Nothing’s Really Changed, To Be Frank

This summer is tough. Both too much and too little to do, too much time alone, working, thinking, and not enough time to get everything done. Lonely, bored, pissed off, stressed, highly strung, and this is what it’s like to be well. It no longer surprises me that I am well; I am thankful for it, when I remember to be, but it no longer gladdens my heart to think, thank goodness I don’t feel like that any more, because actually, this life thing is pretty hard work, and I can no longer allow myself to sit back and say, I can’t do this today, because these days, I can do this today, or tomorrow, or almost any day you care to name. I can do it, so I must. Crawling back under the covers, whilst tempting to all of us at times, is no longer an option.

No, instead I am unhappy and short-tempered and stressed and I have every reason to be, for all manner of reasons, but I just have to get on with it, there’s very little I can complain about and very few people I can talk to about all these nebulous, niggling little things.

My life is not going in the direction in which I wanted it to go in, and I feel like a tanker out at sea – it takes more to turn around than just a quick flash of my indicators and a turn on the wheel, we’ve got hundreds if not thousands of tonnes here, and it’s pretty tough to get them all facing in the right direction. And I’m doing it, slowly, but I am fed up of being strong, looking organised, and smiling. I want to stomp about and shout a bit but I don’t want everyone to hear, so I don’t. People living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

I’m having to learn that it’s not always easy to be self-confident, it’s something you have to work at. It’s all well and good when you’re looking good and doing well and the people around you give you the positive affirmation to keep you going, but it’s harder when you’re not doing so well, your hair is somewhere between two lengths, and the people whose good opinions you care about don’t care to voice them any more.

And didn’t I say I’d always be honest, here, always talk about exactly how I felt and why? And am I not doing more or less the opposite, putting up a front, explaining and saying little except to those who know how to read between lines and even then there’s little of my soul bared here. Tough. I guess that’s what it’s like to be a grown-up.

On the upside I am now eating and sleeping enough. I have a job, and I enjoy it. I got confirmed just over a month ago. And we have a working shower and Lady Grey tea.

In The Spirit Of Honesty

I am not great at the moment. Not happy. Not sad either, not depressed, nothing is wrong with me as such, but I am just so…stressed. Anxious. I keep busy, I keep moving, it’s fine. But I keep waking up bizarrely early and that’s been going on fora couple of weeks. And I’m not really eating enough and that’s been going on for a while and this time it has nothing to do with willpower or any kind of desire to be skinny, it’s more that I have no appetite and I don’t feel like I have the time to go shopping and when I do get into the shops I don’t know what to buy or what I need or what to cook with the things I’ve bought, so basically I’m living on fruit and tins of beans and soup and then when I’m at my aunt’s house at the weekends I eat properly while I’m there because all the thinking is removed, I don’t have to decide what I feel like eating, it’s all just there.

I think the word for how I feel at the moment is highly strung. So I keep busy and I’m permanently in a bad mood and chasing happiness or occupation or good moods or whatever, just so long as I don’t have to stop and think. Which is why I’m in the choir and the orchestra and on the church student committee and going to  a session tonight in the University Arms and in who knows how many other things to and then at whatever A manages to drag me to inbetweenwhiles.

Next the summer will happen and yet again I kind of hope that’ll be the break I need, somehow. And that next year will be different, more organised, more regimented, better, both busier and less busy, and that I’ll be closer to my housemates and have more definite and trustworthy friendships and it will all be OK and I’ll somehow turn into the woman I so very nearly am.

This is the terrible thing: I am in the habit of scrutinising myself. I look at myself and I know what is right, what is functional, and what is not right or not healthy, because I’ve seen all these things for years. And actually it is perfectly normal to be a twenty-year-old student and to be stressed and busy and not willing to stop and think for too long. So I see all these problems in myself and they worry me hugely but actually they are nothing and I really should go and do some revision now.

I suppose I’m just not used to having responsibilities to get stressed about.

I Couldn’t Leave It On That Low Note.

