I can’t think of a suitably momentous title but heeeere’s Suzy…

Because I’m a sucker for flattery I’m back! Briefly! Well, not so briefly, actually; I intended to be brief but it turns out I had more to say than I thought I did, so this isn’t really that brief at all… as you can see, instead of collapsing hard drives across the globe I split it into chunks and put the chunks on pages, and this way it’s like an entire year’s worth of blogging in one post! You’ve got all the ingredients:

1. The post where there are several dramatic descriptions of the current state of me
2. The charmingly irrelevant anecdote post
3. The ‘because no mini-blog is complete without a crappy little bit of self-indulgence…’ post
4. The climactic and eagerly anticipated finale post

It’s all there! Contain your excitement!

Anyway, I get the feeling that some people may have given up on the idea that poor old DBAH would ever have another post on it (pessimists! Whatever would have given them that impression?), so tell your friends, tell your mother, tell your ex, rickroll it, spread the word like a Jehovah’s missionary, make the relentless spamming of this post around the internet your New Year’s resolution! It is also an excellent way to improve your karma. Seriously.

You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline…

I guess you know things are getting interesting, mental health-wise (or not so healthy-wise) when you see ‘-ersonality disor-’ on your GP’s screen when she thinks you’re not looking.

OK, I know I occasionally sound very crazy in my posts. I don’t do it intentionally, but when I notice I’ve done it I don’t try to cover it up. I mean, that’s me. That’s me who wrote that, and if it’s what I think, then there’s not much point trying to hide it. I post one day about how glorious life is and just how amazing I am and you are and life is and I am and life is, and the next day it’s some disturbing post about my deep, deep hatred for Rhiannon, and how I know everybody is talking about me and how I can’t help but imagine killing them. I do believe that people talk about me; I do believe that they plan together to alienate me; I do believe, on an unconscious level, that there are cameras. It’s one of those things I never question because I know it’s true, because I’ve always had to believe it – like the existence of God. I grew up being told He was there, so I don’t question it. I grew up terrified of the constant surveillance I was under, so I still am. I know it’s there, on that fundamental level; while at the same time I know it’s ridiculous. I read an amazing post on AbysmalMusings the other day about insight; about how being aware you’re hallucinating doesn’t mean you’re not actually hallucinating. He’s an excellent writer. Read the post.

Currently pathetic and paranoid

I guess you might have noticed from the recent lifeless, humourless, dialect-free posts that I’m feeling a bit down. Nothing important. Nothing special. Just, the words are getting harder and harder to pull out of me. I know what I’m like with stress, so maybe it’s just the thought of starting sixth form tomorrow is getting me twitchy. Because I am twitchy; I’m the kind of paranoid twitchy that is going to make me nasty company. I’m also the kind of paranoid twitchy that means my mood is going to start swinging like an orangutang and, hell yeah, I’m going to start on the whole love/hate cycles again. Added to this, my self-esteem, self-confidence, everything self-related – they’ve all crashed down. The talk of grammar in the last-post-but-one was scaring me; any suggestion that I was wrong or that my choice of rule was irritating to anybody, received with my defences down and my misinterpretation skills on at full power, led me on to the oh-so-familiar rut that starts with absolute self-hatred. And then with hatred of everybody else. And then with love of myself. And then with self-hatred. And repeat. And repeat. And -

So, here’s to a new look blog! I had so much stuff in the sidebar before, it was making the front page about a hundred foot long; and I’m hoping that sorting it out will give me something to do so I don’t stop writing completely.

. . .

No, it’s not working. I can’t fake enthusiasm convincingly. To your face, I expect I could, but when it’s just words, and they’re stripped of intonation, of accent, of pronunciation – no can do.

I’m sorry if it’s not my paranoia and you, my readers, really do hate me. I haven’t done anything to intentionally hurt you, or offend you, or antagonise you. I’m really, really sorry. But please don’t tell me if you do, or I’ll overreact in the worst way possible. Emotional lability is my forte.

