I have a follower, Yay and welcome! Halfwaybetweenthegutter

In my head I believe I am a wonderful writer: funny, insightful and ironic.  I often lie awake at night composing endless narratives, cheerfully abandoning the pretence of sleeping, preferring to hone a sentence in peace without interruptions.  But the really strange thing is that now that I have a blog I am struggling to share more than a handful of sparse paragraphs.  There is so much that I want to say; to share.

I have spent today browsing other mental health blogs and being completely blown away by the quality of the writing and the useful links and the brilliant photos which capture so much with just the briefest of titles. Halfwaybetweenthegutter  I salute you.  I don’t think that I can write like that – you are an artist, I’m more of a jobbing journalist.  Some of what I have read speaks to my innermost being – a phantom child, lonely and starved for companionship.  I feel as if I have joined a party, where as usual everyone is having way more fun than me, but this time I can see a small space for me to creep in, my presence acknowledged and tacitly accepted.

I’m thrilled, nervous and excited.  I had not expected to feel this sense of belonging.  My blog is really planned for people like me who are struggling to make sense of a dramatic change in mental health.  People who have spent time within the normal population – perhaps been successful, thriving on the challenge that a demanding and full life brings – who have yet to come to terms with their new and unfamiliar persona.  Who hate and resent the change in their circumstances.  Who reject the opportunity to become a more rounded person: to acknowledge deeply buried insecurities and expose their vulnerabilities to the outside world.  I want to be the intensely private, self-contained, difficult, confrontational, assertive, ambitious, tough cookie that I spent years pretending to be.  I want my camouflage back.  I want to be able to hide again in plain sight.

I want to have a job that other people respect.  I want economic power.  I want to be part of the problem in a prejudiced society.  But I broke my toys.  I never had many friends and they were part of the life I can no longer lead.  I pushed everyone away from me in shame, humiliation and self-loathing.  I have lost all my friends and distanced most of my family.  I don’t know how to build relationships which are not predicated on sex or power.  I don’t know how to ask for help, or to accept help when offered.  I don’t know when I need help.  I don’t trust others to be able to help me.

I have to learn wisdom: to accept the things that I cannot change.  I have to learn tolerance, self-respect…self-love.  I have to learn how to forgive myself and my flaws and my failings.  I have to learn to like my quirkiness.

Instead I want to throw myself to the floor and indulge in a massive body flailing, writhing, throwing myself around, spitting, ranting tantrum.  I want to howl with rage against the moon.  I long to escape this life, to bound unleashed out into the night. To pad silently through dark alleyways, to scramble up grassy hillsides, to push – panting and sweaty- past bushes and trailing brambles, force myself over barbed wire, grinning with mad intent.  I yearn to throw myself into the abyss, into nothingness, into silence and space and rushing air and oblivion.  I crave this passionately.  Secretly I hope for the Hollywood ending.  I hope for a split second of lucidity, of regret, of apology.  I daren’t hope for even one moment where everything suddenly makes sense.

But I don’t trust myself.  I am no longer competent; I daren’t take the risk that I might cock it up.   My family haven’t signed up to wash my arse, wipe dribble off my face and I can’t face a future where I lose all rights to self-determination.

If I can just get well enough to be sure I could manage it, then, maybe…coldly, rationally, yes I’m there.  But for now, I’m stuck here. Blogging.