Guest post by The Razzler

And herein lies a really wonderful guest post by The Razzler, who is for some reason convinced it’s no good. It is, though. It’s really good. Unlike her usual posts, it’s based around dissociation and depression, and really, I don’t know how else to introduce it. So I won’t try. I’ll just tell her again that it is good, and I won’t even add a picture for the day because the post underneath gives more than enough food for thought.

My crazy plans. No, really, I mean crazy.

When I’m in an irritable, unsociable kind of mood, sending off that notorious ‘drop dead’ aura to everyone within a thirty mile radius, I’m an even worse showoff than I am generally because I want to put people down and make them feel small.

I’m pretty well-up on mental illness, unsurprisingly, but in front of people I can’t show this. It leads to awkward questions. Why do I know so much about that? I’m expected to be generally knowledgeable, but why am I able to list the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder off the top of my head? What the hell is borderline whatever you said, anyway? Freak.

Danny is obsessed with Stephen Fry. She watched The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive when it was on and now considers herself the school’s expert on bipolar disorder. All my friends go to her when they want to know something about being crazy, because she’s the closest they’ve got to a real live nutter. Yeah. I guess I used to be like that, too. It’s scary I could be so ignorant. It’s scary they’re so ignorant, and that it’s normal to be that way.

I have a very smart, very competitive friend name of Rhiannon. She’s got to be right, even when she’s wrong.

Tips on hiring objectionable therapists

Much to my surprise I had an appointment with the cognitive behavioural woman this morning. Less to my surprise, I hate her. This is becoming a bit of a problem. I hate all the stupid patronising adults working in that building over the road from the computer I’m at now (I can see it out the window! Yuk) and I don’t get on with any of them and they all leave these great long silences where they nod sympathetically and wait for me to say something but I don’t because there was no question and then they say why are you getting angry? What’s going through your head right now? and I say nothing, nothing, and smile fixedly so that they can tell it’s a big fat fib and they nod and go mmm and I try not to tear my hand to bits with my nails because I need that hand to hold my pen on Monday in my Maths exam.

At this point she said “I can see you’re angry right now, Suzanne! What thoughts go through your head when you’re angry?”

“What, you mean what am I thinking now?” I’m thinking drop dead you stupid woman. And if you can’t do that then leave me alone, I hate you, I hate you. Euuuch. My hands are shaking just typing this.

“Not now, just generally. What do you think that triggers your anger?”

“I don’t. I just am. Sometimes I wake up angry and that’s it, I’m angry.”

“Yes. Well, you see, I’m a therapist, so I do know more about this than you -” well, blatantly you do, at which point did you hear me purporting to know more than a therapist? I’m not that arrogant “- but your moods are connected to your thoughts. They don’t just appear somehow; they’re triggered. Can you perhaps remember an occasion when you were angry? What were you thinking then?”

It doesn’t matter how many times you say it, lady, and how many different ways you can think of to say it in, because I am angry. It is how I live. Sometimes the anger lays lower than other times, but if you happen to be around when it gets to the surface, I will be angry at you whether you asked me if I wanted a drink or whether you called my mother a whore. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, far as I can tell, I’ll just wake up angry some days. It doesn’t matter what I’m thinking.”

“Yes, but it’s connected. It’s connected, the circle of life, haha aren’t I funny and don’t I get along so well with children with my fecking bad grammar and likely belief in ley lines -”

It isn’t connected! OK? She thinks I’m pre-psychotic (there’s some fancy term for that that I’ve already forgotten) because I told her about feeling unreal, and she wants to get the psychiatrist to put me on meds but I’m not going on medication, right? I function fine! To have some kind of mental disorder it’s got to interfere with your social or physical or mental functioning, right? And I operate just like everybody else! I just happen to feel like everybody else isn’t real, on occasion. It doesn’t negatively affect me. Sometimes it’s handy.

She thinks that while feeling unreal CBT would be of minimal help, so I best get drugged up before coming back to see her. Jeez. I probably ought to stop hating on mental health professionals but I can’t help it, I hate them, it’s like the interview process involves finding the city’s most objectionable adults and then giving them objectionable clothes and then giving them a leaflet which outlines What The Youth Of Today Find Amusing and telling them to learn it by heart and jeez!

“I had a girl send me a card last week. The one who goes to your school.”

Oh, sure you did. Because that isn’t the world’s greatest coincidence? You have seen another girl of my age at my school who has my issues. Of course you have. Shut up.

“It just said, Thank you.”

Yes. OK, it said thank you. All right, I’ve got that. You can stop staring at me now. There’s no need to outline the words in the air, yes, OK, stop that now. I said stop that!

