Here Be Dragons

I'm in uncharted territory now. Places in a relationship I never thought I'd be. Places for which there is no guidebook.

You'd think asking around might help. After all, I'm hardly the first person to find myself in this situation, any of it.  But when I speak to other people, the best they can offer  -  for all their good intentions  - is something along the lines of: "I was there. It was shit".

What to do for the best depends on your perspective. A kick-ass feminist workbitch like myself wants to be independent, lead a life of integrity, hold out for someone who thinks she's The Very Thing.  A kind concerned loving mum like myself wants to do the best for her children and see if they can make it through childhood with their family life intact, and without too many emotional scars. You see the problem.

I've had my Period of Shittiness. I've resigned myself to the shitness of things, and got through the Period of Resignation. I went through the phoney-separation and the Period of Bridget. And now, well, I don't know what period I'm in.

I think it must be a sort of Captain Cook or Christopher Columbus sort of period. Should I find out more about them before I name my latest life-stage after them? And even then, I'm not sure. I feel they set out with more excitement and optimism than I have.  Maybe I'm more like someone who's forced onto a journey. Convicts condemned to Australia? Irish people sailing to New York during the potato famine? I'd like to think of a journey into the unknown that has a reasonable likelihood of an eventual positive outcome.

I know. I'm going to call it the Period of Map Making. What do you think?

Pickle

The Period of Shittiness was followed by the Period of Resignation, and this too passed.

And now I realise I am in a new phase, one which will probably last me for many years, see me through to the time when all I live for is a hot cup of tea up top and a fresh Tena Lady down below. I hereby name this phase the Period of Bridget. 

It mainly involves being by myself a lot, eating meals that consist entirely of custard, or of Branston Pickle directly from the jar, and daydreaming about Colin Firth. It involves drinking every day, and trying not to smoke, and inevitably finding myself wearing the wrong thing at the wrong time (although actually I did that in earlier Periods too). It involves the appalling realisation that all the nice men are married, and intend to stay that way, and will be steering a wide berth away from my confusing new status.

It involves involuntary celibacy and self-hatred and chocolate. It involves binge-drinking sessions with screwed-up female friends which may end in giggles or sobbing or a sccary combination of both.  It involves deep headfuckedness of the worst kind.

And sadly for you, dear reader, it involves writing about it all. Look away now if you don't want to see the final result.

Wheat and Chaff

One thing a period of depression teaches you is who your real friends are.  It gives people an opportunity to show you their best  -  or their worst.

A person who is ill with depression is not good company. She doesn't have the emotional energy to initiate anything - events, phone conversations, trips, get-togethers.  She doesn't have sparkling, witty conversational gambits. She doesn't return calls, because she has nothing to say. She pulls out of arrangements all the time because she doesn't feel up to it.

And the people who like her because she's fun and lively and full of ideas, think up lots of ideas of things to do for themselves, and do them anyway, and find new lively folk to keep them company.

And the people who like her just because they like her, they are the ones still standing shoulder to shoulder with her at the end of the dark time. The people who left her messages on her phone and her Facebook and pushed through the letterbox. "No need to reply, I was just thinking about you". Who were happy to walk down the road for a coffee and a cake for an hour, or pop their head around the door of the office or the kitchen just to say hi and give her a hug. The people who knew she could not speak, could not explain the grey curtain that had come down between her and the rest of the world, but sat patiently on the other side of it just so she knew they were there.

If you had broken your leg snowboarding, and had to fly home by air-ambulance; or been in a spectacular car smash; or even having a hernia repaired or fibroids cauterized or something completely unglamorous and non-dramatic; everyone would still understand that you were ill. Lots of people would visit with flowers, and cards, offer to help out with the kids or the cooking.

Depression is not like that. Its grey darkness leaches out to anyone who gets too close. It's the 21st century Black Death, daubing its invisible cross on the door. Yet when she emerges, blinking in the unfamiliar sunshine, trying to find her centre of gravity like a new born calf lifting itself onto suddenly-discovered legs; her true friends, the people whom she loves and who love her back, are there waiting.

And she knew they were there all along, because they had crushed their notes and crammed their fingers and whispered their care through the cracks and faults in the tired, sticky creosote-black splintery wood of her misery shed, and said, "We are here. Always".

And every one of their kindnesses took a stone from her pocket until she could break the surface of her life and breathe again.

Capitulation

And so the Period of Shittiness has squished its tentacles right through the centre of the earth and popped out its suckers in Sydney.

For sure we've all laughed about Charlie Sheen, but when he turns out to be your brother-in-law's secret alter ego, it's not quite so funny. I mean, it's all very well living your life as one glorious, heroic shag-marathon, but not if you've got a wife and family who have followed you to the other side of the world to make a fresh sunshiney, family-focused start.

