Gil Scott-Heron- the revolution will not be televised

and today all this week and yes possibly for ever more I am the architect of the revolution I am the sunlight in the middle of the storm I am the soul the centre the joy the hope, the life in spring which never goes, and I am power and I am running and I can jump and leap and skip and my mind takes in all things and makes them glow for me and I am magic and I am made of sunshine

PRETTY FUCKING MANIC

Trying to find a way to describe this which has for the past five days made me into the ubermensch of joy, just one big oddly dressed, fast-talking bunny of love. I've had on my dancing shoes, yes, siree, and I'm dancing on clouds, my friends, and dancing good.

Mania is the gift you don't know you have to pay for till the bill turns up, and it's part of its character and a little bit part of its charm that it doesn't matter how many times you get burned that way you never learn. It turns up again with the insouciant charm of Humphrey Bogart and the directionless energy of a red setter and tells you there's no bill you can't talk your way out of. It takes you by the hand and tells you to put on your dancing shoes with the ribbons and bows and come to a place where everything is beautiful and everything is possible and everything, absolutely everything, is free. You just gotta DARE. BUT YOU HAVE TO DO IT IN CAPITALS AND YOU CERTAINLY CAN'T USE PUNCTUATION OH NO YOU HAVE NO NEED OF THESE THINGS YOU JUST HAVE TO KEEP ON RUNNING AND YOU HAVE TO TELL EVERYONE BECAUSE THIS IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO SHARE BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS SO BEAUTIFUL AND SO PERFECT AND FAST AND FREE AND PEOPLE CAN'T SEE IT BUT THAT'S JUST BECAUSE THEY AREN'T LOOKING YOU HAVETO SHOW THEM THE WAY. Your thoughts stop and in their place is an overwhelming screaming influx of bona fide genuine motherfucking JOY which just runs and runs and makes you run with it, the faster the better, and laughing at the same time, and if you're running into the sunset then that's just fucking perfect because there's nothing mania likes more than the picturesque. Mania is knowing you can drink until you drop and you'll never get a hangover; it's knowing your bank account will never run dry; it's knowing you're the most beautiful thing in the room and you're ten feet tall; it's knowing your stories are the funniest things you've ever heard; it's having so much love there just aren't enough places to put it. You don't need to eat. You don't need to sleep. You don't need to breathe. You just need to keep on moving, keep on doing, keep on making things beautiful. You can go anywhere and do anything and everything will be just fine because you are, at the end of the day, blessed.

Every year there's a day you wake up and it's suddenly spring, and everyone is suddenly smiling and holding hands and the summer is a tantalising possibility rather than a dusty sweaty reality and your feet just want to dance and you get out your summer clothes and wear the brightest colours you can. Manic euphoria is the first day of spring magnified a hundred- a thousand- a million- fold. Magnified by a million times a million times infinity- you can't count it, you can't measure it, it's off the fucking scale and if you get a bigger scale well it'll be off that one too. Everything is exponential. Everything is fractal. The simplest thing breaks into a hundred thousand beautiful pieces of rainbow which catch you and take you spinning with them out into a great blue love filled space.

The trouble is, underneath it all, although you feel like you are the absolute paradigm of control, it's not you that's riding the horse, it's the horse that's doing the riding and you're just trying not to fall. Somewhere there's a bit of you holding on for dear life and hoping like hell you head in a safe direction and not towards that big old cliff and, most of all, that you don't do anything too embarassing. I have done a lot of quietly bizarre things in my time. I have bought clothes I will never wear. I have decided to become a spy and taken it upon myself to follow people in and out of bookshops and up and down streets (forgetting that it's a thin line between spying and stalking). I have attempted to teach myself to read ancient Assyrian. I have tried to sell my house and buy a houseboat. I have forgotten that I am shy, that I am too chubby to wear leggings, that other people have things to do other than play with me, and that I can't dance.

