Nineteen: Adventures of Poland

Mostly of the emotional kind, I'm afraid.  It was on the whole a successful trip, but being away with someone else's family brought a lot of stuff up for me.

29th July

Just crossed the Polish border.  M and I committed the cardinal sin of going for lunch at McDonald's when we stopped at a petrol station - M's mother and her partner seem to want to drive non-stop from 9am to 7pm for some insane reason - but barring the occurrence of any tragedies of the natural or human kind we should reach Gdansk in good time this evening.  I'm going to attempt to use the rest of the journey productively, and finish Volume I of "Le Morte D'Arthur".

(later)

Is M's mother still cross with me? (for stopping to eat lunch at McDonald's.) Her silence says that she is.  Why do I suddenly feel so small?  Guilty, fearful and tense.  The pull of negative energy is so strong it's as if we were the only two people in the car.  It's exhausting.  Imagined or otherwise, I wonder what the setup here reminds me of.

(later)

It was probably inevitable that this car journey would remind me of going away with my parents as a child.  My mother would drive, and my father would use a map to get us hopelessly lost.  They would fight.  Sometimes it got nasty.  Nevertheless, I remember it fondly.  Sitting in the back with my brother, a bag of sweets between us, being lulled to sleep by the motion of the car and the BBC World Service rumbling low on the radio.  Secure in the care of the adults in front of us, who (mostly) knew where they were going and would always get us there safely.

The later journeys weren't so peaceful.  Either there was more fighting, more tension, more silence, more failed communication and a greater sense of discord between the four of us (well, three - my brother never really featured in my emotional configurations of the family) or I simply became more aware of what was present all along.  My mother became a vicious, relentless harpy, wounding with words chosen for their lethal precision, the threat of real violence never far away.  My father would either become the bleeding martyred target for her poisoned arrows, or beneath a shield of heavy silence emanate a violence of his own.  His aggression erupted rarely, but when it did it was with an amplified and eventually disastrous effect.

Childhood perception is not wholly trustworthy.  After continuing a while in this vein I find myself explaining my father's suicide in the following way:  as she had almost done to me, my mother lashed out one too many times at the most vulnerable part of my father, and unable to cope with what she had discovered, left him alone with it until it consumed him entirely.  Ergo, my mother killed my father as she had wanted to kill me.  (It may be of interest that, after much provocation, my brother did once actually hurl this accusation at her).

But this isn't the whole story.  My mother loved my father.  The silence and the distance he forced between them hurt her deeply, and the final silence was devastating - she lay immobile on the sofa for days, refusing food and literally wasting away.  After he died, I could find no trace of the former spite and malevolence I thought I had detected in her.  Even in the flashes of anger that sometimes came over her when she felt most painfully her abandonment, the "evil" of before was absent.  She was just another fragile hum being, who had loved too much.  However slowly and reluctantly, I have come to accept that who we were and who we are, what happened and why is a puzzle that may never be pieced together - least of all by me.











                                                                       Botanical Gardens.  Wrocław, Poland.

Sixteen: Sweet reminder

"You're lagging Grace, you're lagging", as my boyfriend would say.  I promised myself I'd write up the second opinion meeting I had last week, but something in me is resisting.  Not that anything spectacular happened.  I just seem to be in a sort of mental torpor where the whole issue is concerned, and I don't want to disturb it just yet. 

I keep re-reading and editing my last few sentences.  I am not at all sure that what I am writing is making any sense.  It is my speech but I do not quite understand it anymore.  In the days following Amy Winehouse's death it would be crass to suggest my own drug use creates anything like the problems attached to serious addiction, but I do have a growing sense that I need to slow things down.  Tonight is the third night we've smoked pot (the Americans staying with us roll Californian joints, composed wholly of weed, no tobacco), and the first night for a while without a (in)decent amount of  alcohol.  Within the past two weeks I have also tried LSD and ketamine, two substances I never touched before.

M isn't right.  Within half an hour of lighting up I noticed an abrupt change in his manner and speech.  It's persisting and I hope to God it will lift when he sobers up, but what if it doesn't?   My own cognition is somewhat impaired too, but it's as if he's in a whole different realm to me, a place where time creeps and thoughts shift like sand, burying all my distressed attempts at connection.   He's silent unless I ask him a question, which he may or may not begin to answer after a prolonged pause and will certainly not finish.  He stares at me, or his eyes don't move.  He hears me within his own frame of reference, divorced from and contemptuous of mine. 

