I am not happy. My mother’s done something to iTunes which stops it from opening. When I woke up this morning she was downstairs on the computer optimistically fiddling about with my playlists and trying to burn a CD off it for my father (she’s good with computers, which makes this doubly irritating). Well, the burning function on my copy of iTunes for some reason hasn’t ever worked, so she couldn’t do that. When I got downstairs, she’d given up. And when I came to open iTunes half an hour ago, it wouldn’t open. Not from the desktop, not from the Start menu, not when I connected my iPod, not from nowhere nohow. And I am well annoyed.
Oh, well. Que séra, séra. Before that unpleasant discovery I was planning to go on a guided tour of my assessment letter from the Early Intervention in Psychosis team – whoohoo, I hear you cry! I haven’t actually had the nerve to read this thing yet – I’ve skim-read it, I’ve actually read some bits (ones which don’t make me cringe into a corner), and I’ve sat down with it telling myself read it, Suzanne! and thought I meant it. And I still skimmed the bits I didn’t want to know about.
OK. Let’s get started with History. The italics is what the letter says, the rest is what I say. Your unusual experiences started around April 2007 when you were upstairs at home and thought you heard someone knocking at the front door… there was nobody there which you thought was a bit worrying, but it stopped happening and you did not speak to anyone about it. That’s basically true (I left out a chunk in the middle of it because it wasn’t very illuminating). I went down to the front door to let whoever was calling in, and there was no one there so I went back upstairs. And then… yep, you guessed it, they called again, so I went to let them in – no one there – went back upstairs, heard them call, went to let them in, and spent the next hour or so doing this. And then the next few weeks. You became worried about going into rooms or toilets at school because people might be seeing what you were doing even though you had not done anything bad. Yeah – I didn’t use a school loo for months. On one occasion… you hid under the seat of your dad’s car in the car park at B&Q. My friend had an epileptic fit in front of the matt black paint tins in B&Q, I had a little psycho fit in its carpark. Amazing store, that one.
Next there’s a seriously patronising chunk about the Birthday Incident (Jess, one of my two best friends at the time, called me on my birthday to tell me that she didn’t like me, Danny didn’t like me, Dipali didn’t like me, and they hadn’t liked me for more than a month, and oh yeah, happy birthday, see you at your party tomorrow), which makes me embarrassed and hurt to read, so it’s not being repeated.
In September 2007 you had a couple of days when you saw bright green creatures crawling around on the floor. This happened in the mornings before you went to school and did not reoccur after that. They’ve got the wrong end of the stick here. For one thing they were running very fast, not crawling (har-de-har-har, funny Suzy). For another, it wasn’t in the mornings, before school, it was about a week before school started back. I suppose they just misunderstood. I can’t have been very clear.
That’s my history dealt with; onto School. What really annoys you are some of the girls like Charity who say things like ‘I’m so crazy I don’t know what I am going to do next’, but don’t actually have an understanding of the distress that it can cause. I mostly put that there as an example of this letter’s crap grammar. At a recent assembly some girls also booed you (one girl. One girl. See? This letter makes me feel such a loser) which made you very angry at them. These feelings then became directed at your parents and you felt that you therefore did not exist (where the hell did that ‘therefore’ come from?). This led to thoughts of killing yourself and the girls (girl singular. One girl!). When you spoke to your mum about what had happened, she commented that if you lived in America, you would be the one who took a gun into school and shot people. …it was closer to what you had been thinking than your mum realised. I actually started shaking when she said that, and I couldn’t close my fingers because I felt so weak.
And on to Home. Your feelings of paranoia last year involved vivid nightmares about your mum coming in to attack you with a mallet. Just one nightmare about that, actually. I’ll go into it at some point. I get night terrors like the all-shooting all-torturing all-dying-bloodily finales of James Patterson books. You spoke briefly of a man…whom you fancy very much…although he has a girlfriend and is not available. Oh my gosh. Don’t I sound like such a slut there? ‘He is not available’ – that didn’t come out my mouth. And I believe the questions went: ‘Have you ever believed someone was in love with you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you ever been in love with someone?’ ‘Yes.’ I did not say ‘fancy’. When I saw that written down I practically cried. In fact I probably did. I overreact to everything.
Penultimately we’ve got Your thoughts and emotions. You have felt you have unusual powers (I love that line) such as controlling the weather; being able to fly. During these times, you have felt as though you have a billion thoughts going through your head at once like a train which is about to derail. It wasn’t ‘as though’ I had a billion thoughts: I did have a billion thoughts. …at the time it feels as though it would be so easy it would only take a second to achieve it… You have spoken of times when you… giggled for the rest of the day at a joke someone made in the morning. Let’s just make it clear that it wasn’t a joke. My friend looked at a photo of a sheep, said ‘that’s a sheep’, and I was off for next six hours. Sometimes you speak very quickly to the extent that other people cannot understand what you are saying. I did this to my psychiatrist as well. I gave her a transcribed version of a nightmare to read and a transcribed version of everything I’d been thinking in an English lesson and carried on talking at the speed of light about a golden tree with sharks hanging off it like lanterns that was stuck inside my head. Smooth move, Robinson; smooth move.
And finally, here’s what we’ve all been waiting for… Our opinion. But actually, this post is gonna be long enough as it is. I don’t want to crash WordPress with my inability to shut up (plus I washed my hair this morning and I haven’t dried it yet, and if I don’t turn a hairdryer on it soon it’s going to dry naturally and in the shape of an enormous haystack), so I’ll add the Intervention dudes’ opinion later.
Have a happy Saturday, everyone.
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