This time, I haven't done anything too awful. I scrubbed my front yard with a brush from a dustpan and brush, wearing pink mooonboots and my pajamas, in view of a playground full of school children. I dusted everything in the house and sang very loudly and danced around but at least it was in private. I talked very fast and very big lot at lots of people. I headed to the other side of the city on the off chance some people might just be somewhere, and explained the plot of the ring cycle to an unsuspecting stranger. In full. With actions. And also dancing. I didn't eat anything except pasta and pesto because it was the only thing I could think of and also the most perfect magic food in the world. I drank two bottles of cheep white wine in two hours because you can drink a lot more when you are in this sort of state and still keep on going. I skipped everywhere and smiled at people and gave my number to some extremely strange men because they talked to me and I wanted to talk and they were friendly and I wanted to be friendly and they asked for my number and hell, we're all members of god's great family and I'll go anywhere with anyone who knows. That's all, though. No body count. Yet.

Tonight, I'm dancing through the night, much to the upset of the neighbours (although I've stopped stamping my feet and clapping and shouting with excess joy now). And I swear, this time there will be no cost. This time I will talk myself out of it. This time it will be different. And if anyone wants some love I've got so much it's escaping from my pores and making me glow, like gold, or like sunshine. I fucking GLOW, my friends.

Nick Cave- stranger than kindness

Language is a complicated and multifarious creature. It occurs to me that, for all the superficial articulation, I have spent most of my life unable to use it, or at least unable to use it to say what I mean. I have said things I thought were clear, only to find myself mouthing in foreign.

I have never mastered the link between thoughts and words, but I found a way round it, something which I thought was close enough for people to decipher. I swear I never meant to mislead anyone. I thought it was all quite clear.

I beat the walls when I meant to say hug me.

I cut myself when what I meant to say was help me.

I have said I wanted to kill myself when what I meant to say was I love you.

I have refused to speak when what I meant to say was I don't know what to do.

I have said I was fine when what I meant to say was I'm sad.

I have become manic when what I meant to say was I'm scared of myself.

I have been agressive when what I meant to say was I'm glad you're home.

I have seen strange creatures when what I meant to say was is it going to be alright now.

I have been deluded and paranoid and fucked in the head when what I meant to say was I'm not very happy and I don't know what to do about it.

I have invented and elaborated as a way to represent the landscape I don't have words for in the reassuringly physical., the easily describable. I thought people would understand. I really did. I always thought they would see through me to what I was really trying to say, to what I didn't have the words for, and what I wasn't sure could be spoken. Forgive me, but I honestly thought people understood.

The litany of my sins is endless and peculiar.

All language is a cypher. It works as a code for thought and world, and as a result affects its subject, merges with it. If most things I have said and done were also cyphers, then my error was the hall of mirrors which results from encoding a code, and the isolation which results from not giving anyone else the key. From not having the key. Sometimes therapy seems like a process of dragging the key out from where ever it is you have buried it- the one original translation which makes sense of all the rest. Medication quietens the surrounding noise, it sends the heebie-jeebies and the clamouring beasties back to where ever it is the live when they aren't living inside my head. Then in the silence you find a way to use words everyone else understands just on, you know, a basic level of being a bit normal.

Sometimes mental illness feels like one whole big misunderstanding between two people, one of whom mis-spoke and one of whom mis-heard. I think I am speaking. Other people think they are listening. So how the fuck does it go so very enormously completely catastrophically wrong on a level of wrongness which is almost unparalleled in other realms of human experience? I think I am trying to render something unspeakable clearly and understandably through stories and mime. Other people find my stories and mime so unspeakable and incomprehensible that they label and diagnose and treat and medicate and therapise until I don't know whether I am coming or going anyway a lot of the time. Language just falls apart, like scales dropping from thine eyes, to reveal a terrifying new world in which nothing has a name, and that world is mental illness. I'd find it funny if it wasn't so sad. Or maybe I'd find it sad if it wasn't so funny.

Joan Baez- Diamonds and Rust

Much to everyone's suprise, I'm still alive.

Much to everyone's suprise, I am somewhere between where I was and well. Nearer to where I was than well, but still somewhere on that exponential curve the wallahs call recovery.

I haven't posted for a long time. There are many reasons. Partly, it's because it's been hard enough living it without writing it, too. Mostly because I ran out of jokes, so just for this one page, don't expect the funny. Like you did.

