borderlines

You and Yours

2007-12-04T03:59:00.000-08:00

I have tonsilitis for the second time in a month, and the forced inactivity and constant feelings of hard-done-by self pity are leading me to resurrect this blog. Aside from which I feel I have more to say now than I have done for a while. Recently I have been doing things I never would have thought possible, which brings its own set of problems- usually of the "sweet jesus, this is still impossible" giving up variety. I have a job. A flatmate. And a date, of sorts. Almost indestinguishable to the naked eye from a sane, sober, normal person. I also have a sore throat- but that's a side issue. I'm just out for the sympathy vote now.

So, let's talk a little bit about the problem of relationships in a pathological, mental diseased sort of context. I am reliably informed (although my own experience is necessarily limited) that the early stages of a relationship between two completely healthy people are a tense time, fraught with possible pitfalls and ways of putting the desired right off the desiree as fast as you can say post-traumatic stress disorder. I am also told that these same early sstages are (and I quote) "fun", ""exciting", "charged"- but I frankly refuse to believe such obvious, transparent lies. Now imagine that coupled with this you also have to broach any of the following subjects, with someone you don't know very well, who you quite want to like you and think you are really very normal:
i) scars (having them)
ii) scars (how you got them)
iii) where you spend the missing portions of your week (in a mental hospital)
iv) what you have been doing with yourself for the last two years (see above)
v) fear of being touched arising from childhood abuse
vi) the need to sleep in the far corner of the bed, surrounded by pillows, with the radio on (see above for reasons)
vii) why it's all a lot funnier than it seems, really, truly, if you like that sort of joke
Really, it is a veritable minefield. And in this particulr instance the old education adage (that if you can just get this person to read a bit about what it is you've got then they wont find it so terrifying after all, and will see that it is a perfectly manageable condition which will in no way affect your healthy, happy life together, and by the way if they doon't propose marriage right this instant then you are going to beat them over the head with a hammer, keep them in a freezer for a fortnight, and intermittently fry up bits of their forearms with onions to serve up for lunch) just doesn't work that well. Confess to borderline personality disorder, and then fear, fear that your object of passioon will go and look it up on the net. Almost all definitions include lines such as "a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships", "relationships and the persons emotions may often be classified as shallow", "a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation", "frantic efforts to avoid real or perceived abandonment". And so on. And so forth. And that's without the general, social stigmitization surrounding personality disorders which seems to have got worse, not better, in recent years. A focus on the severe and untreatable category leads to a general suspicion that the whole lot of us are hopelessly incurable, baby eating, criminally hardened, sociopathic headcases. I would like to put it on record now, once and for all, that I have never eaten a baby. NOt even a little bit. Not even a toe.

It gets worse. The most commonly recommended books for those trying to learn about a BPD in a friend or partner have such inspiring titles as "I hate you! Don't leave me!" and "Stop walking on eggshells: taking your life back when someone you care about has borderline personality disorder". In the literature, as in the online support communities for carers of someone with BPD, the emphasis is on how difficult it is to live with someone who is impulsive, manipulative, volatile, flighty. Far from reassuring a prospective canditade for twosome bliss, I can personally imagine few things more likely to get me to back away from a prospective single white female with a penchant for boiling houehold pets.

And this, of course, is no help for the sufferer, who is, by this point, already scared witless and trying to think of ways out. Because, using the standard borderline model of rational thinking, anyone who doesn't know I'm crazy can't really love me because they don't know me, and if they did they would leave me, ergo, I am unloveable and everyone leaves me. If they do know, and they still want to go out with me, they must be dangerous and or demented, or only doing it to hurt and mock me- only somoene crazier than me would love me, and I'm pretty crazy, so they must be really crazy and don't count, ergo, I am still unloveable and everyone leaves me (possibly through sectioning). And soon you convince yourself that this possiibly quite nice and kind person is oonly trying to hurt and leave you, so you start to become cold, and agressive, and then they do hurt and leave you, and so the whole cycle perpetuates itself, a little worse each time.

I know this isn't the fault of the internet, and I know it isn't the fault of the books. But it might be a bit easier to negotiate the beginning of a new relationship, in borderline terms one of the most traumatic things there can be, which is already put under additional stress because of the skeletons in your mind, which is already put under aditional stress because one of you is actining a little crazy all of a sudden, if some emphasis was put on the benefits of loving us- and if this was explained not just to the sane half of the equation, but for the sufferer. The truth is, we can be difficult, but can also be more appreciative, more loving, happier, more thoughtful, more self-aware, than anyone with diagnosis normal.

Bob Dylan- Simple Twist of Fate

2007-04-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

It's late and I am tired, and sad in a heavy way. I've spent the weekend with my family, which always seems to tip me back to an older, darker place in my mind. Coming home, I am fillled with anxieties which float free of anchorage or rationality and take me floating with them. The greatest innovation in my life recently has been the addition to my little managerie of a lodger, and after the novelty wore off the inevitable happened, and home began to feel like a place of requrement, and not a refuge. Even the walls seem to make me feel guilty. There are so many ways, it seems, in which I have failed, in which things are not as they should be. There is dust- a cup is unwashed. I am not smiling when I ought to be. A bill has waited a little while unpayed. I have not tried hard enough. I want to start hiding things again, to be secretive, to drink alone in my room and cut again, just to have something whcih is mine, just to have protection. I become suspicious, and wonder who is trying to steal myself from me. My mind feels like a bluebottle stuck in a jar- no matter which way it tries to escape, it ends up beating itself against something, like a chandelier against a cosh, bright and sharp and breakable. I want to run, or I want to hide. I want to cease to be in some sense which I know for sure isn't possible, and the effort not to cut takes almost everything frm me, leaving behind just sinews and a scream. I am reminded again of a passage from Saul Bellow's Seize the Day in which someone prays "Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy."

I feel the absolute certainty that I am not good enough and never will be. I am only half a human.

There is a sense of loss somewhere in me, and a lonliness, a reaching out for love, but I am the unloveable, the untouchable. Nothing will ever make people love me; nothing will ever make people stay. I am not good enough. On the train home the thoughts took the form of hatred of my appearance. I felt it so strongly I cried, and had to huddle in a seat behind my bag, in case people saw me, saw how ugly I am. I can't explain how it feels to know absolutely for certain that you are physically repellant and that everyone who sees you must see that too, to know that everything that is wrong with you is on display, on the level of your skin, for aall to see, and then to be sure that people are seeing it, are watching you and despising you. Their hatred comes over you in waves; you can feel it every time you catch their eyes. I want to tear at my skin, to peel it off, to bite my hands and rend things. I want to cry and be comforted- funny how those two wants come hand in hand so often.

Tired and sad and more than a little bit crazy is how I feel. Sad and lonely. I feel that there is a deformity in my mind. I feel that I have not been good enough. I feel that I have been at fault. I just don't know what I have to do to make myself better, but if there is anything to pray to I pray to it that I will come to know, and then I'd do it, I swear I would. To whoever it is that listens to me I make promises I know I'd kill myself keeping if I let myself go down that road- to work harder, to be better, to become beautiful, to become clever, to try. To work. To be. To try. To work. To be. To try. To work. To be. To try harder. To work harder. To be better. I will be better. I will try harder. I will make things okay. I wwill fix things, I don't know what it was I did wrong, but whatever it was I promise to make amends. And in return... Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.

Bed time. The city is around me, and none of this is real. Things will feel better again in the morning, and if they feel worse again at night well then there will be another morning, always.

Monteverdi: Orpheo

2007-03-19T04:45:00.000-07:00

Monday morning and I'm bunking group to drink coffee and read anther great American beat novel. I ate a whole meal last night and slept for twelve hours, and I didn't, I really didn't want to spend my newly discovered vitality on being miserable, upset and exhausted, which is what group always makes me. I've been working every evening this week. Again, I fail to find any sort of balance- from not working at all I go to working every day without any space in between, and I can't figure out how you know when you need a rest or a holiday, unless it's when you are physically incapable or moving your body anymore. Like I can't figure out how you know when to eat unless you are shaking and your blood sugar is so low that you can't walk downstairs because your depth perception has gone peculiar. Black and white thinking is an innocuous sort of phrase, and it would be fine if it was just thinking but it's a big think for simple words. It's what happpens when the world and everything in it fails to make sense to you. It's not just people love you or hate you, it's that you are either full or empty, running or stationary. It's a very physical thing, and until you have tried to live like that for a week you don't know how diibilitating this disorder can be.

The fact that people can manage the miraculous balancing act which is health, mental and physical, without even thinking about it seems to me impossible. At the moment, I have to do everything consciously. I have to go through all the steps, asking myself what I want, what I need, what the situation is, what other factors are in play, what the repercussions will be, how I will feel tommorrow- writing the whole thing down if necessary. Deciding to eat or sleep is a process which can take fifteen minutes of reasoning and a few minutes of medtative analysis while I try and work out if I am hungry or tired. Don't even get me started on things like aranging to meet people. Things like that entail days of agonising and days afterwards of mental self-flagilation and often it just seems easier not to bother.

It seems hard to believe that recognising physical signals and knowing when to respond to them and how are things that you learn, but they are, and I am. And my god it seems hard. To carry the balance simile a little further, what I lack is any sense of true. One knows instinctively, through whatever cunning thing the inner ears and brain do, when you are the right way up, and when you aren't, and when you are safe and when you are about to fall, and what to doo about it. There is a similar instinct in almost all other areas of life, from the basic to the complex, from when to eat to when to love to when to be happy. And how much. The how much is often the problem. If you lose your balance your ears tell you how far to right yourself so you don't go too far the other way. I'm like one of those toys with a round base that swing constantly and frenetically in action and reaction from one side to the other and round and back constantly on the brink of toppling over completely. Whatever the emotional equivalent of my inner ear is is fuckt, basically, so instead of knowing how far I've fallen and how far backwards I need to go I have to measure the distances, do the maths, then measure again and hope I got it all right and then travel backwards and try aand assess whether I am upright because there is nothing external to tell me.

The nothing external is the other problem, and that's where your traditional new-pilot-in-clouds metaphor comes in. If there's nothing to tell you whether you are the right way up then you are liable to fly out of the clouds upside down, except there is no outside to these clouds, There is just smoke and uncertainty. I have no idea which direction I am facing most of the time. So I'm taking a morning off, and reading cheerful books about starving men and drinking coffee because I sat down for three quarters of an hour last night and decided that that is what I should do. Put like that I say, jesus, just give me a gun so I can shoot myself. Being alive should not be this much hard work.

Some programme on radio 4 about old manuscripts

2007-03-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

I feel that I should be making more actual factual about my day posts to make this blog more interesting. I don't think that would make this blog more interesting, since my days are about as moment to moment interesting as Waiting for Godot without any of the jokes, the metaphysical implications, or the icecreams in the interval. Still, I am resolved to try, but not today- like Aquinas I say God, make me good, but not yet. I promise to try factuality and fun next time, though, if you promise to put up with one more post about being miserable and suicidal. What jokes! What larks we are having!

I was reading through some old notebooks today, from a few years ago when I really was a bit peculiar in the head and when I tried to kill myself a few times in a way which obviously failed unless I am writing thins from a bed BEYOND THE GRAVE while drinking beer out of a MUG MADE OF GHOSTS. Even when filtered through the depressive paranoid but oh! so illuminating ramblings of my own notebooks what I remember of that time is fragmented. Mainly, I remember being utterly dislocated from my life and the world, feeling like I was behind glass, or in aspic, and at the same time unconnected from my body and unable to feel anything at all. Now, I recognise this as the fairly mundane but unpleasant and weird phenomenon of dissociation, which is a sign that I need to go somewhere safe and work out what's up with me and then do something about it. Back then, I thought it was a pretty sure sign that I was already dead, which just goes to show how you can get up in the morning with a tricky but curable mental health problem and end up Sylvia Plath by lunchtime.

What became clear from all this reminiscence on good times past which wasn't at all clear when moment to moment living was so unendurable that dying wwas truly all I wanted is that suicidal thoughts and intentions aren't any different to other symptoms of depression- sleeping a lot, or drinking, or eating weird foods covered in salt (although that last one might just be me)- and those in their turn aren't any different from symptoms of other illnesses, like rashes or spots or having achey joints or palpitations. Suicidal thoughts are the symptom of depression which will kill you like having your throat swell up is the symptom of a nut allergy that will kill you- it's what makes it a potentially fatal illness and not, for example, whinging and self-obsession, and the chances of it being fatal just get higher if you are afraid to talk about it, though the rather nasty little catch 22 is that part of being depressed is being afraid to talk about it. Just like if you eat nuts and your throat swells up and you don't mention it to anyone you are more likely to die than if you just go to casulaty and get your shot of adrenaline or whatever it is they shoot into you if you eat a nut, if your brain goes weird and you start wanting to kill yourself and you don't mention it to anyone you are more likely to die than if you go to hospital and get whatever it is you need to sort yourself out.

The further difference between the two is that if you eat a nut and don't tell anyone because you don't know what's happening and your throat is too tight to talk and you're scared and as a result you die then people (they! mind the paranoia gap) probably wont say you killed yourself. They'll say it's a tragedy you didn't know you had a nut allergy and wasn't it a dreadful accident and a pointless waste of life. If you succumb to depression, on the other hand, the general consensus is often that you somehow had a choice; that you could have fought harder- you should have told someone, or seen what you had to live for. Also, you shouldn't have acted on your thoughts, you should have controlled them- but suicidal thoughts aren't controllable, or at least they aren't controllable immediately, without theraoy or medication or some combination of the two. ILet's get even bigger and say that the mind isn't controllable- as anyone ought to know if they have ever been too excited to sleep even when they wanted to sleep, or walked on stage and felt a big old urge to wee from nervousness, or been in love with someone unfortunate. Saying that someone with severe depression shouldn't kill themselves isn't at all like saying they should try and see the bright side; it's like saying someone with pneumonia should just try a little bit harder to breathe and while they're at it should stop their lips turning blue and come down to dinner because everyone else you know manages to do it every day even Aunt Mabel and she's ninety four and only has one leg.

There is a hideous disparity between the way we as a society deal with physical illness and the way we deal with mental illness. That's mainly regarded as a truism. What we don't do is think very hard about why that should be. I don't think it's just to do with prejudice. I think it does have a lot to do with fear, but I don't think it's fear of the mad- I think we're getting a little bit past that now, although you wouldn't think it if you heard what respectible news programmes had to say, quite casualy, about personality disorders (and that's a whole other rant). I think it's to do with fear of the mind, and, specifically, about fear of our own minds. A hundred years of Freud, and the idea of the subconscious- of a bit of the mind- a bit of our minds- that isn't transparent and controllable, still scares the shit out of us. Accepting that suicide is the tragic outcome of a fatal illness opens the way to the closing of choice. The idea that we don't, always, have the choice what we think or feel, or the choice to act on those thoughts and feelings. If we see suicide as either weakness or madness then we never have to think what the act might say about each one of us- we never have to see our minds as things that we don't automatically understand.

The most terrifying aspect of being diagnosed with a mental illness is realising that your mind is not a transparent arbiter of truth. You don't know it just because it's yours: like the body it has a surface which you know and an inside or underneath which you don't. That's a hard thing to accept, bringing with it as it does the idea that truth isn't a simple matter of seeing and perception isn't just about receiving and processing (which we should all know if we'd read our Kant but alas the youth of today). Truth, trust and choice become infinately more complicated if you accept that your mind isn't a thin shimmering thing the entirety of which is within your view and conrol. Ultimately, we have to challenge the idea, legacy mainly of Descartes (the Greeks never had it), that the self is located solely in the mind while the body is functionally dispensible. Personally, I also blame Descartes for the fact that in 2007 people still seem to think that psychotropic drugs work by magic- look, man! you put a pill in your mouth and it comes out in your mind! cool!- and don't take it as a total piece of obviousness too stupid to mention that emotions and brain chemicals and what you eat are all linked up. If we could only stop seeing ourselves as divisible and understand that mind and body and self are an unholy and inextricable trinity, then perhaps we could stop seeing physical illness as divisible into the present tense curable and the future tense curable while mental illness is divisible into weakness and voodoo. Then we could do something about the appaling mortality rates for mental illness. One in ten for BPD. If that was nut allergies we'd be writing to the Times.

Billie Holiday: lady sings the blues

2007-03-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

In therapy this week I had one of the sudden flashes of understanding which therapy can bring you at times and about which it is easy to be derisive if you haven't needed them, or experienced them, or known what it's like to seek a cure for something which is invisible and in your head. They aren't Freudian flashes; they aren't dark and sudden dream revelations; not realisations that your brother stold your doll when you were six and now you fuck everything that moves in revenge or out of a desire to get your doll back. These flashes are usually quite simple, and in retrospect seem self evident; they are more like the tying up of threads, or the untying of knots- two things which were unrelated suddenly knit themselves together and you see why something is. These moments are rare in my experience. Most of therapy is the constant chipping away at the ways you think about yourself, and it you only see it working later, when you look back in suprise and see how far you have come. But the odd moments when something suddenly makes sense make you feel like you have achieved something fast, even though usually what you have achieved is seeing a new way in which your behaviour is pretty much completely futile.

The session was long and hard. I started it in tears, and ended it in tears, and there were quite a lot of tears in the middle too. I've been feeling a particularly pernicious hate towards myself lately. It's partly that my mood has cycled back into depressed again, and partly that a lot of things feel like they aren't going very well in my life at the moment, but I have been feeling like a faliure, a waste, a lazy lump of nothing. I have been feeling like nothing will ever change. Like I will be forever unhappy, alone, chaotic, without the qualities other people have which make them personalities, which give them souls. I have felt myself to be souless. I have felt myself to be loveless. I have felt myself to be lonely and unlovable, have felt that the centre of my being is rotten, and that, more to the point and worst of all, it's all my fault. As a result I haven't been eating. I don't mean that I haven't been eating properly, or that I haven't been eating three meals a day. I mean that I stopped eating anything, at all.

