Tag: Musings

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

What if?

Posted on by WeeGee

My granny used to have a saying that went something like this: ‘if it’s for you, it won’t go past you’. It’s one of those things you seem to have say to people when they have a broken heart, as if words can really take that away and make it all better. Plenty more fish in the sea and all that….

I have a broken heart. My broken heart is a big part of my broken brain. When people say it’s all in my head, I can at least challenge them, because some of it is in my heart, rather than in my head.

I’m told I care too much. Does anybody know what that means? Is it even possible? I tend to look at things in opposites – so I care too much and the opposite is not caring enough. In light of that I don’t accept that I’m doing it wrong. I know where I want to be.

The what if is what if you had what was for you, and it went past you because you were mental?

What if you left behind who you were and the things you could be just because the person who made you all those things couldn’t live with the mental?

What if your brain went wrong and what was for you did go past you? What then?

A confused and unhappy WeeGee xx

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Mixed up things

Posted on by WeeGee

If I knew where to start with this post it would probably have a better opening line. But I don’t know where to start, so that’s as good as it gets. Sorry.

Before I go any further, I should probably say (for the benefit of my British readers) the only thing that British people have said to one another for days now – WHAT IS IT WITH THIS WEATHER?* On reflection, that might have been a better opening line….

Before I go even further, I should definitely say that this is not going to be a nice organised, beginning middle and end kind of post. I’m just going to open up my brain and spill it out for your reading enjoyment. Who was it that said “you’ll like this but not a lot”? Oh yes, it was Phil Daniels (ageing magician not ageing mod). Anyway – what he said. Definitely not a better opening line.

It’s all got a bit mixed up in WeeGee land. Everything’s jumbled up and messy and I don’t know what to feel about anything. There’s probably going to be a me shaped explosion some time very soon** I suppose a mixed up exploding brain is the price I’m going to pay for all that thinking I was talking about in my last post. Note to self: do not think. Ever again.

For a start, my brain is a bit mixed up. It can’t seem to decide whether it’s flat and empty, a bit jittery, full of the horrors, or contemplating jumping my body off a tall building. If I knew which one it was going to do from day to day I could make a plan, but it’s a bit of a moveable feast right now and the plans aren’t working. It’s becoming a bit tedious to be honest.

Then there’s work which is possibly the most mixed up thing of all. Work is my refuge: it’s the only normal thing left, I swear to god. Except it’s not normal anymore – I’ve got three huge projects*** some particularly unhelpful colleagues and one specific senior colleague who is paid double what I am but appears to need me to do her job for her. I don’t say that in a big headed kind of way, but I can’t say too much more not least because I wrote the ‘Acceptable Use of Social Media Policy’ and it would therefore be a bit embarrassing if I was to fall foul of it.

Then there’s my heart which has gone massively wrong. I know that the heart is just a muscle, but I hope you will know what I mean and forgive the scientific inaccuracy. For ages I’ve been walking around with all the nonsense in my head and consoling myself with the part of my heart that had a little flag pinned to it which said ‘last hope for WeeGee’. Well now, my last hope ‘gone done’ a bunk. So now what? Is it just broken brain all the way?

Finally there’s the other part of my heart which ‘cares too much’, is ‘too kind’ and which ‘takes everything to heart’. As far as I can tell, these are the things that people say to you when they’ve been shitty to you but they want to make it your fault. Nevertheless apparently I’m doing it wrong again so I’ve got yet more stuff to figure out even though I was mixed up enough to start with….

In conclusion? Pfft.

WeeGee xx

*For those of you not in the UK – there’s some kind of apocalyptic rain thing going on. And I have to mention it because I’m British and talking about the weather is in my genes.

**When it comes I hope a)It doesn’t make a mess because I can’t stand a mess and b)that it doesn’t frighten the cat because he’s skittish at the best of times

***Three big projects being two too many even if you’re not mental.

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Who is WeeGee?

Posted on by WeeGee

I’ve been in a thoughtful mood of late – the thing about being mental is that you’re not really supposed to ‘think’. When a thought comes in you have to decide what to do with it, and if you can’t figure that out you have to tell yourself its only a thought and then stick it on a shelf (or in a box) for another day. Sometimes I wonder if all that thinking about thinking is more exhausting than the thinking itself.

