Bob Dylan: Caribbean Wind

Every girl needs some sort of stability in her life. Me, I know that no matter where I go and what I do, and on whatt strange paths of adventure my ears take me, yea, even unto the outer reaches of electronica, Bob will always be there for me, waiting. There will always be an open window high up and some cold night air, however chock-full of pollutents and city noise, to make tthe curtains billw, always some low lighting, a bare floorboard or two, and where ever any of these things congregate in my name, there will Bob be. With his crazy shades and his cracked but frankly really rather sexy voice he has never, ever failed me. I know he's wandered, I know he's had to walk his own path and, yes, I admit that some parts of it- the Christian phase springs particularly to mind- have struck me as rather bizarre, but what's love if not letting someone go free to make their own mistakes? Point is, he's always been here when I've needed him. I've put my faith in so many other voices, and they've all walked away. It's then that I turn to Bob Dylan.

Like tonight, for example. Sitting in bed eating peaches from a paper bag and dreaming of bottles, feeling a hundred kinds of lonliness and seven times that in minor irritations. The worst thing about being sober is the way time just aches out in front of you, and you know that every moment of it has to be conscious, and there is no way of switching off your body or dimming out your mind. Drunk, I can lie on my back for hours and wait for sleep, and all the time will feel like sleep anyway. Drunk, I know that I can't do anything about anything even if I want to, on account of being drunk- which is a pretty good excuse for lying on my back and dozing until morning. So now I'm flumoxed. Sober, but flomoxed. One big girl shaped bag of self-pity and misplaced brain chemicals. And lo, as I walk through the valley of the shadow of feeling a bit sorry for myself, the bootleg version of Sweetheart like you echoes through the ether, and I remember that, no matter how hard things get, there's always Bob Dylan. So here I am. Sitting on my own by an open window, laptop on my knees and everything else stuck in my throat, getting through the evening because someone told me that the longer you try, the easier it gets.

Lou Reed: Vicious

Not drinking is going suprisingly well. I have achieved sobriety on four out of five nights so far. Admittedly on the fifth I became mind numbingly plastered on a combination of damn fine pinot and damn cheap scotch, but a girl has to live sometimes. My main complaint is that sobriety is dull. Not only is it dull, but it is the antithesis of rock'n'roll, and maybe I am getting a bit old for rock and roll now but it rankles that I am losing all my vices. Obviously I'm not exactly proud of being half-cut and half-crazy, but looked at iin a certain light it has a narritive sattisfaction; a sort of war-wound charm. Filtered through a story of myself it sort of works. Obviously it would work better if I was not, in fact, living it. And it will n
be better still in the future when I have overcome, yadda yadda, to find fame, yadda yadda, and love, yadda yadda, and children and an occasional slot on woman's hour (the middle class girl's mark of success). The only other possible end to such a tale of sorrow and vice is ending up dead in a hotel room, abandoned by my brilliant but wastrel sometime boyfriend, who will later immortalise me in song. I'm too chubby for that. Immortalisation in song requires you to be immortalisable, which I, along with most of the population, am manifestly not. So the overcoming ending it has to be.

Which means, in some way, that I have to find success. Now I am trying to work out what that means. As I piece my life back together I am trying to carve myself out some sort of future. I am abandoning academia and philosophy for good and in the next month will complete applications to music college to study singing as a postgraduate. In my mind, I try on different futures for size. My therapist harrangues me to list my goals. I am stumped. Or at least, I am semi-stumped. Because I find that far from the sort of goals I have always felt are expected of me- brilliance, success, achievement- mine are all to do with quiet and calm. I want to earn enough money doing something I enjoy to bring up some children somewhere with a garden. I want to be surrounded by people. And that's really about it. I want to sing, because, as I have leaned by trying to do pretty much anything else, it is the thing most guarunteed to keep me stable, which I can do without it ever palling, and which I am naturally good at, not good at by dint of neurosis and a constant feeling of not quite meeting expectations. That's it, though. It would be nice if I could support myself with it one day. If not- c'est la vie. I'll teach. Or something.