In amongst trying to explaiin this (badly) to my therapist, and crying a lot and sniffing repellantly, and being in all ways a miserablist snotbag, I understood suddenly what it is that people get wrong about eating disorders.

It is true that eating disorders as I understand them (and my own, if it even gets dignified with that name, has always been mostly latent, a last resort when all the other ways of quietening my thoughts have gone away) have very little to do with getting thin and nothing at all with getting beautiful. It is also true that the prevelance of size zero models in the media is very bad for eating disorder statistics. These two points often seem to be set on opposite sides of debates at present, and that to me seems wrong. The link which is disturbing is not the link between thin and beautiful, but the link between thin and happy, and eating disorders are all about being happy.

The thing is, if you feel that you aren't loved, if you feel flawed and failing, then you look for a way out. The impulse towards health is incredibly strong, but also terrifyingly easy to subvert- in myself, the impulse towards health has almost lead to my death, and that's the somewhat bitter irony in personality disorder based mental illnesses. When things are bad, people look for a way to make them better, and the horrible thing about the media culture at the moment, the awful, glib cruelty of this consumer society, is that it gives the impression that thinness and happiness are the same thing, so that you can attain one by striving for the other. If you look through celebrity magazines (and they used to be a secret vice of mine, before they started making me so angry I wanted to be physically sick all over their glossy entrails, so I know what's in them) what is notable is not the copy which says that thin is beautiful, but the images which say that thin is happy- pictures of thin, happy celebrities in love with nice clothes, and fat, miserabe celebrities in rehab with tracksuits.

Eating disorders aren't about the need or desire to be thin. They aren't about emulating celebrities. They have bugger all to do with girls (and, increasingly, boys) being told that the ideal is thinness. People with eating disorders aren't dim, and they aren't shallow, and this sort of reductivity is not a little insulting. On the other hand, the mind, and particularly the unhappy mind, is a very simple thing. It will latch on to something which it thinks will relieve the awful grinding moods, and it will take a lot to unlatch it, because the mind also has a tendency to blame itself, to think that if it isn't happy, then it just isn't trying. The thing it latches onto might bbe quite simple, but there's a supersitious thing going on in the human psyche that's hard to undo with education, and it comes out when a person is in pain. If you've never been depressed then think of times you have experience physical pain- wouldn't you have latched on to anything if you thought it might take that pain away? If someone had told you that not eating would make the pain go away, wouldn't you have done it? Of course, no one would tell you that, because it would be criminally negligent as well as grossly stupid, but while we are open enough about physical pain to sell analgesics over the counter, we don't talk much about pain in the mind and pain in the psyche. Too many children grow up not knowing how to salve unhappiness and make themselves feel better. Without a learned, healthy path the drive to happiness will make its own, and if thin and happy get linked then it's easy to see why it might forge that way. The tragedy in watching someone with a severe eating disorder is not watching someone starve themselves in an effort to achieve bodily perfection, but watching someone desperately unhappy try to make themselves happy, and fail, and try harder, and fail harder. It's the will to life and health getting it all wrong again. If you look at it like that, it's so sad it almost takes your breath away.

It was something like this that I understood, suddenly, while howling my way through another miserable therapeutic hour. I'm lonely and unhappy just now, and I want to do something about it, and somewhere in me there is something which says that if I were only thin then I would be happy and I would be loved. And so I stop eating. And of course I know it isn't going to work. I know it isn't going to bring my mother back from the dead or give me a dad who isn't a flakey, crazy alcoholic, but those things don't matter in this context- they're complicated, analytic needs with subjects and objects which come from the conscious mind trying to work out what would make me feel better. The drive to happiness isn't really conscious and it certainly isn't complicated. It's very simple, and it's very strong, and it's very hard to reason with when it's decided on its particular method, and it's why some people will starve themselves to death because they think it might work, and it's why I have cut my skin so badly I look like a tabby cat, and it's why people will eat until they can't walk, or drink until their livers disintegrate, or work until their families fall apart.

Somewhere, I think, our whole society had its will to happiness subverted so badly it's lost all sense of how you get to be well. That's quite broad as staements go, though, and might have something to do wwith the fact that I'm a bit depressed myself right now and tend to think the world iis failing horribly and about to, you know, fall apart or something. You don't have to agree with that one. On the individual level, though, understanding what lengths people will go to in an attempt to be happy might give us all a better understanding of mental illness.

Gram Parsons- Return of the Grevious Angel

2007-02-26T16:51:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-23T14:49:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-06T15:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Gil Scott-Heron- the revolution will not be televised

2007-01-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-26T15:35:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-11T17:22:00.000-08:00

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

Tom Waits: Poor Edward

2006-09-30T17:09:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-09-14T14:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Bob Dylan: Caribbean Wind

2006-08-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

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.

Janis Joplin: Summertime

2006-06-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

I'm not very good at being left. I'm even worse at telling the difference between being left and being abandoned. Most of the time it doesn't even occur to me that there is a difference, that there are ways of people walking away which don't involve them not looking back over their shoulder. Right now, my best friend is leaving to live in Ireland- somewhere on the coast of the sticky out bit on the bottom left, if you're iinterested. He probably told me the name, but I was probably drunk. Predictably, I'm not dealing with it very well. Thus I find myself hiding in my spare room at two on a tuesday afternoon wearing pink moon boots and an enormous red fluffy cardigan. They clash terribly but I don't care, which itself is a sign of the depth of my malaise. I've made a den of pillows and blankets. Leaving it, even to go downstairs to take a piss or make another cup of coffee makes me feel exposed and in danger. Although, come to think of it, if I made fewer cups of coffee I wouldn't need to piss so often; I could probably halve the number of times I need to leave the security of my little hovel just by doing that, and also if my caffine intake was lower my left leg wouldn't be twitching quuite so much. Hell yes. Logic as the tool of the mad.

I don't deal well with being left. I find it hard to believe that people will come back. I find it hard not to think a tad apocalyptically- my life is empty, there is no one left (despite the obvious untruth of this), no one will ever love me, no one will ever stay. I find it hard to accept the truth- that people do leave, and then they return. Or they don't return. Either way it's not my fault, and I, like Celine Dion, will go on. Although, like Celine Dion, I probably shouldn't. Or so it seems from here.

I don't deal well with being left. I slip quickly into the worst possible form of shadow life. I can't face anything. I can't talk to peopl and I don't want anyone near me. Touch seems to burn. I can't summon the energy or the will for simple tasks. About ten years ago I saw a drawing by Blake of the corner of a room, done in pencil. In my mind, that is what this place looks like- blank and empty. Safe, though, in its annonymity. I don't particularly want to leave. I sit in the corner with the wall at my back, and I just keep on sitting. I stare without interest from the window or immerse myself in DVDs of american TV series'- the televisual equivalent of smack- sweet, addictive, an eater of days, but ultimately resulting in your brain rotting and dribbling out of all the holes in your face.

I don't expect this to sound like anything other than self-indulgence, but it isn't that, quite. It's what happens when your brain shuts off any sort of emotion. The brain isn't too good at filtering out one type of feeling from another. It can't really tell the difference between pain and sadness and anger and cheerfullness and irritation. So if, like mine, your brain has the learned response to overwhelming emotion of simply blocking whatever emotion it is which is doing the overwhelming, then it doesn't discriminate. It blocks out everything. All those emotions you hardly ever notice which get you up in the morning- interest, excitement, anger, duty, whatever floats you- go too. What is left is a big hole which manifests itself as a sort of boredom- the eternal ennui of the long distance soul, or something. I've tried to fill out my diary card for therapy every day this week. I'm supposed to tick boxes to describe how I've been feeling. I can't think of anything to tick. The whole week is left blank. Which is what it's like.

I know I should stand up. I know that this sort of behaviour can only make things worse. I've known this since sunday, when I ran away from a one day festival in Hyde Park and walked around London for hours with the only person I know whose presence I can tolerate at times like these. We window shopped for houses and I dreamed of a future in which I live on my own in peace and isolation and sing for a living. I came home and sat up till five in the morning, doing nothing in particular.

Here's the funny thing though. I've been here before, more times than I can remember. When a boy doesn't call me back. When an email isn't answered. When my ex has a new partner. When I row with a friend. When my therapist cancels a session. Everything from my mother's death to the man in the fucking corner shop not returning my smile induces this numbness. Every time it's the same- I hole myself up in my house for a week like a wounded animal and refuse to answer the phone. Eventually, the numbness wears off, I start feeling things again, the boredom stops and I can muster up enough interest in the world to do the washing up and have a shower and go out. What it feels like to be sitting here, though. That's different from the times before. I haven't once in the last three days contemplated suicide. I say this matter of factly because it's a simple matter of fact- suicidal ideation has always been a symptom of this before; it goes together like shopp-de-fucking-whatever. In it's place there is something different; something like resignation, or endurance. This week is just something to be lived through, like I've lived through it before.

There used to be a poem which would come to my head on days like these. It's by Berryman, and the lines which come to mind are: "I don't feel this will change. / I don't want any thing / or person, familiar or strange. / I don't think I will sing / any more just now; / or ever..." Today, something else is stuck in my head- Summertime, in the voice of Janis Joplin. You need to hear the words in this voice, raw and true, to understand why this isn't as wholly fucking corney as it sounds. The song isn't so much like a lullaby when it's sung by a blues-harsh smack addict. Unsuprisingly. It sounds like a promise of protection offered by someone powerless to protect, and the only thing that rings positive is the line which sticks in my head, switched in my mind from third person to first- "One of these mornings, I'm gonna rise up singing". Hell, it sounds corney awhatever voice it's in and my attempt at cultural reference distraction wont change that, but I hold onto that line with all the fervour of the convert. I'm sitting dressed like a sartorially misguided extra from Fame on a pile of rags surrounded entrely by mess, and the only time I have ventured further than the corner shop in the last few days I felt like I was in Blade Runner adn had to run away, ignominiously. I'm allowed to hold onto any line I damn well like if I think it might help.

I'm not very good at being left. Maybe I never will be. My best friend, who has held my hand through all the crap even when I was being irritating as only an overeducated borderline with a penchant for razorblades can be irritating, and who is one of the few people I have ever trusted, is moving over the sea to write a novel, like the big damn cliche he is, and I am not dealing with it very well. I am dealing with it though. And I find that I understand the difference between being left and being abandoned. People who leave come back; or they don't. Either way, they don't stop looking back, adn they don't find it so easy, and they stop to say goodbye. People who abandon you walk away without a glance. Obviously this brings up the matter of Orpheus and, you know, the underworld and shit, and the whole looking back and losing Euridice but we'll just put that down as the exception that proves my somewhat sentimental, ill-thought out rule. Besides, Orpheus was given due warning that the usual rules didn't apply, and if there's one thing that classical mythology should have taught us it's that if the gods tell you to do something then you should probably, you know, just do it.

This post has no substance particularly. I'm not in my right mind, you know. Someone is leaving, and I'm not dealing with it well. I have found comfort, though. In American TV, mainly. If the worst comes to the worst and you have to leave on a plane with some other guy, and I have to walk away with the funny-faced dimiutive policeman, and if life comes between us as life has a tendency to do, and the problems of three little people don't add up to a hill of beans in my crazy head, then at least we'll always have bittorrent.

Elgar: Dream of Gerontius

2006-06-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

Appologies if this post comes across religious on yo' asses, and it will. It's late; I'm feeling tired and sad and ruminative, and my mind is buzzing. It's fucking hot. I have all the windows open. The hot weather always seems to do odd things to me. There is nothing that lifts the spirits like waking to a pure blue morning, and nothing that deadens them like its closing in sultriness and dust and the city's shrouding pollution haze. As a result every day of the heat wave is like a minor essay in manic depression, and I spend a lot of nights sitting in my attic, looking out towards canary wharf, watching the lights in the tower blocks blink out. I have always loved high places and high windows. As a child, growing up in a tall house surrounded by moorland, I would spend hours, amongst the horror and the train wreck of my parent's relationship and my father's abuse, curled up on a window seat watching cloud shadows move across the hills, marking the passiing of time with the colour of the heather and the varying bleakness of the sky. There is something ineffably comforting in the feeling of being so small, so insignficant, all pain eased by the simple fact of space. "...and immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: the sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless". There is peace in distance, and sadness, and I'll take the latter if I can find the former there.

Christianity has had a hold over my mind this last week which seems to have been emphasised by events. I've been learning the part of the Angel in the Dream of Gerontius. There is nothing more evocative than music if, as I do, you have a tendency to listen obsessively to one thing through any particular period of your life. The Dream is one of the only things I have listened to consistently over the last ten years or so, and as a reult it seems to bring with it some buggered palimpsest of the whole period, so that if I let my mind drift I can reach out and touch the summer I discovered fun and boys and drink and drugs, the first time I fell in love, teenage angst and alienation, living alone for the first time at sixteen, my A-levels, my first days at Cambridge, my last days at Cambridge with all the dissillusion and dissolution that accompanied them, caring for my mother and her funeral, and all the darkness of the year that followed. A potted history of me in one great Catholic monument. There's a thing. Learning it, reaching the sort of familiarity with text and music which you can only gaiin by pouring over the score for hours at a motherfucking time, I have begun to wonder if the reason I have come back to it so often is that it deals so capably with the theme of redemption.

On thursday I went to see the beating of the retreat at hourseguards parade with my grandfather (and, as a side note, I got to flirt with an actual red-coated member of the household cavalry, which I think largely completed me as a person) and while squinting at men doing complicatedthings with horses and trombones found myself talking about this with him. He made the point that a lot is said in these (hem hem) times about forgiveness being the central tennet of Christianity, but that this is a misnomer. It isn't forgiveness which is important, but the darker, more complex theme of redemption. It's not an easy thing to get your head round. Mozart, for example, for all his adeptness at dealing with forgiveness, only really touches on it in Don Giovanni where the Don, who fails to repent, is consequently denyed redemption- redempton being characterised in Mozart, tacitly, as getting it on with whoever has the name which sounds most like yours- and is dragged down to hell by the statue of the father of the girl he has, um, wronged. Or tried to wrong, anyway. Gerontius, conversely, barely features forgiveness at all. It deals solely in redemption- in a man, sinned against and sinning, facing the moment of his redemption and being afraid. Elgar said (and it is true he was a better composer than writer) "Look here: I imagined Gerontius to be a man like us, not a Priest or a Saint, but a sinner, a repentant one of course but still no end of a worldly man in his life, & now brought to book... It is, I imagine, much more difficult to tear one's self away from a well to do world than from a cloister..." Gerontius is saved, but he is saved not through the forgiveness of others or of God, but by himself going through the process, both painful and strange, of redemption. Forgiveness is easy; forgiveness is a movement in the mind, of you or another, but redemption is something you suffer, something you do and something you live. In this way, to my mind, redemption has more in common with love than does forgiveness. To forgive someone you need only think and feel. Love is an action, a thing you do, a way of behaving, a way of living. And is consequently by far the harder half of the equation. It is true that redemption requires forgiveness, but forgiveness is only the start. You seek it so that you can begin, not so that you can end. Forgiveness is important because it gives you the chance to atone, to make amends, to seek redemption. And so, when Gerontius asks if he will see the face of God, the angel replies:
"There was a mortal, who is now above
In the mid-glory: he, when near to die,
Was given communion with the Crucified, -
Such that the Masters very wounds were stamped
Upon his flesh; and from the agony
Which thrilled through body and soul in that embrace,
Learn that the flame of the Everlasting Love
Doth burn ere it transform. . ."
And so the soul of Gerontius, sinned against and sinning, goes not to heaven but to purgatory, because redemption is achieved not through forgiveness but through living. As much as a, you know, shade of a person can be said to live.

I find myself living this process now, and so returning to Gerontius again. I have, to all intents and purposes, given up self-harm. That, it seems, was the easy bit. In my mind, I have forgiven myself- for the wrongs I have done, real or imagined, for all the pain I have inflicted on people who, however strange their ways of showing it, loved me. For not saving my father from alcoholism or my mother from cancer or myself from everything, for doing what I ought not to have done and leaving undone that which I ought to have done. I have stopped punishing myself. But that is only the beginning. It is worse now, in many ways, than it has ever been. With forgiveness comes the realisation that there isn't any simple solution. I can't just pick up a razor and make it go away; I have to live with guilt and shame, whether deserved or not. When actively self-harming I didn't, oddly, think about it msuch. The thought came, and then the action, and then peace, of a sort. Now, I can think of nothing else. My mind is filled constantly with images of injury, with the soft thock sound of a razor on skin, with images of blood and bleeding, with the absolute comfort of cuddling a lacerated arm to my chest. I've taken up smoking again, for something to do, for a more subtle means of self-destruction. No, scrap that. I haven't taken it up for self-destruction but just for something to entertain my fingers, for a way of marking the moment and passing the time. I don't really think of acting on the urges now, but that doesn't make them go away; rather, it makes them intensify in some sort of baroque fantasy of wounding. With forgiveness comes the acceptance of my right to feel and so my feeling run amok, making up for lost time, spilling out across the canvas in reds and browns and the blues.

Forgiveness gave me the chance at hope. Now comes my own personal purgatory. Redemption is something you live. It is easy to talk about being redeemed from your past, of starting a new life, but you don't get a clean slate just by saying that you no longer hate. You have to try and live each new pathway, each alternative. You have to recant, repent. Repentance, too, isn't easy. It's not a thing you say, but a thing you do each time you are given the choice. Every time I see clearly that the only way to end this is to hurt myself, I have to take the other way. So I see that redemption isn't a momentary salvation but a thng you live, every moment of your life. There was my past, and the chemical makeup of my brain, and if I am to redeem these things then I can't just do it now, but also every other now. Am I ranting? Am I making myself clear? I don't know how to say that which I am searching for. After every action comes a reaction and the same is true of the act of forgiveness. Live through the reaction, and you might just be redeemed. Not in a religious sense, but in the sense of living your life free of the thoughts of injury, and free of the burden of guilt. To quote another, yes, another, bit of scripture: "I never said it would be easy, I said it would be worth it". I know it isn't easy. I'll let you know if it's worth it. And there endeth the lesson for the day.

