Goodbye and Hello

Last week I decided to create my own website, just to see if I could.. it isn't finished yet but I'm pleased with the way it's working out. Anyway, I've decided to end this blog.. there will be a new blog on the website but I haven't decided if I'm going to be as frank about my feelings, I just haven't felt totally comfortable writing about them.

I'm going to hide my old posts and just start over, as 'me' .. no pseudo-identities. Fresh start, fresh clarity of mind.. we'll see.

See you in the new place, I hope.

www.detritusofthemind.com

Hello Darkness..

So, I'm up at 5am.. check my bank and work haven't paid my SSP. Now I'm panicking what that means and waiting for 9am so I can call and try to find out. I say try because getting a response from this company has never been easy. I tried to go part time a month or so back, but was told I hadn't been off long enough for them to consider it. Bewailing this fact to an online, American friend, who has been my closest support through all of this.. he told me about the situation in the US.. they get so many sick days and then they're out.. no government help. I felt pretty crappy.

I felt crappier still when he gently asked if it might not be better for me to work, rather than have so much time to sit and think. It upset me a lot. Only because I keep asking myself the same thing. I've worked since I was 16, in some form or another, alongside education. I've worked through some pretty bad lows where I've been pacing the office and lying down in the toilets unable to function (yay for being the only female in the building and having a room that is lockable and more hygienic than that sentence sounded). And shouldn't I keep doing so, rather than survive on what is essentially hand-outs? See, I thought time away from 'it all' would do me good, allow myself to find and then fix myself. Only it wasn't supposed to take this long, and it was supposed to be going a lot better than this.

I've had flashes, some really good weeks. Admittedly, I am better with a purpose: leafleting against the BNP, helping out with a homeless kitchen, demos and the like. I also sing with a band - we're not gigging yet, but writing and rehearsing (expect for most of May when I slumped and couldn't). I've learnt a lot about myself and I've done things I never thought I'd be able to, and am proud of. But I seem to have hit a block. Slowly the things that were giving me a purpose have dwindled, and I haven't had the impetus to seek out more. I am largely friendless, here, thanks to a nomadic lifestyle and a marriage that really excluded all else. My closest friendship seems to have become complicated, and awkward. Mental note: if your best friend is a boy, don't kiss him. I rely too much on online relationships, I know I do, and now I feel like those are being eroded too.

Everything I do takes so much effort, I panic if I have more than one thing to do a day. For example, I started going to church (that's a subject for another post) which is 11am on Sunday, but I also have band practise on Sunday.. usually 6-8pm.. I find it immensely hard to do both, even with so much time between. One appointment or activity can consume my whole day. Sustaining the ability to work consumed my whole life, until eventually I just couldn't hack it any more. But I feel incredibly guilty not working, and I constantly doubt my motives. I want to do something useful for 'the greater good' but have made no efforts as yet to work out how. I've considered long-term volunteering where I get a roof and board, but I'm scared to take that on while I'm still so flaky. I just want to do something where the reward is enough to get me out of bed on the bleak days. I suppose everyone wants that, shouldn't I just get on with things in the meantime? Especially as I have long-standing debts I need to sort out.

Problem is, I've been so busy trying to stabilise my financial situation I've lost sight of the bigger picture. I know I can't do this forever, but I just don't know what to do.

I'd quite like to stop crying, though.

Money, money, money..

So, on Monday I received a call from the Housing Benefits office to discuss my appeal against them not back dating my claim. They wanted proof that I have had depression from the time I claimed, 'No problem,' I say, 'I have a photocopy of the initial sick note. No good. 'We need a letter from your doctor or therapist. Oh.

So, I contact the therapist's office. We can certainly send a letter stating we've been seeing you, and the dates your therapy started, but we might not be able to put 'depression' on the letter - you'd have to talk to your GP about that. Letter arrived two days later, they are very efficient about things like that and I know it's not their fault that they can't do 'labels'. I call my current doctors. 'this pre-dates your time with us, you need to contact your previous GP' so, I do... 'oh, yes, we can do that' great! 'that'll be £20' ... um, I'll leave it for now.