I feel like I have had enough excitement already to last me a life time, and like I have reached the age where I want to retire. More than that, I feel like I have had enough brilliance to last a life time. As a child I was surrounded by brilliant people- my family, aunts and uncles who make films, save the world, write poetry or history or get interviewed by Melvin Bragg. My mother- a feted young artist who gave up her career for me. My father- brilliant, funny, imaginative but functionally incapable. And all their friends. We lived in Devon where a group of London artists had moved when they started having kids. We'd go to parties and people would talk and draw and read out loud. The kids, all under twelve, would steal bottles of booze and go and play in the studio. Sculptures made wonderful adventure playgrounds. Everyone was good and everyone was clever and everyone was going to succeed. There were books everywhere and the pervading ethos was not exactly bohemian, but was full of making good. It was about making things happen. We were taught that you do what you need to make what you want come true. That there is nothing you can't achieve if you work hard enough. That you are free, to experiment, to mess up and fuck up and come down. All very exciting, all very liberating, and maybe if I had been older then it would have had a different impact on me.

I did work hard. I did try to make big plans. My shameful secret is that I have always wanted security more than success. And I never really wanted brilliance. I'm not lazy, but I also don't want to burn that brightly. It always seemed a bit too effortful, a bit too edgy. It always seemed one step away from falling down.

There were parts that I loved- beautiful houses, wild gardens, long lunches. I'd like those things. But I'd like to be able to enjoy them. Oddly, I still like to be surrounded by people who are similarly driven, who are determined to make things and make them good, but I don't really want to be one of them. I wonder, is mediocrity a goal? Is it something you can willingly set out to achieve? It's not a particularly good end to my story, I'm aware of that-- I went through the fire of depression and self-harm and mental illness and survived, and then I got an early night with a glass of milk and a good book. It's not going to make a very interesting novelisation. I probably wont even sell the film rights. No semi-tragic heroine I. On the other hand, there is a part of me which feels that if anything gives you the right to aim for mediocrity it's such a survival. I know that peace, continuity, steadiness, are no mean achievements. I know that if I ever manage to retire to somewhere without storms that will be a success all of it's very own. If that's mediocity, then that's what I'm hitting for. Altthough I can't say there wont be a shot of whiskey in that there hot milk.

Mozart: Symphonia Concertante

I'm trying my hand at sobriety. It's five to ten in the evening, and I haven't had a drink yet which is fairly good going. If I was anywhere else this would leave an hour and five minutes before a drink became a practical impossibility, what with everywhere being shut. Here, though, I am graced- or cursed- with an all night off licence. Still, I am also blessed with laziness and do I really want a drink enough to venture out into the dark and get one? Right now, not. I went aspirational supermarket shopping today- defined as buying huge quantities of vegetables, determined that you are going to become healthy- so I am trying to get through the night on fruit tea and, well, fruit. Oranges- the thinking girl's smack. There's nothing like a good aspirational food shop to make girl feel like a new being. The only trouble then is remembering to eat the stuff and not ending up haunting cafes consuming coffee and cheese sandwhiches like they are the only things which will save you. Sometimes, I think they are.

