Am I Still Ill?

Codependency Car Crash

Oh dear folks. The light has started to dawn on this poor mangled specimen of a Zoe.

Lashing out at my near and dear ones, and hurting no one more than my self.

I have been stark raving mad for six months. I lost all insight. I raved, harassed and abused people I claimed to love. I destroyed my closest relationships. I’ve been self-righteous. Been ‘the innocent victim’. Manipulated, tried to control, ceased caring for myself, become dysfunctional, withdrawn and isolated.

I was mad with the pain, like a wounded animal.

I’m so sorry for all the rubbish I’ve talked, even here on this blog.

I’m off to Codependents Anonymous as soon as I can drag this punch-drunk carcass, this poor husk of a Zoe, to a meeting.

Much love, and if you have been, thanks for tolerating me. X

Karma Drama

Anxiety about my son yesterday sent me into yet another tailspin.

In the meantime, ex-partner R is enjoying himself with his family on holiday in the Lakes. Does he miss me, I find myself asking during the one and only phone call (made by me). My desperation painfully obvious.

Huh. Of course not.

But he tells me I am the dominant one in our relationship.

Would that it were so.

I am approx one hundred times as needy as he is.

And I find myself thinking ‘it’s not fair’.

The dumb thoughts, of which that is by no means the dumbest, came thick and fast today, as I fed my ‘pain body’ (see Eckhart Tolle) with more and yet more dumbness.

I am your classic ‘woman in an abusive relationship who won’t leave’.

I’m in a truly ghastly double-bind of needing him desperately, even as I fear his power over me.

This is sheer madness, more, it is total insanity.

As Eckhart tells us, I have become totally identified with my fear to the point where I am one walking ball of the stuff. Scared to leave him. Scared not to.

Even as I write this I am desperately bargaining for one more chance. One more chance to feel unloved, needy and desperate, with a man who probably can’t really love anybody.

The lack of love, disguised by small crumbs, feeds the need. Which makes me cling. I am so used to not being loved. It has the comforting ring of the familiar.

I’ve been existing on crumbs for years. I am a love anorexic.

And yeah R. You know what? This is emotional self-harm. I am an adult and I can choose to just say no. But I am addicted to the pain, stress and drama of this horrific situation.

The crows have picked the bare bones clean and I am fully exposed.

I can’t lie to myself any longer. It is what the f*** it is.

Rainy Day Woman

And this was the day a friend and I chose to walk along the River Lea all the way from Tottenham Hale to Homerton.

I kept going for the last couple of miles by promising myself a good nosh-up at the Pogo vegan cafe, a volunteers cooperative in Hackney. The portions were more than generous and the food, delicious.

Eckhart Tolle’s message is getting through to me. I am realising that I really do have a choice as to whether to be dominated by ‘mind’…essentially thoughts of past and future which, for me at least, often feed negative emotional states.

Thoughts are nearly always a bunch of crap. When I remember to, I am consciously dropping them and coming back to the present.

I have booked onto a ‘Sharing Presence’ workshop on Sunday in Battersea. It’s only £10 to attend, and I’m excited at the prospect of meeting some like-minded people.

How wonderful it is, after a long day out and much physical exertion in relentless rain, to come home to a nice warm, dry house and my beloved cats.

It’s time, folks. We’ve all got to wake up. Old ways are destroying us and the planet. Time to try a new tack.

Political action on it’s own is always limited in its effects, because it depends on the mind, which is principle defender of the ego…essentially our delusion of separate existence.

We are all part of the One. The insanity starts inside ourselves. We must all put our own house in order: no one else can do it for us.

Lotsa love. x

Less sad…

Life lacks direction or purpose, at least outwardly. I accept I’m still healing, so I have taken on no commitments. I try to see at least one friend each day. To write something, most days. I’m still not cooking for myself, and even go out for breakfast.

After that, I head up to the boating lake at Ally Pally, to watch the water, ducks, sky and trees. Still reading The Power of Now and it is extremely powerful and impressive. It is easier to find those moments of inner silence – what Eckhart calls ‘Being’, when alone in nature.

Watching the silly mind producing it’s endless web of thought. The grief over R less heavy in my belly today, and the conviction that our separation is A Good Thing in the ascendant.

Tomorrow it’ll be something else.

I have no respect for what the human race as a mass gets up to. Eckhart calls the human species ‘dangerously insane’…and so we are. Killing and hurting each other daily. Decimating other species. Tearing into the planet.

Sitting on a park bench trying to create inner stillness and silence is as rational a choice as I can think of right now. Way preferable to joining in with the insanity of ‘work’…a concept I have struggled with to some degree all my life but never more than now.

X

Sad

Am reading ‘The Power of Now’.

Mood ‘a bit sad’. Hung up on the relationship with R. Which, Eckhart Tolle tells us, is not the Now, but the past and maybe the future.

I am ready to take full responsibility for everything that has happened to me in the last seven months. But I’m not willing to blame myself or be blamed for it. There is a difference.