Magnetic Fields: all the umbrellas in London

2006-05-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

I'm ill again. Sitting on the sofa (sober) surrounded by a detritus of tissues, orange peel, bits of weekend newspapers, locket wrappers. The fact that my immune system seems to have wholly packed up (this being the second cold I have had in three weeks) is slightly concerning me. I'd put it down to anaemia but I haven't been doing anything to cause anaemia- my habits are healthier now than they have been for three or four years but I seem to be getting more and more ruun down. My anxiety gave way to bitterness fairly quickly- that I should not be reaping the rewards of my attempts at health and happiness. I am using my ill-health and general snotiness as an excuse to be a shamefully self-indulgent miserablist for the day.

I've been leading an odd, peripatetic sort of life in the last few days, walled up in an artificial hole of ipod and sunglasses, trying to avoid humanity, wandering around bars and cafes. Truth be told, it's been a fucking odd few days and it's left me with both the desire to get immensely, inhumanly, unforgivably drunk, and a feeling that, yes, all the umbrellas in London couldn't stop this rain. Not that it's actually raining. That was metaphor, innit.

It's a well known fact that crazies attract crazies, the damaged find the damaged, like reverse brownian motion, like somehow all the damage and desperation just makes us sticky. Magnetism. Static electrictiy. Like attracts like and somehow I attract the worst sort of lunatics of them all. Most of them aren't even that crazy; they're just a bit wet and, you know, sad. This is possibly a varient of the principle on which the vulnerable attract abusers, people who will take advantage of their vulnerability, of their inability to draw a veil over their weaknesses. There will always be that sort of manipulative cunt out there, and hell knows I've met a few; this is just why the cylcle of abuse is, well, cyclical. That's not the prnciple I mean, though, quite. I just mean that people seem to be able to smell my instability from ten paces, or maybe they recognise my desire for connection, or maybe, as I was once told, I just have an open sort of face.

Walking back from a rehearsal on friday, a slightly sinister man tried to follow me home. I was angry and frightened, a bad combination for me, particuilarly when it's men I am dealing with, because I will do most about anything to make them go away and stop freaking me the hell out. In this case I gave him my number, too discombobulated and disconnected to make up a false one, thinking only of how to get him to leave me alone on that dark street in that moment. He's called me about every half an hour since. Part of me is quite impressed. It's been, you know, three days now and I haven't answered any of his calls except one at half past fucking eight this morning, when I was too damn asleep to press the reject button. I shouted at him and put the phone down. In the next three quarters of an hour he called me fifteen times. Fifteen! Christ alive. Does't the man have anything better to do? It's not as if he could even see me that well; it was dark, you know, and I was wearing heels and he was quite short, so that what light there was could have afforded him a view of, at best, the insides of my nostrils.

This has added a slight and anxious edge of unreality to the proceedings of the weekend. Which have been bizarre. Some girls get left for another woman. Some girls get left for another man, Me, I just got left for the catholic church. Oh yes. This man didn't realise he was gay, he didn't realise he wanted to emigrate, he didn't even realise that he didn't much like me; he realised that he was a Catholic. I have been stood up for God. That's right. God. Worse, I had to go and watch. Would any of your exes invite you to and see them consumate their relationship with their new found, better, funnier, sexier and, oh yes, deffinately more powerful, love? And would they expect you to be proud? And go for lunch afterwards? If they do, you are crazier than I am. Oh, and there's nothing like realising that as a result of that wonderful institution, confession, the priest taking the service probably knows more about my sex life than I disclose to even my nearest and dearest. Hell, he probably knows more about my sex life than I do, since I tend to blank these things out if I can help it at all.

He was a nice chap, this soon-to-be-Catholic. I don't think I thought it was going anywhere, but I fall in love like nothing on earth and he was kind to me, and he stayed all night sometimes, and that's a pretty lethal combination. I thought he was a bit odd, but then, you know, I think anyone who expresses an interest in me has to be a bit odd- the scars, you know, and the funny hair, and the fact that I can't see why anyone would really fancy me much. I had a sneaking feeling that he was taking advanntage- that he didn't really want to be wiith me either, except I was there and easy. I can't explain how comforted that made me feel, and I'd rather not explain why. I have to admit that the Catholicism came as a bit as a suprise. He's thirty-seven. That's quite old for a young man's conversion and not quite old enough for a death bed one. I sat in the church on sunday morning and wondered why these things always happen to me. I also, it has to be said, considered the fact that I may well be the last person he has sex with- unless his (ex)wife dies- and that I can't imagine he enjoyed it all that much. Shades of my past and all that. I'd quite like to appologise for that, but I wouldn't have thought it would go down that well.

Possibly the oddest thing of all was that it happened in Croyden. Not an auspicious place for a road to Damascus moment.

Afterwards I went to meet some friends, and told the story like it was jokes. It is, in lots of ways, but I would have liked to say something else. How sad I felt, and how much I felt that this is something which just keeps happening, and how, sitting in the church, I had wanted to start to run, and to run and run and never stop. How the only thing I wanted to do after the service, after fighting the urge to run or vomit, was to go up to the man who so recently lay naked in my bed, next to me, making small talk, and lay my head on his chest, and try and make myself feel better and feel close to someone, and put up with it just being for five minutes or a night, because I know and always did know that I am not really who he wants or what he wants. I'd be willing to compromise. I wouldn't make demands. I'd be quiet, and let him fuck me if he wanted to, and then I would go home and not call him until he called me.

Maybe it's like this for everyone. Maybe it isn't. For me, I can't see it stopping unless I manage to get the lonliness and emptiness which accompany BPD in check. Which are the bits which are the most painful and pitiful and which I find most difficult to control.

If other odd people stick to me then it's just as true that I stick to them. Because, in some sense, anything is better than nothing and I can't help but feel that I deserve nothing. And, even more, because the alternative to crazy, half-arsed fuck-buddies most of whom I can't even tell my friends about at all (not being particularly suitable for jokes, you see) is me telling the truth about myself to someone, and quitting the jokes, and trying to get over myself and accept that I'm not lonely and I'm not empty.

Do people actually do that?

Fuck me.

Maybe they do.

Doesn't sound like fun.

Maybe I'm better off just staying sticky.

Nick Drake: Pink Moon

2006-05-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

A word to the wise: when you crack open the Nick Drake, that's when you know that the self-pity has started with a vengence.

Sunday evening. I'm curled up under a duvet on my sofa, the by now presumably inevitable glass of cheap booze by my side. I maintain that I am not in fact an alcoholic, but that's an argument best taken up with my therapist, I feel. I quite hate sundays; mondays have nothing on them as far as I'm concerned although as I believe I have explained before, I do also not like mondays. Not quite as much as I don't like Tori Amos, who, as far as I can see, has no reason to dislike mondays at all and is therefore talking about something she knows nothing about. Sundays so often seem full of the sad; something to do with the closing down of the week, to do with exhaustion and a slight aftertaste of faliure. Did you have plans for the weekend? Did you look forward to them? Were they ever as good as they seemed before they happened? I thought not. Summer sundays are the worst. The day hangs around, its organs shutting down one by one, slowly but surely, until it's dark and you can't prolong the inevitable any longer but must go to bed and then get up for yes, another bloody monday. Perhaps this is true for everyone or perhaps it's just that for most of my youth the main feature of sunday evenings was maths homework and now, in a feat of pavlovian conditioning, as soon as the five 'clock news is over I start to feel panic and incomprehension.

It's been quite a week. It's had everything- highs, lows, laughter, tears, hangovers, song and dance numbers and even something which we could charitably call a bit of a love interest, a rare thing in this particular show and so cause for some excitement. It even had a job interview in it, which, if possible, is an even rarer thing than a love interest- photo finish, though. Photo finish. The job interview was the cause of quite a lot of the hilarity, actually. I have a friend sort of staying with me at the moment- a fact which is good for my soul but unspeakably bad for my liver. Apart, we are two intermittently self-loathing miserablists, the only difference being that he has a job, talent, and a girlfriend whereas I have cats, a house, and a mental health problem (swings and roundabouts). Together, though- together, we are two halves of a finely honed drinking machine. The night before the interview we stayed up drinking white wine till three. As a result I awoke scratchy in mind and brain and compensated for this by consuming a potenttially lethal amount of caffeine in various forms, the final error being a can or two of red bull- think of the e-numbers, people. And I was high on fear anyway because I hate interviews and hate new people and hate having to dress smartly and just hate, really, in an unfocussed and mildly repulsive manner. By the time I got to the interview I was high as a kite on legal speed and full of a sense of my own power and glory. The interview was for a job at the Hayward gallery. Their current exhibition is on Battaile and the subversion of surrealism. They asked me about it. I got overexcited and gibbered about the relationship between eroticism and violence in Bataille's pornographic novel the Story of the Eye, and then in porn in general; I don't know much about porn, having never actually seen any, but I am yet to encounter any gulf of ignorance I can't traverse by leaps of blind faith and logic. I waved my arms around and somehow got on to performance theories of modern art and thence on to choral music, my monologue by this time taking on its own aweful momentum. I found myself completely unable to stop talking, partly because I didn't want to put anyone in a position of having to respond and partly because I just didn't know how to wrap up. The expressions on the three faces of the interview team (it had three bodies, too, but they were hidden by the table) turned from amusement to bemusement to actual fear. After a while I ground to a halt mid sentence and giggled. They asked me about sales technique. I attempted to compensate for my philosophic loqucity by answering in polite mono-syllables. It occured to me that I possess few social skills unless I am pissed, which I wasn't, it being only mid-day. I tried to make some jokes, but they didn't get them or possibly they just didn't laugh because the jokes weren't very funny. On the way out, I fell over my left foot. Needless to say, I didn't get the job, a fact which I was informed of by letter. I think they may have been too frightened of me to phone.

Other highlights of the week included many rehearsals and a rather ropey concert. In the front row was a woman in a bad hat who waved her arms around a lot; I smiled at her as often as I could, because I felt she was my kin. When I am old, I will be like her, unless they cure me first, although I am feeling far from cured right now. I cut myself last night for the first time in six weeks or so. I have a few cuts on my shoulders and two deep slices on my right arm which wont stop bleeding. The action itself had little or no effect on me; pehaps this was a last fling and perhaps it wasn't- it may take longer and a few more slips before I realise that this isn't for me anymore- but what it has demonstrated is that self-harm has lost it's romance somewhere and now seems just as sorded and petty and self-defeating as in fact it is. A fact which itself is sad. That something which has been for so long mine, for so long a part of myself, my solace and friend, has deserted me, leaves me feeling both exposed and lonely, as though a girl who dazzled me has suddenly revealed herself for a shallow bundle of expensive clothes and north london confidence; not the ethereal glory I took her for but a clay-footed moron. How could I have been so stupid, and how could I have been so deceived?

Most bizzare, it seems to me that I have lost an integral part of my personality. Who am I, this being gone away? No longer marked out by wounds I must face the fact that I am just like anyone else, and cannot hide behind madness and self-mutilation to excuse my excesses and my faliures. The truth is, I didn't get the job because they didn't think I was the best candidate, not because I was crazy or because I was different, not because I was damaged or wounded or hurt. Perhaps this is just a part of growiing up- being able to see the humanity in yourself or others as something complicated and difficult, rather than in terms of angels and devils. I got an email from my father this afternoon. In it I found, against my will, nothing but humanity. It wasn't written by demons, by a nightmare figure, by the myth I have created. It was written by a man who hurt me, who I hurt in return, who is trying to make amends although he doesn't know how. He says "I know so little about your life that I have nothing meaningful to go on. I would love the opportunity to spend time with you and get to know you again; to find out what you have been doing, thinking, and feeling all this time. To find out what it is like to have a daughter again. To go over past mistakes. To talk about Sarah. All of that, of course, is up to you." I want to say no, that I don't want to see him. Because it is easier to hate him than to learn to see him in perspective. It is easier to blame him than to see that things are, as always, more complicated. For so long I have wanted an apology from him, and now I see that this is the best I am going to get, but also that it is better than an apology. It is the statement of a desire to atone.

I talk alot about revealed complexities. About self-harm being a way of hiding. In a way, that's okay. I can hide if I want to, and I do miss the simplicity and the romance of razors. As long as it's only myself that I caricture then it's only my loss, but I find myself, lost in my cartoon-strip version of events, doing the same to other people, and that isn't what I want. I want to try and find the truth in others. I want to try and feel again. I want another chance. Now, at a time when I am coming to terms with my culpability, I am being offered the other chance, the chance to see my demons as men- and I find that for all my big words I don't know if I can. Scrap that. I find that I don't know if I am brave enough. In the literature of depression, seeing things as they are is the ultimate buurden, the four a.m. lucidty and the trigger to suicide, but I am learning to distrust that. Seeing things as they are is seeing people as other creatures and yourself as one of them, your hurt unexcused, whether inflicted on yourself or others. Life's so much easier in black and white, I find, and life is so much easier if someone else bears the blame, and complexities are reduced to a rubric of archetypes.

Vaughn Williams: mass in G minor

2006-05-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

It's raining, thank fuck. Never a fan of hot weather, I've been in bed for a week with a foul cold, getting hotter and hotter from the inside out and the outside in. This last in a series of unpleasant lurgees confirms that I have indeed killed my immune system dead for once and for all, the only suprise, that it lasted for so long.

I walked to the off lisence through the rain, rejoicing through my coughing at feeling cool and clean again. Now I'm sitting with only candles lit, a half of scotch and a bottle of soda by my side, the breeze smelling of gardens after rain- jasmine and lilac and earth. Vaughn Williams goes remarkably well with rain. A lot of english choral music does; it's something to do with the harmonies and the spaces. You could put it down to the climate, but I'd argue it's more to do with a latent streak of gothic romanticism in our religion, most english choral music being religious. It's written for college chapels and cathederals, for twenty-four boys and men by candle light and somehow the image is only perfected with the addition of an engulphing rainy night- fellows, commoners and congregation shaking rain from their foppish hair as they enter. I can sympathise; it was running through a dark court, forcing my arms into my gown, chapel bell tolling my lateness, skin proclaiming my dampness, to shelter from the rain in the chapel porch as the chaplain said the preliminary prayers that, at Cambridge, I felt most beautiful and most like a cliche. I, too, have a streak of gothic romanticim, but mine is less latent.

I digress. This evening, what with the rain and all, and no longer being laid low by fever (hem hem), seemed like a good time to break silence. I haven't written for a while. The paranoia has had me by the throat. It would have had me by the balls as well, but, you know. Being a girl and all. It's a strange, lanky, whispering thing, the paranoia. I've always thought of it as the poor brethren of Descartes' evil demon. It too sits on my shoulder muttering lies, but Descatres' demon decieved him about the whole of reality, and I have a fair amount of respect for that- the grand deception, you know, the big lie. Mine just tells me that I am a Bad Person. It tells me that people are looking at me, and that they are thinking Bad Thoughts. It tells me that I am the centre of evil. It spreads doubts. I have written a couple of posts- all of them, it has to be said, fairly buggered- and been unable to publish them, for the very reason that people might be reading them. I couldn't bear the thought of being in other people's minds, of being thought about. It feels too much like being stolen, and that, in turn, feels like disintegration. Instead, I have huddled in corners and tried to make myself invisible- no mean feat when nature has given you a natural talent for visiablity.

I brought the paranoia up in therapy. It had reached its height, and I had found myself shiverring in the corner of a cafe on Tottenham Court Road, unable to leave because I was so convinced that people were looking at me, and whispering about me, and thinking bad things about me. I was so utterly sure of their contempt and hatred. Casual glances seemed embued with absolute contempt. People were hating me. I could feel it. And they were, I was sure, whispering about me. I was thoroughly miserable. Describing this to my individual therapist, I found myself desperate to convince her of the truth of this. -People, I wailed, were LOOKING at me.

After I'd said this, rather aggressively, for perhaps the fifth time, she asked -And were they looking at you? I was taken aback. All my previous therapists, when confronted with my capacity for neurotic paranoia- the bit where I stop being borderline and start being pretty psychotic, actually- are sympathetic but look slightly worried. I am used to this. I capitalise on it when I want some sympathy or to distract from a particularly stupid thing I've done, because that's the sort of manipulative cunt I am. Never before has anyone asked me if people are looking at me. It occured to me suddenly that I'm five foot ten and I dress funny. Yes, people probably are looking at me. And normally it doesn't bother me; I accept it and keep walking, in the same way that it no longer bothers me when people stare at my scars, or ask me wierdly intusive questions because of them. It's a part of my life, and I'm usually too busy thinking about something else to pay much attention. It's only when my brain is looking for something to fixate on that it starts becoming a problem.

I have been wondering, ever since, as the paranoia left its perch and freed me for a while to think normal thought, proportionate to myself and circumstance, about the way we designate reality. So often, it seems to be by majority vote. Psychosis is often defined in terms of experiences not shard by majority. I have little problem with that. What interests me is the narative element- the fact that whether it is real or not is to some extent defined by the way you tell it. Oh, yes, I know the reason- that psychosis is a thought disorder; it's not the event but your thoughts about the event which digress from the normal, and "thoughts" is a remarkably broad church. But all the same there is somewhere a boundary. At some point I stopped telling the truth about the event. People were looking at me, but at some point I started discribing it in the wrong set of terms. Well, at some point I started embellishing and thinking that as well as looking they were stealing bits of me, but we'll leave that by the wayside for now, seeing as it doesn't help my case. I don't really know what my case is. But there are a myriad different ways of telling any story. Mine's a little kooky, sometimes, sure, but "real" is an emotive term. It's pretty bloody real to me. Real enough to make me cut and starve myself; real enough to make me cancel appointments and stay in my house until after dark, when people can't see me so well. And is it true? It's my version of the truth. Yours differs, perhaps, and yours is in tune with the majority. Mine is the deviant one. Well, it is. I accept that. But in the particular, bounding world which I inhabit it's the only truth there is.

