The sun on the lake

The sun on the lake

Here I lie, naked and still, on an ancient, narrow raft. The placid lake stretches away into infinity. The sun shines down, and my skin drinks its energy like a greedy child gobbling its favourite treat.

I lie and rest, and there’s peace flowing through every vein. My heart is velvet soft, nestling among the cushion cave of my chest.

I move. I'm just twitching slowly to let the blood flow freely, and suddenly I realise I'm stiff and sore and scorched.

The sun continues to beat down, and there's no cover, no shelter; I cannot resist its prying prodding fingers. I cannot turn away.

I'm alone on the lake with the heat of the sun, and it burns my flesh.

Now I can't resist dipping my hand into the icy water, and I raise a handful to my broken lips.

Refreshed, I plunge my hand in deeper, and dip my face to the surface, but the raft is too narrow, too unstable, and it tips, and I fall.

The cold, tranquil water brings instant relief, and I sink into it, soothed and calm. This is home. Now I'm home.

The water wraps around my aching body, and the silky tendrils of weeds stroke my limbs like a mother tending her baby. I need never leave here again. Down here, alone in the cold and the deep.

A memory from a long forgotten life pesters me with increasing urgency; I can't breathe. I must breathe.

I try to banish it, but the reminder is desperate and I can’t avoid its savage truth.

I pull myself up, up, up towards the surface, but my strokes are feeble and desperate and ineffective.

The slimy weeds ensnare my ankles, and I'm too weak to kick against them.

The water is freezing now, and it rubs sores into my thin, wretched arms.

With every pathetic pulse of pallid energy I pull and pull, up towards the surface, up towards the looming sun.

I break the surface again, my desperation sending ripples though it’s glassy top. I choke and flail and suck air desperately into my boiling, freezing lungs.

I find my frail, flimsy raft, and I pull myself onto it. I weigh more than the iron centre of the Earth. My refuge rocks dangerously, threatening to tip me back into the ice water.

Eventually it settles and I lie there, sweating, panting, my heart like rock inside my echoing chest.

I lie naked on the raft between the icy water and the burning sun, and I can't see the shore and I fear the night.

Bipolar

I see that I haven’t updated my blog since mid-May. This is because I’ve been off having adventures in the dark recesses of my brain.

Where I’d left the long story of my mental health, is that I’d seen a psychiatrist, and he’d prescribed me a new antidepressant, Mirtazapine. For a good few weeks, Mirtazapine was a wonder drug. It saved my life. I stopped actively looking for ways to die and started settling down.

Unfortunately, that only lasted about 8 weeks, before the recovery started tailing off. I was completely unable to feel joy, but was more or less content with this. Who needs joy anyway?

The psychiatrist thought that ‘happy’ really ought to be on the agenda, so he increased my dose. It was not the miracle cure it had been before.

A couple of weeks after that, I started moving backwards again. Making plans, new plans, because I’d told people my old ones and I needed to work in secret. I started quietly saying goodbye and not committing to anything beyond the next few weeks. I started trying to work out how the practicalities would work after I was gone.

I stopped being able to love my children. I’d like to say that this frightened or upset me, but I didn’t have any reaction to it at all. I felt like an empty glass. Occasionally, some emotions would break through, but they’d usually be the tricky ones; rage and fear and hatred. I knew, on an abstract level, that all of this was a bit not good, but it had just become part and parcel of who I was.

I went back to the psychiatrist to explain this to him, and we decided to try a new combination of antidepressants, so he added Venlofaxine to the Mirtazapine.

I’m not sure I can adequately express the hell that was Venlofaxine.

The physical side effects were difficult. My nerves became super-sensitive and I’d have hours and hours of tingling and buzzing skin which drove me up the wall. Water started feeling hard and rough. My digestive system ground to a complete standstill, regardless of overdosing on several things to free it up again. My pupils were permanently dilated making me really light sensitive. I felt drugged and exhausted constantly.

All of this might have been worth working through if it weren’t for the effect that it had on my brain.

My GP has recently shared with me the fact that I’d said a couple of things back in March which crossed the fuzzy, grey line from neurosis to psychosis. She wasn’t sure, but this was why she wanted me to see a psychiatrist. I have no idea what these things might have been – at the time, I thought I was being perfectly logical. Up until August, I was quite prepared to say that I’d never experienced a psychotic thought.

In August, while on the Venlofaxine, the thoughts that were coming at me were so out and out mental that I’m pretty darn certain that at least some of them were psychotic.

One of the peculiarities of that time was the incongruity between what I was feeling and how I was thinking and acting. I described it to a friend as if I were at a great party, all dressed up and bouncing around the dance floor, grin on my face, pulling everyone in to dance, while tears were coursing down my face and shouting ‘I hate myself! I am totally evil! Hahahaha! Guess what, guys? I want to die! Isn’t that a hoot!’

I would spend hours silently curled up, trying desperately not to accidentally let this lunatic out.

I had to pay attention to every single thought and word in case it was not a normal one.

One evening I was hot and feeling claustrophobic, so I thought ‘I know, I’ll pop out for a walk up the road in the rain! That’ll work! There’s no point getting dressed for it or putting my shoes on. If anyone asks me, I’ll just pretend I can’t see them.’

And the sane side of me wearily going; ‘No, Pip, you can’t do that.’ That sane side put up one hell of a fight, and I stayed in.