And when it comes to resolving a conflict, there have to be two willing parties. One is not enough.

The Company of Artists

Nearly all my friends these days are creative people, in one way or another. I bond with them easily. Artists ‘get me’ and I ‘get them’. I will never be a corporate drone. I have always had difficulties with organisations. I especially won’t go near any type of organised religion, even though I am an intensely spiritual person.

Organisations run on consensus, on the whole. They are therefore usually only as effective as their sickest member.

This afternoon I returned to my art class for the first time in months. It was balm to my soul, even though I am not primarily a visual artist. I chatted to the teacher, telling her about what has made me so ill the last six months.

I explained to her, that when I said the things I did on the course I was following my inner light. This is why I cannot let the whole thing go, with R. Cannot accept that I did anything wrong. I wasn’t ‘mouthing off’. I wasn’t motivated by some dark desire to destroy Equals. I said what I did because it was what I believe.

I have basically been punished and vilified for being true to my inner light.

This is an extremely powerful experience, especially when the two prime movers are your best friend and partner, respectively.

My fundamental position is this. The ‘mentally interesting’ have a unique perspective. Our experiences are a strength and not a weakness. This is not something I read in a book. It is what I live, every day of this cursed-and-blessed life.

And I have to ask myself this. If these thoughts and ideas are so deeply threatening to Equals, they must be extremely powerful. Way way more powerful than I knew when I uttered them.

Which makes me think this. I’m on to something.

Poor R. He is suffering deeply because for as long as he tries to set himself against my inner light, he is also setting himself against his own.

Inner lights, folks, are all part of the same Source. They fuel our creativity, our ‘madness’, our passions, our irrational joys.

Equals are hurting themselves far worse than they can ever hurt me. They will never move forward, never find their vision. Because they have denied mine.

And look how many people’s lives have been affected by their actions, their choices.

To suffer for the truth, for your own inner light, is a great blessing. They have well and truly kicked me into touch with who I really am and how I should be living my life. Maybe they have even set me on the road to full recovery from a ‘severe and enduring’ illness.

You’ve got to say, folks, it is a splendid irony. This firm, devoted to ’empowering’ service users, has done just that. Not in a way anyone would have predicted, but y’know what? I learned more from the course, my expulsion from it and all the fall out than anyone actually learned from their course. Guaranteed.

I’ve always been a very gifted student. No-one can stop me rising to the top. I listen with a quiet mind. I speak from the heart. I have no fear of anyone. I love the truth.

Do we work, or does work work us?

I emailed Haringey User Network today to tell them I’m stepping down. It’s called ‘voting with your feet’. Sometimes you have to risk hurting people you like. Sometimes you can be more powerful in your absence than by showing up.

Enough is enough anyway. It’s not a choice at the end of the day. I have to go with what supports my mental health, and not with what doesn’t. HUN is going nowhere fast and I don’t back losers…not consciously anyway, much as I have a perennial weakness for the underdog.

They know my feelings and views, at least if they don’t, then I’ve made them clear enough. To keep bashing my head against a brick wall is self-harm basically…

Talking of brick walls. R. My ex. He cannot agree with me that I have a right to express an independent opinion. He stonewalls me constantly with both verbal and non-verbal messages, all of which are mixed, because I know that with R, what you get on the surface is only the tiniest tip of a very big iceberg.

Somehow I can’t just let it go. Deep down he doesn’t want me to, hence the mixed messages. He hasn’t suddenly transmogrified into someone else and nor have I. There is a slightly mad, offbeat, creative and funny side to R that, for the time being, he is repressing and denying with the help of work, work and more work.

I’ve gotta say though, I really miss the other R. This angry, defensive, robotic, proto-conformist R is not the man I fell in love with and was so close to for so many years.

Once again my monkey mind will try to persuade me that it is ‘all my fault’. But my monkey mind can just f*** right off. We all make choices, every minute of every hour of every day. He is making his. I am continuing to be true to my inner light, and that is, in a way, a denial of all choice. I am what I am. I can’t be what I’m not.

R is off to the Lake District for a week tomorrow. I hope the Lakes and mountains help him to plumb his inner depths. He has a strong, simple response to nature that I have always loved and admired. He is not this ‘jobsworth’ monster that he wants to make out.

There is no question, fellow ‘mentally interesting’ peeps, that the World of Work creates conflict within and between us. Look at what happened with me and Equals, and what is still happening between me and R.

When he was a volunteer for Friends of the Earth I didn’t see this side to him. He was happy in what he was doing, believed in it and was shown proper appreciation for it. Now he has a boring and mundane post/porter type job in a hospital, plus dribs and drabs of work for Equals. When he’s not doing that, he’s compulsively performing household and garden tasks as if his life depended on it.

And I’ve gotta say, he’s never seemed more unhappy. No, he doesn’t sob down the phone to me. But he never seems really relaxed, he is like a coiled spring with aggression always crackling away just under the surface.