(Edit: well, the header photo is so colourful that none of the choices of font colour are visible at all points of the title. I’m going to change the photo – oh no! – but till I find or take a suitable one, it’s going to have to stay an illegible red. )

CAMHS has taught me a lot, and I truly appreciate that

Well, unusually, I can come out of my CAMHS session today saying I have learnt something. In fact, I have learnt several important things and had my mind opened to a host of new ideas. They’ve kept me thinking busily for the last hour or so, since I curtailed my session by being monosyllabic and generally uncooperative, but seriously. Seriously now. I’m genuinely amazed. This is what I have learnt:

Update on changeable sisters and English Lit.

Here’s a bulletin post. Number one: today I did my Drama paper and so my GCSEs are over, finito, consigned to the great memory scrapheap in the sky. What I get for them is what I get, and I can’t change it, so hey, that’s that. I’ll try and forget I ever did them, now.

 

You don’t call me borderline, I won’t intensely devalue you

I started out with the best of intentions, intending to do one of the old ‘look, you, quit trying to diagnose me, OK?’ things with the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder. I did a bit of cut-and-paste and started getting ready to prepare some smart arguments and cutting comebacks to stop all those doommongers in their tracks.

 

But no, this is Suze we’re talking about, it was never gonna be that simple.

 

Classy quotes and death by teddy bear

The mood round here really has come down, hasn’t it? I know it’s my fault for being unable to feel anything to a normal kind of extent, and I still remember what I was like yesterday afternoon (cue disturbing flashback to walking down a road that’s every suburb there every was, trying not to cry, and going past a policeman outside the school and pretending to look at some house’s net curtains so he won’t notice my face – then there was a scream and I thought someone’s dead there’s a murderer run don’t run just die you’re hearing things it’s your imagination hallucina- and then the little boy shrieked again, because he was having so much fun being sprayed by the hose while his grandma washed the car – yep, paranoid overreactions to the fore – and then I decided that while I was in a place where no one knew me I might as well get it out of my system, so I started crying into a wall), but (deep breath) I’m over that now. Mostly.

I had my second Latin exam this afternoon, Verse Literature (Virgil, Book IV of the Aeneid, if you’re remotely interested) and it went way better than I was dreading it would. That’s lifted my mood, so I thought maybe I could lift the general Dumped By A Hallucination mood with a classic anecdote from a classic psychosis appointment. I’ll just go find where I wrote it down.

OK, set the scene. I’m trying to explain the famous Birthday Incident to the social worker (I explained it in some other post) and I finish talking and he looks at me, doing serious nodding and making sympathetic ‘hm, yeah’ noises.

“Hm. Right, yeah, I see. So you don’t have any friends?”

“No! It was a lie! That’s the point!”

“Oh, right. Yeah, I get you.”

“I have friends, really, I have lots of friends, loads of friends – no, wait, that sounds like I’m boasting – I mean, I don’t have no friends, I just got a usual amount – not no friends but not loads – I’m normal!” I scream desperately. There’s an echoing silence. “Friend-wise,” I add.

Well, it makes me smile. Of course, at the time, I cringed in embarrassment and probably went through several shades of red from pink to purple. It’s not up there with the whole ‘sharks are lanterns hanging off yellow trees shining golden light’ talk I gave the first time I saw a psychiatrist, but it’s pretty fun.

Thing is, I just don’t seem to be able to talk to anyone from CAMHS without humiliating myself. They leave big empty silences, headnodding sympathetically, and wait for me to dig myself into a hole so depe I’ve got no chance of getting out – then they draw a false conclusion, watch me get embarrassed over how false it is, and nod a bit more. And then I get tongue-tied, and can’t defend myself. Then, when I finally thought I’d managed to say what I wanted to, and thought I’d got my meaning over clearly, I get an assessment back with mistakes all over it and an appointment wih a psychiatrist who didn’t even realise she had one booked in that afternoon. It’s not good. Nope, it’s not good.