I stopped being able to tell what was real and what was not. I was pretty convinced that everything that came out of my mouth was a lie. I had the strange sensation that I had actually already died, and that this reality was just hanging onto me for some reason. I was convinced that everyone else either couldn’t see me, or was disgusted by me hanging around. I deleted a number of my friends from Facebook, convinced that they hated me. As yet, I haven’t been courageous enough to ask for them back. How do you word that? ‘Hi, a couple of months ago I assumed I didn’t exist, and that you hated me because I was an angry ghost. Any chance you’ll be my friend again?’

I called the psychiatrist and asked if I could stop taking the Venlofaxine. I begged him while talking at 500 words a minute, and he eventually cut in and said it was a good idea.

A couple of days later, I made a tiny, but stupid mistake with something.

I went mad. Literally mad.

Those thoughts started flying at me. I was, of course, stupid and evil, or I wouldn’t have made such a mistake. I should go away. Just get in the car and keep driving until there was nothing, and then walk into the sea.

No, Pip, you must not do that.

Fine, then I’ll just stay in the graveyard behind the house. That’s where I’ll live now. I can at least stay here until my husband gets home, and then he can fix it and perhaps send the tent out to me.

No, Pip, you must not do that.

Fine, I’ll go home. I will. But I won’t talk to anyone. Oh hell, there’s Tom. Scream at Tom. Run away. Hope Claudia doesn’t see me. Upstairs, hide here. Be here. Hide, jump from the window, hide in the bed. Stupid, stupid, stupid…

And then there was a pair of scissors in my hand and I was using them to whip my arm. It wasn’t deep or dangerous (I’m very clever at hurting myself so it won’t show for too long), but it cut and it bled and eventually it the pain worked its way into my brain.

And then I was looking down at my bloody arm, and was I furious that I’d lost concentration and let the crazy out. I still can’t say precisely what happened. Only that I was tired beyond everything, and I lost concentration for just a minute but that minute was all that was needed.

When I went back to the psychiatrist the week after that, I started telling him about the visions and voices for the first time. The voices are a part of me. I mean that literally; I’m aware that the TV and the radio aren’t talking to me. I can’t stop them – the constant, draining ‘you’re rubbish, you’re pathetic, you should just go ahead and die…’ these are a constant soundtrack to my life, but I know that they’re me. Sometimes I can overrule them. I’ve had some, limited success with mindfulness and meditation. Other times not so much, and if I try to clear my head, it just fills instantly with louder, more vicious voices, grinding me down and down, making me more exhausted, and then I can’t fight them at all.

There have been a couple of occasions when the voices have sounded external, but on those occasions, they were soothing. I heard God talking from the corner cupboard once, telling me things were going to be OK. On another occasion, I was in a top bunk and became aware that my dead grandfather was on the bottom one, telling me it would all be fine. Obviously I lay as still as a rock on the top bunk, terrified to move just in case he was really there.

More often, the audio hallucinations are bangs, screams and crashes. The worst ones sound like a bookshelf has snapped and everything has fallen from it. Though I could live without the screams too. Generally speaking with these, I can wander round, establish that nobody is screaming and that nothing has fallen, and I put it down to being very tired and stressed. And I don’t report them to anyone.

The visions are also quite rare. They’re usually nasty images; me lying in a bath full of blood, opened up and drained. Me lying dead on the kitchen floor. Blood pulsing from my wrists to the floor. That sort of thing. Again, I’m usually quite able to tell that these things originate from inside me. I know they aren’t a prediction of the future or a set of instructions. I’m able to force myself to look and prove that they’re not really there (apart from one occasion when I was just too tired, so thought ‘fuck it, if that’s what my brain wants to see, that’s what I’m going to see…’)

The more usual visions are little aftershock things – just something I glimpse that make me jump and my heart race and my mouth dry. Little, everyday things that make me uncertain of what’s really there and leave me off-balance. I’m pretty sure everyone gets these from time to time, so I didn’t report them. It didn’t occur to me that I was getting rather a lot of them.

It simply didn’t occur to me that these were symptomatic of something other than chronic and severe depression, and that I needed to perhaps share them. When I finally did so, the psychiatrist calmly pointed out that just because I know they’re all coming from my brain, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be there.

There are other things too that point towards a bipolar diagnosis. I can’t take SSRIs and I now know people with bipolar regularly react to SSRIs. The writing that I do – some of that was great and lovely, but other parts of it were wildly out of control. I should not have been able to write two novels in 18 months while working full time and raising two children, while also writing hundreds and thousands of words of fanfic. That’s a few steps beyond ‘driven’.

All of this time, I was also sedated. I should have been calm and quiet. I still managed to not sleep for weeks on end, just waiting until I literally passed out.

So, we're tentatively stepping towards bipolar, and the end result is that I'm now on an anti-psychotic and mood stabilizer.

It is amazing. I did not realise how noisy my head was until that noise was suddenly stopped. I can now step outside and do some mindfulness, and I relax, as I’m meant to. I’m no longer fighting through this wall of nonsense to get anything done, or trying to physically keep a pace with the speed that my thoughts are hitting me, so I’m no longer as crushingly tired.

There’s still a way to go. This is the longest amount of writing I’ve done for a couple of months. I’m also aware that it’s turned wordy and epic. I can’t tell whether that’s a sign of the mania, or a sign that some of the creative side of me is coming back. These things are no longer straight forward to identify.