Why do people hurt themselves with work (and other addictions), as if they were their own slave-drivers?

It’s like he thinks he’s a bad person, and has to punish himself by denying his true nature with a never-ending roster of false ‘duties’.

It’s our duty to be true to our inner light. Whatever work comes out of that is the work we love to do, the work that is creative and genuinely productive, and which is performed with an inner freedom and lightness of being. It fosters our growth, never stymies or blocks it.

The Science of Zoe-ology

…is what this blog is about. I am dedicated to my own inner light. This is my calling. This is my duty. This is my work.

In actual fact it’s where we are all headed, whether we know it or not. Wisdom, ultimately, comes from within.

This type of work becomes effortless once you see that there are no choices.

Zoe-ology is Zoe’s share in the divine. Your ology will be different, because you are not a clone of me, but a unique, sacred individual. But ultimately wisdom is One. That’s why you will recognise that some of the things I say are things you already know. In wisdom there is no room for conflict. It just is.

Zoe is of few words today. X

Crash Course in Human Failings

Hey. Neat title Zoe. Not quite as random as usual.

No, because that is the best and snappiest way I can sum up the last six months!

Y’see folks, people are great. Never underestimate their capacity to shine the light of truth on all your weaknesses!

It’s a paradox that at one and the same time I am horrified at the depths people can plumb, and respectful of the amazing insights they can yield while they are doing it!

So that on the one hand I find myself thoroughly jaundiced about the capacity of human beings to face reality and know truth. On the other I have to hand it to them. They are great at enabling me to do so!

I honestly feel grateful. Looked at from the perspective of one who has passed through the ‘dark night of the soul’, experiencing bullying and betrayal over a long period by no less than my two closest and most trusted people, I see that these two people actually did love me very much.

Only those who truly love you have the power to expose you to the kind of roasting that yields the ripe fruit of wisdom (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor!)

All that ever stands between us and blessings is a period of affliction and persecution such as I have had to endure. I have been stretched on the rack. Had needles stuck through my eyelids. Been shut into the Iron Maiden.

But I’ve always loathed descriptions of torture. They make me physically sick. Thank God none of it was physical. My eyes are whole and seeing. My body intact.

Torturing other human beings is the nearest thing I can think of to pure evil. Torturing animals may be even worse. Those who carry out these appalling acts sentence themselves to Hell. Not eternal damnation. But at least a mighty roasting.

But those who endure torture (whether mental or physical) for the sake of truth reap many heavenly blessings, the greatest of which is a share in divine wisdom.

I know of what I speak.

Many are those who talk, knowing nothing. Few are they who know of what they speak.

But I can never say ‘I was right’. The most I can say, in all humility is ‘I was not wrong.’

Thank you A. Thank you N. Thank you B. Thank you R.

Much love, Z xxx

Letter to A

Dear A,

Believe it or not, when I attempt to communicate with you, I pray first. I reflect long and hard. I choose my words carefully. I try to do no harm.

I KNOW you have found that hard to believe since what occurred in February. But I am going to have another go now, six months on and with plenty of water under the bridge.

I KNOW that some of my words hurt you badly. That is an index of how highly you valued my opinion. And I appreciate that.

But if you look carefully at all of the emails I sent, you will see that in the very first one I said ‘I want to make this easier for you, not harder’ and ‘Please, A, don’t let us let this affect our friendship’.

It was never ever going to be easy to tell a close and much loved friend that I didn’t like something she did.

If I had been allowed to stay on the course, as I clearly expressed my wish to, it would have been very different.

There is a difference between having a close, much-loved friend tell me she didn’t like some of my actions, and having that same friend exclude, ostracise and send me to Coventry (along with others) for expressing contrary opinions.

Maybe you think what you’ve done is take me to task for ‘abusiveness’ and ‘aggression’? It isn’t really good enough. You have to be more specific. You also have to take what I said in the context where it was spoken. You were not in the room. However you did know that B had told, not asked or suggested, TOLD me not to return to the course. Giving no reasons. In an ansaphone message. After the first day when in actual fact I had really not said all that much.

A, the reason she did that, I would suggest, is that I was openly critical of her training style in an email to N after the first day. I said she was too bossy and that she should understand that the participants, and not she, are the experts on mental health conditions and how they affect their lives.

Of course, when I did go back on the third day, I did not feel welcome. Of course I was aware of some hostility toward me. If I came across as ‘aggressive’ that day, it was because I already felt my rights had been violated to some degree. My right to an opinion. My right to openly express what I thought. My right to attend a course I had started in an organisation I was part of, and which I had supported as a volunteer. I could not attend on the second day because I did not feel well. For no other reason. That should not have been used as a reason to bump me off the course. I could have easily been given the literature on the DDA and told to catch up on it.

Anyway. Getting back to what I said about ‘telling a close and much loved friend I did not like something she did’. What exactly is it that I did or said which you did not like?

