OK, OK, OK

I give up, I give in, I give myself over to you entirely. The directions, the voices, coming from outside, coming from inside, I can't even tell any more.

I have to get the television out of the house. It's broken, but dark energy still seeps from it. This is urgent. Then I am going to move one of the bookcases back against the wall and the other up to the landing, buy a bigger table to make things on, and give myself space to pace. That's what's wrong with me at the moment, I don't have space to pace.

It's odd how things can simultaneously be so confusing and so clear. I don't know if anyone remembers the little earthquake that happened several years ago, or was in the area it affected, but I was sleeping on the sofa that night and woke up to find the world shaking around me. It's a sensation I've been having often lately. But at the same time I feel absolutely sure of what I must do now.

You don't get to choose who you are.

The Self Extends Beyond The Self

I keep slipping into altered states. My mouth wants to speak strangely, repeating some words and adding odd intonations to others. I want to take off my shoes and go barefoot everywhere. I feel quite sure that everything I have experienced is real, and everything I have thought is true. In my mind I am using my name here, werehorse, because my ordinary name does not feel like mine. Waves of fear keep washing over me.

I am having command hallucinations, though the commands don't seem negative in nature. This morning I was told firmly to go to the library. This is ridiculous, I said, I have a pile of books already. But the voice was insistent. I saw a poster for an event called "Poetry in the Park", and picked up a couple of leaflets for poetry competitions. Poems have been arriving in my mind lately, however hard that I resist them, and it seems I am being pushed in this direction. Then books started calling out to me, but when I came to check them out I found I didn't have my card. It was a relief, because I was feeling agitated and frenzied.

My body wants to rock and shake. My legs want to pace. I do not feel in control and I am scared.

I have thought about calling the nurse, but much as I like her I don't see what she can offer other than anti-psychotics, and I don't want to take them.

A Second Opinion

I don't think I mentioned it on here, but about three weeks ago I went for an initial hour-long assessment for the second opinion I requested at the beginning of the year. Today I had to go back for another hour.

By the time the appointment letter arrived I no longer felt so strongly about having a second opinion, and wasn't bothered by which particular label I had, and I considered cancelling, but then I decided I would go anyway, out of interest. At the start of the year I was angry with services. I wanted the BPD issue cleared up once and for all, because I felt that having what I considered a misdiagnosis had negatively affected my treatment. And I also felt that my psychotic symptoms had never been taken seriously.

The first appointment felt awkward, because the junior doctor asked the questions while the consultant observed, and I couldn't help be aware all the time of her just sitting there, watching. I was also in a rather strange place mentally and I can't quite remember what I said. Today was much easier because it was only the junior doctor, and I was feeling more articulate.

We covered a lot of ground, all the history and symptoms that you'd expect a psychiatric assessment to cover, but that no one has ever actually sat down and gone over with me. Some things are hard to explain, and other stuff is just plain embarassing, but I was more open about those psychotic symptoms than I ever have been. Partly because no one has ever really asked me about them before, but mostly because when I have attempted to tell people I have pretty much been dismissed, and I carry the paranoia with me that I will be accused of lying.

The doctor said she needed to have a discussion with the consultant and then I have to go back again and they will talk me through their thoughts. I'm not too happy about this - I would far rather just be sent a letter and be able to open it and process it in my own time. I have this fear that they're going to say I am borderline after all, and just making everything else up, but I told her that and she said it certainly wasn't something that immediately occured to her.

So I guess we'll see. I don't see that they're going to come up with anything dramatically different, and it's not as though it's going to change my actual treatment. But it might change some things - for instance I always feeling uncomfortable calling my symptoms psychotic, though I don't know what other word to use, and I don't feel I have the right to ever describe myself as manic. It's as though having a hopefully more accurate name for my illness would somehow give me more power over it, enable me to better separate it from myself, and master it.

Sleep and False Equations

For a long time I regularly took sleeping tablets, sometimes prescribed, and sometimes ordered myself from the internet (and yes, I know that was a stupid thing to do).

But I haven't taken anything to make me sleep for several months now. At first it seemed I might never sleep again. I had maybe half an hour the first few nights, and that was spent in intense dreams about the very meaning of life. Or monsters and murders.