So I've contacted the appeals team again to see what they say about my therapist's letter. I can't afford to pay £20 when the amount I'm claiming may not be awarded, and isn't exactly for lot of money anyway (my claim was processed on 12th April, I asked for it to be back-dated to the 8th March). That's like a week's food shopping. We'll see.

In other financial news, I have been awarded working tax credit (based on my full wage) of £36/week .. between that and housing benefit I can now pay rent.. I managed it last month without having to borrow from my sis, I was so happy!

Another Suitcase in Another Hall..

I've avoided blogging so far today because I felt it meant answering the question 'how did yesterday go?' and, honestly, I don't know how to. It was easier than expected which, for some reason, just made it emotionally harder.

We met the auction person at our old home but with the up-front costs required, it looks as if we're going to have to let the mortgage company take the house. This doesn't daunt me as much as it should, bankruptcy has been an inevitable part of my future for a long time now. I don't like that it's come to this, and do feel guilty, but there's nothing I can do about it, and I have nothing much to lose. Walking around the house we renovated together was odd, but that wasn't what made me sad.. we'd barely finished it before we left to run our own business, and it had never really felt like home. I think it was the comfortableness with each other that did it. Well, after he'd finished glaring at my scars and asking me why I did it in such a prominent place.. 'uh.. it was the first piece of skin available?' See, when I burn myself, I go out (can't smoke indoors) to my 'special' place.. this is not conducive to disrobing to injure secret places. Besides, the first time I burnt I was not thinking of the covering-up consequences, and it was colder.. so, long sleeves. The second time, well, is it weird to admit that the non-symmetry of the three previous burns was pissing me off? I know that there's going to be at least one more time, one more burn would make a star-design.. yeah, that sounds sad, right? I used to cut myself, well 'graze' is more accurate, with a key, across the top of my arm. Still do, sometimes, though it doesn't help like it used to. Much more hide-able. Not from a partner, though. He hasn't lost the same expression of bewilderment as he had that day, many years ago, when he first noticed.

Walter also caught me pinching at my skin in the car, 'you're not self-harming are you?' .. 'um.. no?' It's too hard to explain how it gets me through the day, and that most of the time I don't even know I'm doing it. I've come to realise that some people are either willing to understand, or not at all. Sadly, my husband was always of the 'pull yourself together' category, and no amount of explaining would change that. I knew it was hard for him, too. Before 'the end' I asked him to find a counsellor to speak to - to help him deal with me. He agreed, at first, then decided it wasn't him that needed fixing. He does try to make sense of it, sometimes, maybe more so now: 'I thought you'd be happy once you'd left me' .. but depression doesn't work like that, if that's what 'this' is (more on that some other time). I never blamed him for my depression, it just devastated me that we couldn't find some way through together, and I realised, gradually, that I needed something else. I needed space to be 'me' without repercussions: I met him at 18 - had never lived alone. I lost all sense of self, and there wasn't much of it to begin with.

In better news, the room opposite mine in the house-share has been empty for a while. The door was left ajar yesterday morning and a quick glance made me realise (a) how much bigger it was than mine and (b) how much better the furniture was. A quick call to the landlord later and I was given permission to move. Which took up the rest of the day following Walter's departure. A welcome physical distraction. I have a lot more of my stuff around me now and for the first time since September last year I have a sense of a 'homely' environment. Grateful as I am, I've still spent a good part of the day in tears. Looking through old photos perhaps didn't help..

And now that I feel more settled in my living accommodation, and another nail has been hammered into the coffin of my marriage, I return to the constant, unanswerable question.. 'so what happens now..?'

