Am I Still Ill?

Hi folks.

Well, I suppose I’ve been ‘high’. Not psychotic, but a bit irritating and full of myself. I was losing a fair bit of sleep. My partner kept me safe. However he also encouraged me to spend more money than I could afford. Not so good. But I’m sorta lucky with money. I tend to recover quickly from financial setbacks.

I posted on Suicide Project yesterday. I was depressed first thing, but in the course of the day I met people and did things which uplifted me. My partner and I also made it up after a prolonged row over money and general wastage…which I hate.

Things have been difficult regarding my son. He has been moved on by Social Services from my Mum’s to a foster placement in a coastal town near her. He had not really progressed at all in the year he had been with her, and the conclusion was, that we his family tend to enable him to pursue a life-rejecting lifestyle, and lack the authority over him to force him out of his room and into some version of the world. It hasn’t been for the want of trying in any case.

I’m not without misgivings about this current foster placement, despite meeting the carer and liking her. The comforting illusions I had about my son are almost extinguished altogether. He may be ‘mad’, unbeknownst to us (and he always refuses appointments for assessments by CAMHs etc). But his behaviour is also pretty ‘bad’.

He surpassed himself while staying at my house for three days recently, by telling me repeatedly to kill myself. He thinks nothing of staying in the same clothes, unwashed and smelling, for days on end. He refuses healthy meals and prefers to eat junk. He busies himself mainly watching hip hop videos online. He is an arrogant know-it-all who is, underneath the man-of-the-world veneer,  pig-ignorant. I have wondered whether he may be a sociopath. His emotions are very flattened, and he laughs and smiles as he is abusing me verbally. If he HAS a conscience, he keeps it well hid.

I know a lady with a son of 23 living at home with her. He sleeps all day and is up all night on the Internet, and does nothing else, no education, no training, no socialising, exercise, never leaves the house, nothing. He doesn’t even ‘sign on’ for welfare benefits but lives off her disability money, so she can’t even afford to buy clothes for herself etc, and he’s basically unknown to the system completely. He is also hugely overweight. She has bipolar pretty bad, like me (probably worse actually), and is a single parent.

I feel so sad for him, and her. But hearing about her heart-rending struggles, I just vow to myself that I will NEVER, EVER, no matter how guilty or responsible I may feel for my son’s plight, allow him to live like a parasite on me. However many mistakes I’ve made in my life, I never asked to have a mental illness, and I don’t deserve to be treated like s**t by anyone, let alone my own flesh and blood..

This lady told me that her son had a couple of drinks and found some Dutch courage to go out, catching the bus across London. He came back basically saying he’d had a panic attack of some sort, shaking with anxiety just being out in the world for that short time.  I think his and his mother’s lives are as bad as it probably gets, tho’ I am probably wrong about that. They aren’t homeless at least.

What kind of world are we living in, that becomes such an object of fear that people cannot bear to go out?

I really hate this world sometimes.  I won’t take on board all the responsibility for my son’s situation any more. Society can take some blame, as can life itself, that hands out such a cruel fate to so many…this is the same life that ordains that children receive all kinds of abuse growing up and struggle all of their lives to get over it.

You may notice I don’t say God. I am pusillanimous enough not to want to alienate God (however you do or don’t understand God as we say in the Fellowships) in case sometime soon I need to beg and cry to him for help again. With all my manic bluster, I am a coward underneath. I’m pretty sure I will never have the courage to commit suicide, even tho’ I have more than enough reasons to want to.

But still. Best foot forward Zoe. You can make this work. Even tho’ you don’t truly belong anywhere. You’re not really and never have been addicted to anything more than coffee and ciggies, even tho’ you access drug services. And you don’t even do ciggies anymore. You aren’t suicidal most of the time so have really no right to post on the Suicide Project. Yet somehow you manage to fit in in these places, like the chameleon you are.

Going out to meet a friend I haven’t seen in a while, for coffee. This afternoon, therapy group. Because life must go on.

Zoe x