I am determined to tackle drinking on my own. It is too humiliating, too secret, a thing to own, even to the people who are paid to know my dirty secrets. I review the things which I have learnt so far about myself and the reasons I do things. Cetain things are immediately eliminated. I don't drink because I have to; I'm not adicted in that sense. On the other hand, I don't have an off switch, so presented with some quantity of booze I will keep drinking until it has all gone away. I am like a hoover or a magic trick in that respect. I don't drink to make mysel feel better, because it doesn't make me feel better. It makes me feel palpably worse and spending three days out of five with a low level hangover is no way to live. In the main I think I drink because I get lonely and bored, and I don't know any other way to fill in the dark hours when the creepy crawlie thoughts come out. At least if one is drunk one is guarunteed some form of sleep, however disrupted or stupour like. So I combat it in the only way I know how- with a big pile of books. There is nothing reading can't solve. I have pap for instant immersion, the sort of book you can lose yourself in for hours until you turn the last page and realise you not only feel slightly sick but have also instantly fogotten the plot, meaning you have blanked a whole section of your life you will never get back again. Thinking about it, this sort of book is not unlike a good cheap bottle of blended scotch. Then I have the literary equivalent of an aspiration supermarket shop; the sort which will make me feel everso everso healthy and good about myself if only I can put aside all that tempting pap and immediate gratification. Finally, when things get dark and horrible and I run out of my own words for things I have the books which I believe, secretly and shamefully and in ever such an adolescent way, say what I would if only I knew how. Tonight it's pap. Desperate times call for desperate measures and I am determined to go for fourtyeight hours without a drink. Or at least twenty four. Let's not overstreach ourselves.

In this as in so many other things I wonder whether intellect is a blessing or a curse. I am still struggling to get round the idea that emotions are a useful and functional part of life. In group, they give us worksheets about this. Group is a funny sort of place, and it may or may not suprise anyone to learn that while the first rule of group might be don't self harm in the toilets, the second and third rules of group are never talk about group. That's right kids: Fightclub as a modern metaphor for therapy and the catastrophic theory of phsychic renewal. Discuss. Or don't. It's really up to you. Anyway, I wont talk about group because if they find out they will come round and break my legs. Or, more likely, this being a PD service, they will come round and cry a bit and threaten to break their own legs. Either way it will be a bit embarassing come monday. Without going into specifics, this week I had to challenge such "emotional myths" as: letting other people know that I am feeling bad is a weakness and painful emotions are not really important and should be ignored. I find myself struggling like the kid that can't get to grips with times tables. Everyone is very sympathetic as I sit there and mouth like a guppy, unable to think of a way of saying what I want, not even sure what it is that I want to say, except that every fibre of my mind is telling me that these things are true, and that I am strong for seeing the world that way. I glory in my mind, which can take me places. I don't need emotions. Emotions are for people who never learned self control, who never learned not to cry, who never learned to be comforter not comforted. Painful emotions are a waste of time. You can't make them go away, and they just hamper your progress as steely embodiment of Brain. Odd that I also learned in a childhood spent with horses that giving painkillers to a lame horse is a dangerous enterprise; if the leg doesn't hurt they keep walking on it and make the injury worse.

I know all these things in words. Often in group or in individual therapy I find myself losing track of what is going on, trying to see the theoretical basis for things, trying to make links, because it is so much easier that way. It deflects my attention from the fact that I am at a loss. So often giving an account of myself feels like joining the dots. I know how people are supposed to feel in certain situations, so I conclude that I must feel that way, and I start to describe it, and become so engrossed in my own rhetoric that I forget that I am not describing myself but a cypher for myself: a story which could be mine, but isn't.

I'd like this to be just the way things work. I'd like to be able to carry on this way indefinitely. I'd like for this system to work. It doesn't. In the new world order I am trying to construct for myself- using, it has to be said, my thinking brain, because that is the only bt of me which is reliably functioning- the intellect is a framing device. It has to have something to frame. Words, if we're going to be Wittgensteinian about this, and it's me doing the talking so we are going to Wittgensteinian about this, don't have meanings in and of themselves; they are clothing for pre-linguistic behaviours, pre-linguistic facts- for emotions and behaviouristic ways of expressing emotions. They, to use old Ludwig's own metaphor, "take root" in existant behaviours. If you don't have the behaviours to start with a quick wit and some kind of societal conditioning might allow you to use the words, but you'll never be quite sure you're using them right. Pure intellect is a frame for an empytiness, with the possible exception of mathematics, but have you ever stopped to wonder why mathematicians are so weird? Maybe if I'd been any good at maths I'd be weird but happy now, instead of both weird and miserable. As it is, numbers were never really my thing. So I am left trying to clothe something that isn't there- the opposite of the emporor's new clothes. Chronic boredom is a recognised symptom of BPD.

