Marbles

I've recently become obsessed by marbles. They have such lovely names and for obvious reasons I need some.

When I'm not up to posting but still want to follow my fellow bloggers I often write little posts and save them as drafts so my blog list updates. This means I end up with lots of drafts that say intelligent things such as "sdjthewo" and "slekrhj" and "dghdghd". I've started to think I should just publish them, they probably express my state of mind as coherently as anything else would.

Thank you for the concern in the comments. I had what I can only describe as a little bit of a kind of breakdown. My focus entirely narrowed to getting through the day. And right now I just feel downright weird and a little bit evil. I don't have an inner child, I have an inner psychopath.

Something

The legs walk across the carpark. Why don't they buckle? They want to buckle. They could buckle and the body could fall onto the tarmac and the mind go far away and not come back. Oh the temptation of that! But something keeps them walking.

For periods of time there is no time. Time is broken, or moves in different directions. The body lies on the bed. The mind is a dark road a stranger is driving down. A child's hand writes the date in pencil. It's 1977. It's 1981. It's 1975. It's 1983. Thoughts divide and distort, dissolve into nonsense. Visual reality is a flat picture that begins to peel away round the edges. But then something gets up, boils the kettle, makes a coffee, feeds the cat.

I'm against the wall, I'm down to the rock, I'm down to the bone. I'm an animal, existing, with no time for an awareness of how. But then something comes to the keyboard, forms these sentences, attempts to describe with words an experience that seems to be beyond words.

Something keeps my heart beating, something continues to breathe. Perhaps that's all I can say right now, that I am coming to trust in *something*?

"Even the eyeless cat perceives

Things are not going well"

Lines from poems, threaded through my life, embroidered through my brain.

And I'm here wondering, trying to work out what the hell happened. How did I move from such an overload of energy I was out at 3 am running through the darkness, elated and triumphant, to this exhaustion, sleeping now for 10/11/12 hours and still not waking refreshed?

There are an infinite number of hypotheses to explain any given set of data, so I amuse myself enumerating them. Current favourite contenders include "Those damn aliens are messing with my mind again" and "As a creature of the turning earth there are seasons in my brain".

My social worker brought the pyschiatrist to see me. I'm coming off lofepramine and trying citalopram. Will it make me all sparkly and spangly again, or will it make me sick?

Straight from that I went to therapy. And of course she sees things differently, sees the dread and the wanting to die as the past presenting to be healed. I guess she has a point, there are intrusive fragments of memory (or something) hammering at my awareness. Oh but I want to avoid them at all costs. Except oh but I HATE feeling depressed, and maybe that's the cost? The forces of silence and censorship and unconsciousness are strong. Am I stronger?

Thank you for your comments on housing and college in the last post. I feel a little ashamed, I feel that sneaking sense of failure, because I have to admit now that college is a no-go this year, for reasons both energetic and financial. And moving seems an impossible mountain, but a couple of autumnal days have cemented in me the need to pursue it, as my stomach began to clench and curdle at the memory of being COLD COLD COLD for months and months. I cannot endure another winter within these freezing walls, that's for sure.

Hmm and Housing

If I don't say the words, it won't be true. If I pretend it's not happening, it will go away.

My mood is slipping. Yesterday was the worst day I've had for a long long time. An ocean of exhaustion began to overwhelm me, passion, desire, delight began to disappear. And the worst was the twist of fear in my gut - I can't go through this again. Nearly had me in tears.

It's not the meds, I started taking them again. This is not the right time to cope with the withdrawal. And I know, really, however much I rail against it, that if/when I do come off them it needs to be done sensibly, carefully, gradually.

Today I feel tired, but slightly more resolved. I won't let panic over my mood make my mood worse. I won't bully, harry, chastise or criticise myself for my mood. I'll just try to gently ride it out.

After all, perhaps it's not quite so random or strange. I am embarking, or attempting to embark, on a new phase in my life. Things are changing. I have a place at college starting the week after next, and I am still looking for somewhere to live.

The search for housing is certainly depressing. So many places won't even consider someone on benefits. And then if you do manage to find somewhere you have to front up a frightening amount of money. Some of the deposits asked for are huge, and even though I should get the majority of my deposit back from this house I'd mostly still have to top it up. And agency fees add up to around £170, and I'm worried about the credit checks as I've recently been turned down for a couple of balance transfer credit cards (though then offered cards from associate firms with interest rates of 40%. I guess it's lucky I'm not stupid!).