Suddenly, the whole thing just didn't seem very entertaining anymore, and there's nothing worse that people talking about the miserable intricacies of their therapy sessions. Well, there are worse things, actually. Living the miserable intricacies of therapy sessions, for example. Having hot needles inserted under your finger nails, or being raped. That sort of thing. But from your point of veiw, my oh so avid reader- I didn't want to bore you.

And so, what happened to occasion this change? I honestly couldn't tell you. I would like to give some down-pat story of love and redemption, but I can't. For a start, love is a poor basis for redemption, because love pales, and where does that leave you? Buggered, to be honest. Back where you started, but harder. It's a journey. I'm sorry to have to say, that needs to be done alone, without any crampons, and with a sadly defective tent. I can't give you a rock bottom moment, because I don't believe in that sort of thing. I've been skulling around the shallows of rock bottom drowning in two inches of water for years, and it got me not one jot closer to health than I was when I first arived there, brand spanking new and ready for Damascus, too many years ago to list.

If anything happened, it was just being listened to, and being taught how to speak. It's taken a year, and even now, perhaps, being able to tell the difference out loud between anxiety and sadness, anger and mania, is a small thing to effect so large a change, but I've only cut myself twice in the last ten weeks, and that seems a tangiable enough difference to remark upon. Self harm has felt like screaming for many, many, years, and finally I find that I don't need to scream. I am able to articulate myself- clumsily, brutally, but verbally- and someone is listening. Years ago, in my early teens, I used to get so angry or upset I couldn't speak. My mother would ask what was wrong- distressing for her to find a child so hurt and so inarticulate- and I could do nothing other than crawl, and huddle, and rock. For the first time since then, I am able to stand up straight and speak. No screaming silently. No shaking. I fall down on my knees and thank the good lord god I don't- bless me- believe in. I don't feel like I'm screamining into silence anymore. And that's a big sort of end.

What I find in this hinterland of mental illness is strange. It is harder than it was. Without the masking power of self harm, the problems I have stand starkly, and on bad days seem to multiply. I feel no inclination to see people. I want to hide, my flesh too pink and squashy to stand up to the scrutiny of contact. At the same time I am desperately lonely, because I tell you, when things seems this glaring all you want is someone to hold your hand. Self harm seems an easy thing to deal with when set beside this shifting myrad of things I just can't do like, you know, talk to strangers, and go to the supermarket, and deal with people cancelling on me. Maybe that's the secret of its power- to reduce everything to one simply manageable wound, each scab the promise of an actual healing. I find that there are no solutions- just hard work, and doing things you're frightened of not inspite of, but because, they frighten you. I find that I am sick in ways I never imagined, but also that there is a core of wellness I never knew I had. I find that its about balance. Sometimes I'm manic and sometimes depressed- about one week a month I still have to spend in bed, watching the ceiling- but there is a centre. I get closer to it.

I miss cutting. I miss burning. I miss bruises. And then I don't. I have spent lots of moments recently sitting on the side of the bath or in the corner of my bed holding a razor in my hand, then putting it down again (I still keep them- cmfort blanket or, you know, sentimantal value, innit). It's not a sense of obligation, or any kind of resolution. It's more that for the first time I am given the foresight to see what my impulsiveness will entail- blood, and pain, and my clothes sticking to me, having to wear black, fear of being touched in case people inadvertently open my wounds, more pain, and more blood. The way my skin puckers round a cut a few days after I've made it. The way new skin opens under pressure. Not being able to sleep in another person's bed in case I mark the sheets. Frankly, put that way, it doesn't seem like so much fun. Maybe you don't get well, you just get wise. Maybe. Maybe there just isn't a formulation, and no explanation for what happens when you turn your sights on something else. I can tell you that I drank a lot of bad whiskey when I first stopped. That now I am not eating much. I can't quite do without an anaesthetic yet. But I am getting well. Or at least starting.

I look at my scars a lot. I can feel them undreneath my clothes. I ought to say, they show me how far I have come, they show me who I am, they show me... yadda yadda et cetera et cetera. It's all bollox, frankly. They show me sweet fuck all. They're there, though, and although I cover them now more than I did because I have less to say and less to scream, I am still pleased I have them. I turn my face somewhere else. I resist he urge to make illness my life and soul and centre. In, for want of any of my own, someone else's words:

Well, that's over. The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendent.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

-Adrienne Rich