You have never been specific. Instead there was a blanket condemnation of me as ‘aggressive’ and ‘abusive’. As I say. Not really good enough. Followed up by ostracisation, and silence in the face of my many entreaties for a dialogue. No attempt to look at Equals’ actions. Or if you did you concluded that they were all perfectly correct.

A, this has all affected me more than I can say. It has truly been an annus horribilis for me. What you might not understand, as you have a partner who will staunchly defend you whether you are right or wrong, is that R watched me gradually fall apart over this, but felt able to take no action except to tell me I needed to think about how I could have done things differently.

But A. I did and said what I did because I believed I had a right to my own independent opinion. For no other reason. Not to hurt anyone. Especially not you.

A, I still love you very much and I always will. It was some of your actions I did not approve of. You as a person I esteem and value very highly.

Even if I didn’t like your course, at the end of the day so what? It’s not the same as saying I don’t like you! It’s as if you came to the Clarendon, saw some of my pictures on the wall and said to me ‘Oh Zoë, you could really do so much better than that!’ A bit hurtful maybe. Not a reason to break up a close and wonderful ten-year friendship!

It’s not the same, either, as excluding someone and sending them to Coventry for expressing contrary opinions to the trainer, or even being (politely and courteously) critical in a private email to N after the first day. I genuinely thought my opinions would be sought after and valued. Why wouldn’t they? I am a long-term dyed in the wool mental health service user, and I was a volunteer for you! I’d given up many hours of my life for Equals in one way and another, many of them listening to you talk about them for about four years since their inception. My partner was working for you too. I had every reason in the world to want it to be a roaring success.

A, R has been very much affected by this. J has been dragged into it too. It has affected everyone around me who has seen my health deteriorate over the last six months as I struggled to maintain my close relationship with R, and to save my friendship with you…against all the odds. Even my son is affected. I have not been well enough to see him for four months now…that hasn’t happened before in the whole history of his time in care.

Please know that I will always love you very much and I am desperately sorry for causing you hurt, but try to see that what has happened to me goes way beyond hurt. You and R were my two closest people, and I have effectively lost both of you. Explain to me exactly where I went wrong A, but you need to be more specific than just vague use of the old stand-bys ‘abusive’ and ‘aggressive’. You actually know me better than that. NO ONE is exclusively those things in any case.

Condemn my actions by all means. Specify where I went so badly wrong. Show me the error of my ways. But don’t condemn me wholesale as a person. That is demonisation. It is futile, damaging and always wrong, and it is even more harmful to the demoniser than the demonised in the long run.

I am going to copy this letter to N and R.

Much love, as always, Zoë

Death and rebirth.

The rain came.

Washed away my sorrow, washed away my pain.

I took a few books to the Unit. Pema Chodron’s ‘When Things Fall Apart’, Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’, Therese of Lisieux’s ‘Story of a Soul’, Simone Weil’s ‘Gravity and Grace’ and St John of the Cross’s Collected Works, a hefty tome including ‘The Dark Night’.

Pema Chodron is a Buddhist teacher. Her words did not quite touch the pain I felt. Her book may be very useful to practising Buddhists. But I’m not wholly convinced.

If you are being trodden on by a giant foot (Monty Python springs to mind) is it really time to meditate all your passions away or is it time to scream ‘Aaargh!’?

At one point she asks if we really want to add to the aggression in the world. Again I have to disagree. As I said in a previous post, aggression can sometimes be a life-saving quality. It serves a useful evolutionary purpose. There is too much shit going on in the world to turn our saintly faces aside and ‘do a Gandhi’.

I described myself once as a ‘bully bullier’. I don’t recommend this, and don’t try this at home!

Look what happened to me!

However…

I tried good cop. I attempted good cop until every blood vessel in my body nearly burst. Then I picked up my AK 47. I am not a violent person. But I don’t like bullies, and when they try it on with me they will incur my wrath. I give them every chance in the world to go the reasonable route of dialogue. If they refuse that and persist in demonising me, sorry Pema. I ain’t gonna go away and meditate.

This is not to diss Pema Chodron or any Buddhists out there. If it works for you, fantastic. But I’m human, I get angry, and sometimes I have good reason.

As the Public Image song goes ‘Anger is an energy’. It fuels a lot of brilliant creative work.

There’s too much shit in my life to meditate away.

Bullies always have something to hide and I don’t believe in sainthood. I believe in exposing the bully. Who knows, it may give them pause for thought next time around. (And with bullies there will usually be a next time).

Once more, to quote John Lydon ‘I may be wrong. I may be right’.

None of us can ever be 100% sure. We are human, we don’t have the ultimate perspective.

I have had all certainty stripped away from me over the last months. From one day to the next I don’t know if I will be plunged into the fires of Hell. I don’t know if God loves or hates me. I don’t know if I’m evil or good. The one thing I can be certain of is complete uncertainty. I have had no solid ground to stand on. I have not known who I was any more.