It scares me.  The M I know is just no longer there, reminding me and warning me of  the possibility of a complete, future absence.  The absence of psychotic mania, or the absence of any other unwanted parting.  When I think about losing him, my best friend, my lover, I can't stop from crying. In losing the (nearly) complete understanding that I thought we had achieved, I lose myself.  All the castles in my head come crashing down, shuddering and splitting to their foundations which vanish like scotch mist.  The wilderness overwhelms me.  I doubt whether my perception is accurate.  Maybe it is me who cannot understand him, and maybe it is me that needs to understand him, because I am the one that has strayed from the path of reality - I have conjured this storm myself.  Again, I know this may not make much sense.  My words are running away from me.

I will stop now and read over, once.  Then try to engage with the man in his dressing gown, pacing the kitchen and trying to see over my shoulder.

Perhaps lagging is needed after all.

Nine: Four years

It's the fourth anniversary of his death today.  I don't feel much. Numb.  Anxious that I'll stop feeling numb.  My session at the Tavistock was not terribly gruelling.  I spoke minimally about my Dad, more about my relationship with my boyfriend which feels a more immediate issue.

In short I made it through the 55 minutes without crying, and I felt relatively okay until on the way out, I crossed paths with the inpatient psychiatrist who saw me through the whole ordeal four years ago.  I have seen her maybe once since, also at the Tavistock, and although I think she did nod at me on that occasion I had no expectation that she would engage in conversation with me if we encountered eachother again.  Perhaps it was the date that made her response today seem particularly heartless.  I know she noticed me, as I saw her scanning my face.  When I reached the bottom of the stair case (she was ahead of me on the floor below) she turned round to look at me again, and I said "hi".  That was all.  But she didn't nod at me, or smile, or do anything else to acknowledge the greeting.  She just walked away. 

It hurts.

I've been staying with my boyfriend for the past 6 days, during which time I have not cut myself or vomitted once.  I do however have to go back to my Mum's tomorrow, at least until Monday, and I'm not sure at all how I'll manage.  I'm trying to live very much in the present, and not let a moment's anger or sadness spoil the next.  Tonight we're going out for a Thai meal, and I know I'll feel safe at least until tomorrow night.  If not, the poster campaign I keep noticing around York may (with a certain irony) serve to remind me of why I should not hurt myself:

A visit to A&E costs on average £117 per patient, so Dr Lethem tells us.

Five - A taste of my own Medicine

Last night, my phone alerted me to a text message at 1.30 in the morning.  It was from a girl on my course who I have got to know slightly over the past few weeks – let’s call her Ellen.

The message read: 

“I’m in hospital, taken an overdose”.

Ellen and I originally got talking when she sat next to me in our first workshop of the current term.  She was in one of my classes last term too, and she told me she had been really worried about me when she saw a bandage on my arm.  Apparently she had tried to catch me up after class to ask if I was okay, but I was walking too fast (I do, particularly when I’m on edge.  Ellen has bad knees so she didn’t really stand a chance).   I was surprised that she had noticed, and rather gratified that she cared enough to worry.  Despite the very obvious signs of self-injury I display, including one memorable day last term when I was really out of it and walked around campus with clothes soaked in the arterial blood I had spilled the night before, no one here has asked any questions.  I do appreciate the respect of my privacy, but for me there is a fine balance between an intrusive and an uncaring reaction. The fact that not a word was said by anyone about the scars on my arms had an unexpected isolating effect.   In some ways, I think I have grown reliant on remarks from others about the scarring to affirm my more hidden suffering.  I have felt for a long time the existence of a “split” in myself, the emotionally unstable hurting core armoured by a shell of social enthusiasm, rational capability and intellectual interests that seeks to distract and divert attention from the “real” me.  But while this attention is terrifying, I also crave it.  It proves that I exist, or at least, that the part of me that is often overlooked exists.  When this recognition or “attention” does not take place, it has a greatly destabilising effect, barely discernable at first but increasingly apparent over time – last term, it got to the point where I felt SO divided, SO unacknowledged that I began to doubt my sanity.

