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.