No, I’m not back – I’m here to tell you why I’m not back, and what’s happened since I last posted over two months ago. I started to feel increasingly shaky and anxious over the week before I went back to Uni Town – I spent a lot of time mousing around P’s house, small and scared and trying not to be, trying to work. I worried P a lot when I admitted that it was willpower and not just a lack of appetite that stopped me from eating, one really fun evening, that. Then we went back up to Uni Town – several hundred miles away from one another. He had his life, I had mine, such as it was, but I felt very much like I was starting over. Very few friendships from first year were ones I wished to maintain, my housemates were all new, and I was back in the first year with a whole new year group. Then I came down with the fresher’s flu and missed a week of classes. I was feeling lonely and unattractive and stupid and fragile and out of place in fundamental ways; feelings I could hardly describe. I was waking up in a panic before seven most nights, hardly sleeping inbetweenwhiles, tightly sprung and weird and paranoid, and everyone could see it. P and I arranged for me to come down for the weekend but I was dreading it, I was so nervous, and I wasn’t entirely sure he sounded like he really wanted me there – which I guess was all down to nerves on his part too, his continuing insecurity about whether this was a relationship he really wanted (to be fair he was having to text me three times a day to check I was actually eating anything, I was in something of a state about, well, everything, really).

So I went to see him, and we were a bit subdued at first but then we went out for dinner and it was lovely. I felt secure and happy and beautiful and we had a lovely evening, wandering back through the city at night which was beautiful, stopping for the strongest (and one of the nicest) cider I have ever tasted, and we went back to his… and then I woke up at six, lay there for hours tossing and turning, in a strange mood, and P woke up and I just felt worse and worse until we had some stupid argument which was all based around him wanting me to give my honest opinion on something and me being quite unable to do so, and then we started to talk about that. I remember saying that I honestly couldn’t see any way out of how I was feeling at that time, and I didn’t think I could take it any more, and he asked me what did I mean by that, and I know what we were both thinking, and I simply couldn’t give any kind of an answer, because I would have either been lying to make us both feel better (and knowing it) or telling the horrifying truth.

The thing about how I was feeling by this point was that usually in the past my depression has been fairly passive – it’s taken it out of me, left me completely uncaring. This was an overriding sense of panic that had been going on for weeks and wasn’t really familiar, at least not in the long term. So it was a fair point to moot that maybe we were making one another worse – and my reply, that yes, maybe we were, rather sealed the deal. We talked about it, batted the idea back and forth for a few hours, but it was a given from that point. So a cousin of mine, to whom I’m fairly close, collected me from P’s, and I went to hers and cried a lot, and got on the train back to Uni Town the next day, and spent a week trying to spend as little time as possible on my own, talking to a lot of people and praying a lot and just doing my best to be OK and pull myself together. And when I say praying a lot, I really do mean it. I think God really dragged me out of this one, held me up when I couldn’t do it myself. I started to believe in God this time last year, but I think I’d been scared off, and then P encouraged me to rethink the matter, and I got to university and He became more important to me again. So I spent much of that week just praying – for myself, for P, that I could just keep going.

And then I went home for the weekend and it became increasingly obvious that how I was feeling had very little to do with P and everything to do with my continued complete lack of self-esteem, my loathing for myself and my place in my life and everything, really. I went for a walk with my parents on the Saturday morning and found myself sobbing in a field in the middle of nowhere because everything was so beautiful and because I hated myself and because I could finally see why that was the case. If you’re bullied all through school, if you can’t trust your friends in your formative years to be your friends from one minute to the next or to stand up for you when everyone else is doing their best to make you feel like the smallest and lowliest thing in existence; if you react against that by fighting the cliche and becoming the hard-drinking baby whore, the darling of the seedier, sadder side of the school over the road from the one you went to, but never truly liked for who you are, if you allow all of that to let you get into poisonous friendships where you are treated with a total lack of respect or dignity because you allow yourself to be walked over without expecting anything in return, if you judge yourself as either a nerd or a slut and feel the full force of those words used against you by yourself every day of your life, if you can’t see any of the good about you, then you’ll go on to have encounters like, well, you all know who I mean when I say ‘T’, you’ll go onto university and take a while to trust that the ‘cool’ people like you and so you’ll never quite let them in, and so it goes on, such that even when you are in actual fact no longer the socially isolated school pariah, nor the teenage binge-drinking whore, when you have friends who respect you, and you act in a way that deserves their love and respect, when you have (or had) a loving and supportive boyfriend, all of that is still going to have affected you, and it’s no surprise that actually you’ve spent years and years getting depressed on and off, but mainly on, recognisably since you were a small child but more and more up until this point.

