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.

Happy, free, and sparkly like glass

Dragging myself away from researching the topography and transport systems of Trondheim, Norway, to let it all out. I had forgotten the absolute crystalline joy, just-cut diamond joy of being ever-so-slightly mental and not remotely dissociated. In those couple of days before it overloads, before I overload, when all I honestly want to do is sing and run and rhyme and talk and talk and talk, and any hallucinations are friendly ones, like the girl who was my friend for a week and never existed. I’d forgotten. My father told me I’ve been ‘mellow’ lately. I don’t fight. I don’t argue. I don’t see CAMHS. I think I miss it.

There’s a skeleton hiding under my skin

‘If there are any factors which may affect your child’s performance or well-being, please do not feel shy or embarrassed, but let us know. We will treat all confidence with discretion and sensitivity.’

My school’s bumf leaflet, 2008

It’s all very well to say this, and I’m sure they do actually mean what they say, feel it with the greatest sincerity and are convinced that ‘discretion’ and ‘sensitivity’ are the most apt words to describe their efforts, but really. I mean really now. On an unscheduled trip (read curious trespass) I took into the staff room, one fine day after all the teachers except the ones running netball practice had left the building, I opened a door off the main room and there, tacked to a pinboard, was the mental health history of one of my classmates. As soon as I realised what I was looking at, I stopped, because it’s none of my business and I’m sure she’d be just as horrified to think someone else knew as I would be if it was my messy mind pinned to the wall; but that does not feel like discretion and sensitivity to me. Out there in the open, on a noticeboard that every member of staff sees every time they’re in the room. Discreet, subtle, tactful. Lou Raleigh Is A Fackin Nuttah!

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:

Naive, youthful, arrogant – for a reason…

Recently we had our school leavers’ service, so the whole of my (inner-city state) school trooped off to the nearest church to listen to boring sentimental speeches about how life is a journey, a long journey, on which there are choices to be made, we must make those choices, and the Year 11s and Upper Sixth are making those choices right now, as we speak, it’s a journey, yeah? We get it every year. It never changes.

So the head comes to reminsice about how she taught my year when we were in Year 7.

“I remember how Amy’s handwriting was so beautiful – I wonder if it still is, har har! – and I believe it was Suzanne, who was happy with no mark but full, har har -”

Everyone in the school turns to stare, I go bright red, practically start crying from anger and shame, and they’re all watching. Everyone. Even my little sister and her friends are staring at me; and then the head says something vaguely innuendo-ish and I crack up laughing, so now they all think I’m funny in the head.

Oh, happy days.

By the end of Year 7 I’d just about managed to escape the obsessive-compulsive anal-retentive reputation I’d got myself in my first term. Now, in a fit of nostalgia, she has reminded my year of how I used to be and told everybody who didn’t already. My year just think it’s kind of funny, or sweet (oh boy have they changed their tune since the good old days), but I got upset (what’s new?). I wanted to speak to her and tell her but she was in a meeting. I’ll probably write her a letter and stick it under her door on Monday, before my Maths exam.

I was that anal, though. I was so used to getting perfect scores in everything without even trying that senior school was a bit of a shock. Yes, I still got perfect scores in everything. But sometimes, so did other people. I wasn’t used to competition. When Jess started in Year 8, she’d only been sitting with me in Maths for one lesson before she told me “My mum says I have to have a competitor. You’re my competitor,” which was very intimidating. Then again, in her first week Jess insisted on retaking a science test becase she only got 87% (top of the class). Our class still haven’t let her forget it. Maybe we were destined to be friends.

If I lost a mark in a piece of homework, I wouldn’t be OK about it. I wouldn’t remain outwardly stoic. I would break down publicly, because I wasn’t used to it, and I didn’t realise that so many people would hate me for it. Now, of course, I’m used to it. I don’t do that anymore. If I am disappointed because I think I should have done better, I’m not gonna tell anyone, God no! I’ll just keep it to myself. As you do.

I’d never done Art lessons in junior school, not sit-down-and-sketch-this-pot Art lessons. More sort of here’s-a-brush-here’s-some-paint. I thought Art was the greatest thing in the world, apart from possibly myself. Then I got a B in a piece of homework.

If you’re going to be irredeemably turned away from me by the following story of ten-year-old conceit, I’m very sad. This embarrasses me hideously. I’m not about to relate this for fun.

I got a B and I started crying in class, all over the Art teacher. He was new – just a sub – and he’d got no idea what to do with this little kid sobbing all over him because she’d got a B for a drawing that was, on reflection, pretty crap. He nervously patted my arm a bit and asked what the matter was, and I had enough pride not to want to tell him – but then I couldn’t help it so I told him I was sad I had a low mark. He told me it wasn’t low. I said I knew that but it didn’t help. He stared at my crappy drawing helplessly. Eventually, sacrificing all his pedegogical ethics with a silent prayer to the Minister for Education, he offered to give me an A for it. I was mortified. I could never look him in the eye again. I’m so glad he left that term – if he was still at the school it would probably have been brought up again like a bad curry in the leavers’ service.

I’m not really sure where this is going. I was a conceited, complacent, totally naive ten-year-old. I read somewhere (I think it may have been a Jeffrey Archer book – they’re full of words to live your life by, for sure) that there’s nothing worse than an arrogant man who has something to be arrogant about. And I definitely was, and unfortunately, I definitely did.

A bit of full-on psychotic fun

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.