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.

Dead dogs and drugged-up bumble bees

Rhiannon is riding for a fall and how. She thinks she’s a bit cool. She thinks she’s more than a bit cool. She thinks she is not just the bee’s knees but also its head, thorax, and abdomen.

Warning: epiphany in process

Well. Without meaning to give more ammo to my lovely borderline shippers, I’ve got to say that the only war cry that springs to mind lately, the only phrase I think I could sincerely apply, is that infamous I love I hate you don’t leave me. But, of course, the fact I notice this rules out the possibility of BPD. Self-awareness is not part of the package.

Anyway, I’m not here to argue that today. I’m here to complain about the close friend of mine who’s recently buggered off to Canada. Things aren’t the same without her around at school. Because I knew she was leaving, she was amazing. She was wonderful. It wasn’t fair she was leaving. She was leaving me. How dare she leave me? She was leaving me and I was going to be on my own? And so I wouldn’t say her name and I hated her and I bitched about her and I spread rumours and now I’m over it a bit and I am so scared everybody else is going to leave me that I am going to leave them first. They’re not going to get a chance. It really seems to be the most logical option. I don’t want to be ditched. People are going to alienate me; they’re going to talk about me; they’re going to hate me how I’ve hated them and if they don’t, I’ll drag them down, and I don’t really think that the girls who are my friends particularly deserve to have to spend time with someone who is going to be looking at them and seeing their organs and bones and the blood in their veins, or involuntarily imagining how they would scream if that pen went into that eyeball at that angle – because I can’t help that, it’s a reflexive action – an immensely troubling one and one that is worsened whenever I read something like The Silence of the Lambs or The Regulators, which maybe I should avoid but seeing as those are two of my favourite books, I don’t and don’t even want to – I don’t mind feeling that way, which scares me -

Deep breath. New sentence.

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. )

The psychopathic traits of my formative years

There’s the question comes up, every so often: what are you most scared of? Or, what’s your biggest fear? And lately, that’s been me. I’m starting to scare myself very much.

I’ve been a complete insomniac for years. I waste all the time before I get to sleep with ‘dreaming’ – I always assumed that was what dreaming was. The world inside my head was where I spent most of those formative years I ought to have spent in the sandpit. All right, that’s not strictly true. When I was in infants’ school I was the life of the party. No, seriously. I was so popular it amazes me. Anyway… So, the girl who led the Good side (Good vs. Bad, just like little kids ought to see it) was called Suzanne, and she looked just like me, and her best friend was a blue unicorn. She lived in a stable, with Rupert (yep, Rupert the Bear), Max, Bambi, and Snip (a Beanie Baby Siamese Cat who I worshipped and adored – uh-huh, these were all toys I had). Then I got a bit older and I got completely obsessed with fantasy – Suzanne’s best friend and sidekick became Hypno (original, non?) who, yeah, could hypnotise people. They spent their days saving the world, flying around and showing off to not-so-amazing people. Pure wish fulfilment. But I spent so much time there it got real – I was Suzanne, she was me. Not in a crazy way. Just in a little kid way.

Retrospectively scary diaries

When I was thirteen and about to turn fourteen I kept a diary. I wrote all kinds of stuff in there; and if you read how I write instead of what I write, you can chart the onset of psychosis – it’s unbelievably creepy.

 

(I’ve just found out how to work this Read More thing and it’s a bit of a buzz – it means I can fiddle with techie stuff and feel like a computer whizz and fit more posts on my home page! I’m sure it’ll wear off soon…)

 

Making my mother cry

Probably better point out that I’m putting this on timed release as a bit of an experiment… so if it acts up funny, tell me, please. Thanks!

 

I was trying to read the latest post at BPD in OKC and my mother came in behind me. Our internet connection is in my parents’ office, which used to be our dining room, and the computer is on the end of a table down one wall, so when you’re at the computer your back is to the door. It’s partly my innate paranoia and partly heightened paranoia because I remember my psychotic paranoia, but I can’t let anyone see what I look at on the computer. OK, so maybe this is because I’m not allowed to have Myspace/Bebo/Facebook and I don’t want to be caught using them, and also because I have not put up a large banner on my school locker saying I went crazy so I read crazy sites and so I don’t want kids at school catching me reading a site that says The Secret Life Of A Manic Depressive across the top in a huge banner however wonderful a blog it is (and it is), and also because I try to keep my parents out of that part of my life – whatever it is, I immediately shut down the internet.

 

My mother did a bit of “Suzanne, I don’t like it when you do that,” because she’s convinced I have a social networking account, scourge of the devil that they are.

 

I got twitchy and said “I just get twitchy.”

 

“You shouldn’t have to.”

 

“But I do.”

 

She carried on being awkward and annoying and finally I started shouting that I hated sitting with my back to the door, I couldn’t do it, and windows, I never sit near a window, not in school not never, and then I burst into tears and carried on shouting and she looked all upset and scared and said she didn’t want to upset me, did I know I could talk to her about anything, anything at al that was worrying me? And then she went upstairs and I heard her do a bit of crying too, and then she came back and asked tentatively if ‘there’s been anything happening… like before?’ I said no in my best ‘I’m a bad liar’ voice and cried a bit more, acting defensive. She went away, looking crushed and feeling helpless. And I was free to use the computer.

 

Is this a sign of a born liar? I can be sobbing and crying and making like I’m collapsing in front of her, acting like I’m trying so hard just to keep myself together, playing all mysterious-like with non-existent psychosis – and inside I’m just irritated because she won’t shut up? All I wanted was to get her out the room and let me keep reading, so I staged an emotional breakdown.

 

I made my mother cry to get her out the room. No, nothing doing…

 

I have hinted to my mother that I am possibly psychotically paranoid to get her out the room. Nope…

 

I feel like I ought to feel something about this, but I don’t. I’m just pissed off she wouldn’t leave me alone, smug that I got her out, and confused that I don’t feel some huge remorse over it.

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.

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.