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.