All this means I'm having to revise my ideas. The best solution, short term and long term, would be to secure a council flat. The trouble with this is that flats in the town where I currently live are very popular. My local authority operates a bidding system where they advertise available properties and you register an interest and get put in a queue depending on your housing band and your position within that band. Last one I bid for I ended up something like 13th. (And this is one of the rare situations where I start ruing the fact I'm not older as there seem to be a lot of properties with a minimum age of 40)

So today I bid on a property in an area I hadn't considered before. It's a (big) village to the south of where I live now. Nearer to the city where I'm going to college and nearer to the town I go to for therapy. Doesn't fit with one of my other criteria, but is no worse for that than where I am now, and I've decided I have to be flexible about things. The big plus is that there is much less demand for that area so I stand more chance of getting a place there. The bidding closes on Tuesday, so it's a case of wait and see. It would be good to get at least this part of my life sorted.


ETA: I've just checked and I've already been bumped down the queue. Guess that plan wasn't quite so inspired as I thought

Someday Never Comes

(you better learn it fast, you better learn it young)

Someday I will write intelligent meaningful posts, radical, articulate and full of elegant analysis, honest I will.

Actually, someday I might have to. It feels as though all my ideas are being shaken up and rearranged, and streams of past experience, thoughts and memories are rising up within me, crying out for sense and shape to be made of them.

As ever, my difficulties and dilemmas are not just mine. I have to sort through all the debates about the validity of psychiatry, the variety of therapeutic approaches, the warring opinions, the mess of explanations for mental illness or disorder, to find a structure of meaning within which I can sanely live.

I want to stop seeing my social worker. I want to stop taking the medication. (I *have* stopped taking the medication, but how long will I last, this time, before the hot shivers and cold prickles and sickness drive my weak self back again?)

- What have they done to me, what have I
Done to myself, entranced these days by only surfaces
Of worn and curious stones, the wet leaves shivering?

And now I live like this.

I remember sunlight thick on the white walls and all the talk of war. How can I construct some optimistic vision of life on top of such a bitter heritage? What, in this wrecked and ruined earth, can possibly grow? Isn't it insane that anyone even expects we might be happy?

I learned it fast. I learned it young. There never was much innocence for me.

Direct Action Pays Dividends!

So, seems I'm back to the ping thing. Twenty past two and that's me done sleeping for the night.

Had a mixed day yesterday. I woke up and I wanted to go out, somewhere, anywhere, but I technically can't afford any more petrol until Thursday, since I'm not supposed to be using my credit card. So I stayed in, did some scrubbing, and some more sorting.

But my mind kept banging against the walls like a moth against a window, and I began getting irate about ridiculous things. Like my support worker signed me up for a confidence building class without telling me and it's on the same day as therapy and I'd have to rush from one to the other and I don't WANT to and I had to call her and tell her NOW even though I see her on Thursday (she wasn't there). And my friend keeps forgetting to give me back the money I lent her and I'm going to end up with overdraft charges and that's going to make me MAD. And my cat drives me bonkers, since I'm clearly not nearly bonkers enough already (though really, what else are cats for?) And, and and . . .

Was no good at all. So I texted my friend and told her I was coming to collect the money and got in the car and went. Had a coffee with her and her partner and it turns out they have an old but working washer in their garage that I can have. Cool! Went to the bank and paid in the money, donated some more of my clutter to a charity shop, walked very fast round town, visited my lovely library, bought a sandwich and drove out to a place with an amazing view to eat it. By now my mood was once again euphoric.

I just think I need activity at the moment to channel and focus the energy or it starts getting too much and knocking me about. Last week I got a GP referral to the leisure centre and I'm looking forward to that, I have a craving for some really furious and intense exercise. I think it will do me good!

Scattered and Restless

Can't stop moving. Walk past the window and see the clouds of butterflies in the garden next door. Wonder if I actually have any more choice than a caterpillar. Or a swallow or a salmon or a seed that finds itself lodged in a crack in the wall and grows there, because growing is what it is, what it does.

Thoughts flick past like quicksilver fish I can't get hold of. Lots of things I could do, lots of projects to begin and to continue, but I can't settle to any of them. Realise I have to get out, go somewhere, anywhere. Drive to a lake and walk round it, fast. Admire fungi, reverently stroke moss, envy swans, avoid people.

Then to the supermarket. Everyone seems so impossibly slow, and every second person looks like my last social worker. Why am I suddenly seeing her everywhere? Go for another furiously fast walk through a part of town I've never been to before, out into the country and back along another road. Later I'll look at the map and see where I went (I always seem to do things the wrong way round).

Home now and marginally more focused though still a bit ferocious. Messages arriving in my mind - you have to rescind your allegiance to the cultural thought-forms of your time. Experiencing intense psychic energy. Going to scrub the soot off my kitchen walls from the day last summer when I nearly burned the house down, jump around to some music, have a shower, maybe later I'll take a sleeping tablet.

All I mean is that my obsessions are consistent. Inner urgencies move through me, drive me, draw me, I can't change them, my only choice is to cooperate or not. They will find expression somehow, they come back and come back and come back.