Which brings us neatly back to alcohol. Drinking and all the rest, sometimes it's a way of filling the space where your heart should be. If not that, it's a way of having something to talk about. Something to think about and worry about, to apply your mind to. A substance to structure. At least if I'm full of booze I know I'm not hollow.

Serge Gainsbourg: la javanaise

Summer evening, light spilling through the windows, listening to Serge Gainsbourg, getting ready to go out. It doesn't get any more normal than this. I feel very normal. I feel like any other woman, putting on makeup, looking forward to seeing friends. This normality seems to have overtaken me. I haven't written for a while because I haven't had anything to say, or because, even in the midst of the storms which have descended occasionally, because I haven't really thought it important enough to be worth writing down. I am becomming- dare I say it?- slightly less self-obsessed. I find it rather disconcerting. What do people spend all their time doing if it isn't worrying about impending insanity and trying to hold the ccorners of their mind together in a perpetual hurricane? Good god, this means I might actually get to read the newspapers from start to finish.

In fact, this iis very much what I have been doing with my new found solidity- reading. Anything I can find, anything with print- glutting myself. Then spewing it all out in the form of letters. I don't know if the people to whom I have been sending these letters recognise them for what they are- a combination of appology and promise. I find myself writing to people about the insignificant details of my life- what I am doing and thinking, what I have been cooking, what I see and taste and smell, because all my senses seem to have come back to life after years of being blocked. I want to communicate this to people, to show them the worldd, fresh and growing and green, which I have slipped slowly into. I also wanted to appologise for having been such a miserablist cunt for the past few years.

It seems to have happened slowly and in a way which I hadn't expected. I had expected there to be some sort of crisis, some sort of expulsion of matter, where sadness was born and sttarted to exist outside and sepreate from me, rather than inside. I had expected tormented faces, fireworks, drama, things to burst forth like an out-take from Gremlins, tearing my flesh and leaving me exhausted and pale but smiling bravely, ready to regain my strength with nourishing soup and turn my eyes to the road ahead. I suppose, in my head, which has always been too ready to create the fantastic, the melodramatic, I had decided that betterness would have the same sort of attendant ceremony and crisis as suicide, but without the unfortunate side-effect of being dead afterwards. I suppose that I had imagined some point after which everything would be different. After which I would be different. Better. In health and also in general. In fact, what has happened has been a gentle sort of receeding. It's been almost imperceptible, but suddenly the volume has turned down on my neurosees. The voices are all still there, but I can listen to them with detachment. If a voice in my head tells me to jump from the window then it doesn't throw me into a panic. I am capable of considering the idea and dismissing it as a bad one. I amable to imagine a world in which random thoughts of death by gravity don't feature at all.

I spent some portion of the afternoon today reading old diaries and emails, sent and unsent. I notice, with a jolt, that the feelings they describe aren't mine anymore. It has been weeks since I had the overwhelming urge to lie down in the street and give up, to split myself open and lay the secret parts out on the floor and ask someone to take them away. I recognise the feelings, but like something old- Christ, I did feel like that, didn't I? And then, following on: Shit, I really was nuts. I don't think I'd realised.

It's not all easy. It's not all better. I am not all better. There are still things I can't cope with, things which spin me out of control. Last weekend I went to see a play which, among other things, depicted domestic violence, and it was all I could do not to bolt from the theatre. I felt sick afterwards and got extremely drunk. Sudden noises make my mind space out, but I can bring it back. I don't daydream about becoming stone or ice. I don't think about sucking my limbs inside my body and vanishing. I recognise my face in the mirror two times out of three. I am solid. I find myself becoming almost good company, not just for others but for myself. I think about going back to work- I am no longer reduced to hopelessness by the idea. I find that, somehow, imperceptibly, without me noticing it, hope has come back.

Things have been difficult. Things are difficult. But I think they wont be this way forever.