My argument is not that there are more than one kind of truth. I'm a finely honed rational philosopher, y'know, and I have little time for that RELATIVISTIC BULLSHIT. Rather, it is that the truth is the same for both of us- my story and yours contain the same grain of truth. It's after the truth that things diverge, and that's just what telling a story is, and that's just what the judiciary is, and in lots of cases that's just what mad is. People were looking at me. I accept that, and so does my therapist. From then on in, it's just a case of how you spin it. My spin might be left-field, but that doesn't make it wrong. Spin can't be wrong- ambiguous is what spin is. The difference, as far as I can see it, is that my spin makes me deeply miserable, makes me doubt myself and hurt myself and sometimes, yes, it's so bonkers that it makes me wonder if I'm crazy. But the real truth is that some people tell their lives as romances, some as sagas; some have Dickens ghost them and other poor buggers pick Martin Amis. Me, I read like a cross between a horror story and a second rate tragedy. The truth's okay. In itself it's neither sad, nor uplifiting, nor funny. If you're laughing, then it's just the way I tells them.

Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli

2006-04-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

It's not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.

-John Berryman

I write this from the depths of one of the most unpleasant hangovers it has ever been my privalege to endure. I feel repulsive, like my brain has shrunk a centemetre all round, been shrink-wrapped, and the resultant space between cellophane and skull has been stuffed with rancid cotton-wool. Wandering grumpily down Oxford Street at ten am in search of coffee and a paper I saw a man with elephantitis of the testicle. This was an auger of evil; my hangover has just gotten worse from there on in. I am listening to Palestrina because it is the only thing my poor pickled head had can take.

Actually, I seem to have been hungover for most of this week. That is, in the spaces between being asleep and being drunk. Many of these spaces have been mercifully short. I can't say I have done anything exciting; last night was a rather glorious experience, but the preceeding ones have been in the main solitary affairs, whiskey soaked and angry and sordid. One night saw me on my knees scrubbing the floors at three am, a whiskey and soda my permanent companion. Last weekend I decided to stop eating. An outpouring of anger and self-loathing, a sudden inability to look at myself in the mirror without shame and hate, led to this strange gesture of rebellion; as a result I have been survining on apples and mustard and scotch and black coffee. By yesterday morning, day six of two apples a day, each sliced int thirty six pieces, the second dipped in mustard because the strong flavour kids your brain into thinking you are full, I was so hungry that I couldn't stop shaking. I dragged myself downstairs and drank two glasses of ribena, trying to get the sugar into my bloodstream. I called a friend. He came round with food. I fell on it in an undignified manner and devoured every crumb and then felt like crying. I got drunk instead.

I'd like to say that I don't know where this is coming from, but I do. I know very well. I can trace the process through the days and ways of my thoughts. It goes a bit like this: I don't like that I am not self-harming anymore. I am angry with my therapists. I hate being angry at other people. I turn the anger againnst myself. I stop eating as a way to punish myself and as a petty act of rebellion against the people who are so patiently trying to make me better. It's terribly fucking transparent and I know it's a bad thing in the same way that I know that not eating is a bad thing. I know it's bad but I don't care; for myself, for those around me, for my therapists, for anyone. I am a big bundle of incohate rage and I am using my body as a weapon in a war that no one else is really fighting. I fight it anyway, because it makes me feel strong and safe and seperate, even when I can't walk straight and there are black dots dancing across my visual field.

One interpretation says that I have reached a point of suspension, the moment of weightlessness the runner feels when his back foot has left the floor and his front is yet to reach it. My therapists have patiently unpicked my mind and laid out the pieces before me. They have taken away my old, bad habits, the concurrent circles of thought which I have owned for so long. They have yet to put anything in their place, and so I fall, and, falling, clutch at straws. Without the palliative of self harm the noise in my head is unbearable and I try anything I can think of to quieten it. Food restriction gives me something to focus on, some definite goal, a thought around which all other thoughts can be construced, so that the feeling of infinite chaos goes away. The resurging hunger pains are a testament to my strength. For the rest- I just want to run, and drinking is only a form of mental running. You can run away from yourself through booze in a way that is utterly unique. Besides which, it passes the time, and time seems an infinite burden these days. I'm not sleeping much.

There is another interpretatiion, though- a darker, flip-side. The one in which I am not the shell-less crab striving to find a newer, better set of lviing arrangements, but rather the stroppy and self-sabotaging child. I am self-harming less because the focus of the therpy on this behaviour means that it isn't mine anymore, and there is a large part of me which resents that bitterly, and which has no interest in being treated or cured. A part which is angry as hell with every single person on the planet for what has been done to me. A part which looks on every person it meets and says: you never lifted a fucking finger. This is the thing in me which needs a secret, which needs to claw something back from the world, which is angry because it is also deeply, deeply frightened. As am I- of every person I meet and their capacity to hurt me. There is a large part of me which is still utterly intent on self-destruction by any means possible, and you can't therapize that bit. Therapists can teach me skills but they can't do shit with the bit of me which is determined not to use them.

Self-harm, anorexia, bulemia- it's a cliche that the sufferer gains a sense of control through them. While everyone knows this and excepts it as a truism, I think they rarely consider what it actually means. The control is of a very particular sort, and is something you seek when you simply cannot control or predict anything else. I grew up with an alcoholic manic depressive for a father- a man both intensely violent and deeply kind; a man who was charismatic and fun and dangerous and terrifying. Who shouldn't have been left in charge of a goldfish, let alone a young child. Nothing was predictable. Something which one day would bring kindness would another bring a smack in the face. I grew up with no idea how to behave, which of my actions were good and which bad, with no idea how to relate in an ordinary manner to other people. It's Wittgenstein in action- without consistent responses you simple can't learn. It's not control I was after so much as predictability. By controlling your body you at last find something which is consistent and predictable. If I cut myself, I bleed; if I starve myself, I lose weight. If I drink, I get drunk. The relief this brings is absolute. The world of human interellations is too complicated, is frightening and unitellegable and you never know what will happen next; here, you have found an area in which there is certainty; your actions are finally given meaning. It is for this reason, I think, that as a breed borderlines often seem so self-obsessed. The self, and the manifold ways of controlling the self, is the only context in which our actions gain sense.

So I find myself in a position where my props have been removed, and I am angry and frightened and everything feels too intense. It feels like I have had all control wrested from me. One day I look at myself in the mirror, and I think -you fucking ugly bitch. And I think -I'll show them. And suddenly I am exhilirated. I can do this. The hungrier I feel the more I feel that I am winning; the more I feel that I am hurting other people, and the more I am hurting myself. That's the paradox revealed.

And so it begins again. I am tired and I am fighting myself on more fronts that I can keep track of. I've given up trying to find any sort of philosophical point in all this. I'm not even capable of spinnning a line, I can't give my thoughts a structure and my prose has gone haywire. All I know is that this is ridiculous place to be.

It's not a good position I am in. If I had to do the whole thing over again, I wouldn't.

Shostakovitch: sonata for cello and piano, Op. 40.

2006-04-25T13:36:00.000-07:00

God, I love tuesdays.

Individual therapy followed by group therapy. I just love it. All that happiness and friendly camaraderie between the insane. It really perks me up.

The kitchenette of a hospital unit. Tatty sits curled in a chair. Enter fellow patient number 1.
Tatty: hey.
FP1: hello, how are you?
Tatty: pretty glum. You?
pause
FP1: Yup. Me too.
pause
Tatty: Christ. Do you want a cup of tea while I try and think of something interesting I've done this week?
FP1: Okay.
Tatty makes tea and as she does so a companionable silence is maintained.
Tatty: I can't think of anything I'm afraid... Oh... wait... I sat in the corner for a while and sulked.
FP1: I spoke to a new person on msn.
Tatty: yup. That does seem exciting in context, doesn't it?
Enter FP2
Tatty&FP1: how's your week been?
FP2: I'm feeling pretty grumpy.
Tatty&FP1: Yup.
FP2: but I ate a really nice coconut.

The coconut is then considered in great detail. We discuss coconuts We Have Eaten.

It's ever so boring being this kind of crazy. It's just like an awful lot of primary school wetbreak times, all melding into one another. You know- like you were expecting to be able to go and play football, but then it rained again so you have to sit inside feeling a bit pissed off with that kid who keeps trying to kick you. I got quite excited when they told me that I was suffering from "transient, stress-related paranoid ideation", which is a form of psychosis. I thought, brilliant, at last, some real action. It turns out that it just means that when I get a bit stressed I start thinking that people hate me. Sometimes I start thinking that animals and inanimate objects hate me. Occasionally I have conversations with people which I think happened and then it turns out they didn't, which is mildly embarassing. Oh, and once I thought I was hearing voices, but then it turned out I'd just left the radio on upstairs. Really, on a scale of one to exciting, that's pretty fucking dull. The whole thing is dull. That's the worst thing about it; the constant, knawing ache which is just so unexciting while at the same time filling up your whole mind. Like tooth-ache.

Individual therapy was Like Totally Jokes. I got lots of Brownie points for not having self-harmed all week and then lost them all again by admitting to having eaten a box of ibroprofen, accompanied, garcon, by a bottle of scotch. I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't even a very nice bottle of scotch. It was blended. On the other hand, they were real ibroprofen; not your own-brand Boots shit, so that sort of makes up for it. I don't usually own up to that sort of thing t therapists,; it's just rather embarassing, d'you see? But I am determined not to start lying to this one, because once I have started I wont stop until I am spinning a girls own annual version of my life and everyone is smiling at my seuccess apart from me. So I told her, and she asked why. I don't know why. It seemed like a jolly good idea at the time, and I find those little air-blisters that pills come in just about as compelling as bubble-wrap. You just want to Keep! On! Popping! Also, I have this really good theory that if they sell them in boxes of sixteen, then sixteen can't possibly be enough to in any way harm you, because if it was then small children could buy them thinking they were happy white vacuum packed smarties. Don't tell me that they just count on children not being that stupid and adults having self-restraint. They put nut allergy warnings on packets of nuts. (See, you thought I was going to say peanuts, didn't you, and that you could then cleverly point out that peanuts are LEGUMES, not nuts, but I saw through your little plan and didn't specify what kind of nuts. For I am clever. And I think ahead. Except in matters pertaining to my continued existence on this sainted planet). I don't know why I did it, and that is something which has always scared me about this whole maklarkey- that I could do myself permanent and severe damage and have no explanation better than- it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In fact, the best approximation to a reason for my stupid and pointless act of destruction- calculated, by the way, not to kill myself but just to make myself sleep for twelve hours and then feel like shit for a further twenty-four (an OD of ibroprofen makes your face prickle- did you know that?)- is that it was the boredom. I'm not feeling too well at the moment. I say that to people and they expect me to start talking in tounges or wandering around with my shoes on backwards. Actually, what it means is that I keep being a bit wierd at my friends, I find my thoughts turning rather irritatingly to ending my own life when I am meant to be thinking about the quickest way to get to Notting Hill Gate, I am overwhelmed by the prospect of housework, I can't stand the sight of my own face, and it's taken me three days to read a hundred pages of a fucking detective novel. It's really just quite fucking dull. So I thought I'd do something to take my mind off it. A little bit of entertainment for the chronically sad.

Most of the other women in group therapy are older than me. In them I see what could be my future, or what could have been my future if I was born twenty years earlier, or if I lived in a different place: DBT has only been developed in the last ten years and still isn't offered very widely in this country. In most places the old programme is still adherred to. Borderlines are trouble, they're manipulative, fraustrating and draining and they don't get better, so there's really no point trying. Also, a lot of them aren't very likeable (although I have to say that I've liked all the ones I've met). Therapist after therapist will try and help you and then, fraustated when you don't respond to the talking cure, will give up. Or you'll give up, because it isn't helping and you're bored of treading the same ground week after week. There will be drug therapy programmes started and abandoned. There will be hospitalisations. And then discharges. And then more hospitalisations. And people will look at you without much hope in their eyes, and A&E will patch you up and send you home and wait to see you again, and your doctors will sigh when they see your name, and your life will be one constant attempt to live in a world which you don't understand, and your life will be one long session of not being listened to after another, and your life will be a bit of a chaotic mess because that's what BPD is, and one in eight of you will kill yourselves. Because it is boring. And it isn't what any of us wanted to be when we grew up. But mostly because it is boring; it's so, fucking, tedious, and there doesn't seem to be much hope that it will ever be different, and no one else seems to have much hope for you either. I've seen it when I've been to casualty to get stitches. They look at me and they look at my notes, and they are awful nice after that, but in the hushed way you have with someone already marked out by death. They expect to see me again, and they expect that next time it will be worse.

I lost hope again for a bit this week and re-discovered my inner bored, damp, over-excited play-time child, and ate the damn pills. The tuesday of doom, although not spent in my favorite way, has given me a bit of my hope back. I like the people in my group. I like being able to make jokes about the whole thing to people who get the jokes, not because they are about something slightly taboo, but just because they are about our lives. Funny because true. I can throw my head back and laugh. And when I talk about my fears, people just nod and look a bit bored. I like that.

Otis Redding: I love you more than words can say

2006-04-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

In an article in one of the weekend newspapers I came across the following passage:

"A psychiatrist I know says that people who suffer from chronic depression often attempt suicide when they are on the way down. They know they will not be capable oof it once they are in deep depression. 'They see things too clearly.' So they grasp the moment."

A loud chord struck somewhere within me; I had always thought that this was a perverse feature of myself alone. The danger times are not the times you expect, but the times when you are okay but start seeing the signs. It's then that you think- I don't know if I want to go through this again. And again. Forever.

Cleaning out the house recently I found some diaries I wrote when I was thirteen. I thought I'd thrown them out; I've always kept a diary but I rarely feel compelled to re-read them. The act of writing is a catharsis rather than an attempted record, so every now and then I have a sort of purge. These had escaped. In what I have written, I can see all the signs of a major depressive episode. I talk about hopelessness, lethargy, sleeping too much or too little. I talk about being afraid that I am going mad. I talk about ways that I might try and kill myself. Whole pages are given over to wondering if I am just making it up. In the worst bits, the same word is written over and over. This is a trick I still use, when things are very difficult and my mind is not much more than my own personal tourture chamber. When I am so low that I can barely move and I seem to exist in a state of semi-stupour I cease to be able to think of anything to say. Retaining the vague memory that writing helped, I pick a word and write it over and over again, until it ceases to mean anything and whole pages are covered. It was a shock to see this in my own childish handwriting, and to realise that this has always been with me, and probably always will be. It's not a cheering prospect.

I am lucky in many ways. My periods of acute depression rarely last for long. My moods are extremely labile. It means that I can usually keep it from getting embarassing. If I disappear for a few days, spending them lying in bed staring at the ceiling, then it is unlikely that anyone would notice. The less acute phase of depressions lasts for a lot longer, though;for months at a time I struggle about in the shallow water, occassionally getting engulfed, rising again, splashing about without muc dignity and then being sucked back. I stop being able to smile. I stop being interested in anything. I stop being able to read, or listen to music. Everything is an effort; my mind is steeped in treacle. It's for those patches, which for the last few years seem to have been more common than normality or hyperactivity, in which I think almost constantly of suicide. In the meditations, Marcus Aurelius says "In all that you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your hands", and the thought is a comfort. The knowledge that you could walk out if you wanted to makes it easier to stay. And so I keep it in the back of my mind. The other times- when the depression is acute- I don't think of suicide. I also stop self-harming. Killing yourself takes quite a lot of effort and even more firmness of purpose, and you just don't possess those when you're that ill. Also, in order to kill yourself, you have to be interested in something. You have to care enough about what happens to you to not want it to happen. The same is true of self-harm. You have to have enough of a sense of who you are to want something to keep you going through the day. You have to care. Quite a lot, actually.

The times which are really dangerous are those characterized by a particularly bleak sort of rationality. It is hard to say whether the rationality is real or illusory; whether I am seeing the world through the haze of depression, or if these really are well wieghed decisions. These times often come when I can see things are getting worse, in the very early morning, an adjunct to insomnia, when the world is steeped in the particular pre-dawn light which makes everything appear exceptionally clear but somehow flat. These were hours for smoking in, before I gave it up. I look at my life, and I see it far too clearly. I see that there are good things; that I will get better and laugh again and enjoy the sunshine and so on, in a clinton's card vision of reasons for staying alive. And I see that I will get worse again. Gravitation, innit? It's not that the bad outweighs the good, necessarily. It's not that I want to die, even. It just feels like I have looked at what my life might hold, and I don't want it. I am too tired, too buffetted. I decline politely. Thank you very much, but this just isn't for me.

Often, thoughts of actually really truly ending my own life are prompted by something rather trivial, which is a bit embarassing. Showering is a common one. The thought that every day of my life I am going to have a shower, only to get dirty again, seems so exhausting, so redolent of futility, that I just think- no. You do it if you want to, but I''m not playing this game.