This is a rather long-winded way of explaining that Ellen’s interest was valuable to me, and that I felt disposed to encourage a friendship between the two of us. There was (and is) however, a complicating factor.  Ellen of course has her own problems, problems which I have come to realise she presupposes I can intimately identify with. I have come to expect the appeals “You know how it is, you know what it’s like” to pepper a sizable proportion of our conversation – which, more often than not, is about her.  Ellen is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, as well as depression, and I do wonder if the nature of our exchanges has something to do with this.  It may be a case of pot and kettle to suggest that she is particularly self- absorbed, but while I too tend to feel my existence as particularly isolated, I (perhaps overly) compensate for this by showing a pronounced interest in other people when I spend time with them.  Ellen feels that she “does not exist” when she is alone, that she needs other people to make her exist.  When I am on my own, I am all too real – it’s the rest of the world that disappears.  If it is possible to form such a comparative hypothesis, perhaps then this  explains why Ellen is “larger than life” (she has informed me that people have told her she comes across as “intense” and “frightening”) around others,  the only time she is able to realise the concreteness of her existence, whilst I am overwhelmed by other people’s needs when I engage with them, to the extent that in order to recuperate, I have to cut off from a recollection of these completely when I am alone.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like two sides of the same coin – though I do not think I fit the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s, I think Ellen could quite easily be diagnosed with BPD.  The irritation, as well as concern I felt when I received her text message was an important reminder of how my poorly integrated outside and inside worlds have worked to cause a lot of damage to my relationships, hurting those who I fail to realise (until too late) love me.  Ellen is fine.  The overdose she took does not sound substantial enough to have caused any damage, if her reports of the lack of medical treatment she was given in hospital are anything to go by.  Ellen, I think, wants me to help her, if only through the understanding she thinks I possess of how she feels.  She offers, unasked, details of her self-harming behaviour and watches closely for my reaction.  I cannot help but be responsive, but I am very wary of getting too involved.  For various reasons, which I won’t go into now, I think some of her recent behaviour has been modelled on what she knows of my history.  A few days ago, before her recent overdose, she told me she had once again taken a few too many of her citalopram pills.  I was bemused, and asked her what she had wanted to achieve – assuming she knew, as I do, that (whilst not a great thing to do) a small SSRI overdose is not particularly dangerous.    I can’t help but wonder if my reaction played some part in the fact that last night she appears to have taken paracetamol as well as citalopram.

I am annoyed partly because I hardly know her, and in some ways I do feel the text was an imposition. I was also angry because it took no account whatsoever of my possible feelings, and gave me only enough information to make me feel worried (disproportionately, considering the situation wasn’t in the end dangerous) and powerless.  It did make me think, though, of how my own self harm and suicide attempts must have affected those close to me – if I felt the way I did about Ellen, who after all is only really an acquaintance, how much worse it must be if you have a greater personal investment in someone who seems to behave towards themselves, and towards you, in such a cruel, careless way.  Those are emotionally loaded words, and my anger towards Ellen was almost entirely an emotional response.  While it may not be the most useful reaction, it is human – it is human to hurt when someone, particularly someone you love, hurts.  My experience of re- gaining consciousness in intensive care, hooked up to a million tubes, my mum, her face ashen, standing over me; or of my mother telling me how my Dad (he was still alive then) had cried when I was being treated for my first serious overdose and they were still waiting to find out if I would pull through, has a flip-side.  A flip-side which is at heart no less caring, but requires more insight, and in my case personal experience of being on the other side, to understand.

It is the frustration with a friend who has once again put herself in hospital, the friend you were relying on that weekend to come to see you on your Erasmus placement abroad.  It is the bewildered, frightened fury you feel when she goes out to celebrate a birthday with you only to spend an hour vomiting in the toilets of a bar and then sits down in the middle of the road, and you have to call an ambulance.  It is my mother’s terror, as she finds me hurting myself once again – the terror that provokes a hysterical “you don’t have to kill yourself; I’ll do it for you”.  It is my therapist's questioning of why I am “tormenting” her by making her watch me lose a dangerous amount of weight, yet again.   It is all this, and so much more. 

Thank you, Ellen, for helping me to see.

Three. A letter that won't be sent.

