Gram Parsons- Return of the Grevious Angel

I was all for the cheerful this week. I really was. I was going to see the sunny (or at the very least the funny) side of things and look forward to the up. This all seems to have gone, for want of a more salubrious phrase, tits fucking up.

I had three job interviews last week, which were all of them horrible. One was just more or less normal job interview horrible, which when you factor in my fear of people and places I don't know, and my intense anxiety surrounding other people's opinions of me (desire to be liked, nay, LOVED, even by the one who's only in the interview to write the notes and talk about the money), and my horror of smart clothes is pretty fucking horrible.

The second was for a job in an office. I had this dream, you see, about what life in an office would be like- it was full of banter and the productive fun of people being, you know, productive, and fun. Imaginative clever funny people, like in the WestWing, but not at all like in the Office. It turns out that just being in an office is not like the WestWing at all, and much more like the Office (who knew?) and also, being in an office makes me feel like my soul is dying. Sitting in the interview, it was hard for me to work out who was more horrified- me, at the idea of me working there, or them, at the idea of me working there. Somehow I don't think I'll be hearing happy things back from those people, and my illusions about office life have now been shattered by the simple expedient of, you know, being in an office. Brrr. Never again. Even the plants looked sad in that place.

The third interview was for a job anyone with opposable thumbs and the ability to string ten words together could do while in a coma. Now, I don't mean to boast here, and even if I did, I think the very fact that I am manifestly off my rocker would make my boast seem hollow if not overtly and pathetically misguided. But. I have two degrees. Two! In philosophy! From reputable establishments! I could do this job. However, even with these pieces of paper supposedly confirming my intellegence I found the interview a tad tricky. It was three hours long, and had a tea break. No interview should have a tea break. Half way through (I think it was at about the time they brought out the mental arithmetic test) I began to wonder if I had accidentally stumbled into an MI5 recruitment session- they are, after all, just up the river from the building I was in, and might conceivably use it to cover their tracks. Anyway, this means that I might end up being a spy. That would be pretty cool. I tried to be a spy once, but then I realised that a spy without a government is, in fact, a stalker.

So all of that was pretty exhausting. Worse, it coincided with the end of hypomania and the beginning of feeling like a dishtowel, rinsed and mangled and hung out to dry. Things have just got worse, really, since then. It seems like not only my brain but also the world are out to get me. Among other things I fell down stairs, dramatically, comprehensively and painfully, and have lacerated my fingers quite badly on the two wineglasses I was carrying. I had a hard time persuading my doctors that these were accidental injuries, which didn't make any of it any better. There is nothing more humiliating than angling for sympathy with your impressive war wounds and nearly getting sent back to the bin. It brings out the righteous indignation in a girl- and also, it turns out, the tears and footstamping. Finally, by a process to complicated to explain, I seem to have acquired myself an adolescent stalker, who has spent most of the last three days sitting on my doorstep. He seems to have decided that I can save him, or take care of him, or at least go out for a drink with him- none of which I am going to do. It makes me feel sort of sorry for the poor chap, to be honest, because of all the people to chose as the light of salvation a clumsy, depressive, jobless borderline with a prediliction for drink is really, really not a good one. Bad luck, boyo.

My neighbours, who seem to believe (possibly, to my deep annoyance, rightly) that I can't look after myself, have been calling the police on my behalf. So rather than spending tomorrow in bed reading nice comforting novels by `PGWoodehouse and drinking industrial stength PGtips I have to meet a policeman and try not to let him find out that I am crazy. Borderlines don't, as a rule, make credible witnesses. Also, we are known for being a tad, how do you say, hysterical and neurotic. A policeman's nightmare, really. So that's going to be a laugh.

All in all, things are not so great chez bluetrees.

On top of which. The sadness has taken on a shape in the room, and I don't seem to be able to get away from it- there is a weight in my chest, and my face in the mirror looks strange. I am listening to the most cheerful music I can deal with in the hope to shift it (in itself an activity not deviod of pathos) but it doesn't work. It makes my body curl in on itself, sucking my limbs into myself in an effort to wrench safety from physical space.

Every person I love seems a long, long way away tonight. All I want is comfort, and in my mind I run throug the litany of names, realising that not one of them can help me. I am alone. I ache from my fall. There is a weird stalker on my doorstep. I have cried so much my eyes burn and my body feels emptied of itself. Even Gram Parsons isn't making me want to dance. It's not a good position to be in.

So- not a funny post about valentine's day. Just another post about how sadness eats away in the strangest places and everything, always, seems to go wrong in a single wonderful, spectacular, glorious shower of tears.

coming soon: an amusing post about valentine's day

this will prove that the miserablist wankmeister who was responsible for running girl has not wholly taken over my soul. As soon as I perk up I'll write this and put in all the jokes there are.

Ooberman- Running Girl

I think that my skull is a cage and I share the space with another creature. Sometimes the creature sleeps, or goes quiet, and then I foget about the cage and the creature and all is well, and I live in the world and not in my head and I begin to believe that it's all over and the beast is dead. Sometimes the beast and I are in love and all is well and we control the world and everything in it. Those are the hypomanic times. The rest of the time, my skull is a cage and I share it with a creature that hates me with such a dead white heat of rage that I can't hardly breathe. My eyes turn inwards and the beast claws me and holds me and tries to suffocate me, and I can't get away from it, because my skull is the cage and the creature is in there with me.