The triviality of such reasons makes writing suicide notes rather hard. I know, because I've tried. One doesn't want to not leave a note, you see. That would be rather rude, when all these nice people have let you stay in their lives for a bit. A social faux pas, like not folding the towels after yourself when you go and stay with someone's parents. On the other hand, you don't really want yourself to be remembered for the rest of your life as "that girl we used to know who topped herself because she was too lazy to wash". Neither do you want to lie, not in the last document of your life. Also, I don't like cliches very much. "Good bye cruel world" just isn't for me, and I don't want to say "I can't bear it any more" because of course I can. People can bear just about anything. It's just that I don't really want to. The moment of your own planned death is a really bad time to be suffering from writers-block, but I wonder how many of the world's famous literary suicides left notes? And did they proof-read them? Proof reading your suicide note is the sort of thing that makes you feel rather self-conscious about dying by your own hand. Someone should probably make a template for notes and sell them ready made in batches of ten, like a particularly morbid thank you letter. Accompanied by a government health warning (suicide can seriously damage your health, perhaps, or Death is forever, but probably not Death can lower your sperm count because the morbidly depressed don't care much about procreation) they could probably sell just as well as razorblades.

I'd always thought that this habit of mine of contemplating suicide most when things are reasonably okay was just a strange feature of myself. Coming across that line in the paper made me realise that it isn't. And also that suicide isn't the violent and desperate act people tend to regard it as. If it isn't an act of bravery then it is at least an act of resignation. It is the result of a decision. People often make the mistake, when trying to persude you not to think about topping yourself, of ennumerating all the ways in which life can be good. The subtext is- think what you'd be missing. In effect what they are doing is showing you the cost of your action. Would-be suicides aren't stupid, though. Most of them will have worked out that cost more precisely than you can ever hope to do. With a certain sort of clarity they will have looked at the good and the bad, added them up and subtracted the one from the other, looked at the result and asked themselves if they are willing to pay it. And they have decided that they are.

I don't think suicide is wrong. I think what it does to other people is very wrong, and that has stopped me, mainly- that and a fair degree of ineptitude. I can pay the price for myself but it seems hardly fair to leave other people with your debt of guilt. Selfish it may be, but irrational it isn't. And I think that acknowledging the possibility that one might choose not to live transforms the act of living. I am here because I have chosen to be. I am not alive because sometime about twenty four years ago two people got jiggy. I am here because, sitting on the side of the bath this morning and contemplating the particular sysiphean cruelty of personal hygeine, looking at it in the rational light of yet another dawn, I decided that I am willing to pay the other price. Things will get worse again. They always do. For now I'm willing to deal with that.

Bonnie 'prince' Billy: grand dark feeling of emptiness

2006-04-22T02:36:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful morning. The sun is shining. Children are playing; I can hear them. My bedroom window is open and I can smell cut grass and fresh toast. I am having trouble recognising the substance of this, though. It's a less good day; a day which is more reminiscent of the bad days, when I feel further away from other people and from the corporeal world they inhabit. I feel distracted, caught up in a place with different rules.

There's something about assuming the mantle of depression which is like stepping sideways into a different world, a feature excacerbated by the concurrent presence of a personality disorder. Although it is a world which is mainly made up of big spikey lumps of PAIN it is not without its appeal. The other world, the one you've left, ceases to mean very much to you. It is strangely one-dimensional and although you can see people's faces moving you have to concentrate very hard to hear what they are saying, and then you don't really care. When I had to go and do things in the real world outside the door it seemed alien- a mixture of dream and fantasy and reality, in which people had strange faces and odd sounds came from their mouths, and things were at once too close and too far away, and everything seemed to be disconnected. When I stepped through the glass again, into the new quiet place I had found, nothing in that world had any power over me, and I was free.

In the new world, everything is black and grey. Everything is a thousand times as large. Gestures are vast. This is a world in which determinaton by fate holds absolutely. You become in your mind a sort of doomed hero, a bit part from ancient greece. You are doomed and there is nothing you can do about it. You stop trying to remove yourself from difficult situations and start trying to endure them. The ability to endure pain and suffering gives you a feeling of power. In the new world, there is no need, there is no loneliness, there is no requirement, no connection to unpredictable others; there are no daily tasks to drag yourself through. There is only self-subjugation, martyrdom, and ultimately a glorious end. You are self-sufficient. You need no one. You become oddly weightless.

There's a downside to all this, even from the point of view of someone so buggered as to actually think it is a good idea to live in such a plaace. In this new world, the one behind the mirror, you are on your own. There isn't anyone to see how amazingly strong and in control you are. No one praises you, and you want praise, because you are doing so well, you are becoming so strong. There isn't anyone to walk by your side and join in your games. Self-destroying games, although you can't see that. And so you turn to books, or songs, the vast literature of depression and glorified human misery and you find what you are looking for. Me, I found John Berryman, Robert Lowell, John Donne. Partly, you just want to know that you aren't the sole inhabitant of this brave new world; but it's more than wanting company. You want the words to express what you can't fiind a way to say, but it's more than wanting to tell people where you are. You have fuck all interest, to be honest, in telling people what you feel, because feeling is exactly what you are trying not to do. You want the words to tell people, not how you feel, but how fucking exhillarating it is here. How fucking marvellously free and defiant you are. You want the words to say "I am not coming back". You'd sing it from the roof-tops if you could. I've escaped, i've left, and I'm not coming back.

I'm not kidding about this. That world is very seductive. It's hard to explain, just because all the reference pints are the same, how everything seemed (seems, still, most of the time) different to me. To other people I was perhaps a bit of a worry, an odd and irrational being, intent on a series of petty and grubby acts of self-destruction which escalated a bit too far. II don't honestly know what other people thought; people were unfailingly nice to me, long beyond the point at which they could have walked away, and it is only occassionally, in a chance comment, that I get an inkling of what I must be like to watch. To me, I was... what? Not quite human. I was shimmering. I was in control. I was pure and strong as steel or bone and I was laughing at everyone from the other side of the mirror. Well, I was bonkers, obviously. Except that I wasn't, not from where I was standing; my behaviour had an absolute logic to it, a perfect simplicity and order. The only way I can explain it is that I had stopped being real and started being a part of a game which I had constructed for myself. And I was winning. Well, you know, obviously I was winning- I made the rules. What's the point of inventing a game you aren'tt supremey good at? Admittedly, it was a game with shifting goal-posts. Everytime I got close to what I was trying to achieve, I had to raise the bar. But from such a self-contained and self-controlled world, why would I want to come back? Why would I want to start living in a world where the rules were proscribed by someone else and required abiding by such incomprehensible pronnouncements as "thou shalt eat three meals a day" and "thou shalt apply antispetic to thy wounds". Oh, I know that it was nothing cleverer than running away, a sort of abnegation of all reponsibility. I know it was childish and rubbish and self-indulgent and annoying. But it felt grander than that. A lot like emo, in fact- a depth to which I have always tried not to stoop.

I am coming back, now. The real world has started to take on a more solid aspect. I think I will always live with one foot in either place. I wont ever see razors in the same way; will still think of injury in the language of desire. I don't know if I'll ever be able to view my body as wholly mine, or as somethiing to actually like. I think I will always be too ready to dismiss need. I am coming back, though. I do things I wouldn't have done before. I am more enthusiastic for mundanity, less eager for grand gesture. I care more about other people.

The trouble is, although I am coming back, I miss it, particularly on days like today, when things are difficult and I feel ucomfortable in my skin and can see nothing good in myself or the world. Lonely days. I know all the reasons I can't live there, but then it isn't really a place where you live; it's a place where you explode in a glorious burst of colour. It would be so easy to slip back. I want to. I really, really do.

JSBach: violin sonata no.1 for in G minor

2006-04-18T12:09:00.000-07:00

I am oddly calm and at peace with myself and the world this evening. The shades are coming down; extraordinary cloud formations in dark kinds of grey float across the patch of suburban London I can see from my window. The dafoldils in the vase on my desk are coming out of bud. In the kitchen, I am making soup. I have had a shower and a whiskey and soda; I'm in my pajamas with another of the same. Listening to Bach. It isn't feeling that all is right in the world, nor some kind of Pangloss-esque optimism. I don't mean redemption and I don't even mean all will be well and... Out of nowhere a passage from Romans comes into my mind- chapter eight, I think. Paul claims that "all things work together for the good of them that love the lord", and I presume he means by all things not just the nice ones but the really bloody nasty as well. Out of the terrifying chaos of good and bad comes something solid and true. A thought which has returned to me often over the last few days: that out of all the good and bad- out of the particular, unique combination of good and bad- I came, and that without the bad I would have been something different altogether. There is a sort of reconcilliation that comes from accepting that even the trully horrific bits of your life played their part in your own self's fashioning.

Tonight, my perceptions, my sense of peace, have the particular clarity which comes only from having been buggered in the head for a while and then having it stop. It's not unlike the feeling one gets when a heavy load is put down- an inner sense of weightlessness. It's been a hard week. I spent the weekend with my grandparents. I love my grandparents. In many ways I think they are the sum total of the ways in which my family are good. However. Spending time with them is a little wearing. My grandmother is obsessed with my lack of boyfriend. -So, darling, Do you have a boyfriend? is her usual opening gambit. After this has been answered in the negative, she will talk about something else for a while and then, when I am least expecting it, she will fire out -Why don't you have a boyfriend? -Well, I, uh... After this we have -Do you want a boyfriend, -Is there anyone you would like to be your boyfriend, -Why don't you get yourself a boyfriend, and, if I am really lucky, -so, then, darling, do you have a girlfriend? No, nanny. I don't. And I don't know why. It's not a moral thing, if that's what you're asking. In the words of Johnny Cash, I guess things just happen that way.

I am a constant disappointment to her, and have been for years, with respect to my lack of boyfriend. Sometimes I am tempted to make one up. A peer of the realm, possibly, or if not that then someone wholly and utterly unsuitable- a plumber, perhaps, or a peadophile. I would like to see how far I could push my powers of invention without making her suspicious. The only thing that stops me is that she would ask to meet him. She's a forceful woman, despite being about five feet tall and having severe Parkinson's. I'm quite scared of her. I'd have to get someone to pretend, and it's just one step from there to Victorian farse and men disguised as women pretending to be other men hiding underneath tables. I am resigned to being a faliure in her eyes.

My grandfather, on the other hand, is a quietly pessimistic supporter of the UK independence party. He likes Wagner. He likes watching opera with me. This time, he made me watch Strauss' Elektra at ten a.m. on Easter Monday, an act of such unusual cruelty that it ought to be part of basic routine in the Guantanamo Bay area. After the full, unbroken two hours of the film version I felt like I had been beaten about the head with a big stick and then had nasty, insanitary objects inserted into my brain via my ears. The odd thing is, I did quite want to see it. Just not in the morning. On a monday.

All this, and they remind me so painfully of what it is like to have a family. There are photographs of my mother everywhere. I try not to look, because it is too paainful to see her face. I can't think about that. Not now. Not yet. I can't deal with mmy grandmother saying how proud she would have been of me. I don't think she would haave been. Not now. Not here.

I took the train home yesterday in a mood of utter bleakness. I dislike trains intensely. It's something to do with being suspended between there and here; where you have come from and where you are going. You shed identifying marks and for a while you exist in transit, in a vacuum, no longer part of the lives of those you have visited, nor yet a part of your own. I am afraid that I will forget who I am; that somehow I will be lulled by the rhythmn of the wheels and the passing fens, and I will stop being myself, and continue for years, one train after another, dark sea to dark sea, broken only by strip-lit platforms with cigarette butts. The alternative is to return to my life, which, seen from outside, seen from a seat on the WAGN intercity service from Ipswich to London Liverpool Street, seems to be so empty as to barely exist. A small and tightly bound routine all that keeps me from floating freely into negation.

I got home. I sat for a long time just inside the doorway as a patch of light from the window moved slowly across the wall. I sat in the waiting quiet next to a pile of unopened mail. I got up, poured myself a drink, and sat back down again. It's as close to killing myself as I've come for a whille. Unfortunately, at some point during the last week I threw out all my blades. Every single last one; every beautiful, glorious piece of pressed steel. I don't quite know why I did it. There wasn't a moment of truth, a revelation or a turnin point. No ceremonials, no fanfares, no ray of light across my face as I consigned them to the rubbish bin. The opposite of these things. I did it because for the first time in more years than I care to count I felt that I had the choice.

The upshot was, though, that feeling bleak and feeling empty and feeling like I didn't want to resume my life but didn't want to run away, and feeling more lonely than it is possible to describe, and feeling like there was no where I could turn and nothing I could do to just. make it. fucking. stop. I didn't even have the means to kill myself. No blades. No pills. No rope. I sat on. After a while, I got up and went out.

And now peace. In the time it's taken me to write this the evening has settled to night. The candle's burnt down a bit. The soup is probably done, although to be honest I have no idea how one knows when to stop cooking soup. I feel calm and resolute and in a silent far off way I am glad to be alive. If I hadn't thrown out the blades, I wouldn't be here. If I hadn't felt like dying I wouldn't be here. That doesn't change either event. The bad is still bad and the good is still good. I don't believe in that sort of redemption. But you work with what you have to hand, and with what I had to hand this moment is what I have made.

(I am hoping that this principle holds true for soup).

Blind Willie Johnson: dark was the night

2006-04-16T02:16:00.000-07:00

Last night I passed someone in a pub doorway. Poking my memory a bit, I realised that it was a woman I recognised from the waiting room of the psychiatric unit. She was the orange hair and rouged cheeks sort; the sort I hope I don't become but worry, when I catch sight of myself in the mirror with blusher up to my eyebrows and my hair sticking in all directions, that I am already.

Recognising people like this is an occupational hazard (if you can regard being a member of the psyche services as an occupation, which is debatable at best). It's also supremely odd, and another indicator of how uncomfortable we still are with mental illness. It feels, sometimes, like we ought to have a code; or like, perhaps, we already do- too much rouge, a battery of scars, eyes that dart from side to side and never quite settle, collar bones protruding just that bit too much. The trouble is, although it allows us to recognise one another, it also allows the perfectly and unthinkingly sane to recognise us. And, then again, why would we even want to recognise one another? Mistrust doesn't polaraise us simply into the mad and the non-mad. Waiting to be seen in the psyche building I find myself looking sideways at people, trying to work out from their behavour what they are there for, wondering if they are sort of okay, like me, or if they are one of the really bad ones. My first few sessions in group therapy, aside from spending most of my time recasting the Breakfast Club from those around me, I was repeatedly reminded of a line from Casablanca. Captain Renault says to Rick: "I've often speculated why you don't return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator's wife? I like to think you killed a man. It's the Romantic in me." My eyes slide sideways to those around me and I think -what are you here for?. Did ya kill a man? Did ya? It's the impish bit in me, the perfectly sane bit with the slightly distrurbed sense of humour, which makes me want to ask, and makes me want to chat blithely. I try not to; I am supposed to be crazy, after all. I have my reputation to think about.

I think there is a lot to be said for challenging the notion of illness as applied to the mind. In my own case, those character traits which, beyond my control, cause me such difficulty, when brought under my control can be not just okay but rather wonderful. I like my capacity for throwing myself absolutely into something or someone; I like my capacity for sponteneity and for generosity. Learn to control them, and my personality, despite containing all the same elements, would no longer be "disordered". In fact, I think "disorder" is a bit of a misnomer. My personality is fine, thank you very much. What it isn't is necessarily in my control. It's like a big and unrully dog which pulls me every which way; it is too strong for me, and so veers from one extreme to another with frightening regularity. So the method of treatment I am going through is this: to use drugs to make the etremes of mood I suffer from less severe. And then to teach me how to manage my own mind.

All this also ignores the fact that a lot of time I, and many others with similar and even radically different diagnoses, are fine a lot of the time. A person with bipolar disorder is not always up or always down. The schizophrenic isn't always hearing voices. Sometimes, when you tell a new person about your disorder, your days spend in therapy, they look at you like you have cheated them. All this time they thought you were acting normally, and all this time you have actualy been crazy! Crazy I say! Oh, you may have been hiding it well, but it was there, under the surface, looking out through your eye-holes. It doesn't work like that. It doesn't underly everything I do. When I am well, it isn't hidden, lurking and unpleasant but cleverly masked; it just isn't there. My mind, then, is in one piece, whole and unsullied and as sane as any of us.

As for the rest of the time. Well. I'm not so scary to look at.

I admit it. I'm a fraud. Most of the time, I'm not that crazy at all.

Fiona Apple: the way things are

2006-04-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

And the moral, ladies and gentlemen, is that rum, anaesthetic post-rock and a depressive personality don't mix. Or, rather, they mix excellently, but shouldn't be allowed to. In this respect they are not dissimilar to, for example, the components of a long island iced tea. It's not wrong, exactly; it's just a very, very bad idea.

Today has been a day of faliure, mostly. I failed to remember that it is good friday and the doctor's would be shut, which means I couldn't pick up a prescription and I will spend all weekend enduring the early stages of peroxitine discontinuation syndrome, which is rather unpleasant. I failed to get my boots reheeled, because they are, apparently, too far buggered. Which is a shame, because they were nice boots. I have been quite successful at eating chocolate and reading trash fiction, which means I am also now being successful at feeling rather sick. Other things I might have done successfully: abandoned all last vestiges of my intellectual integrity.

I don't know what it was that made me equate intellectual goodness with a sort of cold-eyed anti-emotionalism. I'd like to say that I got into the wrong crowd at university. I don't think that would be true, though, although it didn't help- if my friends had been fluffy eyed medics and students of the natural sciences, perhaps, instead of a bunch of english students with a love of gallows humour- well, perhaps I wouldn't be sitting here writing this. Perhaps I'd be married and living in suburbia. More likely I would be dead of despair and fraustration and a broken neck. Alternatively, it may have begun in a teenage period spent listening to radiohead, drinking gin, and reading Eliot and Pound and Plato and Euripedes and cutting myself up with razor blades when really I should just have read Sylvia Plath and be done with it. I did read the Belljar when I was about fourteen, between, I seem to remember, Anna Karenina and the rather sinister We. I thought she should just get a grip and a smile and be done with it. It smacked, to me, of a lack of willpower. Anna Karenina, now there was someone I could identify with. Proud. Strong. Dead. That sort of thing.