She told me that if I’m going to have CBT, which I am, I have to decide what I’m going to ‘work on’. I get a choice, too: she recommends ‘working on’ fluctuating self-esteem, or anger control, or ‘stress’. Yeah, my ‘stress’ pervades everything. Everpresent omnipotent stress causes everything although I’ve never really been aware it exists for me. Anyway, she also asked me if I ever feel I don’t deserve to live. I said I sometimes feel that no one else deserves me to live – they’ve never done anything that wrong. That got us onto suicide, and suicidal ideation (lots of it), and planning my own, and trying to carry it out, and that wasn’t mentioned as something for CBT. I don’t know, I just really felt like I was being dismissed as another little emo kid with too much time on her hands, trying to blend in by pretending that she thinks suicide is cool. I don’t, and I’m not emo (I’m a regular surfer chick, harhar). I just have days, weeks, where all I can think about is how much better it would be for everybody if I wasn’t around. For a while I was convinced I would be dead by the summer holidays – or not so much dead, as winked out of existence. I would just fade away. I thought it would probably happen on a higher plane, so I wouldn’t be aware of it at the time; I thought that my physical body would probably be hit by a truck or something, and go into a coma and so wither away to nothing physically and spiritually simultaneously. I’d be on a higher plane. I don’t know what kind, but that’s where I was going.

I just started looking up delusions on Wikipedia, seeing if there’s a name for believing you can predict your death, and I found a very troubling page.

I have believed this: “Syndrome of delusional companions is the belief that objects (such as soft toys) are sentient beings.” I was terrified for months that my soft toys hated me; they were plotting to get rid of me; when I went to sleep they would occasionally try to suffocate me; if I went to sleep with my back to them they would definitely try to kill me that very night. Jeez.

I have a PE exam tomorrow which I have neglected revising for, due to terror over the Latin Literature. I should probably go do that now.

Not feeling exactly excellent right now

I’m not just unhappy now: I’m very unhappy. I came out of the CAMHS building maybe two minutes ago and now I’m at a public computer and I am not happy.

OK, Suzy. Calm down. Start at the beginning.

So first things first. The thought of seeing someone related to the mental health services again, after so long, was enough to freeze my vocal cords into chunks of useless muscle. On the way I hardly spoke and my father had to give the secretary my name because I couldn’t talk. Then when the psychiatrist turned up, she not only asked my father to come on through to the therapy room with us (bad enough already) but, when we were in there, asked him if there was anything he’d noticed lately that she ought to know about – there wasn’t – and then asked me the same thing! In front of him! When she knows full well (or ought to, if she’s read my file any time in the last two months) that my parents are not to be told about any of this under any circumstances! At all! I stared at her with big wide unblinking eyes and hoped she’d get the message. She didn’t. She carried on asking me if anything had happened ‘like last year, when scary things you didn’t understand were happening’. I swear to God she said that. I couldn’t believe it. I let my hair fall so my father couldn’t see and made really blatant and meaningful eye movements (one of my many skills) at her – and finally she asked if I wanted to talk on my own. To which I replied yes.

Now, she’s with CAMHS. Today was the first time I’d seen her since my initial referral – I’ve been dealing with the guys from the Early Intervention team since then.  It turns out she didn’t know she had an appointment with me today, so she didn’t have my file, and all she could do was tell me that my EEG scan shows I have a normal kind of brain.  

“Anything you wanted to say now your dad’s not here?”

And because I’m just always so lucid and intelligible I started saying “Yes, I frequently feel unreal”and at some point during that my mouth started feeling loose so I had to carry on talking without control of my lips, which is actually a lot more difficult and sounds a lot weirder than you’d think. I got mad at myself for not talking properly and started abusing the poor old left forearm (which is stinging like hell right now), finally explained what I said in this post to her about feeling unreal and living in a world of ghosts and pretend, started crying, shredded several tissues in irritation, got spasms in my leg because I was hyper-nervous, and generally made myself look a right idiot.

