Two.

This blog, which is barely a blog (consisting as it does of a whole two entries) is already presenting me with problems.  When I made it I was very aware of not wanting create a public “journal”, a space to whinge about and cling on to issues that have served only to disfigure my life and threaten my future.  This year is in many ways a turning point for me – I have finally, at 21, made it to university.   I have been discharged from nearly all psychiatric care, and… dare I say it… I have started to enjoy life more often than not.   I have moved back in with my mother during the holidays (she evicted me when I was 18, and discharged prematurely from a self harm unit for losing too much weight), and slowly, slowly, my friends and family are starting to trust me again.

I am cautiously ambitious.  I would, eventually, like to go into academia.  I know I will write, and I hope that during the three years of my degree my literary interests will develop in a direction that I will be able to take further.   The course I am on is everything I could have wished for.  I know I am in the right place, and I want to stay here.  I will fight to stay here.  The trouble is, I may have to.  I enjoyed a lot of support in London – as well as psychotherapy twice a week at the Tavistock I had a care-cordinator who I saw weekly, a consultant at the CMHT, a dietician and another psychiatrist at the eating disorder unit.  There is nothing like that available here – although I was referred to the CMHT, they were able to offer me very little.  My experience has been wholly negative – one consultant who assessed me remarked that “frankly, I am very surprised that someone with a personality disorder of your severity is able to do a degree”.  This being the case, however,  he  wouldn’t be seeing me “just to monitor your sertraline”.  Of course, I determined to prove him wrong, and with the support of the GP on campus I did rather well, up to the last few weeks of the spring term.   Stress, weight-gain, fears of losing my therapist and whatever-other-excuses-I-can-come-up-with combined to send things spiralling out of control.  Arteries were opened, ambulances were called and it was all just one big mess where I was being advised to take medical leave of absence, an option that was impossible because I would a) be homeless b) be unlikely to receive any more help than I am currently getting and c) be deprived of the structure of university life, which has been hugely important in keeping me well.

They could not, however, force leave of absence on me unless I was sectioned – and luckily I was able to get a grip on the situation before that became a likelihood.  Over Easter I rested, got back to work, and handed in essays that received a first and a 2.1 respectively.  But what I am trying to say is that however much I would like to erase the past, forget how I have survived it, concentrate purely on my studies and make a blog that deals exclusively with the “un-personal”, the literary, the sophisticated analysis of current affairs,  I cannot do it.  Not quite yet.  At times the two sides of my character seem to be mutually anatagonistic and incompatible.  I must either be wholly sick, or wholly well.  I am either  the determined, “gifted” student with an exciting career ahead of her, or I am the girl who’s spent the last five years in and out of hospital, the  girl whose father killed himself when she was 17 but who was fucked up before then anyway, the girl who hurts herself and those around her again and again and never learns, the girl who by rights really shouldn’t be alive.

Well, isn’t this cheerful!  I  have actually had rather a good weekend.  Booked  a ticket to see Andrew Motion when he comes to York to give a reading in a few weeks, and also secured a place at a conference on “The Literary Eassy in English” being held at Queen Mary in July.  Hermione Lee, Andrew O’Hagan and Adam Phillips (who was actually visiting professor at York last term) are amongst the speakers.  There IS a world outside the stagnant, deadly jungle of my introspective head, and I will dare to take my place in it.  One slightly less self-absorbed blog post at a time.