It would be much too easy to say that this intellectual position is a manifestation of my disorder. It's a tempting inferrence to make, but one which, I think, hints at too much time on the therapist's couch. You could say, though, that my fear and mistrust of emotion, my equation of emotion with weakness, faliure, and getting beaten up, has led to this liking for the clear-eyed, the cold-eyed, the icy-hearted. The modernist. The nineteenth centuary as a concept has never realy appealed to me. I don't like the music, the art, or the writing. I've always been an eighteenth centuary sort of girl- earlier, perhaps- the renaissance and all that came with it has always appealed to me. The triumph of reason, the mind unfettered, all this sitting easily with a sort of thoughtless brutality.

In order to try and combat my excess of self-hate and absolute lack of self worth, my lack of compassionate feeling towards mysef so extreme that I can feel compassion for myself only when I can see myself bleeding, my therapist gave me a set of affirmations- mantras, if you like. There's a large zen component to DBT, a huge element of what they call mindfullness but is in essence a form of practical meditation. When she gave them to me, I stuffed them in the bottom of my bag, slightly embarassed. I showed them to people at a dinner party, held them up for ridicule. What toss, I thought, what embarassing nonsense. They are along the lines of "I promise to treat you like a special loved friend; I promise to care for you through sickness and despair; I promise to stop comparing you to any other living soul; I promise to recognise your talents; I promise to give you your freedom." It makes me feel slightly queezy. This is the sort of thing in which I do not believe. It is the antithesis of everything I hold good- of rigour, objectivism, clarity, control. Strength. Panic rises. It is the opposite of strength.

Last night, I got it out again. I looked at it. I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could actually believe any of these things? Wouldn't it be nice if they were true? I thought, maybe the rigour I apply to myself has gone too far. I thought, maybe emotion and lack of control are not the same thing. A few weeks ago, as I protested once again that the world wold be just much bloody better if we didn't have emotions, my skills therapist rejoindered in exasperation that this just wasn't an option. I didn't have a reply to that, because it was a new thought. I have always believed that with enough self-control, enough selfflagellation in the face of perceived weakness, emotion would just go away, and leave me pure as bone, and clean, and strong. I did a quick strawpoll of some of my friends. They're all good rigorous people not given to embarassing outbursts. Suurely they aim, as I do, to negate emotion entirely? But no, it seems they don't. I am puzzled. I put the thought aside.

And then last night I look again at the mantas and get the thought back out. And I think -why not? It suddenly occurs to me that, whatever I am doing at the moment, it isn't working. My emotions keep bubbling up like tree roots through badly laid tarmac, leaving cruel lines across my skin. The resurgance of the natural. Get the symbolism. I go back to Eliot and flick through, read Gerontian again, and for the first time see not the complex network of allusion, the clever footwork, the technique, but what the poem is trying to express. It isn't devoid of emotion. It is a well crafted vehicle for it. Perhaps- perhaps my intellectualism too has been misplaced. Well, not misplaced. I'll always be more Dorothy Parker than Sylvia Plath- a raised eyebrow, a martini and a joke so dark it's almost invisible. None of this soul-baring nonsense. But perhaps I have been liking the things I like for the wrong reasons, or for only half of the possible reasons. Liking the application of technique without trying to understand what the technique was for. The great morass beneath the words- the space, the darkness filled with unnameable feelings- that terrifies me. So I didn't look. I kept my eyes on the surface.

Suddenly, I think- maybe it is possible to allow emotion and to harness it, to not be out of control, to not be weak. Maybe I could allow myself to feel. Just a little bit. Maybe that wouldn't be weakness. Maybe my mind has been right along. Maybe I should give it some credit. Stop weighing it in the balance and finding it wanting. Perhaps I could try making a few of those promises. Because what is so wrong with liking yourself? Where is the weakness in that? And what is so wrong in listening to your needs, instead of punishing yourself for needing? I look at the mantras and think -fuck it, why not? Maybe I could try liking myself for a change. If it doesn't work, I can always stop.

I pin the sheet up in the bathroom. While doing so, I make a mental note to take them down before anyone comes round. I may have lost my intellectual integrity, but I still have some pride.

Meanwhile, back in communist Russia: Cusp

2006-04-13T15:54:00.000-07:00

Five minutes to midnight. Drinking rum.

Today seems to have been one long conversation about love (which would make a lovely title for a play, or is possibly already a short story by Raymond Chandler). After dinner, a friend says something about falling in love easily. I wince inwardly. Falling in love easily is my stock in trade; seems to be particularly pronounced these days. I fall in love like I breathe, or like I sleep when I am well. Suddenly. Completely. Unthinkingly. Deeply. It's almost a running joke. Another friend says I should stop falling in love with everyone who is nice to me. This is slightly unfair. I don't fall in love with everyone who is nice to me. What I fall in love with, automatically and unfailingly, is anyone who is nice to be when they don't have to be; when they don't want something or need something from me, when they have no reason to court me, when their small act of kindness is wholly unwarranted. That is what makes me fall, and keep on falling.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because it is easy it isn't real. It isn't a passing whim. I don't easily forgoe the kindness. I don't easily fall out of love. I don't ask for much in return (and there's the rub). It's just that I can't belive that anyone would like me, be kind to me, for who I am, and not for what they can get from me. For the same reason I have always mistrusted those who professed to find me attractive; my first thought is- what do you want from me. Actually, that's not true. My first thought is often- how could you do this to me? A profession of attraction seems so much like a betrayal.

But. Today has been a lot about love. In skills training they say something I find incomprehensible. They tell me that a typical BPD trait is to decide that you like someone and then, in order to make them like you back, to give them anything. To give them everything. They ask me if I recognise this. I laugh. Of course I fucking do. My belief in the power of the gift is absolute. The most important thing on earth is that people should like you, and so you do what you can to make them happy, to make them safe, to make them.. yes... grateful. And that;s where it would seem like manipulation if it wasn't so deep, and so desperate. In skills training, they tell me that this is wrong. They say that if you try and fulfil someone else's needs at the expense of your own then it will lead to them feeling put upon and you feeling resentful. Something slides into focus. I am shocked. How could something so simple have eluded me for so long?

I have found it difficult for so long because the whole thing seems impossible and not for the likes of me. Parallel to my belief about the power of giving is the belif that I am just not the kind of girl people fall in love with. I'm difficult. I'm ugly. I'm angry. I'm crazy. . My gut reaction to falling in love- to someone kind- is to do anything and everything they ask so that they stay kind, so that they don't remove the chameleon mask and start hurting me, because hurting is what other people do to girls like me. It's what I was born to, if not what I deserve. I fall in love easily and when I am in love I want to give all. For what is love if not a willingness to give all? And in my frightened, disordered mind, there is no difference between the willingness and the actuality.

On the tube home, I feel cowed by the easy consonance of flesh on flesh. All of London seems to be in love; perhaps it's the time of year. Spring has this effect. The friend that I go for dinner with talks of his partner in easy terms. I wonder. This sort of confidence makes no sense to me. The knowledge that someone will be there when you call. The knowledge that there is a person who cares for you, whom you care for. But perhaps it isn't spring; perhaps it is just growing up, because everyone seems to be making it at the moment- not love, but the more important, the relationship, the shared history, the mutual care, the kindness. I fall in love with anyone kind, but I cannot imagine being sure of finding kindness in return. I cannot, after all this time, imagine being in love with someone who is in love with me; I have forgotten what it feels like to be desired, to be liked. If I ever knew. I wonder if this will ever happen to me. If there will ever be a person who doesn't make excuses six weeks in which parse as you're too crazy. Who isn't deterred by my scars. Who is as willing to teach as I am willing to learn. I wonder if all this love is just not for me.

Barber: agnus dei

2006-04-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

It's easy to turn a good line, and I almost had myself convinced back there. Unfortunately I ommitted to add the caveat- that simple isn't the same as easy. I have it on good authority (a mathematician Phd with a penchant for irish folk music, since you didn't ask) that very high level pure mathematics has a certain elegant simplicity about it, and I'm sure said mathematician would laugh at the simplicity of the differential equations I turned myself inside out over at school, but I can tell you with a fair degree of assurance and a battalion of bad exam results behind me that simple it might be but easy it bloody well isn't.

Now it's sunday. I'm communing with my cats, my sofa, and my hangover. The air in the house has the metallic tang of blood and there is a weakness about my knees which says that although blood may be present, it isn't where it ought to be, viz., in my veins. I feel moderatly disgusted with myself but, more than that, I feel ashamed and disappointed. I've failed again, and I was doing quite well there for a while. I know what happened- I got too ahead of myself, ran too fast again, and then fell, bump, onto something sharp. I should learn to more quickly mistrust that glint in my eye.

I'm feeling pretty fraustrated with DBT. I'll tell you why, and I'll admit it's quite petty. I'm fraustrated because I'm not very good at it and I hate things that I'm not very good at. I'm a reasonably bright lass; there haven't been many times in my life where I couldn't understand, where I wasn't moderatley able. We're discounting sports here, because obviously I was shit at those. I've always been reasonably good at therapy, for the certain values of 'good' that therapy takes. I'm cooperative, I show willing, I talk, I see the links and profess to renewed understanding every now and again. The fact that I've never really got anywhere never really put me off, because deep down I thought I didn't really need it. What were they going to tell me that I didn't already know or couldn't read in a book? It was an intellectual exercise, and I would be able to do those standing on my head, if I could stand on my head, which I can't because, like I said, I'm shit at sports.

Now I find myself in the same position I did when I got an unclassified in a maths exam and realised that I had reached the point where blagging wasn't going to help me and, scary as it seemed, I was going to have to do some fucking work, much of which would consist in staring at a list of letters and funny signs and wondering what the shit I was supposed to do with them. I never did understand how you could change the direction of gravity in mechanics problems. Surely gravity just goes, uh, down? All through my life I have felt that human interaction was some sort of mechanics problem; it has rules, but they don't make sense to me, and I can never keep them in my head long enough to be able to apply them adequately. No matter how hard I try, I always get the direction of gravity wrong and get in a mess and yes, I do know that golf-balls can't travel faster than the speed of light but that's the answer I keep getting.

Now, someone is willing to teach me all these things I ought to knowbut don't. For two hours a week I go to skills training and a woman with a white board patiently explains to me about the necessity of balancing your needs with those of other people; how to tell when demands have to be tolerated and when it is appropriate to make demands yourself. She draws a picture to illustrate to me what happens when you put people on a pedestal. I'm good at that, because in my head each new person is clean, frash and unsullied- a talisman for me, the person who is going to make me normal. People aren't talismen, though, and so each new person fails and I am the one who gets hurt and angry because all that is broken is my skewed view of life. Again.

I sit and listen, and I want to cry. I want to have an all out tantrum like you haven't had since your first day at primary school- the rolling on the floor hammering your fists on the ground and refusing to get up sort of tantrum, because I just can't fucking DO this. Every neuron in my brain screams out against being forced to work in new paths. I come up against a stark and unpleasant truth: that my intellect and my emotions are out of kilter. The former compensates almost entirely for the latter, and now, for the first time, I am forced to put weight on my emotions. As a child I had a lazy eye and I used to wear a patch over the good one to make the lazy one work, and it hurt, and I couldn't see properly, and I looked like a prat. This feels the same.

If someone breaks your back then the muscles on one side grow large to make up for the wasting on the weak side. Other people might not notice; you can walk straight, just, and only you know the pain you are in. Pride and the fact that you are mannaging, sort of, stop you getting help. If, for some reason, you are eventually forced to go to physiotherapy, your props will be removed. You will be stripped bare and all the weaknesses of the damaged part will be exposed. They will make you fall again and again. You will be unable to walk; you will be like a child again and you will be so fraustraed that you will want to leave, because your body willl just not do what it is told. I want to leave. I've managed to opperate normally for years, hiding the things that I'm bad at behind repartee and an ability to talk about the theory of psychoanalysis. There was no conversation I couldn't turn to the general, to some area which I could deal with according to my intellect. And now I find myself faced with a woman asking me how I felt before I cut myself, and although I can give her psycho-social chapter and verse she just repeats the question and I can't answer her, because I don't know. I am wordless. I can't name even one emotion.

Simple isn't the same as easy. Simple is being able to follow the theory through with my mind and know the answer. The other bit- the living the theory, the putting weight on my emotions and hoping against hope that they grow stronger because this just hurts too damn much- that's hard. If it was maths I could walk away. I could walk away anyway, but, oddly, it is the very difficulty which makes me stay. Because I'm stubborn. Because I'm a persistent bitch. Because I'm buggered if I'm going to be beaten. And, mostly, because I know- have known all along- that the weakness is there, and covering it up has exhausted me, and I don't want to do it anymore. There have been so many times when I wanted to tell someone, but I have never known how; I don't have the words and I find it hard to cry, and I was desperate, and self harm was the only thing I could think of, and mostly people discounted that, too, because I'd pulled off the charade so well- don't I seem so bright and in control?- surely nothing could really be wrong? There is a particular horror in being voiceless; I dream about it a lot- about screaming and not being heard. I didn't know how to tell people how scared and desperate I was. Finding someone who can see that- who can see through the smoke and mirrors I've erected to live, to the bit of me that is essentially a bit shit- is humiliating, fraustrating, and cross-making, but it's also a releif. In the dark hours I have wanted nothing more than to be helped. Now there's a woman with a white-board who says she knows how. What have I got to lose? Apart from my dignity, and that was, truth be told, pretty sullied already.

Nick Cave: easy money

2006-04-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

I'm reposting this- it's from a few days ago, and doesn't seem to have worked properly the first time. I'm really a bit not very good when it comes to computers.

I'm sitting in my attic with the lights off, laptop on my knee, looking out through the skylight at the city, lit up. Drinking wine, smoking illlicit cigarettes. Listening, as the title of the post suggests, to Nick Cave.

I feel intensely sad tonight. I have nights like this; ones where I feel that somewhere along the line I have lost my skin, and my nerves are open to the wind and the air. Sometimes, looking out at the city is the sadest thing there is. I seem to see a network of people struggling to be human; people cutting and burning and starving and drinking and fighting because they are trapped inside their minds and don't know how to get out. Each man an island, bounded by his skin. Every person fighting for something. A fight of desperation; a silent screaming of finger nails and teeth and bared souls, and not kowing where to turn; being backed into a corner and each of us so trapped into our own worlds that we are unable to reach out and touch one another, even when that brief touch is all that we need. All across the city, men are beating their wives. What I am learning is that at the last account the only one you fight is yourself.

This is a truth I am struggling to understand at the moment; which comes to me as something new and startling. So bare with me if it doesn't make much sense.

I long ago lost faith with the rock-bottom solution to woes. The idea that eventually you hit rock-bottom and then there is nowhere to go but up. I lose track of the number of times I have been at the lowest point there is. I can give you a selection from the comedy array. Three a.m. a week before my mum died, cutting up my legs in the cublicle of a hospice toilet. Passing out through hunger and blood-loss the morning of one of my final exams. Spending seven days scared shitless that I was going to die because on a drunken whim I'd eaten thirty paracetamol and a bottle of cheap red wine. Perhaps each time I've been temporarily spurred on to something: to seek better help, to try harder in therapy, to go cold turkey on booze or fags or razor-blades. Truth be told I wasn't spurred I was scared, and fear never lasts for long. You sober up, your wounds heal, your kidneys stop complaining, and you say you won't go there again, but here isn't there, even when here is just a few cuts and a few pills and a few drinks and a few lies away from a gibbering heap on the floor and the ignominy of hospitalisation. Rock bottom is nothing but a series of foothills you can traverse for years.

After I had abandoned hope in the moment of truth cure, I put my faith in therapy. I have believed for so long that someone could say something which would cure me; which would make the pain and anguish stop, which would transfiguure the past, put things into perspective and give me an incontravertible reason for getting well. I have thought that this is what the difficuly series of hours in treatment rooms was working up to; I was playing along until the magical denumount. The denumount whch would turn everything around; make my past vanish and my present into something brave and new. When that happened, I would stand up and say that I was cured, no longer subject to the random grabs of all the world can chuck at your head. I have been waiting for years for this.

I am beginning to realise that it will never happen. I don't mean that therapy doesn't work. I firmly believe tthat it does. That if nothing else it gives you an etiology; you learn to understand how you ended up here, in order that you don't end up here again. You can learn skills, and you can examine yourself and get a degree of self-knowledge which allows you to be useful to yourself. In the end, though, this is all that it can give you. It can't make you stop breaking yourself. There will never be a reason stong enough for that.

I can talk for hours about the reasons for my self-harm. I can say that it gives me power over myself and the world. I can say that it gives me comfort; that it allows me to feel compassion. I can say that it regulates my ooods. That it is simply something that I like to do. All these things are true, up to a point. But in the end, I can either face or not face the fact that the only person I am hurting is myself; that the only life being damaged is my own. I can go on being proud of that damage, or I can put down the razor blade, walk outside, and go and play in the sunshine. At some point you come face to face with the truth that the choice is yours. The sunshine will always be full of voices, ghosts and demons. The light will always be an overlay on darkness, one step away from fear and pain and disintegration. That is part of what it is to be human. I am coming to understand that what I am doing to myself, ultimately, doesn't change a fucking thing. If it proves a point, then it proves a point only in the illusory world of mirrors I have built to avoid the real hard one outside. At some stage in my life, through a whole set of circumstances, I chose to pick up a blade. At some point I can chose to put it down. Just as there was never really a reason strong enough to make me start, there will never be a reason strong enough to make me stop. Perhaps it's about coming to terms; perhaps it's just about growing up. Perhaps it's about giving up my fascination with pain and death and all the shades they come in and developing instead a fasination with what life can give me. With what I can get by turning away from myself and facing the world. Just as nothing made me pick up a blade the first time and apply it to my skin, nothing can make me put it down and walk in the dangerous air. It's as simple as that.

Which is not a simple thing to understand.