“Yes… you have exams at the moment, don’t you? That must be putting you under quite a bit of stress…?”

I tried to explain that feeling so cut off from life means I don’t care about exams: I don’t care about them because I don’t really feel they’re happening to me. It’s someone else who’s gonna have to deal with them. There’s a line at the end of some Chili Peppers song, ‘This life is more than just a read-through’ – well, no, it’s not, this feels like it’s my read-through. I tried to explain this. I tried to explain how what I see out car windows seems like it’s just painted on canvas, and if I touch it it’ll give way under my hand and I’ll see the real world. I tried to make her understand me.

“Yes, quite a lot of people feel like this during exam period.”

I started crying again because I’m an emotionally labile little shit who’s such a stereotype I’m embarassed to cry because it reminds me of what a cliche I am. I tried to explain that right now my self-esteem is crawling so low on the ground that it has to stand on tiptoes and crane its head back just to see over the edge of the kerb. I told her all about this and this and yes, I cried some more, and she said that:

“Mm, during exams a lot of people find themselves under pressure. I see you’re under a lot of pressure. Lots of people change: when they’re at work and at home, for instance, they act differently. Lots of teenagers have mood swings. Yes, I have lots of parents in here because their children are having mood swings.”

I realise that I’m under pressure due to exams (I’m sorry, do I look like I’m four?). I realise that people act differently round different people (but I don’t even exist enough to act different, and I cried a bit more there, just for good measure). And, oh God, how stupid does she think I am - I know that teenagers have mood swings! I know all this! And OK, thank you for reminding me, just keep it in perspective, but now I feel so awful I think I’m going to fall into two. If it’s all the fault of GCSEs and everybody else goes through this then I’m such a useless hypochondriac timewaster I don’t deserve her attention - any attention – what gives me the right to pretend like I’m someone important, some big shot with a blog, ooh, catch her, pretentious little twat -

And if that’s true, then I feel empty inside. I’ve wasted my time, your time, her time, the time and money of the NHS. Everyone in my class is doing exams and everyone in my class is a teenager. Why am I the only one who feels the need to go seek help over nothing?

And if it’s true, which is how I feel now, because she wouldn’t listen to what I was trying to say (why should she? I don’t deserve her listening to me, oh God, I feel so bad), then I still feel awful. How I feel, my moods and my disconnection to reality and other people, the fact that there doesn’t seem to be anything inside me – it doesn’t matter. It’s not important. I don’t matter.

I’ll probably delete this post, or at least edit it, but I needed this out of my system. I feel like crap. Why did I ever think speaking to a psychiatrist could ever possibly help?

Theme park revelations

iTunes is working now, but my mother told me Saturday afternoon, once I’d sorted it out and happily charged the old iPod back up again, that she hadn’t wanted to leave the house and go to a fitness class that morning in case I (and let’s open some quote marks here) ‘went into a fury’. Apparently, she was afraid my ‘fury’ would be not just furious, but also ‘damaging’ and ‘uncontrollable’. I thought it was funny at first, but then I thought about it and got pretty offended. She thought that the loss of my music would be enough to trigger me into, say, setting fire to the garage? Into ripping up all of our bedlinen? I don’t know. I think I just got offended because it makes me seem kind of petty. I wasn’t going to go into a fury, incidentally; if she’d gone out I’d have sat down with part four of the Aeneid and done some hard-core Latin revision for a while.