I love my children. I utterly love my children, and the relief there is overwhelming too.

I’ve had false dawns before with this thing (and I’m very aware of the rate of bipolar relapses), so I’m slightly wary of dancing about and declaring that I’m better. But right now, I’m happy to breathe deeply and feel that fresh air, and to listen to the nice, quiet sounds of the world. 

Pip xxx

What a difference a week makes...

Following my last post, I have seen psychiatrist. Without boring you to tears, he has changed my medication from a tri-cyclic to a tetra-cyclic (or NaSSA). The dose was a little wobbly at first, but we can adjust that over the next few weeks. I’ve had some frankly crazy dreams of craziness, but, generally speaking, things seem to be starting to get a little lighter.

One of the most difficult aspects of depression for me isn’t the constant crying, or even the horrible and negative thoughts, though neither of them are a joy; the hardest part for me is the complete inability to just ruddy do anything. The feeling I described in my last post, the pushing myself on and aching so badly, those feelings of complete and utter exhaustion are just awful. Things that should be easy, or at least manageable, take twice as long because I have to constantly stop to draw a breath or focus on what I should be doing. Cleaning the kitchen can feel soul-destroyingly impossible. I take half measures and do things badly or just good enough so that I crawl back to a sofa or bed to just rest.

It’s really crippling, because the next time it takes twice as long again, and the next time, and the next, and eventually it’s just too hard to even start. All of my reserves, every last one, are focused entirely on the immediate and the absolutely necessary.

When I was ill four years ago, I remember a chirpy Health Visitor asking ‘but you are managing to feed and bath your children, aren’t you?’ I replied yes, not wanting to admit the fault, but I couldn’t remember when they’d last been bathed. It had stopped being ‘a necessity.’ Food would be whatever I could hand to Claudia to keep her quiet during the day, and Tom would be sorted at nursery. Then my husband would come home from work and cook a meal that would be nutritious enough to balance it.

When the wellness started, these things got easier. I was even able to do them while doing a full week of work. It was gradual that time around, but eventually I stopped feeling quite so heavy. I could move my limbs without an effort, and things started to get done.

This time it seems to have been somewhat quicker. It’s only two days on the new medications, and I’m sensible enough to recognise that this might well be a false dawn, or worse, the start of a manic response to the medication, but thus far, early signs are good!

This morning it took a couple of hours to get out of bed, but when I did, I got dressed, brushed my teeth (two more things I’ve taken to seeing as non-necessity of late), and suggested to my daughter that we might do a bit of gardening.

I haven’t the first idea where that thought came from. I have noticed a couple of interesting looking things growing in the depths of the garden, surrounded by dandelions and ground eldar, and have occasionally wondered about digging the weeds from around them, all the while knowing that it would never happen. It was so far from ‘necessity’ that it wasn’t really worth thinking about. The weeds were welcome to the garden.

But this morning, this happened…

All the while Claudia was chattering at me, and we discussed worms and maybe having a pond, and how bamboo grew, and whether she’d like to have her own animal wildlife reserve when she’s older (she would, fact fans). At no point did I think; ‘please stop talking to me child! I just can’t cope with the extra thoughts in my head!’

We had a nice morning. By the way, if anyone can identify those plants, I’d be grateful to know what they are. I think my dad planted them last year, and they’ve re-seeded when we failed to harvest them last year.

I’ve also dug out a new flowerbed at the top of the garden. I’ve always wanted to have herbs in that area, and the rosemary I planted three years ago is going great guns, so I dug up the mammoth thistle that was guarding the entrance to the lawn, even down to the massive white tuber that was supporting it, and got rid of the damned thing once and for all.

This is what it looked like before (the soil to the right is where the demon thistle was)…

I moved some Lavender down into the place…

It doesn't look that impressive, I admit, but I think it's better than it was. It's certainly a start, and in my world, a start's quite an achievement. 

I had designs on digging out some of the bamboo that’s invaded from next door, but I stopped, partly because I’d been working for two hours without really noticing, and partly because I haven’t the first idea what to do with the bamboo. Here it is…

If anyone can advice me on getting rid of an overgrowth of bamboo from the middle of the lawn, I'd be happy to hear it. I don’t necessarily want to get rid of all of it, but it needs to be taken back a foot or two.

So, all in all, I’d suggest things are looking much brighter. It’s early days, but my goodness, the sudden possibilities are quite exciting! I don’t just mean with the garden (though I’m contemplating digging a pond), but with other things. I could clean the bathroom later. I need to reorganise the kitchen. I’d quite like to converse with my husband, and spend some time listening to him of an evening, rather than closing off and just battling anxiety until bedtime. Maybe, we might even have an evening out sometime! It’s been about three years since we last went for a walk to a pub, and at least two years since I’ve even wanted to try.

Obviously I've now retreated to be, because the two-hour digging session has wiped me out a bit, but hey, look! I've written a whole blog post!

Here’s hoping that this is the start of a nice little turn around. That would be both epic and awesome.

I know I’m not alone in suffering either, so I hope that anyone else who’s thinking ‘what’s the point?’ might find a way through it too. Early signs suggest that it might be worth it.

Pip xxx

30/03/13

I received a message the other day from somebody thanking me for the unflinching way that I talk about my depression. It was a lovely note, but it confused me. I do flinch. I flinch all the time. There’s all this bubbling blackness inside that I’m too afraid to let anyone see.