So this was the breaking point I had been so scared of, and instead of holding a knife to my wrists or staring at the view stretching for metres below me, thank goodness I was standing in a field screaming and sobbing in a field with my parents piecing it all together frantically. I essentially didn’t stop crying for the next few days at all and it was rapidly obvious that I wasn’t going back to Uni Town any time soon. I found myself a counsellor, Rob, who was brilliant. I saw him that Tuesday, and again that Friday, and then every Friday after that for a few weeks, but not even half as long as I expected. I guess because I’d already figured out how I’d got to where I was: a combination of my relationship to my family; my originally-justifiable inability to truly trust my friends; the thoughts about myself that I’d only had reinforced throughout my life – that I was fundamentally unlikeable and only worthwhile if I had something to give – intelligence, my body, friendship above and beyond the call of duty, whatever it was; and the resulting feeling that I had no right to force my emotions upon anyone else, such that I couldn’t feel angry or show anger, I couldn’t have opinions, I could hardly cry, and my recourse was then to turn all those feelings inwards upon myself, rendering me, time and again, absolutely mute. I’d got to that point, and I could see what I had to change, I just needed some help to know how to do it, and Rob more than provided that. A new way of looking at myself and the situations I encountered. Whilst I was at home I was sent so many supportive messages from friends – especially church friends. Recommendations of Bible passages and assurances of prayer from many people, and I can’t thank them enough for that, because I feel that it really made a difference.

For me I can’t imagine how it could get worse; I know that for millions of others it gets far worse, that what is at most four or five years of this hopelessly unbalanced fight is nothing compared to the decades that many go through, that whatever effect it may have had upon my choices and my degree – who knows, I might actually be doing Medicine now or at Cambridge or something, but I’m not, and that is how it is – that there are other people out there who cannot work at all, who will never be able to have and care for their own children, who will perhaps never leave their parental home. There are others who never make it out of teenagerhood or young adulthood, there are people who do terrible things as a direct consequence of depression. I know I’ve got off lightly, but it was bad enough, more than.

I know this entry might seem like it’s a little P-centric – it certainly reads as if I had a bad break-up experience and decided to chalk it down to depression rather than heartbreak as that seems a little more justified. Believe me when I say that yes, I am happy to accept that our break-up was a catalyst for what came next, but a catalyst is all it was. I’d felt the build-up to this last crisis, in the same way that I’ve seen ever other big crisis coming from days away, before we broke up. Perhaps it would have happened that weekend if he hadn’t broken up with me instead. It was a complete breakdown, a shaking loose of everything that troubled me, the feeling, finally, that it made total narrative sense that I should feel like I did because of the experiences I’d had, of course you’d get depressed and have very little self-esteem and all the rest of it – but that whatever had happened to me in the past had no reason and no right to keep affecting me becuase in all other ways I’d made it clear – in the eyes of the world I was a talented, well-balanced young woman, pretty and agreeable and a good friend and a good person, and I had no reason to see myself any differently.

And so I have spent the last few weeks learning to do so. I’ve hugely cut down on my caffeine intake, I never did go in for the big break-up binge, the crazy nights, promiscuity, and probable smoking relapse, that I would have previously predicted for myself. I didn’t turn to the old friend I’d expected to for rebound sex with no strings, nor did I take the rebound fling when it was offered elsewhere. I did all the right things instead. I go to the gym regularly, I get up early and I go to bed reasonably early, most nights. I go out with friends, I go to church, I pray lots, and I feel closer to God and like a better person than ever before. I am trying to live the ‘right’ life, and loving it. I’ve got a lot more musically involved. I got into the Orchestra and the Chamber Choir here, no trouble at all. I’m expanding my friendship groups and having the confidence to accept invitations and to make suggestions and invitations of my own. I am eating three meals a day – possibly a little more than I should but I’m making up for it with the exercise and more importantly I’m not worrying too much about it. I am a changed person – I feel it, and more tellingly, everyone around me remarks upon it surprisingly often. I am one of the success stories. I don’t feel now that if I made a new acquaintance I would have to explain myself and my past in the way I might have used to after a certain degree of friendship had been reached. ‘I was ill in my first year, so I’m retaking some modules’, I’ll say, if asked why I’m doing what I’m doing. Or, if I feel it doesn’t matter, I’ll say that I am either a first- or a second-year, depending on context (yes, I’ve lived here for a while, or yes, I’ll be here in three years’ time). And if asked what kind of ill, I’ll say ‘it doesn’t matter now’ or something, and change the subject, or ‘oh, you know how it is’, and hope that either they do and it doesn’t matter to them either, or they absolutely don’t but wouldn’t like to ask. Because yes, it’s shaped how I got here, and it’s shaped who I am, but it absolutely does not affect what happens next.