I’ve mostly been trying to figure out where crazy stops and WeeGee starts because so much of the worst of me is really just an extreme version of the best of me. I’m beginning to wonder if I would still be crazy even if I wasn’t crazy.

At the heart of all the thinking is this notion that I have – you can only be who you are. Sometimes, I withdraw from therapists because I start to get the distinct impression that what we are really working on is making me into a different person. Sure I want to get better, but I really don’t want to find yet another person that I have to somehow pretend to be. I want to work out who I was to start with and then get on with being me.

It’s a bit of a standing joke that, at thirty two years old, I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up. In some ways, it is kind of funny because I’m transient to say the least. I keep heading back to University to qualify myself for yet another profession that I won’t quite pursue in the end; I take up new hobbies as regularly as I give up on them; I would change my hair colour like the weather if I didn’t have the kind of proper job that ruled it out. In other ways, it isn’t funny at all, because I don’t think anybody realises that I’m still trying to work out who I am and the person that they know is mostly make believe. As an aside – growing up is over-rated, no?

This is a short post, and I’ve no idea whether it will make sense outside of my head. There are some things in life that you just assume everybody knows, until one day it becomes painfully obvious that isn’t the case and that you’ve been wrong all along. I suspect feeling like a make believe person is one of them, but then quite a few nutters read my blog, so you never can tell!

Love, WeeGee xx

Posted in Welcome to my world

I am disappeared

Posted on by WeeGee

Before anybody points it out, I know that the title of this post is something of a grammatical car-crash. In my defence I didn’t make it up – it’s the title of a song I’ve been listening to a lot recently. If you have any problems with the grammar, please take them up with Frank Turner (but do be aware that I am a little bit in love with him and will certainly fight to the death to defend his honour…..)

One of my friends pointed out that I’ve ‘gone dark’ over the past week or so. I think he might be right because as far as everything is concerned at the moment, I’d be equally happy with taking it or leaving it. Nothing seems to matter.

I know I’m in a bad place because the following three things have taken place over the past couple of days:

  • I almost left the house wearing underwear that didn’t match. That’s a big deal, not because of being run over by buses, but because I’m a firm believer that if things are capable of matching they should. Matching underwear is absolutely critical to my sense of self
  • I actually left the house with chipped nail varnish. That’s an even bigger deal because I never, ever do that. I’ve had painted nails every day of my life since 1995 and my nails are always immaculate when I’m in public. Even when I’m in full on nutter mode.
  • Mr Friendly offered a chat to cheer me up and I said no. This is unheard of for so many long and complicated reasons that I won’t go into them here, but If I can’t even be bothered to speak to him there isn’t much hope left.

Anyway. The good thing is that I’m not in hiding. The bad news is that I just don’t feel like talking to anybody or doing anything. There’s nothing in my head and I’m really struggling to find anything that I still care about – what’s the point of talking to people when there’s nothing in your head and you can’t find anything to care about? It doesn’t really leave you with a lot to say.

Throughout the ups and downs of being Wee Gee there’s always been something for me to hold on to – books, politics, justice, music, Mr Friendly – it has always seemed to me that when I can’t care about myself I can at least find things in the external world to care about. Now it just feels like everything has finally gone. It didn’t happen overnight, but slowly and surely things departed until I wound up here trying to figure out what fills the hole now everything has disappeared.

In some ways, I feel like this is what I’ve been working towards my whole life. Other people get married and have kids; Wee Gee makes everything so small that the future is little more than a robotic march through the motions for no other reason than that’s what being alive is all about: a series of pointless and unnecessary motions that  you put yourself through day in, day out. Boo to everything!

I think this post might be what you call navel gazing; it’s certainly self-indulgent, I know that. I’ve been trying to find a way to say all of this in a light hearted, amusing way, but there isn’t anything funny about it.

It’s either that, or my sense of humour has left the building along with everything else. Oh bums.

Wee (hoping that tomorrow is better) Gee xx

PS – I have at least a million blogs to catch up with and I do care about that, even though I think I don’t so I’ll try and get to them tonight.

Posted in Welcome to my world

A post about nothing followed by a lame joke

Posted on by WeeGee

I hope you won’t mind but I really need to get this out of my head. I’ve been swimming around in it for a few days now and I’m tired. Before I go any further I should say that this is a post about suicidal feelings. Reading about suicidal feelings isn’t everybody’s cup of tea so you may prefer to sit this one out.