Dear A,

Tell me what to do!  I’m menstruating again and my hormones are all over the place.  We sat for an hour making uncomfortable conversation.  He said my message had been a bolt from the blue, and I said I thought his delay in answering might mean he wasn’t going to.  He asked me why – I had trouble explaining.  Eventually I said I thought he would be angry with me, for maintaining silence for so long and then breaking it pretty much on a whim.  He said that if it was anybody else, he would be angry.  I said that I’m nothing special and he said he begged to differ.

We had 20 minutes before I had to leave.  I said I felt sad, but I didn’t know why.  He put his arm around me.  Slowly,   he kissed me and I kissed him.  Bittersweet is the word that comes to mind.    At the ticket barrier he didn’t want to let me go.  A train guard who was watching us kindly suggested he saw me onto the train, but I declined.  I’ve invited him to come and stay with me next week, however.  Now I’m panicking about it.  I want him but when I don’t want him I DON’T want him, and if he stays with me in a city he doesn’t know we will have to be together  every hour of the day. 

My mother called, several times.  I usually call her when I’m on the train.  Today I didn’t.  She asked me what I had been doing, apart from seeing you.  I told her nothing much.  She was pleased when I broke up with M, and if I said I had seen him she would worry.   When I ask you to tell me what to do, I suppose I’m asking you to be someone other to me than you are.  Someone more deeply invested in my life than you are able to be. And when I really think about it, I don’t want you to tell me, because I assume you probably feel the same way about the situation as my Mum does.  I assume that to be the case, but if I knew it to be the case the therapeutic spell would break forever and I would hate you freely.  And yet, even if I believe you think differently to my mother you can’t win.  I felt two very odd and seemingly contradictory things towards you when I was with M.   Anger, linked somehow to a sense of abandonment.  And guilt – as if I had betrayed you.

I want to correct what I think was a misunderstanding in our session today.  I was confused when you suggested that my use of the word “brooding” implied self-absorption or self-interest on your part, because that wasn’t what I had intended.  I presumed I had used the word erroneously so I didn’t challenge you.  But according to the dictionary, brooding can simply mean “deeply or seriously thoughtful”, and by this definition its meditative quality is only as introspective as all thinking-words must be.  In my use of “brooding”, it was the “seriously” bit that I was getting at.  I do sometimes feel excluded by what I term your seriousness, but only because I don’t understand it.  I can’t see your thoughts to make sense of them; I can’t place you, or track you.  That doesn’t mean that I think you have lost me, that you are standing impossibly outside of me unengaged.  Most of the time, on balance, I have to conclude that you are engaged with me, but in a way that I can’t identify.  It is that which is so unnerving.

I know you will counter that by pointing out that there are certainly times when I don’t feel you are with me at all, and of course you are perfectly correct.  But you suggested the distance today when I didn’t feel it particularly, which makes me wonder.   Perhaps, probably, it is unfair of me, but I sometimes think you drag things into the room that aren’t there because you want me to keep them in mind regardless.  You pretend to see things that may well be part of my wider “clinical” picture but are not manifest at that particular moment in time, in order to educate me psychologically.   I know that pre-supposes that you are always aware of exactly what I am feeling, and exactly which way you should respond to it.  All the same, it grates on me how in discussion we always seem caught between the same binary oppositions – all or nothing, inside or outside, alone or overwhelmed…  You could say it’s because I am unable to get past the dualities within myself that they appear time and time again, but I wonder if the very idea of these oppositions is worth challenging.    I’m not sure I do always filter my perception through such a ruthlessly divided lens.   The binary may be internalised to some degree, but there’s an awful lot of external pressure to maintain it too.  If I comply (and catching myself in the act of this is the most aggravating thing of all) it’s because firstly it’s such a tremendous effort to see beyond it, and secondly because it promises to provide at least some structure to contain that which I fear cannot be contained, and is essentially meaningless.  It is a flawed structure but it is still alluring.  Much like my relationship with M, which fails to make sense of me but insists on being revisited just in case. If I could only completely surrender to another, or another’s idea, and exterminate my individual consciousness  - perhaps then I could be saved.

I was going to make some hideous joke here, to detract from the brooding – see what I did there? -  tone of that last paragraph, but God forbid I be accused of trying to entertain you.  Anyway.  I’ll see you on Wednesday.