I’m writing this a few minutes after coming out of a black puddle. I’m still in bed. I can’t be bothered to go to the loo, though I need to. My nose is still blocked. I’m basically a mess. So that’s the state of me while I try not to look away from it. I don’t know why I’m sharing this now, apart from, someone thinks I don’t flinch, so I’m going to try not to.

I wander into black puddles regularly at the moment. Spaces and times that consist of nothing but blackness. You can’t plan beyond it, or see outside of it. It’s a thick, dark air that’s uncomfortable to breathe, and it’s heavy and cold on your legs so it’s hard to move. It’s just despair, and it bloody hurts. This has been going on for several years now, and I’ve become pretty adept at holding on through them. Some of the puddles are pretty big. I can spend hours at a time just breathing, trying to hold on, minute by minute until it starts to lift a little bit. I used to be quite pleased about this. I realised that if I could get through one puddle, then I could do it. So each puddle became an exercise in getting to the other side without just drowning. I had before, so I could again. Each one is pretty horrible, but survivable.

So at some point, ‘surviving’ became the way I lived my life. I’ve had some OK times during those years. I had a run of about three months without a black puddle from October to January. Then that stopped.

What I hadn’t anticipated, when I got into my ‘surviving’ mentality, was that the puddles might get worse. They got worse. They’re a lot blacker, a lot more intense now, and harder to get through. It’s like I’m trying to walk through snow drifts and each time I think I’m through, I’m presented with another one, higher and colder and more ice-filled than the last. I keep falling down in them, and I keep having to heave myself up again with numb arms and aching legs.

I can sometimes predict them. This morning’s was caused by me having a nice afternoon out yesterday. It wasn’t a big piss up. It was a meal with a small group of people who I love very much. I had a vaium so that I could cope with the outing, and I’d napped ahead of time so that it wouldn’t exhaust me.

It would appear that didn’t work. I had a nice time. I felt no stress before, during or afterwards, but each pleasant, nice feeling is always, always paid for the next day. It doesn’t matter what it is; talking to someone new, doing a great piece of writing, spending some happy times with family. It doesn’t matter. It will be paid for.

When I’m in a puddle, I find myself exposed and raw. Everything that is said to me or around me feels like the worst insult. I’m awful. I’m a mess, I’m weak, I’m evil, I’m rubbish. I end up curled into a ball with my arms over my head, trying to shield myself from these constant kicks, but I can’t, because they’re not coming from outside me.

They feel like physical blows. Kicks to the stomach that make it hard to breathe. A few months ago, when I was still trying to get through work days, I started to hurt myself physically. Anything to distract from the pain that’s inside, that’s tearing me apart. Anything would feel better than that. Sometimes it took a lot for me to notice that genuine, physical pain that I was causing. The one that’s going through the normal nerve endings and pain receptors and has a beginning and an end. But usually, I could get my brain to look away from these massive internal beatings that I’m getting.

I know, and I always knew that it wasn’t a healthy way to deal with things. But it worked, damn it, and anything is better than the pain. I can’t explain how desperately I just want the other pain to stop.

I am trying so hard at the moment to not do that any more,but it's because I know that I shouldn't, and sometimes that makes no sense at all.

What’s frightening me most at the moment, is that I don’t know how long I can keep surviving these puddles or these snowdrifts. I am so desperately tired, and all I see in front of me is a life where every pleasure is paid for, and each time the payment is harder and tougher.

I’m a fighter. I’ve been fighting this off for years, but holy fuck I’m tired out now. I do not know how long I can keep fighting, and that thought terrifies me.

I’ve daydreamed about my death, just abstract feelings of ‘oh that would be such a relief…’ on and off for two years, but in the last few weeks those daydreams have started turning to wishes. They’re growing stronger and more detailed, and it causes me so much pain to fight against them now.

I have little, tiny sparks of logic which are keeping me going. One is that if the depression kills me, I will not be allowed a Catholic funeral, and my children won’t understand that.

It’s crazy; part of me can see it’s crazy, that I think my children would understand any part of it at all. I have focussed on my son as needing me to stay alive and help him, and I don’t know why I think my daughter would be fine without me. I know I could not possibly kill myself in the house where my husband and children have to live. That would be utterly, utterly wrong. These are all illogical thoughts, but they keep me going when the rest of my logic is so hopelessly twisted up, that I’m not going to knock them.

When I’m in a puddle, sobbing, with my arms up over my head, I literally think that it would be better for my children if they didn’t have to live with me like this. They could move on, and find a more stable, capable mother. Just staying alive like this must be damaging them so badly. I know, I know that this is wrong and it makes no sense, but when I’m down, in a puddle, being kicked, it’s very hard to see that. So I’ll take the ‘no Catholic funeral’, and ‘not in the house’ if these things will keep me alive.

It’s getting very cold and dark down here though, and I don’t know how long I can keep getting up again. I’m so, desperately tired. I don’t want to try anything new, or try to be vaguely happy, because the unhappy that follows it is not worth the price.

So there we are. That’s unflinching. That’s the absolute blackness of me at the moment. It’s not pretty, and I wouldn’t blame anyone who wants to look away.