I had my insides ripped out while fully conscious. Without anaesthetic I had a thousand red hot needles stuck into my brain. I had to die to everything I thought I knew. Pema talks about death and rebirth but she doesn’t mention that degree of pain.

I had to go to St John of the Cross for that. Over and over again, he affirms that the pain of the ‘dark night of the soul’ is a blessing, and not a curse. He sounds as if he’s been there. I found comfort and sustenance from his words while that pain still lingered.

I said a prayer on my knees this morning. ‘Give me humility Lord’. I am walking a perilous path between necessary self-belief and the ego’s desire to glorify itself. I do not want to feed my ego. While suffering Hell’s torments I believed I must be evil, and abandoned by God.

While in the ‘mania’ I may have felt too ‘special’. What I need is a balance. I am not evil. I am not special either. I am a human being…capable of divinity, also capable of sinking lower than any animal.

This is a prayer I need to say, on my knees every morning. ‘Humility Lord. Humility.’

Dreams and Visions

A little something about my vision for my future.

Am I cut out for a life of politicking? No. It does my brain in. Am I political? Of course. I’ve suffered all the socio-economic implications that long term ‘mental illness’ brings. I’m not just talking about a life restricted to disability benefits or the inability to fit in to the ‘workplace’ and normal family life. Factor in dealing with stigma, prejudice and often, a degree of isolation and loneliness as a result (this is partly why my friends are so overwhelmingly important to me).

OK. I can be a stubborn cuss. I can sound arrogant. Maybe even aggressive (certainly Equals Training found me so, though I would lace that particular opinion with a hefty pinch of salt given what I’ve come to know about them).

Human psychology time. Aggression is sometimes a life-saving quality to have. It enables you to stand up to a lot of knock-backs. It makes you cussed and determined enough to insist that your point of view is as valid as anyone else’s.

Artists in general have to have a touch of aggression in their make-up. This gives them the energy and drive to ‘put out there’ their own unique view of the world. The creative impulse has a touch of the ‘fuck you, world, this is how I think and feel’ about it. You cannot devote your life to people pleasing and getting pats on the head from authority figures, and be true to your creative drive. You have to choose.

I don’t ‘buy’ the medical model of mental ‘illness’. I have faith in my life, faith in the experiences which I would never have had if it weren’t for that ‘illness’. I KNOW that the dreams and visions of ‘psychosis’, as well as the appalling pain of depression have informed the person I have become. Once more, I do not feel that makes me ‘less than’ anyone.

I would go further. It has given me a different perspective on life. I am faithful to my dreams and visions, even to the soul-crushing depression that I so wish I had never had to experience. I have visited other dimensions of existence that the ‘average’ person cannot even dream about.

It goes without saying that there are many, many negative sides to life as a ‘manic depressive’, however beautiful some of those visions might be. I prefer not to go on alarming about those. Let’s take them as read!

I have found that a positive mind set is, for me, not even a choice. I simply cannot afford to fall prey to the view that unless I can turn myself into a passable imitation of a ‘normal’ person (via psych drugs, self-management, therapy or whatever) that my life has no worth at all. Being a positive person does not make me in any way superior to anyone else. However I have found that for me, it is essential.

One of the fascinating things about us humanoids is how different, how diverse we all are. One man’s meat really is another’s nut loaf. We all have our coping strategies.

I believe I have all the necessary skills to contribute something new to the world of thought about mental illness. What I don’t have is a crystal ball to let me know whether I will ever succeed in doing just that. It doesn’t even matter. My duty is to work toward that goal with every scrap of strength and determination I can muster.

I have a very useful ability to read and research widely and look in some places others may not have thought of, for inspiration and nuggets of wisdom. In other words, I am quite academic. I have a clear, lucid and sometimes elegant writing style. I put communication at a premium: I am not writing to mystify, but to elucidate.

I am independent-minded and have developed the ability to discriminate and discern the wheat from the chaff. I have some original thoughts, because I am a unique person, and a thinker.

My proposition, then is this. I forget about trying to slot into ‘the workplace’. It won’t work for me, and I can’t work for it. Whatever I work at in life, whatever my ‘calling’ is, it has to allow for a flexible schedule. I am not always well. Sometimes I am depleted in both mind and body. But when I am up and firing on all cylinders, I have much to give.

I aim to write the book I would have liked to read. Many others have done the same. I have read so many books, I know how powerfully helpful a book can be. But I have not read ‘the definitive text’. It remains unwritten. It’s my job to try and write it.

That’s creativity. You have to have self-belief, you have to be cussed, determined and a tad aggressive. You have to have the sheer ‘brass neck’ to stand up and say ‘ah, but have you thought of this?’

Yeah, I could be accused of being on an ego-trip. I can be accused of arrogance. But that’s not what it’s really about. My life and the meaning I can extract from it, is at stake. I’m not the chattering classes. I am the underclass. I’m hip hop.