The Meters: handclapping song

2006-04-01T14:11:00.000-08:00

I bought an i-pod today.

I drank a lot of coffee today.

I did many, many things today.

Yesterday, something tipped me over the edge from 'feeling quite okay actually' to 'manic as hell'. I say something. I mean individual therapy. After an hour I felt like I had been hit around the head repeatedly with a brick. A very big brick. Maybe a brick the size of a TREE or a HOUSE. Maybe a brick the size of MANHATTEN. I don't know how big manhatten is or even how you spell it but I am thinking that being hit round the head with a brick that size would kind of hurt. So. That is how I felt. Like someone had turned my mind inside out and scraped at the lining ever so, ever so thoroughly. Like I had been given the mental equivalent of a smear-test.

So I did what I always do when things get hairy, when things start to hurt. I ran the fuck away. My mind somehow split away from the pain and ran laughing and skipping to somewhere less real.

All day I have been running running running. Talking nineteen to the dozen, laughing, waving my hands in the air oh yes oh yes oh castles made of thought and breath and imagination. Ignoring the obvious truth, that sure as eggs is eggs my girl what goes up must come down and you no wot I meen. I don't know when the downswing will hit me. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the day after. But soon. And it will hurt; it will hurt like a bitch and it will hurt more than last time or the time before or the time before that because every time I have more invested in it, and every time I am running a little harder, and every time I think [-this one will be different].

I applied for jobs. Ignoring the fact that half the time I am not well enough to drag myself to the hospital, let alone put on my good face and go to work. I went to see people. So many people. So much time to make up for. I must see people, I must show them that I am well, that things have changed, that this is a new start, look, a new beginning, I am going to take up running and I am going to live on oranges and I am going to learn latin and I am going to read Foucault and I am going to repaint my house and I am going to get an ipod and I am going to have a party and I am going to learn to play the piano and I am going to do my garden and I am going to...

In the end, it is sheer exhaustion more than anything else which drags me down. You can't run that hard, that fast, without your muscles filling up with acids. And you can't run from yourself without it catching up with you and kicking the shit out of you through sheer fucking spite. Afterwards, when I am back down again, I will hate myself for this, for being too much. For talking too loudly and laughing too often and waving my hands too wildly and making too many promises (and breaking them) and having plans which are just too, fucking, grandiose. It will feel uncannily like waking up with a hangover and remembering, bit by bit, what you did and said and who with and to whom. I will have the same sense of having been out of control, out of my mind. Not quite there. At the moment, though, it feels like running down a hill too fast. I remember doing this as a child- helping at harvest and then in the evening running down the newly stubbled field, and running too fast, and then the moment in which you are neither running nor falling. Your legs are fighting to keep up with your head and if you stop you will fall and so you have no choice but to go faster until, in the end, you come crashing down, hard and hard, over and over, and your knees are bloodied and your chest is aching and you feel you will never stand again. That is just the cycle I go through. Right now, I am neither running nor falling. Soon, when I am going as fast as I can, and still trying to go faster, I will fall.

This feeling of intense, bubbling, over-flowing well-being is illusory.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that, conversely, the depressions are real. I have long ago ceased to romanticize that blank, that desperate darkness. I don't want to be this happy, and I don't want to be that sad. Neither of them are real. What is real is somewhere in the middle, some form of compromise; I might be the only person who aspires to mundanity. To live a life not in black or white but in all the glorious, beautiful, intermediate shades of grey.

Hell, though, at least I've got an i-pod out of it. And I tell you this. It's fucking beautiful. And they don't come in grey.

Beethoven: string quartet in A minor, opus 132.

2006-03-30T12:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I took a lot of notes for this post. I am something of an obsessive note-taker; a chronicler. I have kept a diary since I was seven, often more than one diary at a time- diaries for events, diaries for reportage, diaries for emotions. It's a way of keeping the thread going, of marking the days. It's a way of making sure your life happened. I have an obsessive and somewhat bizarre fear of disappearing- I will vanish, disolve into nothing, and my life will never have happened. Someone will wake up and it will turn out to have been all a dream. Thinking about it, my decision way back to study philosophy was not unlike a death wish. Given to over-analysis? Bizarre metaphysical fears? Then let's BREAK YOUR BRAIN! Hurrah!

Narrative, I have always felt, is a funny and slippery thing. How do you tell things? How do other people? How can they be so different? If you chose to tell your life another way, would it change what happened? I am very concerned with the truth despite having been, at various points in my life, a near-compulsive liar. Throughout my childhood, my version of events was denied: it didn't happen, it wasn't that bad, it wasn't like that, don't cry, you asked for it. At times I felt like I was going insane; I didn't think I was lying, but these people, this grown-ups, said I was. It's a funny thing about being a kid, but no matter how much damage adults inflict on you, you never stop thinking of them as grown-ups, as responsible, omniscient. As right and true and protective and knowing something you don't. When you stop thinking that, you stop being a child.

Before that happened to me- and the story of how it did is a good old brilliant shit-you-up harrowing abuse memoir isn't that awful oh god how dreadful one, but we'll leave that for another time, another voyeur- my obsession with narrative snuck in. Am I liar? Did this happen? Did it happen like I tell it? If I write it down, keep records, take notes, then I know, I can be sure, that I am not a liar.

Today, my notes can wait.

I felt something when I woke up this morning, before I'd even opened my eyes. A weightlessness, an absence of noise. A breif swoosh as of something uncoiling itself. Today was going to be a good day.

They come now and then, and when they do I remember why I am still alive, and why I bother to drag my sorry ass to therapy for x number of hours a week when frankly I'd rather be drinking or writing or singing or cutting myself or running away or, well, just about anything. I'd rather be eating my own face. Let's not beat about the bush here. Most of the time, I would really rather be dead.

Every now and then I have a day where I feel normal.

From the midst of it all my fears, neurosees, horrors, agonisings, seem ridiculous. I can't believe I ever felt any of these things. And why couldn't I see, at the time, that all I had to do was stop? Get out of the loop, get out of my head, get out of my worry-box and do something useful? Suddenly, for no coherent reason at all, the beast stops torturing me, the constant agonising self-analysis stops, and I wonder why I ever even thought to start it.

If you've ever had backache and had it suddenly stop, out of nowhere, then you know a bit how this feels. It's like all the tensions dropping away and suddenly being able to move without fear of pain. It's like suddenly discovering you know how to fly.

I think, my god, but I'm an annoying cunt sometimes. Jeez. Someone slap me. (Ignoring that faact that I regularly take my own advice and that the short, sharp- very sharp- shock hasn't worked yet).

I got out of bed this morning and got dressed. Felt okay about myself- okay!- when do I ever feel okay? Walked out of the house humming. Drank two cans of red-bull on the way to the station; picked up a coffee when I got there. Caffeine is a beautiful thing when I'm in this sort of mood; it sharpens things, and days like this happen so rarely that I need them sharp, I need to pay attention incase I get distracted and miss a moment of feeling good. I meet a friend for lunch, someone I haven't know for long, and feel thrilled at my capacity to make new friends; I relish the feeling of discovery, of being chosen, liked, sought out for friendship, by someone who could have walked away. I talk and hear myself talking and think, this is so easy, how could it ever have seemed so hard?

After that, back to the bin. A bit of a downer, but I'm so caffeinated it doesn't matter. Then in the evening the theatre with someone I have known a while but have only recently begun to spend time with. I like him, am slightly in awe of him. Relish the fact that he doesn't seem to mind me being there, tagging along. Want to giggle just for the fun of it, but refrain myself (don't want to look crazy) The show is a bit shit, but I'm so overwhelmed by the fact that I have sat through the whole thing without getting distracted by my thoughts, without having to dig my nails into my arms to stop the rising panic, that frankly I don't care. Afterwards, I want to skip down the street. I want to stop passers by and say "this is how it can be. This. Just this. Just ordinary. Beautiful. Me with friends. Me, with easy conversation. Me not afraid to go home. Able to say goodbye without trying to snatch that one extra moment of contact before the paranoia starts"

Days like this, everything is transfigured.

I don't stay alive for the things most people cite. I don't stay alive for the successes, the moments or triumph, the wedding, the day I might watch my firstborn sleep, the shlock and sentiment. I could quite frankly take it or leave it. I think the idea that the sorrows are outwayed by the triumphs is just so much wank. They aren't. Fact. I stay alive because every now and then I have a day where my mind leaves me alone, where the cylcle of depression-anxiety-mania stops, and I know that it is possible to exist somewhere in the middle, between ecstacy and pain, between triumph and tragedy. It is possible to just be. And that is worth struggling for. It really is.

Think on that, oh yea un-mads.

Tom Waits: hoist that rag

2006-03-29T10:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I decided, for reasons which I find it fairly hard to fathom, to wear my scars, or at least those on the lower portions of my forearms, out for the first time this year. A winter spent believing that summer would never come means that they are significantly worse than they were last year. On back of my left wrist is a large red scar in the shape of a trefoil; I gave myself a third degree burn with the iron one tuesday afternoon for reasons I can honestly say I have now completely forgotten. The rest are the long, pink and raised marks of the razor. I look a mess. Still, most people are too polite to comment and I'm damned if I'm going to spend all summer wearing sleeves which reach my knuckles; that'll just make me a sweaty, grumpy, cross bitch. More so than usual. So I decide to go for it.

What I fail to factor into the equation are the rest of the clothes which I have chosen to wear. I dressed in a hurry; I was having a bad morning- hungover, miserable, world-shy. Going to meet an ex-boyfriend over for a few weeks from his new home in Chicago was the last thing I felt like doing. I wandered round the house picking up parts of outfits I knew I'd liked at some stage. A pair of black high heels. Electric blue tights. A gold lace puff ball skirt. A t-shirt which says "DIE YUPPIE SCUM" on the front. A cropped jacket with three quarter length sleeves. Not only did I look mad, I Iooked angry. Let's consider the external signs of being a MURDERING FUCKING PSYCHOPATH shall we? Short, punk hair? Check. Bored expression? Check (I can't help it; it's a musculature thing). Too much black eyeliner? Chheck (I was going for fifties film star. I failed, as always). T-shirt emmblazonned with death threat? Check. Arm full of agressiive looking scars? Ceck, check, and check-a-roo. It's od,, given that I on occasion look like such a nutter, that if you asked me to describe myself I would say- a little odd, maybe, but I'd get on really wwell with your grandparents. I would. Once they'd emerged from behind the sofa. On the tube, people do not sit next to me. I try and pretend that my body doesn't belong to me. It gets worse. I decide to hide behind a book. Unusally for me, I only have one with me- Marya Hornbacher's excellent psycho-cultural memoir of anorexia and bulimia, Wasted. So now I'm sitting there, obviously crazy, reading a book about another crazy. People avoid making eye-contact with me. I try and make eye-contact with people because I haven't eaten for a long time and I'm beginning to feel slightly hysterical. At Embankment a woman comes up to me. -Are you okay? she asks. -Yes, I reply.

I meet the ex-boyfriend for tea. I am horrible to him. I am always horrible to him. I am horrible to him because his care for me is too uncomplicated, too simple, too demonstrative. He is too easy. He loves me too simply; it seems to come as easy to him as breathing. I don't understand it. It frightens me, and I resent it. He doesn't understand, and never did, the complex and convoluted paths of my own emotions, the way I can screw myself round and round until I break, and then lash out at those who try to fix me just because it hurts too much to be touched. Being loved hurts an awful lot; people should, I feel, at least have the good grace to find loving me hard. He never understood the way I ran away from him because I loved him and he loved me and I knew that had to end. One morning, after phoning him at three a.m. and dumping him- again- I cried and cried. I couldn't stop. I was about fifteen; my mother was still alive and living here. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her, and as she held me and rocked me she asked why I had done something which had made me so unhappy. Then, as now, I had no answer for her. The next morning, I bunked school, turned up on his doorstep in floods of tears. His father opened the door, let me in. They put me to bed. I slept most of the day.

Now, he makes me aloof. I am supercillious, hurtful, my words tart, slightly bitter, tasting of coffee-grinds as they roll out over my tounge. It hurts me that he loves me. I want him to stop. At the same time I want him to take me in his arms and care for me like a child. fuck knows what I'd do if he tried. Hit him, probably.

The hard thing about BPD- particularly for those dealing with BPD in others- is the way that we hurt the people closest to us. We lash out at people closest to us, just to get in there first. Feeling certain that people will leave us, we make them leave us, just to prove ourselves right. And then we tell ourselves that we didn't need them anyway. When being alone hurts too much, we rattle to the other extreme, become like babies, incapable and made prostrate by blank, faceless Need- for touch, for soothing, for kindness, for love. Which will be withdrawn. And so the cycle starts again.

I can see myself being cruel. I can see myself being fraustrating. I can see people patiently try to explain things to me- how emotions are valuable, how they can tell you things, how people can leave the room without it being abandonment. I feel myself not understanding. The words are made meaningless by the screaming, whining, utterly engrossing cycle of my own emotions. I hate myself for being cruel. I hate myself for being needy. I hate myself for not being able to understand. I fraustrate myself. Living with my emotions is like living with a body which wont move when it is told to, or which moves wrong; it's the emotional equivalent of a severe physical disability. You know what you want your mind to do, but how in god's name do you make it happen? It's fraustrating, it makes me furious. There is nothing wrong with my intellect, but I have simply no control over my emotions; they are like a foreign body in my mind, a black bear to which I am shackled, which will not obey me, which is determined to hurt and sometimes to kill me. I can't run away from it, because it is there, inside my skull. I see people bemused by the way that I smile benignly and talk about the principles of utiitarianism as blood drips softly from my forearms. I must seem like a retarded child sometimes. You can say what you like to me about emotionality and human interation and love and need and kindness; I will smile blankly at you, nod, tell you I understand (because I do, intellectually) and then retreat to the bathroom and keep on carving up my skin. No wonder people leave us. No wonder therapists don't take us on. No wonder hospitals dread us. The only way to have sympathy for us, to understand why we behave so erratically, so capriciously, so loving/hating, so kind/cruel, would be to try being inside our heads. And I really wouldn't recommend that.

Talking Heads: born under punches

2006-03-28T04:15:00.000-08:00

Last night, at the end of a rehearsal, as I put on my jacket, a woman I don't know very well points at my stomach. My t-shirt has ridden up.
-Jesus, she says, is that a pair of tights or is that your skin? -uh... I reply, wondering what the fuck made her think it might be a pair of tights, it's my skin.
-what happened to you? she asks, a highnote of horror in her voice.
I do what I always do. I look away, say -it's a long story, and then go out and get plastered. Something which was especially easy last night as I hadn't eaten for eighteen hours. I tell a lie. I'd eaten a mandarin. And felt pretty guilty about it afterwards.

Holy motherfucking shit but I'm hungover now. I still haven't eaten.

Why do I hurt myself in this way? I wasn't starving to get thin. I was starving to punish, shrink, expurgate. I wasn't drinking to have fun; I wasn't even drinking to get drunk. I was drinking to make myself feel bad, to prove to myself that I was the awful, out of control, disreputable person I knew myself to be. The degree to which I hate my body astonishes even me. It isn’t the belief that I’m ugly. I do believe this, and have done as long as I can remember, not aided by the fact that I was, even objectively speaking, a fantastically unattractive teenager. Those glasses- what was anyone thinking? And that hair? Jesus. Someone should have taken me aside and said somethiing to me. I would like to be able to say now “I have grown into myself and am in fact not unattractive, despite what my mind says”. I am unable to say this. I know that I am not beautiful. Beyond this, I can’t say. My belief in my ugliness is absolute. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I balk. Heavens above! How can I leave the house in the morning, looking like this? Sweet Jesus, how can I live?

I have felt beautiful precisely twice in my life. Both times were responses to the early stages of relationships. On both occassions it happened that the men I was with didn’t try to fuck me. Sex isn’t something which makes me feel beautiful. In both cases what made me feel beautiful was a degree of intimacy, a taking care. A man stroking my hair and saying something kind. Both times I have seen myself through the eyes of another person. As a thing to be considered affectionately. On both occassions what I fell in love with in these men- and boy did I fall- was something fatherly. It’s not freudian. It’s just true. I wanted- want- someone to see me through rose tinted spectacles and say- my darling girl. Both men left me because, not believing that it could be true, I pushed their affection to the limit. -Prove it, said my mind. -Prove this isn't some kind of joke. The truth is no one can prove that they like you.

Ugliness doesn’t lead to hate, though. What leads to hate is the multiple betrayals my body has inflicted on me. My body betrays me by taking up space, by being a physical object in the world, by being beyond my control. I leaned early in my life how to remove myself mentally from a situation. Much of my childhood is remembered in the third person; I see from the other side of the room a small figure hunched and trying to absent itself from the screaming tirade, trying not to cry, trying not to exist. I see it. Failing. The rest of my childhood I simply don’t remember. I know it happened from the aftermath. I remember the bruises but not how they happened. I remember the fear, but not why I was afraid. I remember my mother hiding from my grandmother, screaming to my father, “how can I face your mother whan I’ve got a black eye and hip broken because her son threw me down stairs?” Although I know I must have watched, I don’t remember seeing it happen. I remember broken objects- my bedroom door, my favorite mug, the glass in the kitchen window- I don’t remember how they were broken. I remember blood on the bathroom walls and trying to clean it up before my mother got home. I don’t remember whose blood it was or how it got there.

Although I could remove my mind I couldn’t remove my body, and that was the first betrayal. My body betrayed me by growing when all I wanted it to do was shrink. It betrayed me by laughing and talking and putting its hand up in lessons. Later it betrayed me by responding when it was touched. This isn’t an uncommon sentiment among those sexually abused as young children. There is a part of you which suspects that you might, deep down, have asked for it, and even enjoyed it. Long before the one violent act of rape I was in contact with men who didn’t know where the boundaries ought to be with a young girl. I think, now, that much of it was unintentional, not designed to hurt or damage. In the gardens of many seedy pubs men told me I was pretty and bought me lemonade. They put a hand on my thigh, shoulder, as yet unformed breasts. Some, less concerned with innocence, put a hand up my skirt. All of them laughed at me. I believe truly that it was meant with affection, for the most part. I was on a level with the obligatory pub dog- basically nonsentient but occasionally prone to do amusing, almost human things. What I felt was humiliation. My body was there for them to laugh at, and I didn't know why. I didn't understand the jokes. But my body was the reason for them. That was betrayal.