I am getting help. I’m not prepared to stop trying yet, so I’m getting help. The reason for the lack of hope is that I’m on medication already. The stuff I’m currently taking has got me through a couple of big bouts of depression in the past. On top of that, I’ve had two lots of CBT, and I do mindfulness exercises, and I watch my diet, and I try to keep vaguely exercised when I can, and I go for walks and look at trees and stuff. Hell, I can’t even listen to music without assessing what mental effect it might have on me. Technically, I’m doing everything right. I’m doing everything I can to prevent this happening, and it’s still happening.

 I’ve been passed on from my GP to the psychiatric team in the area, and they’re going all out to sort something that might help. I’ve been given a small amount of Valium to help me get through the puddles for the next week. Just to ease that pain a bit. I’m seeing a psychiatrist next Friday who will do a full review of my medication, and we’ll start trying to find something that will work now my current medication has, well, it hasn’t failed, but I clearly need something else. I’m going to be hooked up with long term counselling.

So I’m tired. I’m in pain. I don’t know how long my strength will last, but I do, at the moment, have a tiny glimmer of hope that this blackness won’t last forever. I daren’t try to look into the future to far, or plan or dream just in case, but I will keep trying. One foot in front of the other until I get to a place with no more puddles.

I feel a lot better than I did when I started writing this. That particular puddle is behind me. I can go to the loo, and I might even go downstairs and get something to eat and drink. I do believe there are chocolate digestives in the fridge, and that might be worth getting up for. Breathing is easier now. Maybe I won’t be in another puddle for a week or two. That would be nice. There is quite a lot of the day when I feel more or less fine. Slightly anxious maybe, very tired, but not hopeless and in despair.

So these are the things I would like you to take away from this. Sometimes I’m OK. Sometimes I’m even optimistic or can make jokes and talk lightly. And I will keep fighting. I think it’s pretty clear that I’m not going down without a bloody good fight.

Where has Gren Peppard gone?

‘So’, I hear you cry, ‘what exactly is happening with the Gren Peppard sequel?’

Actually, I imagine that to most of you this is largely irrelevant in your daily lives, but I'm clothed in just enough self-obsession today to think you care and to want to soothe you.

I am still writing it. Honest.

In a nutshell, I had a very brief, fairly mild nervous breakdown in May. It really wasn't long lived in its immediate, intense phase, and I was just about able to go back to work after just four weeks. I could only work a couple of days a week for the six or seven weeks after that, and, though I'm doing significantly better than I was, I still need to take occasional day or week off work.

The breakdown was interesting for me (silver lining there), because I experienced a couple of new symptoms. I was quite desperately suicidal during that period. Not constantly, but certainly I'd have three or four sessions a week where I was struggling to hold on. Despite having a long, long history of depression, this is the first time I've been suicidal. 

I have regularly had periods where I didn't much care if I lived or died, and have occasionally been filled with enough self-hatred to want to punish myself, and I've even made vague plans to be filed for later. This, however, has been the first time when I've gone through that darkness of wanting to die so much that I wanted to stop waiting for it and to take matters into my own hands. It was pretty harsh to get through, but get through it I did.

When I was a child, I was of the opinion that suicide was the most selfish thing a person could do. I still have a fair amount of sympathy for people who share that opinion. However, in the past fifteen years or so, I've slowly found myself shifting my sympathy to those people who are so desperate as to take their own lives. Now my opinion has changed again. It’s subtle, so subtle I don’t think I can put it into words, but I've added something to the ‘desperation’. Managing to not kill yourself when you’re actively suicidal takes a massive chunk of energy. When you’re in the fog of Depression, that energy is pretty hard to come by, and it relies on you having just enough logic still intact to know that it’s worth fighting through. When it comes at you over and over for weeks on end, and you don’t know when that’s going to stop happening … well, I can understand how people get so worn down that they just give in.

I am very lucky. I have a supportive family, and a frankly exceptional husband (in this area – I’d still like him to learn how to clean the kitchen properly), so, with a lot of help, I got through it.

That’s the largest part of my excuse. The reason that draft one wasn't ready by the end of June was that I was occupied almost exclusively with trying not to kill myself for most of May. While I love writing and hope to please my readers, you’ll understand why Gren moved down in my priorities.

There are a couple of other things that also blighted me during that time. The first was that I suddenly lost the ability to write. I mean literally; my handwriting went from fairly bad to nonsensical, and my typing speed also diminished to almost nothing. My brain started to do strange things with the keyboard. My poor spelling has always been something of a problem, but I started to type whole words backwards, or get stuck jamming the same key over and over again unable to control my fingers. So, on the rare occasions when I could work out how I wanted a sentence to go, I was unable to get it onto the document. 

Again, I this wasn't all day every day, and I was often able to hold it together to write the odd status update and email. Creative writing was gone for most of the time though, and I couldn't touch Gren at all for about six weeks, and then had to limit it to an hour at a shot. To say this was frustrating is something of an understatement.

On the other hand, it wasn’t nearly so frustrating as the second blight: I couldn’t read.

I was able to work out what the words on the page said, so that’s something. I wasn’t, however, quite so able to work out what they meant. I’d spend ten seconds deciphering what a specific sentence was trying to say, and then, by the time I’d started the next one, I’d have forgotten the first. I’d battle through a paragraph over the course of forty minutes, and then I’d be so exhausted I’d have to sleep again.

Again, this wasn’t all day every day, but I focussed my energy on getting through what was necessary, and then I slept. Reading for pleasure was gone.