“‘I never thought I could be happy’, it said.”

I bet she started thinking that soon as she got into therapy with you. It’s like, abandon hope all ye who hear my voice. Shut up.

“‘Thank you’, she said.”

Yeah, you mentioned that bit. Nothing else? No, like, declaration of her undying love and willingness to do anything for you no matter the cost to her? You mean she wouldn’t lay down her life for you? Well, that’s it, I’m not listening if she didn’t say that bit. Why am I meant to care if some kid who allegedly went to my school once upon a time is happy?

She said a complete therapy course would take about six to ten sessions “because you’re a smart girl.” Then, like everybody else in CAMHS I’ve met, she left a long pause. Probably I’m meant to blush modestly at that point, or say no, i’m not really or thank them, but I just stare at them. I am smart. I know that. Telling me and waiting for thanks is just butt-kissing, isn’t it? Stop it. Stop kissing my butt and go away. Look, if you ever want me to write you a grovelling thank you card you’re gonna have to do more than tell me I’m smart.

OK. I’m worn out now and I’ve almost used up my allotted library computer time, so I guess I’d better shut up. I’m getting a hair cut later which I’m a bit excited about, and I’ll probably erase this morning from my mind as soon as I log off. Thanks to all of you who wished me a happy birthday – it was the one sunny day in my otherwise rainy and typically English-summer half-term. I had a nice day.

Overreactions to freakiness on a large scale

What makes me just so special is I have congenital anosmia. For about twelve years, I was just the kid who couldn’t smell, and I only found out recently that my parents didn’t even believe me till we went to stay on a farm in birthing season (I was ten): no one but me and the farmer dared venture into the birthing shed because there was apparently a hideous stench from rotting placentas and so forth. Anyway, often people don’t believe me when I tell them, and I’m often asked ‘how do you know?’ I used to get upset by this, and I still do, but now I hide it better – I mean, would they ask a blind person how they knew they couldn’t see? People laugh at that. I know it’s not the same thing, but smelling is a sense, and it’s one I don’t have, and anosmia is a disability, just like blindness or deafness (which is a topic for an up and coming post, actually, is deafness), and it’s upsetting when people laugh at me or mock me.

So anyway, one day last year I was bored on the computer and I started looking stuff up, as you do, and I found out that ‘not smelling’ had a name: anosmia. And I found a website all about it, and I discovered that the majority of people who have no sense of smell lost it as they grew up, and that it’s very very rare to be missing it from birth – but it’s possible. It happens. And I started crying.

If you’re blind, you know about it. People don’t ask you why, or how you know for sure, because the doctors tell you. In fact, I just found this:

“As a child without a sense of smell, it requires a considerable amount of thought to determine that something is missing. Blind children are told they can’t see, but anosmic children have to find a way to work it out for themselves.”

That’s what I mean. And I was so amazed to understand it wasn’t just me, to know it wasn’t my imagination, to hear other people talking about things I’d always assumed I was a freak for feeling, that yeah, I started crying. In fact, a year later, looking at the line “These patients often do not understand the concept of an odour,” I still feel choky. Because I still don’t.

Ok, so honestly, this is completely going somewhere – I just got distracted by almost crying over the website again. Where it is going is here.

A while ago, can’t remember whether it was before or after I got in with the mental health services but probably before, I was doing a bit of Wiki-hopping from link to link to link and I found that article about depersonalisation. Now, by this point, I’d been stepping out of myself pretty regularly, watching my body sitting in lessons from a point somewhere up by the ceiling, feeling like the girl who controlled my body at these times was standing behind me and waiting when I was the one living behind my eyes, and I was feeling less connected to the world every time someone spoke to me and I had to fight to hear what they saying because I was so far away. It was hard holding conversations because sometimes I’d come back in the middle of one and have no real idea what I’d been talking about, and if I was in the middle of a sentence I wouldn’t realise and I’d just walk off. I’m not saying it was a separate person; I’m just saying it was a different part of me. At least it felt that way.

So naturally, when I found that article on Wikipedia, I almost started crying again because this was me. This article said that how I was living and acting and seeing the world was valid. I wasn’t crazy – or if I was, I wasn’t the only one. I didn’t cry, but that was because I was in school at the time and there were a bunch of Year 7s rolling around and shrieking in wheely chairs behind me. It meant a lot, though. It was probably a big reason behind my breaking down and confessing in the doctor’s room a couple of weeks later, because now I had an idea it wasn’t all that normal.

It’s like not being able to smell. I didn’t realise I wasn’t normal till I realised I wasn’t alone.