Change Of Address

I left my university-home of two years on Saturday – and it really has been a university-home, not just a university-house. I’m sad to go, and there’ll be certain things that I’m really going to miss about it – living on the edge of the countryside, the sunsets, my bedroom with its gorgeous big window, the well-equipped kitchen, the bathroom. Not the plumbing, admittedly…

I’ll miss my housemates too. Even though my relationship with one of them was strained by the end and with another disintegrated to the point of practically non-existant – he didn’t even bother to say goodbye – they’ve been good people to live with. Sure, they’ve driven me mad at times, especially in the kitchen, but I’m sure that’s mutual in one way or another. There was an ongoing battle over me insisting on leaving a tiny, first-floor bedroom window an inch open when I went out so that the room didn’t become unbearably stuffy, and thus ensued a mini cold war between me and someone else (I know not whom) which involved hide and seek with the key. But hell, they’ve put up with me this last year, which, y’know…! At least they get a break from me now. I wish I did.

Anyhow, it’s OK. Because while I’ll miss my old house, I have a new one to move into in the autumn, on which a lot of time and energy has been spent recently. Two new housemates. A new location, and a hundred-fold easier food shopping to look forward to. A lot of new bits and bobs as well, because this house is unfurnished and so we are desperately going round trying to acquire beds and mattresses, desks and wardrobes, and the like. We do have a table and chairs now, however, thanks to a beautiful, beautiful set that I acquired from the YMCA furniture shop on North Road for a bargainous £95*.

I think that’s the thing. I normally struggle a lot with change, but it’s a lot easier if you have something to look forward to. Maybe I’m learning :-)

x

*The Quaker network’s been great as well. Next stop, Freecycle. Oh, and if anybody in the Durham or the West Midlands area has stuff they’re chucking out…

A Parting Of The Ways

The last two days have been bad days. Not bad days just because, which is good in one sense as it means that there is hope for me and citalopram yet. But having a bad day for a so-called legitimate reason is still not exactly fun in anyone’s book, and boy, have I had a bad couple of days.

To cut a long story short, then, the university have informed me that me and my degree effectively have two options: exams this May, or exams next May after a year out. It’s hideously complicated, there has been contradictory information flying about all over the place, and no decision is helped by the fact that there are so many hypotheticals. The issues mainly derive from the fact that you cannot resit modules in third year, even if you’re going on to a fourth year of the course. The stakes are high for everyone at this stage.

But yes, that’s how it is. And it’s quite a stark choice to be making, once everything’s been put into the equation.

Thing is, I’ve been aware all along that any mitigating circumstances request could be turned down. I’ve been aware all along that the option I perceive as being best for me might run into unavoidable technicalities somewhere, and hey, life’s a bitch. But what I was not aware of was quite how misinformed and plain inappropriate the university’s reasoning behind this decision would be. Isn’t the whole point of mitigating circumstances that you cannot just follow the rule-book without looking at the case in hand? I am trying so, so bloody hard to help myself – with my health (mental and otherwise), with my degree, with going to the right places and informing the right people and playing by their system – that this whole thing just feels like a big kick in the teeth, forcing me back down where I started.

They haven’t got a fucking clue what they’re talking about, basically. Depression does not bring you out in green spots.

And yes, I am well aware of the irony that I am writing this on the last day of ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’.

What You Didn’t Know

“I can’t deal with taking responsibility for other people any more, which makes me colder, harsher, but also more honest.”

My response to this line was “More honest? Hell yes.”

And to a large extent I am – both more honest with people about me and more honest with myself. At the age of twenty, nearly twenty-one, the depression has finally got bad enough to ask for help, but that’s not to say that it’s anything new. I was seventeen when I finally was honest enough to admit to myself that there was a problem, although at the same time I resented and pushed away my parents’ implicit (albeit identical) diagnosis. The head-mess, the ‘lows’, the ‘down periods’ go back at least as far as thirteen.

It’s not even to say that I have been in a bad patch for all of that time, or that everything about me is as a result of being depressed. But that’s a long time for it to take a hold in ways that even I am still being surprised by. This particular train of thought should probably stop here; I stand by my recent assertion (elsewhere) that self-analysis is BAD.

A large part of the problem is that I’ve lived with this for so long without putting a name to it that I find myself getting angry and resentful. At myself for not saying or acknowledging anything sooner. At friends I’ve had for a long time for not knowing, even though I suppose that I’m the one who shut them out. That’s part of depression, and you often don’t pick up on the signs unless you’ve had direct personal experience (; here I would like to take the opportunity to point out that clinical depression is not necessarily about wearing black eyeliner and cutting your wrists). At the sheer scale of misinterpretation that I know has gone on, even though I know why that misinterpretation happened and in some cases that I actively willed it to happen. I even find myself slightly saddened by the normality with which I have related to my siblings since coming home this holiday, because it probably means that it has formed a much bigger part of my inter-personal relationships than I thought.