This is a mammoth post. Here’s fervently hoping and praying it really is the last one, this time. I’m not sure what else needs saying about who I am, who I was, and how I got to this point. I’d like to say, one last time, that for me, a lot of the answer was in God, and that a year ago that’s something I would have never thought I’d say. And that I like being a grown-up – and perhaps this was the final, massive leap I needed to make, to take responsibility for myself. But to take responsibility for myself, I had to love rather than loathe myself, and I do. Fingers crossed, this is it. Best wishes.

Worth Pointing Out Now That…

…thanks to the total fuck-up that was last year, thanks to my first semester being completely lost due to the state I was in, and the second not much better because let’s face it I was still getting better, I wasn’t just better straight away, thanks to my being an arrogant, lazy little shit, thanks to the way I hardly worked this summer because I really wasn’t feeling too great, thanks to all of this, thanks to the fact that I just don’t work hard enough for things I want, or didn’t work hard enough for things I wanted, thanks to the fact that I thought I might just be clever enough to breeze through and didn’t want to work hard when I knew I wasn’t going to do well, and I just didn’t want to put in the effort only to not do particularly well because if I had started working it would have been too late, and I would feel like working wasn’t worth it because if I work, I want to do well, damn you, not just passably OK, thanks, basically, to the fact that I am an arrogant, lazy little cunt who totally deserves everything she’s got, I failed two of my exams, which means I lost thirty credits, which means I can’t progress onto Level Two of my degree, which means that next year, I’m going back as a part-time student to retake the two modules I failed, I’m going to get a job to fund me through this year and to give me something to do with the time when I’m not working, and actually, maybe this is a chance for me to learn a lot about myself. Maybe this will be a good thing for me.

I’m just really angry that effectively it’s all mainly a consequence of being too depressed for too long to do anything about it. That someone who is as clever and potentially brilliant as me should be scuppered by an illness she can’t control or understand, that I’m buggered before I begin because I’m just weighed down with a condition, a weakness, and however good I could be half the time I’m fighting something which I shouldn’t have to fight. I don’t know why I shouldn’t have to fight it, I guess I really mean, no-one should have to deal with this because you think of your mind as being something that’s in your control and so it’s being ill is just not fair, frankly. That’s enough of me being a petulant little brat. I probably deserve this.

So now, I do organised things, I register, I work out how I’m going to get the money to do all of this, and simply, I pray.

Nope, Still Not Dealt With, Oh, Wait…

More nightmares, every few weeks, and only more common now I have P. Not sure why that should be except that maybe as I’m learning to trust him I’m stripping myself bare of a lot of things, and my injuries are open to the air once more and it’s like ripping off so many plasters or something. Because I have to trust him, because any kind of sexual activity with him has a meaning, and so yes, I guess I’m evaluating meaning and choice and guilt and blame and he sees everything of me, so is it any wonder if sometimes I am reminded of T, merely because of the absolute contrast between that experience and everything I have now? To feel safe and happy I have to let go, and to let go I have to trust and be honest with P and with myself.

So yes, the first time I met him I had one of those nightmares, and I’ve had a few bad days, and then he woke me up in the middle of a very bad night the other night and I just dived into his arms and held onto him for dear life. You can’t bury these things, sometimes. Perhaps I can deal with this and get over it for good, now.

I’m hoping I might be able to leave this blog again for a while soon – the last few weeks have been a rollercoaster ride; but I don’t think I’m unwell, as such. It’s more that adjusting to changes like this is difficult, and I’m having to confront a lot of things about myself, and I don’t always like what I see, so I’m having to grow up a lot, which is definitely a good thing. Growing pains are to be expected, even if that does mean bad days and panic and fear and wanting to be infantilised and looked after some times, and being just a bit attention-seeking on the internet every now and again. It’s a stupid kind of dealing with the hand I’ve been played, and I’m a bloody idiot and I annoy myself witless, but I’m alright.