 

So, that got me thinking. I know since finding out I’ve got some well-hidden depths she’s been treating me like a fragile vase (‘not too stressed? Not too angry? You’re OK, right, Su?’), but that’s just because she loves me. I’m in a sensible frame of mind right now and so I know that’s true. Catch me some other day and I’m sure I’d be convinced she hates me and hating her right back, but today, nope, I know she loves me. That’s why she’s so paranoid about me lately: she doesn’t want to leave me alone when I’m irritated and angry because she doesn’t know what’s happening to me.  I mean, after I spoke to my GP for that first time, he called home and told my mother that her eldest daughter was hearing voices in her head, hallucinating, trying to kill herself, and self-harming. She hung up, walked out into the hallway looking like she’d just returned from World War One, and said in a very strange, wobbly voice: ‘Suzanne… I didn’t realise you’d been hearing voices in your head…’ And I got mad at her, because I hadn’t known the doctor would call home, and I felt patronised by that phrase, and I didn’t want her to know, and I don’t self-harm, and they weren’t in my head, I’d told the doctor that, they were outside my head. No one was listening to me. I felt like I was just being treated like a crazy kid, and that wasn’t what I wanted.

 

Getting back to where I was originally going, I simply never realised that my mother perceives me as the kind of girl who might fly into such an out of control rage. I’d never realised she might be afraid to leave me on my own for fear of what I’d do to myself and everything around to me. And I definitely never thought she thought I’d do this over iTunes.

 

With this still hanging over me yesterday, and with me and my friends being stuck in a long queue for this…

 

… going nowhere and going there slow, I decided to see just how many people would hypothetically agree with my mother. Let’s get a re-enactment going:

 

“Hey, guys, would you say I get mood swings sometimes?”

 

“Ha!” says Lucy.

 

“What?” says I.

 

“Well, yeah!”

 

“What, like bad ones?” because her and Ellie are practically wetting themselves laughing at this point.

 

“They’re terrifying!”

 

“Really?”

 

Ellie is vaguely nicer than Lucy about such things, so she says: “Sometimes, right, you’re just like really jokey and laughing and then you’ll be like not joking anymore but we’re not sure why, and you seem really angry. But we’re not sure if you’re joking. And you get angry about it.”

 

I watch a shrieking party of hyper twenty-somethings heading off into a dark tunnel in a plastic log and contemplate the deeper meaning of this. I don’t see one.

 

“Let’s just say I don’t want to get on the wrong side of that side of you!” she says, and starts laughing again. Lucy is still cracking up.

 

“They’re scary, Su!” Lucy’s not stopped laughing, but she’s watching me when she says it, all wary-like; she thinks I’m about to turn right now. She thinks she’s overstepped the mark and triggered Scary Suze. She makes me feel like Jack Torrance feels at the end of The Shining, when Danny and Wendy are terrified of him but trying to act normal, so he doesn’t start having ideas about those roque mallets they have in the Overlook’s shed.

 

So that was me told.

 

OK, I know my moods swing like Rush at Thorpe Park. I vaguely know that they’re not quite the same as the ones other kids in my year get (I’m not sure how different, though, because my evaluation wasn’t very useful at telling me how much of what I’d felt was psychosis-related and how much of it was hormone-related). I know they snap around at least five times a day usually, and I suppose I know that they’ve got to be pretty obvious, because I’ve seen my friends withering and hiding, and when I still had bolshie friends (all my bolshie school friends deserted me last year after a series of mega-fights: now all my school friends are very shy, low-self-confidence types, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it means that when I’m being angry and rude and seriously out of order they don’t throw it back in my face, they just sit there and take it and wither) these bolshie friends would get mad too, because I was being unreasonable, and we’d have huge raving arguments over such pressing matters as biscuits, and carrots, resulting in deep hatred on my part and seething irritation on theirs.

 

This is the problem. I know I fall into screaming arguments just as often as I fall into other realities; just as often as all my self-esteem deserts me for someone more worthy of its attentions; just as often as I end up sitting and crying at the wall for no real reason and just as often as I get angry without a purpose too. I know all this. I just never realised I was scary.