But now I seem to sleep deeply and well, I just sleep at the "wrong" times. Yesterday I slept from 10 am to noon, then I had another brief nap from about 2 to 3, then again in the evening from about 7 to 10, was up for a while and went back to bed until 1. I have been awake since then.

I keep thinking that I should make some effort to get myself into a more acceptable schedule. But the thought of striving for that, of forcing myself to stay awake all day, instituting some of the dreaded sleep hygiene and lying in bed at night trying to sleep, just seems infinitely depressing. The way I am sleeping at the moment is so pleasant. I feel tired, I climb into bed, I enjoy the feeling of being wrapped in my white sheets, and I drift off and sometime later I wake entirely naturally. Or other times I might be reading a book, and I read and read until sleep asserts its authority over me. And I like that too, no waiting for sleep to come, instead sleep comes for you and says now.

So I don't know. I'm inclined at the moment to let things be and follow my natural rhythms. It's just that it takes me further and further away from what is considered "normal". Maybe I have to give up worrying about that.

As far as false equations go, there are currently articles and debates abounding which set against the equation mental illness=biological problem=need for medication the equation mental illness=emotional distress=trauma history. While I don't really agree with the former, when I read the latter it makes me cross. I want to stamp my feet and shout "Don't tell me what my illness means!" Don't they both impose one particular paradigm on a whole range of experience? Don't they both imply there is something to be fixed, that something has gone amiss in the patient, whether that be brain chemicals or emotional development, that can, and needs to be, corrected or healed? I resist and resent anyone who believes they can speak authoratively about such things, and appoints themselves an expert. The approach suggested by the psychologists would fail me just as badly as the one they claim the psychiatrists use (and in my experience they mostly don't).

Brave Soul, Born Free, Weird Fish

The last ten days or so I have been spending money like water. This is worrying and peculiar because I am normally so careful with my finances and I would not have said my mood was high.

It works like this: I sign onto to ebay because I want some henna for my hair. On the front page there are some shorts featured. I believe they are on the front page because they are meant for me. That they are by a brand called Brave Soul just confirms this. The name is so deeply resonant that I have to buy them, because a brave soul is what I want to be.

On my way back from the bank yesterday I paused at a sale rail outside a shop and picked up a cheap long-sleeved t-shirt. This I can logically justify because it will be very useful to wear around the stables. But on my way to the till to pay for it I added a shirt, a jumper and a fleece jacket. It was because of the colours. They are colours that I need to wear because wearing them will protect me, even though I am not sure what I need protecting from.

Then there are books. I am generally of the opinion that books are Good Things to have in your life, but I already have a pile I bought during my last episode, and did I really need thirty? Yes, the voice says, this is knowledge that you have to have, and it directs the order in which I should read them.

At least the plants I have been buying are a relatively inexpensive way to bring myself strength and joy all summer. Being around plants, looking at them and touching them, makes me feel serene. I still need a few more though, because I feel compelled to have a complete line of them along the bottom of the tall fence that curves round to my front door, to act as watchdogs and sentries.

I have also bought a car. This is absolutely fine because I did very much need a new car, but it feels incredibly significant. This new car is "me" in a way the previous one never was, and that is important. I am already looking at it with something akin to love and feeling that it is some way conscious, an ally sent to help me.

There are definitely strange things afoot.

Loss

I had planned to travel by train today to the nearest city, to visit an art gallery that was holding an exhibition I very much wanted to see. Afterwards I was going to window-shop and people-watch and maybe stop somewhere for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.

But there was no way I could do it. I needed the white walls of my house and the white sheets on my bed. I needed to try to stop my limbs quivering and realities shifting around me.

Me, take courses? Embark on a degree? Have a career one day, maybe? No, I don't think it is going to be like that. If these episodes, however long they last, keep happening, then I think this - my animals, my house, medication and appointments, letters from ATOS - is all that I can hope for, and I should probably just be grateful that I have as much as I do.

Never, never, never

am I to be granted, it seems, more than a few weeks of feeling sane, of being able to pursue my own small plans.

I thought I was doing so well. I don't want to be psychotic again, I really, really don't. I was so looking forward to my summer. But things are getting very, very crazy here, very, very fast, and I'm scared.

I don't know what to do. It feels as though there is no one in the world who will be able to help me.