It's a long way away. Too far. You can't hug someone over Skype. Or punch them for that matter.

And yet the Period of Shittiness cannot remain for ever. It's a new month, and lifes moves inexorably on. February is usually my worst time, but January has aced all previous records so I'm alternately fearful, and hopeful, about February now.  And the flow of days and weeks and months insists that we have a direction of travel.

And so the Period of Shittiness is gradually becoming the Period of Resignation.  Give in to it. Let it take you. It has a sort of comforting grey embrace  -  and it might be the only hug a girl can get.

Icy Blasts

It was the sort of week where I woke to a text informing me bluntly that Stuart will not be attending your meeting today as he died last night. Goodness, I thought to myself, might we perchance still be in the Period of Shittiness? Whoever would have thought it.

It was the sort of week where Ms Capable had an afternoon off sick, and another day when she asked for help. Heavens. The sort of week where YogaMan, the soul of calm and cool, swore and got angsty and lost his yin-yang equilibrium. It was the sort of week where NorthernBoy is too tired to go out for a drink on a Friday.

It was the sort of week where the Pet Poet, usually wreathed in smiles and extensive vocabulary, was reduced to shouting what the pissing hell? And the sort of week where Ms Superwoman had to go home at 6pm and lie down because she felt poorly, and then in a never-before instance of crapness, missed the fast train and will consequently be late for a meeting.

What is the world coming to?

Proze and Cons

It's been a while since we've had a Quiz of the Week.  Let's give it a try.

It's deadly serious this week. Well, more serious than some of the others you may recollect, including the obscene one which so offended our American reader. Ho hum.

So I need your opinion, whoever you are, regardless.  I'm coming to the end of my four month course of anti-depressants. And I'm still a right miserable cow. But maybe that's just me, and the winter, and the recession, and the brief-but-lost-ability to write good poetry, and the disappointment of involuntary celibacy and oh god, you know the rest...

Anyhow. Should I stop, carry on, have more, have less, cut my throat, self-harm, jump off Beachy Head, go postal with an AK47, lose control and go loopy or what? Please answer my quiz. I'm begging you. Over there, right hand side.

Clam

She'd been battened down for as long as she could remember.

She didn't mind. It was safe. No-one could reach her. And inside, it was just exactly how she wanted it to be: private, quiet, and writing on every surface. On the walls and ceilings and floors, the looped hand of ideas and thoughts and dreams. On the seats of chairs and the underside of tables, around the handle of the teapot, on the shells of eggs and the skins of bananas. In steam on the shower screen, condensation on the windows, in lipstick on the mirrors and in biro on the back of her hands, all the way up her arms to the elbows. Words and words and words.

After a long, long time she thought she wanted to be reached.  She came out, naked from the shell, and said "Here I am, world, this is me". And to her surprise, the world answered back, extended its hand, and she discovered that being reached was good.  She blossomed and bloomed in this unfamiliar sunshine, from tight green knot to white and yellow daisy. And all the words inside tumbled out, and all the ideas and thoughts and dreams flowed down her outstretched arms and into her pen and onto the page in perfect order, and she laughed out chapters of her novel, and breathed out a poem with every smile.

Then the world said the thing she'd always feared it would. "I'm sorry, there has been a mistake. All this wasn't for you  -  you can't have that. What were you thinking? Go back".  And she wasn't even surprised, and bowed her head and opened the hatch and went back inside her submarine. Ran her fingers over the familiar surfaces, worn to mother-of-pearl gloss under her touch. And she did not cry, because that is the way of the world, and no-one sheds tears over the setting of the sun or the fall of leaves in autumn or the melting of the snow.

She had thought that the words would still flow out of her fingertips, to be freed out from the airlock like underwater butterflies. But they were limp and dead, all the colour and flight leached out from them in the dark salty teardrops of the sea.  And she tried and tried, but the words were clogged to a standstill; leaves that fell in a red and bronze swoop of beauty but turned to dark sludge in the gutters.

And she realised that she had nothing to say, and no-one to listen to the whispers in the dark.

Sunday Night

Now, if watching me do the ironing was this good, I'd understand it.

Unfortunately it's not, but that didn't stop them all sitting in a row on the sofa watching me. they were watching a film too. Then when I asked each person to take their own pile of perfectly ironed clothes upstairs and put them away, there was eye-rolling. Sometimes I think I have three children, not two.

I'm not quite sure what I am for, in 2011.  And I'd be afraid to ask other people. I'd be frightened of the answers.