Tantrums, small talk, and apple cores

Yesterday I had a series of the biggest fastest mood swings I think I ever had in my life – from my mother saying ‘Suzy, put your apple core in the bin, don’t just leave it on the table’ I went down so far so fast and ended up so disconnected I accidentally sliced my left arm into shreds with my nails. OK, so it wasn’t really an ‘accident’ in as many words, but I didn’t realise my nails were long enough to actually cause me any damage. It was unintentional. And OK, so my arm isn’t exactly ‘shredded’, but it’s sure looking a bit freer of skin than it was on Saturday (anger seems more like a way of life than an emotion to me, and whenever it gets a bit too much and I feel empty I generally find myself holding one arm very tightly and sinking in my nails, which I shouldn’t do, but it honestly helps – plus it stops me from punching walls, which has never been considered a smart move. I mean, you’re less likely to break bones if it’s just fingernails).

 

Anyway. Then we went out and that was all gone, I was happy happy happy and climbing practically vertical hills and falling down them again, and I kept being told to slow down talking because no one was following what I was saying. I don’t know if it’s just mine, but you know that expression you see when you catch your parents looking at each other sharing some big private joke? Like a little smirk. Yeah. That’s what they kept pulling behind my head.

 

Later, someone else said something else I didn’t like, and it was back to where I’d been at eight thirty that morning, holding my wrist way too tight and trying very hard not to start screaming at them all to go play in busy traffic. Today, from my left elbow to wrist there all these strange reddish-brown C-shapes. If I’d been abducted by aliens and then had my mind wiped so I wouldn’t remember, I imagine it’d be something like that, some kind of odd repeated mark, that would finally ring the bell I needed rung to bring it all back. Maybe they would turn out to be the marks from an alien blood pressure monitor or something (note to self: withhold this theory from literal-minded psychiatrists, Su). It seems wrong they’re made by me. It’s kind of sick.

 

I have difficulties with small talk – yes, this is completely relevant. I know my mother got worried I was somewhere on the (low) end of the autistic spectrum one time, but it’s not that I don’t understand it: it just really gets on my nerves. I wrote down one of these mother-concerning conversations just after we’d finished it, because I write lots of things down and date them all to keep my head and life in order, so I don’t get too confused by time.

 

“Can you move the picture?” (We were on Microsoft Word.)

 

“Yes.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Ooh. But what about the text?”

 

“You can move it.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes. Click by the text.”

 

“Like this?”

 

“No. By the text.”

 

“Ooh. Really?”

 

“Yes. Then it’ll move.”

 

“Will it?”

 

“Yes. It will. It’ll move. That’s why I said it. I said it would move because it would. Blah blah blah, reels of angry crap because I’m in a bad mood and she’s talking so annoying, blah blah blah.”

 

“Blah blah blah, reels of her angry crap because I’ve pissed her off by being rude. It’s called normal conversation, Suzanne, don’t all the characters in your little books talk like it?”

 

She asked the question – I just felt like giving her a real answer.  “No. In books they have to eliminate all unnecessary conversation.”

 

So she screamed “Well, I’m sorry I’m not a character in one of your books!” and went storming out for a scared angry sob. I didn’t feel bad, which made me feel bad – as in, I wished I could have felt something about making my mother cry, but I was just blank. If this had been since I discovered the palliative powers of arm-shredding, then yep, I would have had substantial quantities of alien marks the next day, but I hadn’t. I just went and sat on the floor in my room with the mirror opposite, and realised I didn’t recognise the person in the glass and that she had no business pretending to be Su May Robinson. I was so detached that I just didn’t want to know that the inside of my head had an outside too.

 

Going back to where this sprung from in the first place, I just hate people repeating themselves. Saying ‘Really?’ sounds like you’re calling me a liar. Listening to what I say then doing the opposite – maybe you didn’t understand but it seems to me like you’re just ignoring me. Saying ‘Will it?’ shows you don’t trust what I’m saying. Getting angry and asking questions you like to think are stumping and rhetorical – well, aren’t you just asking for it if they’re not? I know it’s small talk. I know everyone does it. I know it’s ‘normal conversation’. That doesn’t stop me getting so crazily angry at you.

 

And going back even further, to where I was before that first diversion: the day finished with me leaping around with a camera, a whole stack of stupid expressions to pose with, and some really hyper laughing.

 

I don’t know what to make of it. I just get so angry.