This week is the third kind of week and these are the kind of thoughts the creature gives me:

Sometimes I wish I was the sort of person who didn't cope. I wish I was the sort of person who screams and cries. I wish that when things are bad my throat wouldn't close up, I wouldn't feel suffocated, I would be able to tell people, and make them see the depth and breadth of the hate and the lengths the other thing in my skull will go to to torture me. It feels, sometimes, that because I live out the battles on my skin and in my room, alone, with the doors shut, that people don't believe me- although I also know that thinking people don't believe me is a symptom of BPD too, one that goes with paranoia and mistrust. It still feels, though, like no one really believes me when I say that things are bad. Or have been bad. I have wished so hard to fall apart but the fucking creature wont let me, because it hates signs of weakness and it tells me that I'm stupid, pathetic, winging, a liar and a fabricator. Saying it out loud makes it all sound so melodramatic, and so my skull renains a prison, because outside I am calm and coping, and inside melodrama rules supreme. I try and communicate with my skin. I have cut nerves and tendons and bits of bones. I have burned myself with irons and cigarettes and lighters and knives heated in gas flames. I have overdosed on everything from antidepressents to codeine through paracetamol, asprin, and cold medicine, and now my kidneys don't work very well. My arms hurt all the time where the nerves are regrowing, I can't feel anything in the skin of my wrists and upper arms, or in the pads of two of my fingers. This is the truth of my life. This is how angry I am. It's my attempt to kill the creature that just wont fucking die.

I feel that I have failed my life and all the people in it. At the moment it is all I can do to drag myself out of bed, but bed doesn't feel so good- I can't sleep and when I do I dream of being chased and screaming with no sound.

At the moment my thoughts are unpleasant. The slightest thing triggers thoughts of suicide. I am afraid to walk over bridges or go up tall buildings. Images of the injuries I could inflict on myself fill my brain and swallow up hours, and I wish I could just act on them and make it go away, but I don't do that anymore. I feel like nothing is left to me anymore.

Most of all, the last two months which seem to have been a strange sort of rollercoaster have left me disorientated, with no idea which way is up. I don't know wht is real anymore and what is just mood. I seem to have lost my north.

I still can't say any of this out loud.

Velvet Underground- white light white heat

Am I still made of sunshine? Not so much. Now I'm made mainly of something like for example glue, or soup- something viscous and opaque, and liable to form a scum.

It came on slowly this time. I went to Cork to visit a friend, high on my own brain chemicals, flying literally into the sunset which was pretty fine. My brain chemicals kept me going for a few days, and then I started waking up early in the morning, anxiety filling me, thoughts already racing. I was waking up halfway through thoughts, desperately trying to remember what I was worrying about, knowing I was worrying about something, zero to panic in the time it takes to open your brain. I hate that. Any decent mind would at least give you time to steach and yawn and scratch and drink a cup of coffee.

And then before I know it, I'm pacing the city at night, no scarf and cold ears, not making eye contact, counting my steps to silence my thoughts. I left my little, non-threatening, CMHT-pacifying ushering job tonight (I can just see my notes- "Tatty shows willingness to return to work, which is suggestive of progress"- pah!) and suddenly couldn't face coming home. Home which is repository of requirements. Home which demands I do stuff. Home with big, bovine, accusing eyes (metaphorically, of course- I'm not that weird). So I walked. I ended up in Borders somewhere, looking for a copy of Prozac Nation to satisfy my desire for books by crazy women, which I read like other people read porn or Cosmopoltan, and with a similar sense of muckiness. Borders an hour before closing time is a depressing place- tired staff, neon lights, and everyone in there avoiding something, something hopeless pumped out with the tinny music, the feel of time passing on the way to nowhere better. Me huddled over a cup of coffee reading crazy person porn, dreading the moment they tap me on the shoulder to throw me out and I have to drag myself upright, find my feet and get myself moving, go out into the cold. Suddenly, my whole life seems perfectly clear and perfectly pointless, useless, hopeless. I feel like if there is a crock of happy gold at the end of the rainbow, I ca't be bothered to try and find it. I feel like I cann't believe I'm back here again. And so the cycle from euphoria to despair is complete.

Leaving the shop I still don't want to go home. I keep walking. My ears get really, really cold. The streets are full of drunks, and then, further out, round the banks and offices, they're full of nothing- the silence of people who've gone home to their families and left me behind.

I'm tired of this. I'm tired. I'm something and I don't even know what it is. I don't want to sleep. I want to drink. I want to sit and think and stare at the walls and then not wake up until tomorrow is over and that;s a whole other day of anxiety and shiftlessness I don't have to deal with.

How can the world be so different, such a wholly different place, just because something has shifted in my brain? It's the difference between power and impotence, but here and now and lived out every day. And it makes me sad and tired, but I fight on and try and realise that I'm not seeing things clearly just now- but then when am I ever?

My therapist says I need to work on balance. She says I need to work on my problems with rumination- which makes me sound, I think, like a cow who can't chew properly. For my part, most of all I don't want to work on anything. I want what everyone else has got, or seems to have- normal moods, and friends who don't ask "have you brought your medication?" almost before they ask you how you are, and knowing it's my fault not theirs.