Perhaps that’s what I really came back to say: look, I’m all growed-up, I can haz boyfriend, this is a bit scary and I’m freaking out a bit and sometimes that brings up things I’d rather not think about and sometimes I have the most god-awfully black days is that normal is that normal is that normal oh wait yes it is normal and maybe not every day will be super-happy-fun-times but some days are and it’ll get better and I’ll be less shy and less of a scaredy-cat and learn to grow and trust and have confidence in myself and him and even if it ends tomorrow I’ll still have learnt something.

I am normal, and that is, frankly, fantastic. Or rather, I am a work in progress, and yes, alright, I admit it, I am probably going to go back to counselling once I’m back at university, give it another go, but that doesn’t make me ill, or mad, it just means I’m taking responsibility for myself, and accepting that I don’t always find things easy.

Every Day

Every day I sleep terribly.

Every day I wake far too early.

Every day I wake up terrified.

Every day I struggle to concentrate because I’m working too hard at merely feeling safe.

Every day I can’t wait to go to bed again, because it seems like progress.

Every day I feel terribly guilty for feeling like this, so I smile, and I wait, and I hope.

Every day I feel terribly guilty that all I do is take from you, and what do you get in return? Me, just me, and what is that, of what worth am I to you? So I push those thoughts away because I like you too much to consider letting you go.

It’s only been about a week that I’ve felt like this, I don’t know why I feel like this, and yet already the phrase ‘every day’ seems perfectly appropriate because it feels like it will never end.

Two Decades And I Feel Old

The meal was lovely, in the end. Just lovely. And yes, I felt shaky and nervous and downright weird for most of the evening and then didn’t sleep last night, and yes, I woke up this morning feeling no better, but it was OK, because I felt safe.

I really don’t want P to become my safety, like that. I don’t want to have to rely on him utterly. I am glad he can help, but I don’t want to turn to him every time I’m a bit down, or getting irrationally afraid, and so on. There’s no reason I can’t do this on my own, except, well, past experience. But past experience says nothing about how much better I would cope if I could just collapse on Someone the first chance I got.

Meanwhile I haven’t slept in two nights, forgive me. Let’s hope tonight I sleep better.

As for my birthday, well, I feel increasingly old, sometimes. And I want lots of sensible things and, by and large, I am getting those things. I think a birthday is, for me, better seen as merely an excuse to acquire useful things and get some reasonably pleasant people into the same room as me in some reasonably nice clothes with some reasonably nice drinks and things, in the most generic sense; no need for it to be about me as such at all.

Stop It, Stop It, Stop It.

I knew I was in for it for a while. I wasn’t feeling wonderful, and this came out in my behaviour – loud and funny and attention-seeking and a bit drunken and annoying, and overdone and lurid but it was either that or do nothing, say nothing, be nothing, so of course I went for the former, and I was happy and things were good but then they suddenly weren’t and so I went to bed.

I switched off the light, and pressed play, and listened to about half the song, before it all became too much, the walls were too close and the world too small and I was terrified but I don’t know what was scaring me so much.

So I rang P and he knew what I was talking about, how I was feeling, when I was being completely and utterly incoherent, gibbering and breathing far too fast and just pacing and pacing and close to tears and having a full scale panic, in a flat spin. Not a panic attack like I’ve had before but different, somehow, and no less horrible. But gradually he got some sense out of me, and talked me into naming all the things I was worried about at that point in time, all of them, and talked me through them all, made me get a glass of water and just sit down and stop pacing, and I calmed down, and got intellectually engaged rather than just emotionally engaged with my worries, and just about calmed down, drank some water, kept talking to him, and he made it better, and helped me work my way out of it.

And so he and I went to bed in our separate houses, him with only seven hours until he had to wake up for work, and so I went to bed. And I lay there, tossing and turning, for seven and a half hours, and I got no sleep, none. I dozed for about half an hour at one point and that was it. I don’t yet feel tired but it’ll probably hit in the next couple of hours. Today I feel all shaky and sad and nervous which is bad, but hardly unexpected. And both my parents and P independently have said I really ought to go back to counselling and try that again. Oh, effort. They’re right, though, I think.