Sloathsome

It's that feeling of going back to work after Christmas. Fed up of staying at home, eating and drinking the wrong things. And fed up of being back at work with all the shit that entails. I'm sure fresh air and exercise would be the answer, and I'm trying, honest.  The Tweenage Tearaways are back at school today and everyone is back on the treadmill. Not that I've been off it really, with a Saudi client who wanted a project to a Jan 4th deadline, irrespective of a faraway religious festival in which he has no interest.

During the season of goodwill and bad feeling, I have written nothing. My blood is sludgy in my veins and the likelihood of achieving creative flow, or indeed any other kind, seems scant. I haven't exactly kick-started the year, but then I rarely do. Perhaps a gentler beginning will do no harm in the end.

I won't feel normal until after the weekend, don't think. The regular timetable will be fully resumed and I will have been on my first trip to London. I will breathe easier after that.

And I have signed up for a poetry workshop later this month, and been asked to take part in another reading.  I would like to develop a collection this year  -  if I can regain sufficient sparkle to write. I know what makes me feel confident and powerful and capable of anything.

And I know how I feel when it's missing.

Petrified

I don't know how to turn my hot flesh to cold marble.

My blood stands still in my veins and no writing can flow. The Pause button is depressed, and we hang in a state of suspended animation on the screen of our lives, mouths open mid-sentence, conversation unfinished, the journey to map the private landscape interrupted, incomplete.

The only instructions I can find urge me to keep calm and carry on. So I write specifications for birth-simulation scenarios, and artificially squeeze out globs of wordage onto the electric page and no whisper of pain passes my life-identical plastic lips.

Ivory Flower

What is a piano if it is not played?

Is it still an instrument if its keys are not touched, if its rosewood does not resonate with the swell of a symphony or the twinkling flutter of a playful scherzo?

Already I am troubled with echoes of our music in the quiet empty space behind my eyelids in the dawn.

What Fresh Hell?

I've been listening mostly to Eels, these last days.

Having no privacy and not being able to write or blog has made me feel like I'm developing a personality disorder. Yes, I know. Another one.

And the main thing I was looking forward to  - well, it may be off the agenda now.

I'm tired of the old shit  -  let the new shit begin.

Some Kittens Are On The Pitch

It was one of the most surreal moments I've had in this most surreal of relationships.

He's giving the Literary Lodger advice on How To Leave A Man. I'm listening carefully, to see if I can pick up some tips. 

Actually he's being kind and concerned, thinking hard about what to say. And I have one of those moments, you know, where you think - maybe I'm wrong? Maybe he's ok. Maybe he's nice. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough? Maybe it's me?

"Hmmm," he ponders. "How do you win a woman?"  As if she was a prize, a trophy, a game.

"See, it's like a sport. You can still win, even right at the end, with a late goal in the last ten seconds. We're always trying to win in the final score: it's what we do.

"Men don't get it if you try to maintain a rapport, stay friends. You have to move out, leave, go, cut them off. If you're kind and gradual they just don't get the message, they think the game hasn't finished yet".

Lost

"Listen", she said softly, "I don't like to
speak out of turn".

She sat down opposite my desk, closed the door.

"I've seen you every day, worked for you, it's eight years now". Time flies... "This person who comes in here with red eyes every day and goes upstairs and closes the door so we can't see her crying, this is not you. We've lost you. Where are you?"

"Oh don't worry," I warbled cheerily. "I'm fine when I go out to meetings. I'm not like this when I'm out representing the public face."

"I know", she said. "That's not my point. You are suffering from depression: you are ill. You are worrying about things you don't need to worry about. You are thinking in ways that don't make sense. It's not as bleak as it all seems - it's only inside your brain that it's dark".

I didn't say anything. Inside my head it was too dark to see.

"You're going to the doctor", she said. "And not that stupid Yvonne woman". That's a relief.

"Try not to worry. Everything will be ok. You are a good, happy person. We'll get you back".

Maybe everything will be ok.

In the meantime, a promise to myself. I will triangulate my list of worries with the tiny list of people who give a shit, and I will only worry about the things they tell me are worth worrying about. There are good things,I know. Just hard to see them in the dark.

Before I Sputter Out

Today for the first time ever, I have given in. I couldn't think of a single reason to get up. So I knocked back a glass of 600mg soluble Brufen (only available in Spain, the connoisseur's painkiller of choice), chased it down with a sneaky CoCodamol and pulled the covers back over my head.

2 hours of oblivion and now I'm already awake again.

Novocaine for the soul - where to find such a thing?

Party Conference

Much Too Far Out

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith.

Enough, now.

Having a Bad Day?