My body feels, is saddled with emotion. I have always aspired to the true, the needless. The factual. To need, to want, to desire, to love, to feel: these seem like monumental weaknesses. I have never been able to subjugate them, although I have tried. In the last few months I have achieved something I have never thought I would be able to do: to admit to desiring, to liking, another human being. To be able to say something as childish as "I have a crush on Thomas". I have been saying it a lot, relishing the words in my mouth, relishing the image of myself as someone capable of desire. I have almost, almost, been able to believe that the response of others to this sort of comment is not to think, behind their unreadable eyes what right has she to fancy someone? Can't she see that no one will ever desire her? Can't she see that this sort of thing is not for the likes of her? Can't she see how she is HUMILIATING herself?

Self-harm springs in many ways from this. There are the complicated, the cultural, reasons. There are the philosophical reasons. And there is the reason that I feel, somewhere in my gut, above all others, simple and keen. I want other people to know that I hate myself as much as they do. I want to show them that although I can't stop my body taking up space, I don't for a moment think that it is a space I deserve. By showing on my skin how hard I am trying to overcome need, I want people to give me leeway for trying, even though I fail. I want to show people that I am not delusional. I know that my body is just an object. I know that it is just something to laugh at. I know that it is just something to be used.

It's on the level of a preemptive strike. No one can hurt me as badly as I can hurt myself. That's power, of a sort. Preemptive strikes rarely work, though, for proof of which c.f. the gulf war mark 2. Perhaps I could use my skin as part of an anti-war propoganda film. Look! I tried to beat them, but all I ever did was beat myself! There is a lot of talk in psychotheraputic communities of the internalisation of the abuser. If the people who you were told loved you (your father, your mother, rabbit and all rabbit's friends and relations) bully, beat and hurt you then it becomes the case that you learn that the only way to love yourself is by enacting the same sort of behaviour upon yourself. This may be true. It is true that after cutting myself I feel comforted, surrounded by protection, loved. But I don't think that is how it started. It started as an attempt to beat the fuckers at their own game. You think I care that you hurt me? Your hurt is nothing to me. Look at this! This is how much I can hurt myself. I don't even notice your hurt anymore. You withdraw yourself behing scars. They keep your from harm; they protect you, just as your skin is meant to, from invasion. My skin has never been strong enough, even with its armoury of scars.

I have cried precisely once in therapy. A woman I saw once a month for a period of about six months, the first woman to recognise that I was not just a fucked-up twenty-something finding the transition to adulthood hard, but a seriously disturbed young girl, asked me when I knew how to stop cutting, when the damage I had done was "enough". I told her, quite simply, that I stopped when I knew that I needed stitches but wasn't going to get them. She looked straight at me and said, with compassion and sorrow in her voice I had never expected to hear, -you really hate yourself, don't you. I couldn't answer, but I cried- real, true, grieving weeping. Because it's true, and I don't know how to stop.

Anti-pop consortium: dead in motion

2006-03-27T03:37:00.000-08:00

Monday morning. This I hate.

All around me the city drags itself alive, dusts itself down after the weekend, squints in the mirror and pulls a face, dons a suit and grumbles its way to work. By rights this should be my lot, but I am not one of the socially acceptable, the acceptably contributory. I am part of the army of the incapacitated. Monday mornings smell to me of shame and the humiliation of having given up. After years of keeping the bits of my mind in one basket through a multi-cloured universe of bizarre behaviour, I've finally admitted defeat. Well, hell, it was always a losing battle really; my doctors knew it, my therapists knew it, my friends knew it. Seems that I was the only one that didn't, holding in there like a soap-doctor performing CPR on my functionality long after it was feasible, having to be dragged off: "it's time now, just let her go".

So the process of DBT begins. Dialectical behavioural therapy, designed and masterminded in America by Marsha Linehan, the first treatment for BPD which accepts us as struggling human beings, not, as we are usually characterised, manipulative, because frankly a borderline is too incapable of interpreting the behaviour of others to manipulate them. Too shit to manipulate. It is also the first treatment programme to really have faith iin our capacity to heal. For years, decades, ever since Freud first identified a group of women existing in the hinterlands between hysteria and psychosis, exhibitiing features of both, and coined the term "borderline" for us, we have been consisdered hopeless. Unresponsive, untreatable, exhausting to work with. The dross of the in-patient wards, coming back and back, eaach time a bit more anger and a few more scars. Linehan recognised us for what we are- desperate and unhappy people doing our best to live in a world we don't understand.

The mind of the borderline builds itself wrong. A childhood of abuse, neglect, amotional deprivation, the "invalidating environment" and "emotional enmeshment" so beloved of the text books leads to a warped and stunted growth. Essentially, you learn to build between yourself and the world a shell of protective normality. As a child, you seem precocious; serious, grown-up. As an adult you often seem functional and people have trouble reconciling this with your obvious bonkersness. This shell is fragile, though, and beneath it your mind remains largely unformed. Your coneption of self iis almost non-existant, and your capacity to distinguish between what is in here and what is out there is faulty at best. The world is a constant shifting mess of abandonment, need, incomprehensible pain. A constant shuttling between painful opposites.

DBT aims to break down that shell and build your mind again from scratch, like an adult remaking a child's mangled toy. First you have to give up the pretence of functionality which has sustained and tortured you for so long. Then you sttart to learn the skills which other people were taught from birth. The process of regrowing your personality is painful and humiliating. It also has its moments of humour.

Tuesday afternoon, mindfulness group. A bunch of embarassed and largely socially inept women attempt to learn how to control their attention; we ought to have learned this one between the ages of two and seven, but better late than never. We do exercises- breathing exercises, mindful sitting, eating a raisin slowly and with absolute focus. Mindful walking. When you walk mindfully you walk slowly, focused entirely on the feeling of the ground under your feet, the way you legs bend and streach. You try and feel the breath circulating your body. Locomotion becomes a bizarre and halting process, as a person engrossed in the feel of carpet under shoe pauses and wiggles their toes. You look lobotomised. You just do. Try it; you too will look like you are missing a chunk from your frontal lobe.

The room we practice in is small. Too small for eight women to mindfully walk simultaneously, and it doesn't really work doing it one an a time; you feel a bit of a prat when people are watching you and that breaks the concentration. Someone has the bright idea of going outside. And so at four thirty on a greyy and blustery tuesday afternoon eight mad women fan out across the lawn outside the mental hospital and start to walk slowly in a kind of buggered impression of Brownian motion. I have truly never seen a tableau more reminiscent of the popular stereotype of the mentally ill. We walk slowly and haltiingly, hunched over and looking at our feet. It is obvious that none of us are going anywhere particular. A nurse, actually unconnected to us, stands by the main entrance smoking a fag, watching us without concern. It could be a short story by Beckett. It could be a play abut the sadness of lunacy. It cold be a Daily Mail reader's wet dream about the faliure of care in the community.

Afterwards, we drink tea and eat biscuits. We try to avoid eye-contact, true, because that is what borderlines do and anyway, we're all a little bit embarassed. Every now and then someone sniggers. You can be sure as hell that we all get the joke.

Bob Dylan: buckets of rain

2006-03-26T15:54:00.000-08:00

I spent the afternoon sitting in the Pride of Spitalfields, trying to bring a friend down. Turns out he went to a reggae party in Brixton last night and took many worming pills, the active agent in which is some distillation of black pepper. The effects of these turned out to be suprisingly long lastting; by eight pm he was still buggered and I had to admit defeat and send him home, as he was starting to scare the punters in the Pride- quite an achievement given that the Pride's usual clientelle are elderly coockneys with fists of steel and probable members of the BNP. Half way between a conversation about Angelina Jolie (I'd do her, he wasn't sure) and the wisdom of re-reading the Wasteland every april (in general a good idea, but I should be banned from reading all Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Beckett and anything even a little bit Russian- and that means you too, Nabokov- until I have shown that I can be trusted to behave myself in a manner befitting my age and status) he said that it was a fucking mercy I've never taken to drugs. He's right, of course. The utter dedication I have shown to the cause of self-destruction means that if my forces had been chanelled that way I'd be dead by now, my old school tie in my teeth, a needle hanging out of my bicep. Or eyeball.

After saying good bye I sway gently towards the station and return to a question which has bothered me for years- why, of all things, did I light on self-mutilation as a way to deal with my disintegrating mind? Part of me thinks that if I could answer this question- if I could understand why selfharm rather than cricket, say, or smack- then I would have the key to controlling my desire to destroy my body.

It wasn't like I didn't try other things. I toyed with promiscuity (when, at the age of fourteen, I had my first consensual sexual encounter, with a twenty-three year old physics student whose name I can't remember, he asked me with some suprise where I had learned to kiss that way. I answered in all seriousness that I'd learnt it round the back of the Brixton Academy), over-eating, self-starvation, bingeing and purgeing. I was, to be honest, a bit crap at all of them. The trouble with promiscuity is that you can't be promiscuous on your own, and no one fancied my gauche and bespectacled teenage self. Over-eating left me feeling repellant and I had better things to spend my pocket money on than white bread and nutella. I'm too lazy for anorexia, which requires a dedication and self-discipline I utterly lack. I still think I could have made an ace bulemic, but sadly my body was against me on that one; I just don't have the gag reflex. My throat will bleed before I vomit, and there's nothing more unpleasant than a bleeding throat.

Self harm, though. That was something else. My first time wasn't elegant; we didn't know one another that well; we hadn't started out with the little scratching foreplay and then worked up to going all the way- it was dirty and sudden and without the grace of introductions- perhaps I should have waited; I didn't even hold out for an implement I loved. I sat on the kitchen floor and hacked at my forearm with a steak knife. I seem to remember reasoning that if it was designed to cut steak then it would be perfect for cutting me, for what am I if not steak? Fucking tough steak is the answer. The whole episode was ignominious in the extreme, but I remember thinking "I can do this. I have found what I am good at." And oh, christ, but I was good at it. I threw myself into it as into clear water, as the starving man falls on bread. I was infatuated, overcome, bourne away. It wasn't just that it was right; it was that it was perfect. Between me and the razor there was the sort of dead-on click that usually only exists in hollywood romances of the old school; the eyemeet, the half smile, the knowledge, simple and pure, that this is where you were always meant to be. Even now, years later, I could almost cry when I think of that moment. There's an echo of it every time I pick up a blade; a sudden certainty, an indescribably sweet feeling of being where I belong, but it never matches that first time looking down at an arm which, previously simply a lump of flesh, had suddenly and unexpectedly been claimed as my own.

I still don't know why self-mutilation and not some other thing. I am sure that there is a key in the mental disorder from which the need for this behaviour springs. Although borderlines often have, as I do, an unhealthy relationship with food, a degree of impulsivity with respect to spending, sex, fast driving, fags and drugs and booze and anything else which you were warned against in school, the vast majority of them come back not to these things but to the purity of razor on flesh as their first love. There must be reaons. There are, or at any rate there are for me; they're complex and shifting, and hard to pin down, rooted in the complex interrelation between self and world, mind and world, and both with the body, the skin, placed between subjective and objective as territory to be fought over. I'll come back to them, to my theories- peppered, I hope, with jokes.

For now, though, I wonder this- if I could go back to that first time, to my younger, as yet unscarred self, sitting cross legged on the kitchen floor with my left arm resting lightly on my thigh, would I tell myself to stop? Would I stay my hand and take a different path? What scares me most, more than the possibility of death, more than pain, more than the sight of my naked body in the mirror, is the fact that I wouldn't. I wouldn't miss this love for the world. Now I am faced with the task of giving it up. I have to, if I want to survive beyond the next year. I truly don't know how I will live without it, but in some twisted, fucked up, bat-shit crazy way I believe that it iis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Joy Division- She's lost control

2006-03-25T15:19:00.000-08:00

Today has been a symphony in normality. Luch with an ex-boyfriend; afternoon listening to music and vaguely searching for a trench coat which doesn't make me look lumpen (consider this search: abortive). Dinner with friends. Tube home. Lechy comment from the bloke in the hairdressers, on his own way home. Now, sitting on the sofa in my pajamas, bottle of scotch, laptop balanced on my knees. A week ago I had planned to kill myself tonight. Lying awake in a friend's spare room last sunday I had determined that this whole life malarky really just wasn't worth the effort, frankly; an advertising con on the scale of Sunny Delight. I've been stock-piling pills all week, but I have no desire to take them, now. I don't just feel okay, I feel fucking brilliant. Happy.

It's this sort of dichotomy that builds the life of the borderline. I do nothing by halves. My world is built on opposites- I love you or I hate you; I am exstatic or I am desolate; I am impervious to criticism or I am paranoid. There is no middle way and the swing from one to the other can happen in seconds. No wonder people find me hard going.

Sometimes, though, I realise that it's possible to feel something which has nothing to do with my illness; is, in point of fact, just a person with a feeling. Case in point- my "magic powers" story. It is my secong appointment with a psychiatrist. My first, I was a gibbering pile of mad. This was the appointment I'd fought for desperately for so long. After years of trying to second guess myself, work out if I was "ill" or just attention seeking, I'd finally found someone who would take me seriously, and was willing to see my self harm and depression as unmediated by my intelligence and achievements (the mentally ill cannot be academically successful: bullshit). It didn't help that my psychiatrist had a beard. I have a bit of a thing about beards. I prefer to ignore Freud and regard it as an aesthetic quibble. Beards are unpleasant looking, they smack of laziness disguised as a style choice, and they give a girl stubble-rash, a condition so reminiscent of adolescent eczema that it will bring anyone out in flashbacks. None of this made for a happy first consultation. I was scared, triggered to flash-back, paranoid, determined to present myself well, and absolutely unable to second guess. My brain took the obvious route out and dissociated. I spent most of my first psyche appointment watching from the other side of the room as I giggled, made inappropriate jokes, waved my arms around, and eventually ran out of the room and hid in a small corner of the corridor whimpering. I had to be coaxed out with tea. Humiliating? Oh yes.

My second appointemt was better. It was a good week. The beard wasn't going to take me unawares; I was prepared for the beard. I was, strange to say it, happy. Fucking happy. I'm a borderline; like I say, I don't do things by halves. I sit in the waiting room trying not to hum out loud. It's an okay habbit usually but you really don't want to exercise it in the waiting room of a psychiatric unit. They tend to lock the doors on you. I get called into Dr F's office.

Tatty: Hi.
Dr F.: How are you feeling?
Tatty: Good! I'm really good. I'm feeling really happy.
Dr F. Oh? really?
Tatty: yes, it's great. I'm really cheerful.
Dr. F: Do you feel like you are glowing?
Tatty: Well, you know... yeah, a bit... I'm, you know, happy. Glowing. Yeah.
Dr. F. (face serious, concerned): Do you feel like you have magic powers?

I laughed. How could I not? Dude, this isn't psychosis, this is good cheer. But that's what you get for joining this gang. I can't be happy anymore. I have to be having a manic episode. Give over. This is just a fucking good day. I'm not insane. I'm just liking the fact that it's spring again.

Sometimes I forget that you can feel something spontaneously. That it isn't a side effect of a drug or your childhood, a coming to terms, an uncovering, an "inevitable response". That people do get happy because someone said a nice thing or smiled, because it's the first day of spring or their friend just passed their driving test.

I need to remember that. Perhaps I should get a sign.

Donizetti- l'esir d'amore

2006-03-25T05:15:00.000-08:00

An extended saturday morning. Sitting on the sofa trying to kill my hangover with strong black coffee and Italian opera. It doesn't get much more self-indulgent than this. One of my cats is looking at me pityingly; I guess I probably have mascara smudged over my face. When will I learn that you can't enter the adult world unless you get yourself a proper beauty routine? But a penchant for black eyeliner and clumpy lashes is my one concession to mad-chic; well, that and the stringbag full of catfood tins and the constant under-the-breath muttering. No, I tell a lie. It's just the makeup. The rest of the time I look [i]just like you[/i]. Or just like you would look in a lacy puffball skirt and a pair of black high-heels (I think you'd look pretty fucking good actually). Scary huh? I'm a genuine bona fide (certified) nutcase and there's a chance I might end up sitting next to you on the bus, contaminating you with my disease, breathing the same air, thinking my crazy thoughts. In the old days, you could tell the crazy from the sane by the fact that the crazies were rocking and hitting themselves in the face and dribbling, had frontal lobotomy scars and, oh, yes, were locked up where they belong. Now, they're everywhere. I expect they're even breeding. Thatcher has a lot to answer for, I tell you.

It's okay, though. I've got a piece of paper which says I am no risk to children. No, seriously. They do actually give you one of those. I laughed so much when they gave me mine I almost fell off my chair.

I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a while now. I was finally swung by a conversation I had last night with a friend. Half way down the second bottle of cheep red booze, after a discussion of breasts in general (horrid) and the breasts of the barmaid in particular (amazing), she turned to me and said "you aren't crazy". It was one of the purest moments of my week. It's easy to lose a sense of self somewhere between therapy, psychiatric consultation and group. My disorder- my fissured personality- becomes the sum total of myself. I don't want that. And if I can't see myself as anything other than my disorder, how can I expect others to? Particularly when the disorder in question is one which rules relationships with such a cruel and capricious hand.

Later, defending the humour in Sarah Kane, I realised that it was time that I started this. I've been wearing a drunken hat for mad rights for a long while now; it's about time I tried to form my defence coherently.