Still At Home

I am ill. Not scary swine flu ill, but ill enough to feel pretty shit and not to have used the train ticket that I had booked for going up to Durham on Saturday. This sucks, although as lectures don’t start ’til Thursday and I was planning on avoiding all things Fresher-related anyway, I guess the timing could be worse.

My Dad is convinced that I have brought on the illness by anxiety, and as such the path to getting better is to leap out of bed, (wo)man up, and deal with it accordingly. I am yet trying to convince him that as much as there may possibly have been anxiety-related incidents involving crying and shaking and burying into duvets, a bug is a bug and the prospect of travelling again is even less inviting if I haven’t first got rid of it, which I can’t do by willpower alone. Grump. Parents. If he’s trying to persuade me that staying at home isn’t such a great option after all, he’s doing a bloody good job of it.

However the upside of one of the above incidents is that after yet another well-intentioned invitation to Talk About Things To Us, I am increasingly sure that I am going to take a gap year after university. Or a gap six months – whatever – because the wonderful freedom about leaving the educational system is that no longer will my life have to revolve around September starts and May exams. Maybe I’ll work, maybe I’ll travel, or maybe I’ll just stay at home and remember what bonfire smoke smells like in south Birmingham on November 5th, but what I will not do is refuse to give myself time and space to breathe. Maybe, just maybe, my ideal job will come up in the meantime and I’ll go straight to there.

But I won’t have to, because I will be free! I think that I need that light at the end of the tunnel.

Incompetence

You know it’s a sign of the times when your 13 (no, wait, shit, 14. 14!) -yr-old brother has to text you to remind you that it’s Father’s Day and have you done anything? Not that Dad will have remembered either, as we really don’t set much store by such occasions in our family, but still…!

Personal Definitions

How do you define yourself? I define myself as many things – a student, a Brummie (perhaps of the less stereotypical variety), a mathematician, a geek, a sewist, a Quaker, and so on and so forth. Essentially, though, I define me as me.

I was having this conversation with some friends the other day on the way back from a picnic. One of them has just got together with a new guy, and it’s looking serious already. We were talking about their future, in a loose hypothetical way, when something really struck me. H was talking about her career, her wants, and her life in general purely in terms of his. That’s all good, I suppose, from the point of view that by marrying someone you are tying your life into theirs and that somewhere along the way that is bound to involve a certain amount of compromise. But her aims in life seemed to revolve purely around her prospective husband’s – to quote, she would rather be the wife of a successful businessman than a successful businesswoman herself.

I’m sure that a lot of this stems from H’s rather traditional upbringing (; her mother will ‘allow’ her to leave home only in order to marry someone deemed suitable), and if that is what will make her happy then I wish her all the best. But at the same time, she is a highly intelligent postgrad, with strong views and ideals of her own, and is a lovely person to boot – and instinctively I don’t like the idea of H being transformed into ‘the wife of whoever’.

And for all I can see only too easily how it happens, I despair in the same way at those mothers (and yes, sorry guys, it does tend to be mothers) who find their personalities and lives absorbed into that of their children’s.  Whenever I come into contact with women pushing a pram or pushchair, I make a real effort to engage with them, to meet their eyes without simply going gooey over their children, however cute the children may be. There are many things that I dread about potential motherhood and that’s a whole long story for counsellors to get their teeth into, but one of those is losing my identity to my children. I find myself feeling guilty sometimes for that childhood perspective of my own mother – she was my Mum, not C, not a primary-school teacher  or an English/European Thought graduate or a keen walker. I guess that’s one of the things that I’m consciously trying to make up as I’ve grown older.

I’m quite pleased, for that reason, that J’s friends seem to know me as ‘Lucy’, not ‘J’s girlfriend’. I like having my own identity. It’s something I plan to hang on to.

Boolean Logic

I’m well or I’m ill, it would seem.

So that means that I’m either well and can take six third-year exams in eight days as normal, or I’m ill so I have to take the year out (- nice sympathetic response from the university there). I’m clearly well enough to go to lectures, so I must be well enough to sit down in the library and enthusiastically figure out all the stuff I have thus far failed to think about. I’m with it enough to hold a coherent conversation most of the time, so of course I’m completely sorted when it comes to stressful itineraries and on-the-spot decision making.

I’m tons better on citalopram than I was on fluoxetine – so now I’m completely better, full stop, and don’t have to have allowances made for me any more, because being better means that there are blue skies and happy sunshines and shiny silver bits floating about in the trees, and no lows, and no anxiety, and everything’s normal again so I can get on with life. Green spots, guys. Green spots.

Sometimes I think that people are simply trying to persuade themselves that it’s that easy, because they don’t want to have to think about or deal with the alternative. I have a lot of sympathy, I really do.

x

In other news, I haven’t had counselling for well over a month now because the already struggling counselling service has two people (including the one I see normally) on long-term sick leave. Which kinda sucks all round, really.

Mice

As a partial response to a Facebook conversation I am currently having with Jenny, may I present to you a swirly tailed, single round eared, three-legged and bearded mouse? This one has no tummy button, in which it is lacking somewhat.

x

(Original source. Excuse the cringeworthy blogging style, if you will. It’s amazing what you think of yourself from an older and questionably wiser perspective..)

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?

Taste

My sister and I both got our ears pierced for the first time in the summer. Not long after I went back to university in October, then, it was perhaps inevitable that she should challenge me to a wacky earring competition to be held two months later, at Christmas.

We interpreted ‘wacky earrings’ (or “rediculous (but cheap obv) earings”, as I read back from Facebook) slightly differently. I bought her some bright wooden beads

, which at least are on the tasteful side of wacky, I thought. I mean, I could have bought her some squashed plastic hearts that I saw in a truly vile shade of purple, but there’s only a certain level of plastic tat on which I am prepared to waste my hard-borrowed student loan. What’s more, she has no excuse not to wear them, unlike these….

, which tear at your earlobes somewhat with the sheer weight

, as well as feeling rather unbalanced left-right

, not to mention being completely and truly hideous!

In a loving, home-made gift way, of course. I might use them as room decorations!

Advent Advances…

Tempus fugit, time flies, tick-tock…

Not something I want to think about really, but in anticipation of Monday being 1st December I bought myself an advent calendar whilst in town today. This was perverse from several points of view, the obvious being that I have spent quite a lot of time over the past couple of years or so pronouncing my lack of Christian faith (in my head if not out loud). I also insisted upon buying a non-chocolate one despite the fact that they are really hard to find, it cost considerably more to do so (for the expensive luxury of having air behind the cardboard, presumably), and my chocolate consumption is such that an thin angel-shape more every day really wouldn’t make that much of a proportional difference.

But it was the principle of the thing, and the nostalgia, I guess, and I’m sure that the counsellor will tell me that it’s all to do with clinging on to my childhood. For a really authentic experience I should only open every third door, but there’s no-one to squabble with about who gets 3 so it loses the point somewhat…

Little things, eh?!

Communication

How well do you communicate?

I’ve been considering this quite a bit in the past couple of weeks or so. I’ve never been a great verbal communicator. I’m better in slightly more formal contexts or when talking to people older than myself, but put me in a stressful social situation and I have a tendency to lose my grasp on the English language altogether, flailing around for words and meaning, desperately hoping that somebody will bail me out before I make too much of an idiot of myself. Phone calls can be similarly awkward, although it does depend who I’m talking to. I know this, it’s the way it is, I can deal with it. I’m a mathematician and therefore entitled to suck at words (- and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it!)

When it comes to body language, however, I’ve always thought of myself as someone who wore their heart on their sleeve – even if I’m not saying something, I’ve always been pretty sure that people can tell what’s going on, simply because I’m just not that good at acting otherwise. And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned of late it’s that this clearly isn’t the case.

The realisation started to come a few weeks into first term last autumn when one of my housemates asked me to make a ’status board’ for my door because when I came in and went up to my room, just to dump my bag or whatever, they simply couldn’t gauge my mood. My body language was clearly not sufficient to distinguish between ‘thinking hard about something problematic’ and ‘tired but contented’. ‘I’m in a foul mood’ would have been marginally easier, I’d imagine, but perhaps not as clear as I thought since I found that stating the fact calmly but explicitly got the message across much faster (and with better results all round). It’s not even to do with the length of time that I have known people – a close, long-standing home friend recently told me that she can only tell when I’m annoyed because she knows what’s likely to annoy me. Even my family have varying degrees of reaction time (- it’s my Dad, I think, who tunes in the fastest, probably because we’re quite similar).

Maybe this apparent lack of open communication would explain my interesting time with relationships over the years. What’s chicken and what’s egg?

I think it’s probably in writing that I consistently succeed best when it comes to communicating. Edited, thought-out, structured writing. Is that a true representation of the thought process that goes on behind the letter or the email or the blog? The irony is that no-one can do the controlled experiment and ever be able to tell!

It’s frustrating. It really is.