I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning

So today I'm going to see 'the ex' .. let's call him Walter (still following the Charlotte Perkins Gilman conceit.. but, honestly.. Walter?). Feels weird to call him 'the ex' as we're still, for all intents and purposes, married. Feels weirder still that this will be the first time I've seen him since October last year. Until my departure in September 2009, the longest we'd spent apart since 1997 was one week. Today he's bringing some more of my stuff (keyboard, camera, knitting.. I need things to do, dammit!) and we're going to our old home to meet with an auctioneer in a last attempt to get some equity before the mortgage company follows through on its threats to reclaim it.

And I'm sitting here trying to work out how I feel. I know why I left, and I know why I'm not going back. I don't have the emotional energy to blog about it right now, so you'll have to trust me that It Was For The Best and We Are Still Friends. But, I know today is going to be hard for both of us, how can it not be? We met when I was 18, that's a huge part of my life connected to someone else's. And Walter? (the name is still making me giggle) well, it wasn't his choice to finish it, really - although we mutually agreed by the end - and that weighs on my conscience. I hate making decisions, and that was a big one. On the bright side, given that I'm still crying like an idiot pretty much every day, maybe he'll be reminded why it wasn't so much fun having me around.

Oh well, only 4.5 hours until he arrives. Wish me luck.

You're Not Alone

So, I'm not very good at this blog-writing thing. I've honestly lost count of the times I've opened 'New Post' and it's sat in a tab on my browser all day while I distract myself in the wonderland that is the internet. It's not the first time I've experienced the inability to write. My ambition, for as long as I care to remember, was to be a novelist. Unless being a novelist means sitting in front of a blank screen banging your head on the desk, I haven't achieved it, yet.

The hardest thing about my personal experience with depression has been the slow eradication of concentration, until eventually it became a struggle to read a book or even watch a whole film. I miss reading the way I used to: devouring a whole book at one sitting, but I'm coming to terms with the fact it might be a long time before I'm back to that, if ever. Some days I get a glimpse of how it used to be, but most I'm barely able to read even a whole newspaper article. Which is why I spend most of my time on the internet. There's a lot online to distract my addled brain; twitter and facebook are my lifelines to the world. And there is just enough interaction to make me feel I'm achieving something, even if it's only passing another level of my new physics-based-puzzler addiction.

So, what have I been doing in the vast time between my last post and this? Well, my financial position is stabilising, somewhat. I've stopped having to borrow money from my sister to pay my rent. I have housing support, SSP from work and working tax credit in the pipeline. Forms are not fun. Forms are not fun even when you can concentrate. Forms are apparently not even fun to the caseworker I had briefly who missed some of the things I needed when helping me fill them in. But, it's done. There's always the threat of it all being taken away from me, but at the moment, I'm past caring.

Generally, I try to count the good things: I have a growing network of support, I've been out in the community and am trying to help (when I'm able), life is beautiful and people are immensely reachable if you smile at them and are prepared to listen to them. I know that, I really do. In the last few weeks I've danced, sang, chatted to 'vagrants', protested against racism, found my way to Church, laughed, and cried. I've been reminded of the person I used to be, way back when. I've seen my own frustrations with mental health blogged by someone much more eloquent than I (http://politicalparent.blogspot.com) and I know I'm not alone.

I know I'm not alone.

I know I'm not alone, even though my NHS therapist has pretty much told me they don't have the resources to help me. I know I'm not alone, even though it's going to be another month before my GP can tell me when I'm likely to be referred to the nurse that is the point of contact between her and the psychiatrist.

I know that when I wake from another nightmare, I can log in somewhere and there will be someone to talk to. I know that when I succumb to burning my skin again in frustration, someone will be there to give me a real or virtual hug. I know that my sister is only a phone call away, even though she has so much pain in her own life to deal with right now.

I know, I do know.. but if someone could tell the voice that echoes in my head 'it's all hopeless, it doesn't matter how much you fight - you're never going to win' - well, that would be nice.