I’ll tell you what though; I suddenly have a massive amount of sympathy with Tom and his dyslexia. Reading is not fun. Reading, to him, is a series of mini mysteries that need to be decoded, and by the time he’s said the word correctly it has no connection with any other word. When I read a sentence back to him, it’s like he’s hearing it for the first time. I'm pleased that we continued to read to him at night, rather than forcing him to do it for himself.

For me the ability is slowly coming back, and like I say, the worst of this was over after the first four weeks. After a couple of months of occasionally dabbling in old, favourite, comfort reading, and after a number of frustrating false starts, I finally managed to read an entire novel without too many problems. It was Night Watch, by Sarah Waters, and it was precisely what I needed. It took me another month or so before I found Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell. OK, when I say ‘found’, I really mean ‘stole from my Mother in Law’, but still, I read the whole book. Both took longer than I usually take over a novel, but they made such a difference to me. The idea that I might not ever be able to read a book again had crossed my mind lots of times (I wasn't at my most logical), so these two were something of an elixir.

This weekend I demolished the whole of the Hunger Games trilogy. I wanted to jump up and down on my bed, flinging beloved books, old and new, into the air yelling ‘ I'm alive! I'm alive! I'm alive!’ at the end of them.

So, there you have all my excuses. 1: preoccupied by the trying to say alive thing. 2: literally couldn't do it – and this still creeps up occasionally, and I’ll still find that a two or three hour writing stint wipes me out for the rest of the day. 3: At my most desperate I went back through all the advice I've ever been given about writing, and finally stumbled across the one that’s as old as the hills; ‘read a lot’. I needed to start there.

The Gren Peppard sequel still underway, but it’s going to take a lot longer than I initially bargained for. I'm asking you to trust me when I say that because of the extra time, because of the things that I'm learning and re-learning now, it’s going to be a better book for it.

Pip xxx

Poem

I've fretted over whether to publish this one or not, but in the end, I've decided that it's as much me as anything else I've written here. I'm perfectly fine.

Poem

‘Build a castle!’

‘It’s a cake!’

‘It’s a cake for the sea!’

One child stands

‘The sprinkles!’

hands loosen

tiny stones fall

They catch the sun

a glorious shining moment

as they spiral down

Giggles, love, hope.

Beyond this tiny play

The sea.

Placid

Lumbering

Huge

Blue and silver

heaving. Smooth.

She could reach out now

stroke it with fingertips

She could step onto it

It beckons

Shimmering

Sparkling

Enticing

A line of orange buoys;

‘Here is safe.’

‘Here is not.’

‘We will take care of you.’

She could swim out there

She thinks.

All the way to the buoys.

Past them, perhaps.

She wades in.

The soothing cool.

It meets her

rushing, kindly

gently, intimately

into inside her.

Still on, still further.

Stones shift

Feet slip

She suddenly swims

Not ready yet

Panic

Alarm

The water waits

She composes

Steadier now

she swims.

Water falls over her

like a glistening, satin sheet.

She dreams of sleep

of rest

of quiet.

One strong pull.

Two.

Three.

Soon she slows.

She never swam well:

feeble arms

imperfect technique.

She knows

She won’t reach them.

She’ll fall short.

It’s not important.

They can’t keep her safe

for all their claims.

Still she swims

inch by inch

away from the shore.

She can go no further.

She stops.

The orange buoys watch

in bemused silence.

One leg fails

then the other.

Pain in her knees

unbendable.

Pulse rises slightly

Surprise.

One dip first

head submerged

then scrawny arms pull up.

One more breath.

Cold. Watery.

Choking.

Another dip

More pain

A forced breath

Bubbles. Vomit.

Tired melts away

into the cool, salty sting

and that moment

is glorious.

The bright, shining she

Extinguished now.

Her water

Her salt

Her iron

Shared.

Seaweed in her hair.

A laugh, a shout.

She’s returns.

A giant breath.

Salty eyes.

Dry, safe, warm Air.

Cold heart

Shivering lungs

Head exhausted

Spinning, whirling

Words come slow.

The sea steals round the cake.

Children laugh and goad

‘Eat it! Eat it!’

It accepts the sacrifice.

Her dream fades

hidden. quiet. lurking.

Saved for another day.

Pip

The beach.

I am doing so much better than I have been in the past couple of months. It’s been tough, and I’m not at the top of the mountain yet, but I’m at least half way up.

Part of what I’m trying to do to help me feel better is to take regular walks outside. Unfortunately, my inherent laziness is getting in the way, and I’m finding it easy to excuse myself because of the rain, or the fact that there’s something really good on the telly. (Did you see the sport on Saturday? What a marvellous, marvellous night!) I am trying though, to walk briskly enough to feel the muscles in my legs working, and to feel the blood pumping around. I pay attention to my breathing and concentrate on my breath rushing through my nose, cooling the back of my throat and filling my lungs. These walks don’t always bring a perfect stillness, but it does make the noise in my head a bit quieter for a while. 

This week, I’m at home with the children. I was a bit worried about this, as they tend to add to the head-noise. I was also a bit concerned that I wouldn’t be able to leave to find these moments of stillness, or if I did, it would be on their schedule and not on mine. I pondered and fretted about this, until I came up with a subtle and cunning plan: I’d just take them with me.