Every cloud has a silver lining, however, and mine is that this is a chance to start again. To look people in the eye and tell them, “Actually, this is who I am”. To discover which of my friends really know me (and understand that there may be this extra side to me but it doesn’t invalidate what’s gone before), and sad to say, which of my friends are running away. To run out of mental energy for social etiquette and game playing and indeed ‘the rules’, and to concentrate on who I am. Saying what I think isn’t always to other people’s tastes, but I’m finding myself having to do it in order to get through this.

It’s bloody scary, but even in the midst of a really bad day like today, I still know and take comfort from the fact that this was always going to happen and that it always had to happen. After all, once you’ve hit rock bottom then there’s only way to go, isn’t there?

2009

Here’s to a better ‘un, eh?

Angry

I’m angry. I’m fucking angry, if you’ll excuse the fucking language. I have been this angry since about 7:35pm last night, when I got asked, loudly and insincerely in front of a large number of people that I don’t know whether I was all right, because somebody had [clearly flippantly] commented that I was having a mental breakdown.

On the plus side, however, I’m angry! I’m not sinking, I’m not suicidal, I’m just fucking angry!

As such, this post is tagged ‘Beginnings’.

Plan For The Week

This week is going to be spent tying up loose ends, so to speak. Getting my hair cut and (more importantly) thinned. Going to the chiropractor. Cashing in a prescription. Seeing the one or two friends who are still about. Playing the Kegelstatt Trio (and no doubt discovering just how out of practice I am!). Sorting out a mound of clarinet music, not to mention a large pile of receipts. Getting to the rag market if I have time after trying to finish my final garment for the summer.

Going through the Choral Soc treasury folder and printing off the auditions rota – weird to think that I am no longer the scared, overwhelmed, flu-ridden fresher, but the one to be showing people in and assessing their singing/ sight-reading skills!*

Emails, urgh. I’ve reached my storage limit on the university server and despite my best efforts at rationalising as I go along, my inbox is in a complete mess. Does your place send out tens of the damn things every day as well? Yeh, thought so. I think that takes priority over my laptop’s hard-drive, also long in need of rationalisation – that will have to wait for another year, probably.

Sorting out my third-year module choices, preferably before I have to start attending the lectures. This isn’t actually as crucial as it sounds – provided I haven’t missed anything, I can still change my mind up to October 31st or thereabouts, so it’s perfectly possible to hedge my bets and attend too many modules with a view to getting a better idea of what each involves. But it’d still be nice to be able to attack things with certainty. Maybe even doing some preliminary reading for the modules that I am certain on, although in all honesty that probably won’t happen, not least because I don’t have any of the books.

Packing. ParcelForce proofing and organising and delivering. Defending the number of clothes that I want to take up North, yes really! Repacking. Spending the last couple of nights in a room that looks too tidy and bare to be mine. Navigating the train journey from hell due to big engineering works on the line between Chesterfield and Sheffield.

Saying goodbye to Birmingham for ten weeks. Going from home (where hardly anyone has any concept of my university life) to university (where hardly anyone has any concept of my home life). Playing hunt-the-fellow-Midlander, a game that never gets old because success rates are so occasional and surprising. Meeting hordes of new people, and having to remember to be sociable.

Being with too-long-separated-from friends and housemates. Going back home :-)

x

*We’ll give them a grade. The range goes from A : “You’re a soprano and we’ve got too many sopranos but wow, you’re amazing, and there’s no way we’re not going to take you!” to E : “You’re a tenor, every choir in the country is desperate for tenors, but absolutely no way”

Patchwork Dreams

So, here we are!

A new day, a new blog, the first post!

Yes, it’s jumping on the bandwagon, I guess, and yes, I have managed to do so rather a long time after everyone else… but better late than never, eh? My MSN Space has needed so much changing – the background, the titles, the links, the layout, the increasingly cringe-worthy three-plus years of archive material (and no, that isn’t an invitation!) – that I figured it might be easiest to start again from scratch. Given the amount of time on my hands at the minute and given my general inability to entertain myself for days on end with no-one else around, it seems as good a opportunity as any!

Why ‘Patchwork Dreams’? Well, why not? Loosely inspired by the current image in the header, it just seemed appropriate for a description of the nature of blogging. Each entry, each post is a tiny chunk of my existence – a particular event, a particular interest, a particular thought. There are also large chunks missing, of course, but sewn together over time they build up a picture of who I am and what I do, who I see and what I’ve learned along the way. A patchwork of my life :-)

This won’t ‘go live’ yet for a while, until I’ve tweaked everything into how I’d like it. Having looked at what wordpress.com offers for free, I am very tempted to upgrade to Custom CSS in order to get something that looks and works the way I want it to. Just things like colour schemes, fonts, a layout tweak here and there – I will be learning bits of code from scratch and fully anticipate bugging Dickie for help on occasion, but if I am going to start over then I may as well do so properly! By the time you are reading this, it’s the normal drill – please let me know what you think and act as comment testers for HTML bits, line breaks, and the like.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin…