Tom Waits: Poor Edward

There are certain things I can't accept. I can't accept that this illness makes me stronger. I can't accept that this illness makes me wiser. I can't accept that it is the root of my creativity, or that somehow mental illnes is allied with anyone being the sort of person who is good at making things. This illness is hard and dirty and cruel; it makes me feel unmeasured dread and it fills me with fear and sadness and exultation for no reason at all. It leaves me unmanned. It hurts.

Most of alll I can't deal with the oft mooted idea that my scars make me interesting. Or kooky. Or different. It's true that unlike many I don't hate them, and I don't, with certain exceptions, try to hide them. But that doesn't mean that I like them or am proud of them. They are a part of me, and that is that. I am scarred. That's a fact, and a fact is just a fact. Mostly, I don't mind people giving me odd glances and asking me strange questions. I don't mind the people who are rude and I don't mind the people who treat me like a freak, but I can't deal with the people who thinks it gives them a right to know me or, worse, to like me.

That doesn't mean that I can't.... learn. There is an accepted model of BPD which says that as well as the biological factors there are the social. For whatever particular reasons you don't learn the sort of thing that other people do as you grow up. While your intellect might bound ahead your emotions are stunted. You may not learn how to show emotion, or you may not learn how not to show emotion. You don't learn how to socialise. You don't learn how to be safe. You don'tt learn how to ask for things; you don't learn how to ask for help. You don't even learn how to say that you need it, or that it is not a sin to do so. You don't learn that life goes on; you fail to learn stability, or continuity, or who you are. Treatment, according to this model, consists in learning those things. I am beginning to do that: to not be afraid. Most of all, for me, I am learning to tell the difference between what is true and what I think is true. Just because I think someone hates me or sees me as weak doesn't mean they do, and if they do- well, then they do. The world doesn't end. I might think it will; I might even think it has, but actually it hasn't. This is true. I've tried it on several occasions.

It is just because I come to this late and mangled that I get the consciousness of this learning process. Other people learn before they reach self-awareness. Or they learn it at an early stage of consciousness, and then they forget it. They know who they are but not how they got there, and there is grace in that as there is grace in everything. For those of us that didn't do that, though, we get all the shit, and then we get awareness of growth. I had to do it once, badly, and then I had to do it again, with feeling. I am take every painful, humiliating step in the light of my own self awareness; which is particularly nasty because I keep fucking up in an embarassing manner. I watch myself. I sit in a classroom on monday mornings and learn the difference between shame and sadness, and recite my homework, and rethink my judgements. I do what pretty much every other fucking person on the planet did when they were three, but I do it as an adult, which means I get bored and humiliated but which also mean I get to choose. I don't just discover who I am; I get to think, who do I want to be? And then I get to fuck it up.

Most people grow up naturally. Through abuse, neglect, and the general dicking about of justice I wasn't allowed natural. Instead, I get aware. I don't know if it's recompense: how can you judge what you've never experienced? I don't think it makes me wise or strong or deep. I don't think it's a gift. No gift hurts as much as this hurts, and nothing free should be paid for in your own blood. I think it is what it is, and this is how my life is.

Bob Dylan: Modern Times (again and again, on repeat)

My neighbours are having fun. I can hear them. They're in the garden, laughing and joking. While I am sitting in my living room wrapped in a blanket trying to mope. Damn them. That's the trouble with London in the good weather. It's just so damn hard to mope, to sulk, to feel really goddamn fucking sorry for yourself. But I'll show them. Oh yes. I've got all the windws open and I'm playing the new Bob Dylan album. Loudly. They can hear it, I know they can. They'll stop having fun soon. They'll have to, or I'll bring out the Radiohead. Hell, I'll play Joy Division if I have to. No one can stop me from sulking and if they try- well, then the fucker will rue the day.

Having fun.

And in the garden next to mine.

I ask you.

This is, of course, the problem with city living. It's like schadenfreude in reverse. There is nothing that can make you feel one whole hell of a lot sorry for yourself like the sounds of someone else being happy. Nothing which reminds me of the times I have sat in my garden in the darkness talking like some other fucker pulling the same damn dirty trick.

The sort of lonliness you wallow in, that's a protective sort of lonliness. It's a comfortable feeling, like getting crumbs in the bed, or staying in the bath until the water goes cold. You buy a cheap paperback and a couple of bottles of booze, and you and your aloneness can spend some of the best weekends of your life. But the sort of lonliness you get when your friends are a long way away, and you can't reach them, and next door you can hear people in love talking till the moon sets, that's the sort which cuts you to the quick. I don't get it that often. Normally I'm the wallowing sort, which is why I like living on my own. I relish the lonliness like an old jumper, knowing I've chosen it, knowing it is mine and I don't have to give it up for any man. Or woman. Sometimes it scratches; sometimes I lust after more rarified garb, see other people's communal lives and wish I could live that way, but I can't, and if I ever think otherwise I can have someone round for a few days and remember how annoyed I get when my lonliness is taken away.

Now, I'm suffering from the other sort, and so here I am, with a bottle of wine and the all new Bob. I've been on holiday to see a friend of mine. He's living miles from anywhere and I missed him badly when he left the city for it, and also envied him, because I'd like my solitary to be that absolute, or at least to be determined enough to go that far away to achieve it, rather than sitting here a tube journey away and half hoping, half dreading that someone will chose to come and say hello. Mainly I missed him. So I went out there. We drank. Smoked. Knocked ourselves out at dawn with prescription painkillers. He taught me how to fish. We fished and talked and read and then drank some more. I felt happy and funny and loved and full of hope. I felt like I had something to give, and that everything was somehow just going to be okay. Mainly I felt safe. Actually, that's a lie. Mainly I felt drunk and a little bit stoned, but mainly the rest of the time I felt safe. After two days of listening to my ipod at night, I slept and waked in silence and only occasionally felt dread. The noises of someone else moving around the house didn't bother me. It ended in an appropriate way for such a story of love and debauchery: in buggeredness and come-down brains like grey porridge, and two people in two beds talking insane nonsense at one another through a half open door. It was my fault. I felt guilty, but also possessed of a certain narrative sattisfaction.

Now I'm home, and I miss my friend badly. Stepping off the train from Stanstead into Liverpool Street station I was nearly winded by it. On the other hand, I was pleased to get back to my little house and my cats and my solitude and silence to think in, and not having to feel on show. Then the neighbours started talking, and I doubled up with pain, and for an instant I saw things precisely. Not a course of action I recommend.

So tonight I am listening to the new Bob Dylan and getting drunk. I'm watching an old film and later I will pick up a paperback. Tomorrow, I will do the same, except I need to put the washing on, and I need to start doing some work. But after that- well, I have to screw my resolve to the sticking place and get on with things. Look forward again, and stop wallowing.

The trouble with destrucction is it's easy. You decide once, and then it's all up- the bender has begun already- what's broken can only get broker. Also, it's enjoyable. Whereas staying whole is not very much fun and also it's a decision you have to make a hundred times a day- a hundred times an hour- a hundred times a minute- if you have to. That it's worth it is an article of faith; but destruction is no sort of faith at all. Tomorrow I turn my face to the sun. In the mean time, my neighbours will be rueing the day.