I’d walk a little slower, but the breathing could still happen. I could point out the soothing things I found on the way; those bricks, that garden, these leaves, and they could look or not. Yesterday I took them to the park to do some running about, so I got my exercise, and by a clever use of the ‘run all the way to the big rock!’ command, I got my alone time too.

Today, I was happy and confident enough to take them in the car to the beach. And you know what? It ended up being better for having them with me.

Look at my tall strong boy here; all limbs and muscle. He wants to be an Olympic runner, and he has the tenacity to get somewhere with this wish.

Here they are together, about ten minutes before they were both soaked to the skin. Claudia's usually the more courageous of the two, but she had a feeling she didn't want to go far without him just yet.

I wish I had some pictures of them digging in the dark, wet sand, and looking for crabs. Or the moment that Claudia thought she’d try to get back to me walking across the stones, going; ‘Ow… ow… ow…’ with every footstep, but it not occurring to her to go the short way or to cut across the sand.

I hope that these memories stay in my head for a while. Good times, small smiles, salt in our noses; these moments are often too few and too far between. I’m beginning to realise though, that one or two tiny moments of joy in the course of the day is just about enough.

It’s put me in mind of this poem by E.E. Cummings;

5

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

for whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Pip xxx

Therapy

Sorry, I have no intention of continually harping on about my various health problems, but I was thinking about this, and wanted to log it here.

Going through therapy was, quite frankly, the hardest and most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life.  There was one session out of sixteen where I didn’t cry at all. The vast majority of them had me in a sobbing, wasted heap on the floor.  But the procedure, in my case, was absolutely worth it.

Here is a random analogy. You're standing by the side of a fast running torrent of water. The side you're on is stormy and thorny and full of danger and things jumping out at you to attack you. You're terrified the entire time. The other side is lush green meadows. You must to get to that meadow, but to get there, you have to go through the water. 

That water looks scary. It looks dark and murky. It looks like it might kill you. You feel like there’s no way of getting through it without drowning and being swept away. 

However, there are some things that look like they might help you over, rocks and branches and shallow spots. On the other hand, there are also terrifying waterfalls and deep holes and tangling weeds.  Your only guide is a person who has a wealth of knowledge about crossing this river.  They can hear you, but they can’t see you or what's in the river. The only way to get across is to share with the guide what you can see.

So you have to say, "Right now, weeds to my left, a rock in front of me and a whirlpool to my right. Should I try the rock?" The therapist can then say, "is the rock green?" and you can say "Yes."  The therapist might say, "Avoid the rock, in my experience that rock will be too slippery for you to hold on to. Try the weeds, they look like they'll tangle you, but I know they're strong and will take your weight."

It's terrifying. It takes a massive leap of faith, it can be shockingly painful to be in that water, but you have to get to the other side.

It might be that you take the weeds and they give way and you're clinging to the rock anyway.

It might be that you panic and say, “No, I can’t try the weeds! It’s too scary, let me try the rock! The rock! I need to try the rock!” and they might say “OK, try the rock, lets see how that goes and you might try the rock but slip and end up clinging to the weeds anyway.

But the key thing is, you have to communicate that to the therapist so they can absorb this, and work out how to get you along the next couple of meters, and then a bit further, and a bit further until you get to the other side.

It can be a really beneficial relationship. It can really help you to get to the other side, but the therapist has to know all that you can see to make it work.

I was quite lucky. Largely do to the medication that I was on, I was in a position where I was well enough to know there was no way round it so I just plunged into the water. It was hideous, but having taken that initial leap, I was already wet so there was nothing left to lose. Because I'm human, I was in the river shivering and suddenly realised I had no clue what I was seeing, and I wasn't entirely sure what the guide needed to know. Consequently, I failed to tell my therapist about several key things, and I fixated on something else, so I spent longer in the water than I might have done otherwise, but as he said when I was out and dry ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it, sometimes these things are harder to see when you’re in the water.’

There was one slimy weed he wanted me to conquer and though we went through it over and over with me just barely hanging on I couldn’t understand why he made me do that. Until I was out and dry in the meadow and six months on I had a moment of ‘Oh! That’s why that was important! Doh!’

But I got out. 

It is possible to get across and get out.

I am struggling.

It's not a big deal, really. I'm not sure that anything can be done about it apart from to sit it out, but this is a space where I kind of want to put things as honestly as I can.

The situation is this: I feel ill.

This is fine, sometimes people feel ill. They either take something for it and get better, or sit it out and get better. The thing that I'm struggling with is that I don't know why I feel ill and my brain is itching and rebelling at the not knowing.

This, again, taps into the mental health problems that I have. I've had them for a long while, I have them now, and I have no reason to believe that I'll ever stop having them. Sometimes I feel extremely resentful about this. Sometimes I curse the world and myself for making me this way. Actually, at the moment, I'm finding it a frustration and nothing more. It's a frustration, because I honestly can't tell whether it's clouding my judgement on the feeling ill or not.

Here's the situation. I'm having sudden feelings of 'illness'. The symptoms are nausea, extreme light-headedness, heart racing, shivering, feeling cold in my extremities even on ragingly hot days, extreme tiredness (of the kind where if I just blink for too long I'll be asleep). Now, none of these symptoms are anything to write home about. I've had them all together, fairly often over the past five years. We've checked thyroid, iron levels, pituitary gland, and I know for sure that there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. The most reasonable explanation is that I'm having sudden drops in blood pressure, probably due to panic and as a side effect of the medication I'm on.