Let me be frank* I wish I was dead but, just to muddy the waters, I also don’t want to wind up dead. Makes perfect sense, eh?

For a very long time I’ve had a strong feeling that I’m not going to live to be an old person. I don’t know where it comes from or when it started I just know that it’s there and that it sits in my head. It’s one of the many things on the list of things that Wee Gee will never do for one reason or another**. I mentioned it to Mr Friendly once but he just thought it was a) sad and b) silly. It’s one of those residual feelings that never really goes away. And then I have a few days like the few days just past and it becomes clear to me that it isn’t silly at all because the longer I live, the more likely it is that I won’t live to be an old person. And yes, I know that statement makes no sense whatsoever except in my head.

I don’t often think about suicide – I sometimes go to bed willing myself not to wake up, but that’s a different thing altogether – and I don’t make plans to take my own life. By all accounts that should mean that everything is fine and dandy but it doesn’t.

The thing is it doesn’t matter that I don’t think about it, plan to do it, or want to do it; what matters is that once in a while I just snap and decide to try and do it. Thus far I have always been okay but one of these days I’m going to wake up dead and to say that would be an unmitigated disaster is something of an understatement.

Saturday was one of those days. It was a day of nothing – you know the days when nothing matters, nothing makes sense and everything feels like nothing? Nothing is the thing that I struggle to deal with the most of all – it’s unspeakably heavy and just as loud. Nothing is the reason that I do so many of the things I do to hurt myself and is the thing that sends me into hiding. Some people seem to think that having nothing on your mind is a good thing, but I wonder if those people really understand what nothing feels like? Waking up in the morning to find that everything that was your head yesterday – the little plans, the promises you make to yourself, the things you like, the stuff you care about – has fallen into a giant hole of nothingness taking you with it is no fun at all.

I’ve tried very hard to work out where nothing comes from and what happens to make it rise up and take over but I just can’t figure it out. Sometimes I think there must be a little chink of nothing at the heart of me that has to come up for air every so often, that I’m simply built around nothing and that I am empty at my core even if I pretend not to be. That’s when I jump off the cliff because I might get well enough to get out of bed without thinking about it, to banish the maddies, the jitters, fanatical food stuff and all the other crazy nonsense but I’ll never get well enough to fill the nothing up and it’s the nothing I can’t live with.

I don’t know when or why nothing is going to strike which makes it hard to go about keeping myself as safe. I’ve got my safety plan and I try to follow it to the letter but, in the grip of nothing I find it quite easy to stray from the plan and end up in all kinds of trouble. Bottom line of all this is that I’m mostly terrified of myself which is absolutely exhausting. I’m afraid I’m going to go and do something that I won’t live to regret without even meaning to do it.

Phew. It’s all getting a bit heavy here. Somebody should tell a joke…… Okay, I’ll do it: Q What’s invisible and smells of carrots? A. Rabbit farts. Boom boom {hangs head in shame}

Meanwhile in other news I slept right through until 6am this morning and I worked out that I spend about £300 a year on purchasing beverages from the coffee bar at work today. Nothing further to add save that I did squeeze a couple of asterisks in, so things must be looking up despite the rather gloomy nature of this post.  Oh. And I’m writing this in my lunch hour at FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON.

Sorry about this one folks – the next will be better, promise.

Take care, Wee Gee x

 

*Whenever someone says that I can’t resist saying ‘okay… who shall I be’?

**Other things on the list of things Wee Gee will never do: get married, have children, understand why anyone would voluntarily eat a mushroom

Posted in About today

This is really happening, isn’t it?

Posted on by WeeGee

I don’t really like Radiohead anymore – I lost interest somewhere around OK Computer – but I do really like this song. I think it sounds like how I feel a lot of the time:

The line in the song that goes ‘this is really happening’ is a notion that strikes me every now and then, usually in the wee small hours when I can’t sleep and there’s nowhere to hide from all the things that are happening in my head. Sometimes I feel incredulous about it all because how very dare this be happening in my head, but most of the time I feel frightened because this is really happening and what if I can’t figure out how to make it quieten down again?

