Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Dodgy metaphors

For years, because of GAD, I was never free to feel, I never knew who I was. It was like having numb fingertips, I couldn't quite feel the things around me. Anxiety and depression ruled me, like stormclouds. Now they are clearing - perhaps temporarily, entropy always wins - it's as if I am feeling, sensing the world more precisely. Really seeing the people around me, because I am calm, and go more slowly. Living in my skin. It's always been as if I were a few millimetres skewed from myself, like a shade offset from the world, and I desperately tried to inhabit myself truly, but I was always one step away. Consumed with anxiety - adrenaline, self loathing, tears, pain, numbness, confusion - blinding me, showing me strange fragments of my life through the crashing waves and clouds, I almost drown.

I'm feeling sadness, but it's not consuming me entirely, it has a context. I still feel anxiety, but it has triggers, it stays in a box, even if the box is very big and fills most of my vision. My heart races and I shake, but it passes and the wave settles and does not cause a perpetual chain reaction. The sadness feels real, pure, ad I feel that I am more genuine in my real life interactions, speaking freely (if haltingly) and not feeling as though I am reciting, droning something that I wrote earlier in preparation.

I am sad about past relationships, I see myself in them casting about wildly, blinded and confused and sometimes hopeless and breaking things and ruining, completely engulfed by the waves. I wish i could go back, but this time fit perfectly into my silhouette instead of offset from the world and screaming, and really feel, and really touch, ripples on a calm sea.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Here's something I wrote, I guess about one and a half years ago, after I'd been through a very painful experience, and had been in a bit of a mess for some time and got involved with and made a big nasty knot out of a relationship or two. It's harsh - very hard on myself, having a stern word with myself - but my god it hurts like truth, and I think it marks the start of the bone-twistingly painful journey to the (hopefully) slightly better person I am today.*
They are rules for myself, I am reprimanding myself, I am suffering a great deal, I am furious with myself, I've been badly burned. I wrote them outright in a notebook without any editing.


  1. Don't try to sneak things under the table, good or bad. Say it outright. Be clear. Being cryptic might feel clever and witty but it's manipulative and people can see that.
  2. Be aware that people can see in you the kind of things you can see in others. They can tell when you are angry or upset - don't try to cloak hurtful messages. It's passive aggressive.
  3. Be kind to yourself. Punishing yourself first does not protect you. It's like crying out 'Don't hurt me! I'm too fragile! I'm pathetic!'. It's pathetic and won't make people like you. Like yourself. The rest will follow.
  4. Don't give unsolicited advice or opinions on people's personal business.
  5. Being mean and cruel is not cool. It's a version of 'Don't hurt me! I'm pathetic!' dressed up as 'I'll hurt you first and you can't hurt me.' People get hurt unintentionally even though you are just trying to protect yourself. 
  6. Be in control. Drinking until you are paralytic and trying to absolve yourself of responsibility - 'look how hurt I am, I have to drink to let it all out and it's not my fault'. Then you feel shit and need forgiveness. Not worth it. It doesn't work. 
  7. Be kind to your future self. She would like her lunch ready, her room tidy, her bills paid, her clothes clean and her debt paid off. That would be super nice. Be kind to her first of all, it will leave some space for her to be kind to others (she'd also like to not have a hangover). 
  8. Don't force people to share. They have their own ways of dealing with life which are not anything to do with you. 



*More and more I think of the experience of any mental health problem or trauma as a journey, particularly as I interact with friends and other sufferers more. Sometimes I am shocked to find how early a friend is on their journey - and you can't just reach back and pull them up. You're in different eras, different culture and language, and you can't time travel. The farther away you are from someone else on that journey timeline, the harder it is to relate to the world that they're in and to reach out and help them. But I try to remember dimly the dark places and speak the language.  We might often fall way back on the journey and the situation is reversed, or make temporary leaps forward.

Breaking Bad?


When I watch Breaking Bad, especially marathonning it which is how i almost always watch tv series, it taps into a deep-seated belief that I am evil at my core, and I find myself relating to Walter White to the extent that I find myself quietly convinced that I am walking a similar path or descending into irredeemable ways and going towards a cliff over which my conscience and self awareness will disappear forever. The terror of the dawning certainty that I am the person who destroys or repels everyone around them because they think they know best.  In my dreams I *am* him.

It's the same with Dexter, only he is more sympathetic and does that android thing 'I am so sad that I don't have emotions'. He wonders about his soul.

I know it's just good old depression and its tricksy ways, and that people are people and I don't buy into good and bad, deserving and undeserving, and that I am just a normal person. But I do wonder whether those beliefs about myself, called to by these characters (I am loathe to call them thoughts, it is just the sort of vague certainty that follows you around after a dream you can't remember) are simply a 'negative thought' on the surface that can be CBT'd away, or whether it's something deeper, something that will always be there.

I suppose we can all relate to coldblooded killers, and have that tantalising fear of what lurks within us, or those shows wouldn't be such a commercial success.
Then there's the fear of changing into something else, an other - lit up for me with incredible clarity in cronenberg's 'The Fly'.
I haven't posted for some time. I hope to get back to it.

I have been really good - I am on a new antidepressant, and the really big thing is that a medic finally put 1 and 1 together, or that's how it feels, and suggested Generalised Anxiety Disorder. Not only that, but she put me straight onto pregabalin (which is apparently indicated for GAD but not for anxiety itself), and I am starting to feel like a normal human. I still have attacks of anxiety, but that's what they are, attacks - not a constant, not nearly as much as before. And attacks have triggers, they're not completely inexplicable. I feel more aware of other people, of my body, I sleep well, I am excited. Some of this is the euphoria of the new drug, and most of the time I can't remember what day it is or what on earth I am doing. Hopefully this will improve; but if I were to remain this way I would keep the trade-off, thanks. To me GAD feels like the cruellest and most intolerable illness, but I am very biased!

More on that later. I just wanted to post something I wrote about Breaking Bad.