All well and good.

So this is what I'm struggling with at the moment. I've just been ill. You may have heard me whining about it here and elsewhere. I've been told to expect a long convalescence period, and to not to expect to feel normal for several months. The thing is, 'normal' for me includes all the symptoms listed above. Those symptoms could also fit into a number of other illnesses including the post-pneumonia thing. My imagination is annoyingly active and at the drop of a hat, it will happily start diagnosing me with the black death or the ebola virus or some other such nonsense.

So at the moment, my life keeps falling into the following cycle:

1. I feel ill, perhaps breathlessness or dizziness as you would expect following pneumonia.
2. I notice that I'm feeling slightly ill, and this will spark a full on panic attack, with the symptoms that I've listed.
3. I don't notice that I'm panicking, just that I'm feeling really unwell and I need to lie down and abandon my family so I don't vomit on them or faint in front of them.
4. While I'm on my own, lying down, feeling ill, I start to think 'Oo, these are bad symptoms, what if there's something really wrong with me, like the plague, or the ebola virus or some other such nonsense?
5. This leads to; wow will I tell my children that I'm going to die? I need to ask James if I've got the right level of life insurance. What's the most appropriate way to tell people? Well, I'd better wait until my test results come back before telling anyone anything. (I don't know what test results I think I'm waiting for, but I start assuming a long stretch of medical intervention and start planning what happens and when.) I want to see my children grow up. I can't not see them grow up. Shit, if I die before the next season of Sherlock, I'm going to be extremely pissed off!
6. I start imagining my death, and there's nothing I can do to prevent it. Not even for Sherlock.

Now, reading this, I'm guessing people would think 'she's such a hypochondriac!' or 'What a loon!' or 'What an attention seeker!' and yes, I am all of those things. They all happen to be symptoms of the Depression that we all know about and I'm being treated for. And unfortunately, knowing that doesn't make the feelings and the thoughts any easier to deal with. (Apart from the Sherlock one, I can quite quickly decide that I'll definitely get to see that come Hell or high-water.)

In the meantime, I'll be lying in bed, often in tears, watching the ceiling spin and terrified to move. This will go on until I venture downstairs and cry at my husband.

Now, I'm not totally sure where I'm going with this, other than simply knowing that telling someone, or blogging about the fact that I'm being panicky and weird helps me remember that all of this is simply a symptom of the Depression, and not the plague, the ebola virus or some other such nonsense. It's a panic attack, and they're slightly worse and slightly more frequent simply because I'm run down as anyone would expect to be following an illness.

I don't do much activity, but what I do do is generally focussed around staying mentally well, so walking places, particularly with the kids, going to work (which I complain about but I see people and I know I'm good at it), and the writing in the evenings, they all play a part in keeping my mind balanced so that I don't fall into these panic cycles. Unfortunately, all of these things have been curtailed slightly recently, so again, I'd expect my mind to start running off at the moment. So on that level, feeling like this now is actually normal and expected.

But like I say, knowing that doesn't make it easier to snap out of it. Or I can snap out of it, my my addled mind just jumps onto the next problem it decides to make up. It's almost as if, I know I feel the physical symptoms of panic and worry, so my mind has to make something up to fit those feelings onto.

It's hard to find something else to think about, because my attention span is extremely short at the moment. Even the writing, which I love to do, fizzles out after the first hundred words or so. I drift off from films and even TV shows that I've been looking forward to (brain to addled to understand Doctor Who, for crying out loud), I can't think well enough to play computer games. I'm just stuck in a panic rut without the energy I need to scramble up the side.

What has helped is the enormous amount of support I've been getting from all corners. I've been checked up on and monitored and advised regularly, Sis has taken the kids off me several times so I can calm down about how exhausted James is getting and sleep without feeling guilty, and James is doing everything that needs doing and letting me sleep or just ignore him as often as I need. Work have been brilliant about not pressuring me to go back (yes, I know this should be standard practise, but we all know places where it isn't).

It's all been good. It's all been the sort of kindness that gives me warm fuzzy feelings instead of the cold, panicky ones. There's absolutely nothing more that I need from people, seriously, nothing more could be done by anyone that would make me feel better right now.

I'm still Depressed, because Depression is an illness and not simply a reaction to stuff. I have a self made 0-10 depression scale, where 0 is feeling as low as I've ever felt in my life, and 10 is feeling 'normal' (which I'll describe as 'living in the now, enjoying what I'm doing whether it's easy, hard, happy, sad, but ultimately, something I can deal with and not even questioning my ability to deal with it, and just knowing it's one moment in time so not even thinking about beyond that, if you know what I mean'). On that scale, currently, over the past five days or so, I've averaged out at a 3 or a 4. I've had better moments, I've had worse moments, but probably on average, about 3 or 4.

I'm still going with the 'sit it out' approach, even though I've identified that I'm pretty bad at the moment. The options that I have are quite scant. I'm on the highest dose I can take of my medication, and I don't want to switch to anything else, because I've tried lots of kinds and this works where most of the others make things worse, so it's worth waiting. I don't need (and can't afford) more therapy. All of this is physical. I've been as bad before and I got better then, and when I can properly get back to normal physically, as long as I'm careful, the mind stuff will follow.

So ultimately, though I'm struggling, all is also well. Or at least it will be.

Right, I'm glad I've got that off my chest. It was, I feel, a good rant.