I had 11 whole years when I didn’t have to struggle very hard with myself. I had to struggle a little bit because I don’t think the voices* ever go away you just get better at answering them back, or ignoring them, or both. I think of my difficulties as a dark passenger** because they are always there at my side. I’ve carried my dark passenger everywhere I’ve ever been – sometimes it’s heavy and sometimes it isn’t so heavy; sometimes it’s almost silent and sometimes it’s very, very loud; sometimes it looks out the window as we travel and sometimes it takes over the driving.

For the past year or so my dark passenger has been in the driving seat and I’ve had to struggle very hard with myself. Compared to the 11 years where I wasn’t struggling much, the past year feels like it’s lasted for a lifetime. Sometimes, I get sick and tired of it all and I just wish that all the nonsense would disappear out of my head. Other times, I remember that it will never disappear completely and so I start to wonder what the point of struggling very hard with yourself just so you don’t have to struggle very hard with yourself is. Right now is one of those other times.

Today I feel a bit small and insignificant and, above all else, frightened. I’m wondering what would happen if I just stopped struggling and gave my brain over to the darkness. I don’t much like being in the dark, but I can’t help thinking it’d probably be a little easier on me.

Still, tomorrow I’ll be all brave again. Thoughts pass eventually because that is their way.

Wee Gee x

 

 

*I should point out to you that over the years I have learned that you need to be very careful when you’re talking about the ‘voices in your head’.

**If anyone watches Dexter, mine is not at all like that dark passenger – just for the avoidance of doubt!

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

All shapes and sizes

Posted on by WeeGee

I’m not a very big person (I mean in stature, but sometimes I feel small in other ways too).

I’ve always been a not very big person – in part that’s just the way I’m built and in part that’s because I struggle with food.  I struggle with food because I spent a fair few years of my life on a starvation diet in the misguided belief that I rather wanted to disappear completely. Thankfully, I don’t struggle with food nearly as much as I used to and I nearly always eat enough of it every day. In essence I’ve come to an understanding with myself about food and about my weight which, for the most part, works pretty well. I say for the most part because my weight is still susceptible to go up and down a little. Right now I’m hovering around the ‘telling off mark’ which is the point at which my nearest and dearest step in and ask, in so many words, if I’m struggling more than I’m letting on. I can’t tell you how important it is to me that people are looking out for me in case I stop looking out for myself and I am incredibly grateful to have those kind of people in my life. The worst case scenario for me is going back to the dreaded days of the starvation diet – I think it scares me more than anything in the world*

One of my mantras is that being too thin is bad for you in much the same way that being too fat is bad for you. Which kinda brings me neatly on to the point of my ramblings today. When you’re thin people (and by ‘people’ I mean complete strangers) feel the need to tell you you’re thin. Quite aside from this being a major case of stating the bleeding obvious** it’s none of their business and is, in my outraged opinion, incredibly rude. I know beyond all shadow of a doubt that if I was overweight people at bus stops wouldn’t say “My god, you’re soooo fat”. Shop assistants wouldn’t say “Size 24 – that’s MASSIVE”. Waiters wouldn’t say “I’d skip the pudding if I were you”. Yet the opposite of all of these things in a great many variations have been said to me. And I really don’t think it’s okay – in fact, it’s one of my bug bears.

Sometimes, comments like that hit me at the wrong time and can make me ‘go a bit wobbly’ because I’m a bit sensitive about my weight. In some ways, the fact that I’m a bit sensitive about my weight is my problem – random strangers can’t be expected to know about it can they? Then again, even normal people (I use the phrase with my tongue firmly in cheek by the way) can be a bit sensitive about their weight and I think that might be the reason most people wouldn’t dream of pointing out to a stranger that they’re on the large side. We seem to recognise that when people are overweight there might be all kinds of reasons for that fact (illness, medication, eating distress, poor diet etc) and also make the (perhaps wrong***) assumption that they’re not over the moon about it. And so we generally don’t point out to people that we think they’re too large – It’s about knowing it’s none of your business, it’s about common courtesy and it’s about recognising that rightly or wrongly quite a lot of us are a bit sensitive about the size of our bodies.

My point? In a nutshell it’s that a bit of common courtesy for those people we think are too small wouldn’t go amiss either: manners, surely, are for people of all shapes and sizes.

Rant over. The end.

* It scares me even more than moths which, for the record, scare the absolute shit out of me.