Half of it is that I am disproportionately worried about my birthday meal tonight. Me, my parents, my sister, her boyfriend W, and P, and me. And we’re going to the restaurant my family always goes to for birthdays, and as usual my sister and I are doing the whole dress-n-heels thing, and looking pretty. And for some reason this just terrifies me. Possibly because I am the centre of attention, and I get increasingly funny about that these days, possibly because I’m nervous about the setting and the people and will we all get on, which is daft, there are almost no unknowns in this outing, it’s bound to work. Oddly I worry what W and P will think of the restaurant, which is also silly, it’s just a perfectly nice, safe restaurant which serves good, well-thought-out, nice food, and has a not-at-all-bad wine list. So yes, I’m terrified, and terribly low and sad and deflated and I hope it’s just because I’m tired and I’ll be alright in a bit. And of course my entire family is worried about me now.

Well, You Did Ask

The switch trips in my head and that’s it, down and out, nothing I can do or say, it’s honestly as if I just dropped off some kind of edge in the dark that no-one noticed. And he asks, what is it, what happened, are you alright? I try to explain. It always sounds so bloody artificial coming out of my mouth like that – I just suddenly feel, well, awful. I don’t know why. I’m really sorry. And because he’s Someone, and he’s lovely, he just puts down the teatowel he’s holding and wraps me in his arms and I hide there, curled up in his arms, for ages.

What does it feel like, he asks. Eventually, I speak. I don’t know how to describe it, really, but to me, moods have colours, and this, this is a sort of…grey. Murky, misty grey. It’s the only way I can describe it. But it’s like, every single word I’m saying, every movement I make, is a massive effort. I’m so sorry for doing this to you. No, it’s alright, he says. I want to spend the whole day just hugging you, I don’t like it when you’re not happy. I want to be here. And yes, I think, grey is about right. Mist. Bruises. Clouds. But I don’t bother saying any of those things out loud because I don’t think it’ll help. Worse than that, I think he already understands.

An age later and gradually I can feel normal function returning, I can think again, I care. And without my doing or saying anything he can see that. Your whole face changes, you know. I don’t know what it is, I think it’s in your eyes. They… twinkle, I guess. He smiles. Tentatively, just a little bit, so do I. Time moves on. Tea is drunk. I rejoin the world.

On other days I wake up with a feeling of abject terror and all I can do is get out, get away. I don’t know how to tell people when I feel like that, because usually absolutely instinctively I act almost completely as if everything is normal in order to avoid gibbering like an idiot, and until that facade breaks down it works. But I’m better off if I just get out, leave, I’m going to go and read the newspaper, go for a walk, clear my head. I hope. But then I can come back and I can talk about the things that happen inside my mind, and I am understood. As for why I am understood, or not understood, or the ways in which we struggle, that would be an invasion of privacy I’m not prepared to make. And meanwhile, I am gradually finding that I can talk about anything I want or need to talk about, quite seriously.

I can say the first thing that comes into my head, I can do whatever comes to mind, because I am finding that I can trust him to like me for me. And that millions of the same things make us howl with laughter.

And a week in each others company, comprising almost every given human emotion plus some not so standard ones, was followed by the beautiful, peaceful night we got home, were not burgled, and realised for the first time that yes we can do this. And then I went away on holiday and had days and days and days to myself to think in, and I come back all calm and contented and happy and rejuvenated and normal feeling, having been able to be alone for long enough to have some shockingly bad days just wash over me which is just what I needed, and time to think, and to be, and I come back and I find I really miss him because on some of those bad days it would have been good to have him, just him, sheltering me. And because I hear from him that he isn’t alright and I only want to be there with him even if I can do nothing to help, I just want to be there, because I don’t like to think I could have done something when I didn’t, I want to make things alright, I want us to be able to turn to one another. There are things I would have liked him to see, too, places I imagine bringing him in my more fanciful moments, plans I have made, daftly, for imagined beautiful days.