As Eminem once wrote ‘success is my only motherfucking option – failure’s not’. And success for me lies along a particularly narrow, stony, treacherous mountain path. The stakes are high. But I’d be truly mad if I didn’t give it my best shot.

Lots of love folks. Z xxx

Eviscerated

Hi folks. The day of my last post didn’t start well, as I noted. However it proceeded to get much much worse. I went into a deep black hole. I felt as if a thousand red hot needles were being inserted into my brain.

Every last scrap of my energy went into the task of enduring the awful psychic pain. Thoughts came and went but no amount of CBT could have made my state of mind anything but exquisitely painful. My whole body was on fire with it, and my stomach churned. I could not and did not eat.

I’ve had such a lot of ultra-rapid cycling moods lately that I hoped to God it would be gone by the next day. But this was too deep a hole for that. Luckily I had a scheduled appointment to see the psych for a care planning meeting. I had to take a cab to the health centre. My stalwart and very wonderful care coordinator had a flexible schedule that morning. Thank God.

He made me a tea and made jokes which he knew would make me laugh. I told him I had said a prayer that for once I would just be able to get the help I needed, and pretty damn quick.

He spent the whole morning sorting me out. My first choice was to get a crisis bed at Alexandra Road (need to link back to my post ‘Alexandra Crisis What Crisis?’) But they were being their usual difficult, cagey selves. It looked like there was a bed free on the dreaded hospital ward. This would have come a very poor second as far as I was concerned.

My care coordinator drove me over to the hospital to see the Crisis/Home Treatment Team. As we arrived at St Ann’s I realised the smoking ban on the wards had been implemented on the 1st August. I had been trying to persuade myself that the ward sounded like a good idea, but when I remembered that I thought ‘fuck it’.

Then we saw the Home Treatment lady, one of the good ones. She told us that contrary to what we had been led to believe earlier there was no bed on the ward but Alexandra Road had one.

This came as a massive relief. W my social worker was also pleased. We had got the right outcome. However I then had to go away for a whole afternoon, as the Home Treatment would be coming round to take me to Alexandra Road that evening.

I was still in the most awful depressed state. It was as bad as it ever gets. Possibly worse.

Anyway, I knew I needed help. I knew I needed a place of safety. And that’s what I got. By the standards of Haringey Mental Health Services it wasn’t bad, though thank God I am not suicidally inclined.

That evening I was admitted for a week. They have beautifully refurbished rooms with massive double IKEA beds with fancy ‘wrought iron’ bedsteads and lovely new cotton bed linen.

I continued in extreme psychic pain for four days. I could do very little but had been prescribed Seroquel 50mg and some benzos. These combined knocked me for six on the first night (my body having been meds free for several months).

Yesterday afternoon about four ish I walked out into the massive garden there to have a fag (all rooms are non-smoking now). I felt this terrible malignant cloud (puts me in mind of the Dementors in Harry Potter) perceptibly lift off my head as I walked out. Suddenly, as abruptly as it had arrived the pain was gone.

The great thing about depression is how fucking fantastic it is when it stops.

I am nowhere near out of the woods. But I know the Dementors won’t pay me a repeat visit, at least for now.

I texted R in the evening, explaining how I felt eviscerated. That my insides had been pulled out. That I no longer knew who I was. Everything I thought I could count on in life, all that I thought I knew about myself, had been systematically removed leaving me with no solid ground to stand on.

But through it all I was determined to come through it. Certain that I have another life, calling to me. A rebirth into a brighter, cleaner me. And that one day I would understand the reason why I had to endure such horrible, inhuman pain.

Eviscerated. But still here. x

You might as well clobber me…

‘I don’t feel well, but you still bovver me, you’re giving me a headache, you might as well clobber me….’ Dizzee Rascal

Just had a couple of delightful, abusive emails. I’ll print them here for your delectation. Maybe not.

What is it with some people? I am advised to ‘try a jab, it might deal with my ego’ or words to that effect.

Having been accused by Equals Training of  ‘abuse’ myself it’s a reminder of what abuse actually is.

I am also a ‘horrible old tart’. Are you reading, Equals? That’s abuse, for your information.

Some vulnerable people have no compunction whatsoever about targeting other, vulnerable people and using them as aunt sallies for their own pent-up anger. Are you reading A?

Jealousy often comes into it. Fear is also a chief culprit.

Mostly such people are out of touch with their own feelings. They are strangers to their own motivations. Anger is in many ways a perfectly understandable response to being marginalised and stigmatised as a mental health service user, in this society. Those who turn on their own kind I have no time for.

It’s not been a good day so far.

Bipolar Two

Yesterday was a story of depression and exhaustion. I spent most of it on my bed, though mercifully I was able to concentrate enough to read.