So, you think you're having a bad day?  I thought mine had kicked off badly enough, with losing my keys last night somewhere in Birmingham (car, office, house) and having to walk early in the rain to pick the car up (with the spare key) so I could be on time for gruesome internal investigations with the doctorette.

However I wasn't the only one to discover that much of life is currently a great steaming pile of crap.  Daughter No 2 received this in her hotmail:

On December 24, 2006 at 8 oclock in the morning, a young 14 year old boy by the name of Scott Jackson was found dead. Doctors couldnt come up with the cause of his death. His mother checked his emails to see if she could figure out what happened. Turns out he was still signed into his Yahoo email account. She found he had gone to sleep after he read and didnt send a chain letter about a little girl that kills you in your sleep with no natrual cause of death. This is the email she read:

My name is ofelia Heras. Im 16 years old. Im a murderer. I have no face. When i was young i was abused by my father, then, i killed him, I will do to you what he did to me. When you look at me youll die immediately.You have 900 seconds to send this to 24? people or I will visit you tonight. This is not a joke, If u dont send this then u will die, and u want to know how, I will slid your body in half and then i will stab u 1 million times until all of your blood is out of you body i will take off all of your clothes and leave you naked, but dont worry, there wont be any of your skin left, i will break all of your bones, and i? will eat everything that is left of you... enjoy

Don't break the chain, it went on, in time-honoured fashion. She's ten. She completely freaked out. Fortunately there was a timely parent's evening at school tonight to sort that one out.

So we're at the parent's evening, and He's fiddling about with his phone. While the new headmistress is doing her talk. I throw him a disapproving glance. "They've turned off John's life support machine", he said.  Then got cross with me for crying at the parent's evening. "What will people think of you?" Oh I couldn't give a toss.

When I got home, Daughter No 1, who should be all excited about going away on a school residential trip to the Peak District tomorrow morning, is wan and tearful.  Wouldn't say what was up. "I'm fine," she said crossly. Well you don't kid me with fine. We know what that means. 

Eventually I wangle it out of her as she shows me a Facebook message from the boy she met at summer camp.

Im really sorry but us going out isnt gonna work.(living so far away and stuff) I think that you can do better than me anyway. Im sorry im gonna have to brake up with you. Sorry, Nick

Truly we are in the Period of Shittiness. Neck deep in it, round our house.

Lost For Words

So I'm at the doctor's again.  It's a long session involving stirrups and a fiercely bright Anglepoise lamp and a number of chilly steel instruments  - always a great way to start the day.  I chitchat as if I were at the hairdressers: after all, I'm a regular customer of both these days.  When you've had two children and innumerable gynae proecdures you reach a point where you feel you have no dignity left and that being embarrassed would be a waste of emotional effort.

It was however a false sense of security to heave a small inward sigh of relief as pulled my sensible pants back on.  We weren't done, oh no.

She handed me a small white toothpaste-type tube with a long slender nozzle. "We're giving out free samples of these". I turned it over in my hand, looked confused. "It's like an Actimel, for your vagina".

"E---........", I struggled for the appropriate thing to say.

"It restores your natural inner balance and keeps you fresh and healthy. You should try it!" she warbled brightly. "Lots of ladies swear by it". I mumbled a thank-you and shoved it into my bag.  I worried that perhaps she felt my natural inner balance had been lost, in a way that was noticeable.....how? I wasn't aware of a problem, but now I'm feeling rather paranoid.

"Let's talk about your coil now". Ok..... "Do you need to have it replaced?"

"Well, erm, I think so.... I think it's been in place for five years.... I thought that was the maximum length of time...erm.... you're the expert, what do you think?"

"What I meant is, do you still need contraception? Are you still sexually active?"

"I, well..............." I was mumbling again.

"Don't worry!" she chirped.

So fucking chipper. What's the matter with doctors these days? They're all about twelve and look like Bratz dolls and want you to call them Yvonne.

"Lots of ladies your age say we don't need to bother with another coil, they're not having sex any more".

"I need one", I said in a surly tone.  I was smarting. At the "ladies your age". At the implication that I must look like someone who couldn't get a shag if I tried. At the implication that a celibate life would be completely normal. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Yes of course", she smiled. "This will be your last one, won't it?"

I thought for one awful heart-stopping moment that this was her way of telling me not to expect a good outcome from the latest phase of treatments. After all, my own dark thoughts are often turned in that direction.

Then I realised she was talking about the menopause.  See? There is no escape from reminders that we are entering the Period of Shittiness. 

I plan to have a lot of sex while I can still creak my legs apart, while I am still limber enough to get down on all fours, while I can give a blow-job without swallowing my false teeth.