PEERING AT MYSELF UNCERTAINLY

WONDERING WHERE I CAN FIND MYSELF.

Yesterday, sitting down for coffee with someone I have known for many years; having a lovely conversation in which I was being interviewed about something at work, I was asked about the skills and talents I bring to it.

I knew I was going to be asked about this and thought it was an innocuous question but when it was actually verbalised; I felt awful. Not because of the way it was asked or anything like that but to have to think of something positive I bring to the world.

Oh! how I hated it. My stomach went hollow and as happens a lot nowadays when I am stressed, I found it hard to speak, as though my throat had closed on itself. This croaky voice came out, while I cast around wildly inside myself to say something nice about what I do and bring to people. In the end I said I can communicate but I wasn’t too sure about that and to my relief the person I was speaking with said she would leave that question alone and that she knew some people really struggle with compliments. If I am honest, I don’t struggle with compliments, I love them, I tend to discount them eventually, but I really do like getting them but complimenting myself? No.

Walking back to the train station, my stomach still felt white with anxiety; round and round my head was this phrase about how disgusting I am and how I poison everything good. At home I was just so tired. So, so, tired and disinclined to talk to Wendy about my day even though I am pretty, certain, overall, it was a really, good day.

Wendy has an experience sometimes and occasionally says she wishes people could spend just ten minutes in her head when she goes through it and recently said the same about my schizophrenia; wanting people to understand that inner world that is often betrayed by a false visage of coping.

I agreed with her when she said this but at the time thought to myself that I don’t really have an awful landscape to navigate all the time. It makes me feel a little guilty. I keep on seeing people on social media saying things along the lines of ‘Have a go at my disability, if you think I don’t deserve benefits or if you think I should be in work’ or any of these rather crass things. More often I think, I probably don’t deserve the things I do get; that one day there will be a reckoning and I will be found guilty of deceiving the world.

It makes me think, as did the question of what skills and talents I have to offer. People say I speak openly and honestly, and some people seem to think I know myself well but, in many ways, I find myself as much of a mystery as I do a stranger I might meet on the train.

I still don’t believe I really do have schizophrenia and have currently been listening to people talking about how uncertain diagnosis is and how in some ways it is a social construct to make sense of things that might not ever make sense. That is difficult for me as I yearn to believe my diagnosis and to see it as a certainty, mainly because I desperately want to accept the beliefs I have, are untrue.

I live a lot of my life oblivious to those beliefs or so I say I do, but they are always there, just under the surface. A simple question about what I bring to the world can throw me sideways; direct questions about symptoms and my inner world are horrendous. In an instant; unless I am in a jokey mood I can fall into a spiral where I become aware of what I think and as I become aware it gains a force and a power that sends me to places, I would beg not to go to.

At such times I want to obliterate myself and when I am not on medication that is just what I try to do and when I am on medication, I want not to be on it because I think I live a lie and do the world a disservice by being given relief from what I really am.

As I ponder about who I am and maybe I would do well not to. I think most people, if they entered my mind, on most days would find something bland and blank. I do not know whether it is medication or illness or maybe my own crude coping mechanism of avoiding my reality. But apart from a good dose of anxiety, I am pretty much absent. I am not that aware of thoughts; I rarely know how I am feeling. I am often just not here at all. It is an arid place. A lonely place. But it is so much better than that place where I curl up with utter disgust at myself.

I have said in the past that I remember times when I have lived away from the monotone. I remember a life that shone with colour and where laughter and feelings were bright and vivid and I miss those times so, so, much.

In recent months I have sometimes found myself laughing and surprised myself hugely because I have laughed so much, I have almost hiccuped. I prize those moments. They give me hope.

And now for a contradiction. Despite the bleakness inside me, the flatness, the absence of spontaneity and emotion and ideas; for the last ten years or so I have had the most wonderful life. A life I didn’t realise was possible.

Wendy and the children do that, as well as Dash the dog, Buddy the dog, the bunnies, my wider family and my friends. I do not know how to describe it but there is a warmth in my family. A wonderful, awe inspiring, beauty to it. Always something is happening, even if it is a mini adventure like this morning when I helped Wendy take Hubble the dog out for his walk. He is a lovely dog who she sometimes looks after, but does he pull on the lead? He is a master at pulling on the lead ! And does he go wild and become desperate to hump any human being when he gets over excited or it is time to turn round and go home ? Yes and my wool coat now bears the muddy paw prints as witness to it and did we have a wonderful time? Yes undoubtedly.

I am as safe and happy in this family as I have ever been. I don’t think we have had a meaningful argument in the ten years I have lived here. We bicker. I can scowl occasionally as can Wendy. But I never walk into the house sick to the stomach with how I will be greeted. I never start a conversation unsure if I will say the wrong thing to be met with something thrown at me or a silence that stretches for days.

It is hard to relate to the words of those wiser than me but sometimes I think I have fallen into all the right conditions of something delightful where I am surrounded by love and activity and laughter that does not mind my incomprehension or my almost absence or my need to be alone, a love that constantly surprises me by not stopping, not judging, not giving up on me.

There is now a chink in me where I think to myself that maybe I will never be in hospital again; maybe I will not end up killing myself as I have always assumed I would and maybe this family and my many friends who constantly say lovely things about me really do mean it and will not desert me when they see what I really am.

Its now six months since I stopped seeing my psychologist and still I am confused about that year. So incredibly painful and me still utterly confused at the skills I am not sure I wanted, to help me question my beliefs. For a time after it I was wildly angry. I wanted to grieve and shout at the last six decades; all those years of self-hatred; all that time when life might have been brighter and less dangerous and then I fell back again.

I am still fallen back. It still seems to me again after all that therapy that even though I know mental illness is real that what I experience is not illness at all but something beyond any bounds of what is acceptable and then I think and try to reason and remind myself that my life is safe; I have food, an income and work and love and joy from those around me.

I have finally got a hold of my drinking. Maybe one day I will learn to ignore my fears and maybe those moments of colour in my life will become more common and maybe I will finally allow myself to really believe that the world I happen to live in now is pretty much just how I want it to be.

I am chairing an event by Dr Gavin Francis soon, in his book An Unfragile Mind, I think he says the best predictor for those of us with psychosis is connection and belonging and being able to work; all those things that hold other people and other families together. I get that, it pleases me that I fit into that category but as I write, I need to temper the hope I have just been speaking of.

I hardly even need to scratch the surface to fall into that awful place. A small event, a tiny query can send me somewhere I dread and often they catch me unawares.

I do not know the words of self-help but I think maybe my task just now is to realise I will never be free of the parts of me that I cannot countenance, that I may always need to erect barriers to my soul and my heart and my mind so I float scarily whole just above the whirlpool. But I am floating and I can see the blue sky and a moment ago I kissed Wendy good night after making her hot buttered toast with honey and tomorrow I can lie in bed, half asleep until we wander down the road to go to the pub to celebrate Mother’s day with Wendy, her mum and her sister in law, Sharon and, of course, most of the rest of the family. These are not tiny things; they are the things I glory in even if I am likely to sit uncomfortably and my smile looks wild and uncertain.

I have been posting twice a week recently, but I am not sure I can sustain this. Despite the strict instructions I heard at a workshop a couple of years ago at the Society of Authors to maintain consistency I am not quite in a place where I can guarantee that. There might be occasional Wednesdays or Sundays where I am silent and maybe that is not such a bad thing.

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.