I am reading a book published by Chipmunka called ‘Dark Clouds Gather’ by Katy Sara Culling. She is a brilliant woman who could and should have been enjoying a high flying medical career whose life has been devastated by not only manic depression but also anorexia, bulimia and self-harm. Though her prose is not as polished as, say, mine (!) it is a gripping read. You feel like you’re living through it with her. You somehow come to understand the eating disordered mind, even if you haven’t been there yourself.

Heart breaking.

OK puter. You wanna eat my text, masticate it in your giant interweb maw? Go ahead. I’ll start again.

I was saying, I am now on ‘no meds at all’. I used to be Bipolar One. This comprised serious episodes of psychosis and equally life-threatening suicidal depressions which went on for weeks. Now I have developed Bipolar Two with rapid cycling. The mania is much more controlled and contained, less psychotic. The downside is that it is even harder to plan ahead, and I don’t remember what it is to feel ‘normal’.

There isn’t the long period of ‘stability’ that I could count on before.

Yesterday was a case in point. After texting back and forth with a close friend and R in the evening for a while I felt myself starting to go ‘up, up and away’. Sat in my garden in the dark with the cats smoking and listening to hip hop at full blast on my Ipod. I thought I would never get to sleep.

But I asked R to send me strength and he did and I ate some food (this usually helps), went to bed, put my head determinedly down on the pillow and knew no more.

These medicines don’t work for me. I don’t believe they have the power to cure my altered states of consciousness. I might as well ask someone to cure me of the condition of life itself.

The only meds I now agree to take are benzodiazepines, and I am very careful about how and when I take them. These medicines are dangerously addictive. However they do what they say on the tin (unlike anti-psychotics, mood stabilisers and anti-depressants). I need sedation, sometimes because I am unbearably ‘wired’, sometimes just in order to sleep at night.

This is my life folks. I can’t bring up a kid. I can’t work in the accepted sense. I’m challenged just to keep body and soul together. Why some of us are condemned to this kind of life, I can’t tell you. It’s a curse. It’s also a blessing.

Lots love folks, Zoe xxx

Hypervigilance

Hello blog. Yesterday was a brief window of calm.

Today the sense of hypervigilance is back.

It’s just no good telling me to ‘move on’ etc. I need therapy or counselling now, to talk this all through. But though I have been accepted and assigned a counsellor locally, because of the summer break I have to wait until September to start.

I have symptoms of IBS (diarrhoea and vomiting). I can’t cook (something I normally love to do, and greatly miss). I have been locked into ‘survival mode’ for weeks now. My stress levels are so high I continually have to seek out quiet places, and can only tolerate a limited amount of social contact.

Reading up on PTSD in response to bullying I see that my body has been in ‘fight, flight’ mode for a prolonged period. This fits with my experience. I can’t do things I have been used to doing. My heart rate is too fast. I have had symptoms of fatigue. I am hypervigilant and watch constantly for signs of rejection or victimisation. I obsess about what happened to me vis a vis my friend, my partner, and their organisation.

I have a need to have my experience validated, acknowledged and understood. It isn’t classic workplace bullying though this was a workplace, and I was an employee (albeit a volunteer). What makes it different is that I experienced a crushing betrayal by a trusted friend, and that my partner also seemed to turn against me and join in with the betrayal.

I am beginning to see a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. R has recognised his own need to seek help from a counsellor. He is showing signs of increasing his commitment to me. He knows that what has happened between us was a wake up call, and that change is needed.

I have already done a lot of changing. I cannot tolerate any more the dismissal of valid feelings as symptoms of an ‘illness’. I cannot deal with being demonised any more. Change has been forced on me by the circumstances.

What happened to me is ‘psychiatric injury’ not psychiatric illness.

People can and do inflict pain on one another by the way they choose to act. This pain is very real. Usually good and conscientious people (like my partner) can so easily get sucked in, adding to the victimisation.

What I ‘should’ have done, is this. Butted out of the Equals course after the first day when it was made very clear to me that I and my opinions were not welcome there (despite the fact that I had supported and encouraged them, joined them as a volunteer and helped them recruit).

As I insisted on my right to attend the course, I should not have openly voiced my opinions and views.

By voicing my opinons and views openly and assertively I made myself a target for bullying, exclusion and harassment.

Once I had been excluded, I should have slunk away into the shadows and said nothing further about the matter. If I had done this my relationship would not have been affected in the way that it was, and I would still have my close friend in my life.

‘What ifs’ are great aren’t they. Symptoms of a bereavement. In time I am going to recover from this. In time I will learn to trust again. Never will anything be the same.

It’s a New Day!

Sunday decided to put Zoe through the wringer. The morning was a tale of confusion and the mantra was ‘I don’t know anything anymore’. I don’t know if I am the most hideous bullying monster around. After all a close and trusted friend has implied as much. So has, at times, my partner.

For all I knew, they could have been 100% right about me. I’m human at the end of the day. When two really close people persist in a demonising attitude towards you, try telling me a part of you won’t start to believe it?