More than anything, though, I hope that’s it, the last of the weird days. That from now on we have bad days because one or other of us is a bit short on sleep, or hormonal, or stressed, not drowning in waves of anxiety or depression, not unsustainably insomniac, not paranoid or obsessive or any of those things. And I pray, but I don’t believe that that’s it. Oh, if only.

So, I’m Back.

Not sure how long this return will last. My, this feels weird. Hello, everyone. Not that anyone is still checking up on this place, but, well, yes.

Here is some stuff. I was fine for a while, and yes, I had the odd bad day, and the odd panic attack and long low days and lots and lots and lots of cigarettes and the whole happy-low pay-off (really enjoy yourself for a few hours and when you get away from the enjoyable situation you just crash, altogether, oh, fun times, to make up for being happy. Growl).

And I came home for the summer, and yes, I’d perhaps have a few more bad days. Not many, just possibly a few more. Possibly not a few more, maybe I was just noticing a pattern where there wasn’t one because I was scared and because that is how the human brain works.

And then I met Someone. For five minutes, at his parents house, and somehow I just knew he was Someone (authors note: do not go assuming I’ve actually fallen in love or that I’m possibly getting a bit crazy about this. I have known the guy for a month and I am fully aware of that fact, I’m not some kind of madwoman. Well, I am, or I wouldn’t be here, but you know…), not just someone, and somehow despite getting hideously drunk the next time I saw him, and despite having One Of Those Hideous Nightmares, despite then waking myself up, not really explaining anything, and just keeping a tight hold on his hand as I calmed myself down and he looked on in confused consternation – despite all of this utterly crazy behaviour from a near-total stranger, not to mention the world’s most disgusting hangover, he came home to mine and had lunch with my family, and they didn’t scare him off either, and so yes, he is my Someone. The thing I always feared. That I would find a Someone, and that I might, just maybe, actually have to rely on that person and that they would have to deal with the fact that I am not entirely perfectly A-OK – and the consequences of that.

For a while I was fine – he made me happy, he makes me happy. But then we went away for a week together to a festival and cracks started to show in both of us – and it turns out that he is no more OK than I am – arguably, in many ways, possibly worse. In different ways and for different reasons. And there are days when we make each other worse, and there are days when we make each other better, and there are days where we are simply happy together, and life is a lot more up and down now.

I begin to wonder if in fact I was only alright for as long as I was because I insulated myself from anything that might rock the boat. Stuck to seeing old friends and not going out too late and eating all the right things and protecting myself, didn’t really take risks in terms of getting to know men I might have rather fancied, instead sticking with teasing, dating, and screwing the same old crew (different men in each of those categories, I might add, and not really a ‘crew’ in any ‘large number of people’ sense, don’t go judging me by accident!).

Accidentally walking blindfold into a relationship that in some ways just works, and in some ways is bloody hard work, and in all ways is pretty intense at times, well, that wasn’t really part of the plan. So of course it’s a challenge, and I am having more bad days now, for sure, but on the other hand I am also very happy, not just content – I feel like I am actually living my life, not just living through it, surviving it, navigating it.

So yes, I am challenged, and that means I am not as well. But for now, none of the anxieties I had about leaning on Someone too much, asking them to give more than they reasonably could, and all the rest of it, none of these have really reared their ugly heads. Despite it all I am still happy in a funny sort of way. Battered and bruised (not literally!) and dazed and confused and happy.

And yes, things are only getting easier for us as we learn how to work with each other and when to step back and so on. Not only that, but he’s stopping me smoking, and I’ve cut down on my caffeine intake, and I don’t swear so much, and I feel really rather beautiful these days.

I’m probably not sane, I feel really rather fragile, but I think I can hold it together, and more than that I think it might be worth it. And I have never, ever said this about being depressed before. Nothing has ever been worth the bad days. Perhaps because nothing before has actually been able to pull me out of them – A can only make me realise I can survive them, tenuously; cigarettes change the timbre of a bad day; but, gradually, the darkness lifts, these days, just because P is there. Not much, and not quickly, but it works, and it’s something. And you mustn’t go thinking that things are Really Bad. Compared to how they were this is nothing. I’m just having some bad days, and I get scared sometimes, and I’m not quite on an even keel but by and large I am fine, and genuinely happy. This isn’t a big deal. It’s just that I am not as generically OK as I was. So, well, here’s to another month. I think that’s a good wish to start off with.