EXTREMES

First published in On The Level – from Bipolar Scotland.

I am by nature, I think, complacent and cautious. I like bird song, the sound of the river on rocks high in the hills, or the lap of waves on a sheltered shore.

I am rule bound. Show me a security guard in a supermarket and I will be sure he is watching me to detect any possible transgression!

I hate anger and confrontation and love cuddles and evenings watching films in front of the telly. I like to walk holding hands with my partner Wendy and I am slightly relieved that the children reserve their wildness for the safety of home rather than express it in the panic of the public gaze.

I do not like to judge, tending to hope that most people have good will in their hearts and that those public figures who plainly don’t, were just damaged by a world that they couldn’t understand.

Despite these relatively sensible traits , some of my life has been lived in extremes. In the world I inhabited before mental illness had a bearing upon it,

When I was ten years old I was climbing cliffs hundreds of feet high. When I was 19 (much to my later bewilderment) I wandered into a minefield in search of firewood. Whilst at University, for reasons I no longer remember, I helped barricade parts of their premises from the police in a vaguely smiley, slightly awkward way. And when I was 22 I sailed across the Atlantic with no engine and no navigation instruments apart from a compass.

But it is in the world of distress and illness which I discovered later, that I have experienced the greatest extremes of my life. For someone who tries to do what he is told, I still find it incredible that I could have run away from a hospital with nurses chasing me, or been in the position where I had to work out which nurse I felt the least humiliation from when I went to the toilet under their unsmiling gaze. I do not understand how I can enter internal worlds where I care little for the conventions of the real world and instead live in what people call psychosis, where the logic and everyday habits of those around me matter little to me. A world where I can try to harm myself, try to kill myself, or set off to ‘walk to the light’ or starve myself, trying to achieve an enlightened purity.

And this inner world, where I am so disgusted by myself and what I think I am? That is still a daily reality; I hide from it, I try to ignore it and sometimes I succeed, often I don’t; which is why I am still compulsorily treated for my mental illness.

But today, I live in the real world, or the real world according to those around me. A world where I like to sleep and I love to lose myself in novels. Sometimes the novels I like best are Romances where everyone predictably gets angry with each other before falling deeply in love for ever and ever. .

I am on my Christmas holidays. I am very, very, happy and very sad. I always am at this time of year. Buddy the dog is still sleeping. Soon I will be too and when I wake, I will look forward to the next year which will hopefully be quiet and soft and uneventful except for the joy I get when wee Louie hugs me and says she loves me when she gets home from school and James says something so cutting about my eccentricity that I can’t stop laughing.

Hopefully no extremes at all; just love and kindness and walks with the dogs.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.