Add in the general tendencies of our society to demonise the ‘mentally ill’. I’ve had approx twenty years of that.

One more time gentle folks. If you see someone ‘spazzing out’ (nice expression, think I picked it up from Eminem) you can be sure it comes from a place of pain. If they are not physically violent it behoves us all to approach them with an open mind and heart. Let compassion be our watchword. There but for the grace of God go you and I.

Yesterday afternoon was a tale of trying to socialise with other people at a picnic and finding it well-nigh impossible. I was overwrought, strung out, skinless and in indescribable emotional pain.

I felt a little better after saying goodbye, but still incredibly vulnerable.

I came home, read a few pages of a book on trauma called ‘Waking the Tiger’. When I read this book I can’t really relate to a lot of it, which makes me feel I cannot be traumatised. I don’t find the analogy to wild animals helpful.

However I know that I am. In the last six months I have had to question two of the closest relationships in my life. One has had to be jettisoned and the other still hangs in the balance. I have developed trust issues. If best friend A said she loved me but then acted as if she hated me, what is to stop R from going the same way?

I have also experienced organisational bullying and psychiatric abuse (being carted off and incarcerated when I didn’t need to be).

I have been in crisis for weeks but this isn’t reducible to the classic ‘bipolar’ pattern of highs and lows. It’s way more complex. Yesterday I exhibited symptoms of PTSD with feelings of rising panic, confusion, terror, dread and agitation.

Unable to be alone with it and knowing I might well be unable to get any rest I headed down to Emergency Reception at St Ann’s. For once this turned out to be a good idea. I had a longish wait but was busy texting back and forth with R, and also managed to read my current ‘madness narrative’ ‘Girl, Interrupted’.

While I admire the author’s intellectual brilliance and lucid, satirical writing style, I did not warm to her as a person. Her presence for two years on a psych ward for young women seemed that of a tourist and she admitted at the end (where she resumes a normal life etc etc) that she still can’t stand ‘loonies’.

But you know what? She was being honest, and I respect that.

I had a chat with a lovely nurse, one of the old guard who has been there for many years, and who patients generally like and respect. Not because he’s the sharpest tool in the box. That’s not what it’s about. Because he is human, he sees our humanity, and he cares about us.

I was able to bypass seeing the doc (which would be a pointless exercise) and another old guard nurse from the wards came and put one precious pill into my hand, 5mg of Valium. But with the added bonus of having a chat with a caring professional who knows me, it was worth the three hour round trip.

I returned home much relieved with my pill – the temporary passport to safety – tucked carefully inside my purse.

Today I will be trying to contact my social worker. I need a stash of these little magic pills. I am very careful to use them only when I really need to. There is no point continuing to take them in an ongoing way in any case. They lose their effectiveness, and you become addicted.

I woke up with the depression gone, and much calmer. Stress like yesterday’s should be avoided by anyone with a bipolar diagnosis, but sadly, shit happens in life. If you’re not the Dalai Lama or Gandhi you will be affected by it. I can ‘look after myself’ until the cows come home but I am also human and I need other people to show me love and care too.

Lots love folks. Zoe xxx

I’d rather be hated than pitied…

Last night I found myself alone, lonely, and paranoid that all my friends were turning against me.

Not good.

Chatting on the phone to a friend he remarked that I had once told him that my relationships were the most important thing to me in life.

He said that God relieved him of this pressure. I pointed out that God is a relationship too.

Woke this morning, still depressed.

Trying to shake the feeling that everyone else is right and I am wrong.

Depression ensures you never forget to doubt yourself.

This has been a helluva year.

I am not cut out to live like a recluse. On the other hand I need plenty of space. Sometimes the balance tips too much one way or the other. Too much of other people, leaving me desperate for solitude. Too little and I find my animal side kicking in. ‘I am human and I need to be loved…just like everybody else does.’

I longed for R and the peace, normality and happiness of times gone by. Before the Equals episode. Before our ‘domestic’.

Of course said peace and happiness was always regularly interspersed with rows. But most of the time I found his presence reassuring, solid, a stable counterbalance to my mercurial and emotionally volatile temperament. When things were good they were great.

So why this particular random title?

It’s a bit like the story of my life. But I’m human, and no human enjoys being hated. I’ve stated a preference, but I don’t want to be hated OR pitied.

We all like to be understood. That’s a good feeling. I guess that’s why I’m here now, writing this.

Trying to say if I come across a bit intense at times, maybe I’ve got my reasons. If you were living in this particular head, would you deal with it so much better?

I’m in favour of a humane approach to human suffering. If someone tells you they are depressed, reach out and ask if there’s anything you can do to help. Don’t push them away or become angry because you feel helpless and can’t ‘fix’ it. The fact of human suffering is not a problem even God can fix, for God’s sake!

If you’ve been there yourself you should know that depression is a very painful and lonely place. Why do these simple things become so complicated?

But perhaps I’m too sad today to analyse my way out of this one.

Love, Z x