**A bit like the famous “you’ve had your hair cut” Good spot Sherlock; I’d never have known ‘cos I wasn’t there at the time.

***But that’s a whole other post.

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

If you’re happy and you know it….

Posted on by WeeGee

Chatting to a friend over lunch yesterday I became aware of a frustrating misconception about depression which hadn’t really occurred to me before – the notion that the opposite of depression is happiness and that depression is simply the experience of being very sad for a long time.

Sometimes I rather wish I had just been sad for a while. Sad, I think, I could have done. Sad doesn’t crowd in during the threadbare hours to chase you out of yourself; it doesn’t turn out the lights, one by one; it doesn’t steal the things you care about and taunt you because you can’t find their whereabouts. Sad isn’t a menace threatening to stay by your side for eternity; it doesn’t convince you to abandon all hope, love and laughter.  Sad doesn’t take your life away, incrementally, until the only thing left to do is jump off the cliff edge it has led you to.

It’s funny where a throw away comment can take you, isn’t it? My friend simply said ‘I’m really glad you are feeling happier’. It was meant as a kindness and an encouragement, and it was taken as one, but behind the scenes it got me thinking about what I’m really trying to achieve here. Is this a search for happiness? My conclusion, I think is ‘no’. For me, trying to recover from depression isn’t about trying to find happiness, it’s about trying to find health. It’s about getting myself on a mental and emotional even keel which allows me to experience a range of emotions safe from the harm that my dark passenger can and does inflict.

Sad is sad. It’s the opposite of happy. Depression is depression. It’s the opposite of well and the opposite of what I’m striving to be.

Posted in Reasons to be cheerful

What not to say

Posted on by WeeGee

Yesterday  I was having a nosey around the Depression Alliance’s website and found an interesting list of ten things not to say to someone who is depressed:

  • There’s always someone worse off than you are.
  • No one ever said that life was fair.
  • Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
  • So, you’re depressed. Aren’t you always?
  • Try not to be so depressed.
  • It’s your own fault.
  • I think your depression is a way of punishing us.
  • Haven’t you grown tired of all this me, me, me stuff yet?
  • Believe me, I know how you feel. I was depressed once for several days.
  • Have you tried chamomile tea?

(full list here – also includes 10 things to say)

With the exception of ‘stop feeling sorry for yourself’*, I suppose I’ve been lucky in that no-one has said any of the above to me. Still, it got me thinking about the way people have responded to me when I’ve told them I suffer from depression, or more rarely, when I’ve been talking about the impact it has on me…

In my experience the most common and the most frustrating thing people say is one of the many variations of ‘but why are you depressed’ or, in other words, ‘depression itself isn’t a real thing; what’s actually the matter with you?’ Sometimes it seems that it is impossible for people to grasp that this is a question that a depressed person can rarely answer. Sure, some bouts of depression are triggered by an event or experience (the kind of event that everybody finds difficult to deal with – redundancy, relationship breakdown, bereavement). However, even when that is the case (bearing in mind that many episodes of depression have no identifiable trigger), by the time the illness has taken hold the starting point has almost completely lost its relevance and the thing that is the matter is simply the fact that you are suffering from depression.

At this point, I do feel I should point out that over the years a lot of fantastic people have said a lot of fantastic and helpful things to me. Often people recount their own experiences of recovering from depression and I’ve always found this to be an extremely encouraging thing to hear when I’m in the pit. There’s a lot of re-assurance to be found in knowing that people you know (or people that know people you know) have found a way to climb out and put their lives back together – it’s a little bit of hope to cling on to.

At the same time, I have received a great deal of practical advice (put your shoes on and leave the flat being a particularly valuable one) and recommendations for resources and support material (this one being my favourite so far). Above all else, people have been kind enough to offer a wealth of helpful words of wisdom which have helped me keep my head in troubled times. For example here’s a particular gem that a former counsellor passed on to me years ago and which still means a lot to me ‘Everyone who got to where he  is had to begin where they were’ (R.L. Stevenson)

Having given the matter some thought I have been reminded that actually, the people around me right now are pretty fabulous and the people I have shared my secret with, both recently and in the past,  have almost always responded with genuine empathy and compassion.

And that there is a reason to be a teeny tiny bit cheerful.

*To be fair, I think there was a certain amount of justification at the time and under the circumstances!