre of evil. It spreads doubts. I have written a couple of posts- all of them, it has to be said, fairly buggered- and been unable to publish them, for the very reason that people might be reading them. I couldn't bear the thought of being in other people's minds, of being thought about. It feels too much like being stolen, and that, in turn, feels like disintegration. Instead, I have huddled in corners and tried to make myself invisible- no mean feat when nature has given you a natural talent for visiablity.

I brought the paranoia up in therapy. It had reached its height, and I had found myself shiverring in the corner of a cafe on Tottenham Court Road, unable to leave because I was so convinced that people were looking at me, and whispering about me, and thinking bad things about me. I was so utterly sure of their contempt and hatred. Casual glances seemed embued with absolute contempt. People were hating me. I could feel it. And they were, I was sure, whispering about me. I was thoroughly miserable. Describing this to my individual therapist, I found myself desperate to convince her of the truth of this. -People, I wailed, were LOOKING at me.

After I'd said this, rather aggressively, for perhaps the fifth time, she asked -And were they looking at you? I was taken aback. All my previous therapists, when confronted with my capacity for neurotic paranoia- the bit where I stop being borderline and start being pretty psychotic, actually- are sympathetic but look slightly worried. I am used to this. I capitalise on it when I want some sympathy or to distract from a particularly stupid thing I've done, because that's the sort of manipulative cunt I am. Never before has anyone asked me if people are looking at me. It occured to me suddenly that I'm five foot ten and I dress funny. Yes, people probably are looking at me. And normally it doesn't bother me; I accept it and keep walking, in the same way that it no longer bothers me when people stare at my scars, or ask me wierdly intusive questions because of them. It's a part of my life, and I'm usually too busy thinking about something else to pay much attention. It's only when my brain is looking for something to fixate on that it starts becoming a problem.

I have been wondering, ever since, as the paranoia left its perch and freed me for a while to think normal thought, proportionate to myself and circumstance, about the way we designate reality. So often, it seems to be by majority vote. Psychosis is often defined in terms of experiences not shard by majority. I have little problem with that. What interests me is the narative element- the fact that whether it is real or not is to some extent defined by the way you tell it. Oh, yes, I know the reason- that psychosis is a thought disorder; it's not the event but your thoughts about the event which digress from the normal, and "thoughts" is a remarkably broad church. But all the same there is somewhere a boundary. At some point I stopped telling the truth about the event. People were looking at me, but at some point I started discribing it in the wrong set of terms. Well, at some point I started embellishing and thinking that as well as looking they were stealing bits of me, but we'll leave that by the wayside for now, seeing as it doesn't help my case. I don't really know what my case is. But there are a myriad different ways of telling any story. Mine's a little kooky, sometimes, sure, but "real" is an emotive term. It's pretty bloody real to me. Real enough to make me cut and starve myself; real enough to make me cancel appointments and stay in my house until after dark, when people can't see me so well. And is it true? It's my version of the truth. Yours differs, perhaps, and yours is in tune with the majority. Mine is the deviant one. Well, it is. I accept that. But in the particular, bounding world which I inhabit it's the only truth there is.

My argument is not that there are more than one kind of truth. I'm a finely honed rational philosopher, y'know, and I have little time for that RELATIVISTIC BULLSHIT. Rather, it is that the truth is the same for both of us- my story and yours contain the same grain of truth. It's after the truth that things diverge, and that's just what telling a story is, and that's just what the judiciary is, and in lots of cases that's just what mad is. People were looking at me. I accept that, and so does my therapist. From then on in, it's just a case of how you spin it. My spin might be left-field, but that doesn't make it wrong. Spin can't be wrong- ambiguous is what spin is. The difference, as far as I can see it, is that my spin makes me deeply miserable, makes me doubt myself and hurt myself and sometimes, yes, it's so bonkers that it makes me wonder if I'm crazy. But the real truth is that some people tell their lives as romances, some as sagas; some have Dickens ghost them and other poor buggers pick Martin Amis. Me, I read like a cross between a horror story and a second rate tragedy. The truth's okay. In itself it's neither sad, nor uplifiting, nor funny. If you're laughing, then it's just the way I tells them.