Fight or flight?

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One of the more shitty side effects of periods of poor mental health is the lack of confidence and commitment it can instill. Sure, we're all self-conscious at times, but trust me when I say, my depressive episodes have had a massive impact and have taken little chunks of me with them each time.

The major way this manifests itself is through my seeming inability to hold down a job. Work is important for all kinds of reasons beyond the obvious paying of rent and covering the bills. Most importantly for those with mental health ishoos, it adds routine to our existence, time spent actually doing stuff and interacting with other people, rather than stagnating at home watching daytime TV, feeling sorry for oneself and dreaming about dreams that you think can't come true because you're never bloody well enough for long enough to put the wheels in motion...or is that just me, then?

It's not that I haven't ever worked, in fact I've had a few brilliant jobs, and one in particular as a journalist that was amazing, both in having the chance to write for a national magazine, and to get to experience all the perks of said job, which, by the way were awesome. The job paid atrociously but it was only part time anyway. I could have worked harder in building a better freelance career for myself so that I was actually making a survivable living for myself, but my lack of confidence in myself and my abilities, coupled with hideous what I now know to be bipolar cycles, meant that was another chance squandered. 

I've had other chances in life too: to be an actress, an academic, a senior press officer for a prestigious international agency...and yet, I've never achieved my full potential at any of them, and have often simply found them too stressful to continue with, or have lacked the self-belief, guts and guile to really go for them. 

So as of right now, whilst still having a few writing irons in the fire, I have found myself yet another "new job" working at the local college helping disabled students. I'm due to start tomorrow in a role that has had to be tailored down to a part time position for me because I'm still coming out of my latest descent into the abyss. I'm vastly over-qualified for the job yet I'm toying with the idea of bailing on it altogether. Why? Because I feel tortured, and hopeless, and utterly useless. And, of course, because I have a history of bailing.

The fact is, I'd like to fight, but I usually take flight.

You're sooo Bipolar!!

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I had to preface this post with one of the most hideous and hilarious of google images' finest for your entertainment. Wow, so that's what shows up when you image-search 'bipolar disorder'. So that's what we look like, the heinous bipolar tribe; happy and glowing with smiles that light up the room, and on the flip-side, miserable, po-faced harridans of the lowest order. Hotness!

Bipolar disorder is quite the trendy illness of the mental variety right now. The media likes to make us aware that the bipolar gremlins amongst us are actually friendly, overachieving success stories that you'd like to have at your dinner party. I'm looking at you, Stephen Fry. And actually, this is no bad thing, it certainly beats the outrageous stigma surrounding less tasteful conditions such as schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder.

I've suffered with depressive episodes and periods of outrageous judgement and recklessness throughout my life. Most people could attest to the same: making bad decisions and feeling totally fed-up are nothing new in life. But its when it encroaches on your ability to make it through the week, and at worst the day, or you are living in a total dream land where the repercussions of your actions are as meaningless as the proverbial water off the duck's back, that something more could be going on.

When I was a teenager I hated everyone and everything, most of all myself, much like most other teenagers. The problems arose when the erratic behaviour began, like truanting, but not with friends having a laugh. Instead I was hiding my stuff in the park and instead of walking to catch the bus, I was stripping off naked out of my school uniform in the woods and then putting my own clothes on and hanging out there on my own all day. I was developing an eating disorder that saw me lose a massive amount of weight in just several weeks, that found me going for naps after school so I didn't have to pay attention to the screaming hunger pangs in my stomach. I was involved in a relationship with an older boy who thought, for the whole year we went out, that I was a year older than I was, and that I had sat my GCSE's just a couple of months after we started going out, when in fact I would be sitting them the following year (he never did find out the truth). I found myself, one day after school, throwing myself down the stairs, twice, in a bid to injure myself. On a similar occasion, I numbed my ankle with a bag of frozen peas and then attempted to break my leg by furiously bashing my sister's metal keyboard stand against myself. I didn't, by the way, succeed, as it turns out I have pretty strong bones. Shit like that needs attention. But for one reason or another it didn't receive it. And I developed the life-long  and hugely successful habit of masking my true feelings and turmoil from the wider world.

The problem, as it turns out, with having such a useful skill in your arsenal is that people don't realise you're in grave need of help. Usually until its too late. The endless cycle of highs and lows, of crazed, relentless cravings for 'excitement', 'escapism' and 'partying', or of wishing I was dead so I didn't have to talk to anyone that day, went on for the next ten years, when, aged 25 I found I had run out of coping strategies. After being dismissed by my local GP and sent on my way with a prescription for fluoxitine (or Prozac, kids), I ended up, perhaps unsurprisingly, taking an overdose one drunken night, alone in my room in my latest student house share. I popped everything I had. Luckily for me, a slurred phone call led to a kindly woman from the Samaritans urging me to call for an ambulance. I ended up hanging up on her in a pissed up fug of booze and pills, but I did call that ambulance. I'd love to let her know she saved my life.

Plenty more went on between that time and today, including more overdoses and a diagnoses of borderline personality disorder. This is not a great thing to have folks, mainly because of the stigma and a general misunderstanding of the condition. Jeez, my own sister asked if that meant I had "multiple personalities". It didn't, of course, but this veiled what was probably going on the whole time in the background - bipolar affective disorder. I got this diagnosis after moving to a new area, suffering yet another serious bout of depression and demanding to be reassessed by a psychiatrist. Suddenly I had a name and a set of symptoms that matched my experience over the last 30 years of my life. And for the first time in my life, it all made a bit more sense.

Guilty face...

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Oh dear. Not doing very well at this blogging lark, am I? Having to apologise to the void after only a single post three months ago is a bit of a fail...but hey, I'm back now.

The last few months have had more than a few massive highs and several low-down lows. The truth is I've been too busy trying to live to make time for blogging. Or something like that. I totally get now how hard it is to blog, especially if its about your own life. Even blogging fairly anonymously gives me the shivers, but there is just no one out there telling it like it is about mental health, and I'm sick of it. So I'm going to make myself blog from now on. No excuses.

Honest. 

First Post

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This first post is, for me, akin to giving an awkward acceptance speech when I wasn't expected to win: I don't quite know what to say and am not sure what the hell I'm doing here. Equally, I'm painfully aware that I'm basically wittering away to myself at this point, which I guess is nothing new. I'd like to thank myself for getting off the sofa and getting in to bed with my laptop to write this, and apologise to my milk-white legs for not being outside paying homage to the sun gods instead. I'll make it up to you, honest.

I'll begin by stating the bleedin' obvious: Nut Job is not my middle name. I'm just poking fun at all the uneducated morons people out there who so eloquently use such derisive language to describe people with mental health "issues". The same people might also consider it a linguistic catchall for members of the human race who've committed terrible crimes: It might be easier to stoke your apathy with this attitude, but its not OK to tar me and millions of others with the same brush as the paedos, wife beaters and murderers of the world, most of whom are, in fact, completely sane. There is a world of difference between genuinely wicked, and genuinely mentally ill people, folks.  

I guess I'm one of those "genuinely mentally ill" people. It's not my defining characteristic, but it has impacted my life in major ways. I've found a lack of space on the Internet in to babble on about the realities of living with mental illness, so I've created my own. I guess that's it for now...hello void, and thank you.