My Therapist

I have four more sessions with my psychotherapist.

Four more blocks of fifty minutes where I can say anything, anything at all and know that I'm not being judged. Four more times when I can be nudged gently towards the deepest, darkest parts of myself and get the catharsis that is the wretched, painful sobs of realising just how acutely I feel the pain that I do. Four more times that I can see the face of my therapist who is not just a therapist but a friend and know that she will never, ever think badly of me. That she will tell me when I am exaggerating and not, when I am reading things wrong, when it's okay to say good things about myself and that it's important to be able to say the bad.

She can see through the loud and energetic persona that I put on to hide the other me, the shy and soft-spoken and terrified little mouse, and she can bring out the real me which is a combination of all those other things that I am. She will never push me to do things that I cannot do or do not want to, but will help me to push myself towards the life that I dearly and truly want. There is no person more understanding or trustworthy in the world than this woman.

And in four weeks she's being taken away from me because the NHS will only give a year of one-to-one psychotherapy to people like me, regardless of whether I need more time to heal or not. This woman is one of the single most important people in my entire life and she is being taken away from me. She is so important and yet I know hardly anything about her at all, while she knows absolutely everything that I am and never ever speaks badly of me.

I love her. I love her so acutely and painfully that while writing this I have sobbed hopelessly and with abandon, not tempering my tears like I usually would. And the thing that makes me cry the most is that I cannot express in words the immense gratitude and veritable awe that I have for her, for this woman who has stood besides me as I lay in the pits of despair and said 'It's alright. It hurts, but together we can build you a ladder, and you can start to see the sky'.

No one that I have loved, no one in my family whilst I have lived, has died - but I think I am beginning to know what it is like to be bereaved.

Progress

Often I will think of things that I could do that would help me get better. For example, this week I had to start a diet consisting purely of soluble fibres - to find out what food intolerances I have that are causing my IBS. Unfortunately I'd just been shopping a couple of days before, so I was left with a fridge full of perishables that I couldn't eat. Luckily this is not a hugely painful point financially (as I just got basically all of January's money that I should've had then in one go...), so I didn't have to eat it anyway because there was nothing else to do.

I thought to myself, well I don't really want to throw this all out - I did pay money for it, after all. In the end I came up with the idea of cooking dinner for all of my friends with it. Usually at that point I'd consider the idea, maybe put one or two steps towards doing it; but fundamentally I'd probably bottle out of it, especially if it involved other people.

This time I didn't. Last night I went over to my friends' house and cooked dinner for them and left them the spare food. Whilst today went kind of badly in several ways, it makes it much easier to bear knowing that not only are my friends pretty awesome, but I'm doing well enough to have actually done something. Hooray.

Complaining

As I've written before I've had some issues with the flat above me being obnoxiously loud and putting offensive notes through my door. I promised myself when it happened that I'd make a formal complaint if it happened again - with a single incident I didn't deem it worth the fear that I'd feel as a response of 'telling on them'. Doubtless it harks back to telling the teachers when I was bullied at school, but any time I complain about someone to an official body - even anonymously - I get absolutely terrified that the person I'm complaining about is going to find out that it was me that made the complaint and come and shout at me.

The night before last my boyfriend was here, and whilst we were in bed there were three loud knocks on the ceiling - or the floor, to the person that did it. We weren't being loud at all; my bed creaks a bit because there's no carpet in there (which is not my fault) and because, you know, beds creak - and as my support worker put it earlier, 'unless your boyfriend is some sort of stallion or you like literally screaming then it's not a nuisance'. Which amused me. Despite not being at all embarrassed about my sexual activity, there's something a bit difficult about saying that someone's getting upset because my boyfriend comes over once a week. I end up sort of sheepishly shuffling and going "umm I'm not noisy, honest...we do our best to be quiet and considerate".

But frankly, I have to live in this building too, and I will not extend my consideration to stopping doing something that I enjoy quite a lot and am already trying to be considerate about. It's not like it's waking people up or at obscene times of night either. If I systematically hoovered my entire flat at 3am on a weekday morning then I'd understand the complaint. I wouldn't mind so much but whoever it is that lives there is hugely hypocritical; because most days they've got their music on so loud that my living room literally vibrates. They've had parties there, not frequently but sometimes. I don't mind hearing noise; we live in a block of flats, we are going to hear noise - but there's a level of consideration that needs to happen.

So when those three loud knocks came onto my ceiling, I had a panic attack. I burst into tears and I am so, so glad my boyfriend was there because I felt absolutely terrified. I still do now, though in a more controlled way. It's like discovering that your armour has a potentially fatal crack in it. All I can keep thinking is that I am not safe, I am not alone, I can't escape the people who want to bully and harass me. Obviously I'm fully aware that a lot of this is exaggerated by my condition and lack of logic, but anyone would be distressed by it.

Originally I wasn't going to complain. But my support worker came over and I just...I needed to do it. I needed to hold in the acute terror of being caught telling, of confrontation. I need to accept that it's okay to be annoyed with people who aren't being considerate towards you or are harassing you - like hey, putting threatening and offensive letters through someone's door! Delivered by hand, just to add that extra degree of threat. Every time I hear a door go in the building I freeze. Every time I hear voices I feel like running and hiding, like turning all the lights off so that no one knows I'm here.

I hate it here. I cannot leave soon enough - but I shouldn't let people walk all over me whilst I'm waiting to escape.

Polymathy

I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in absolutely everything. I mean everything - I might not like, for example, football: but I know a reasonable amount about it. Not knowing things upsets me, and not being good at things does too. It just so happens that I'm pretty much good at anything I try.

I think what depression has taken from me is the trying. I still find things interesting, it's just more...peripherally. If I put on a documentary about something scientific I'll sit there engrossed and find it exceptionally interesting. But rarely will I find myself actually wanting to put that programme on, if that makes sense. I know that I absolutely adore fantasy fiction, but sometimes I'll have a book I really want to read and know I'd enjoy sitting there and I don't start it.

To go from wanting to do everything, and actually doing so much...I mean whilst I was at school, whilst I suffered the worst of the bullying and abuse, I also did - three types of dance lessons, ran online communities, played sports, played in just about every music club there was, acted in plays, did extracurricular work, was an active part of my family and generally in the school community even though it treated me so badly.

These days I'm ecstatic if I manage to pick up a book I've always wanted to read, and that hurts. It makes me feel useless, stupid, and pointless. Take this blog for instance; I know it's cathartic and helpful, but how often do I actually write here?

It spirals off into other things as well, where I don't just fail to do things but I then lose touch with what's going on. The past few weeks, I've felt almost detached from things sometimes. Lying in bed with my boyfriend last night, I just kept on thinking thank you so much for being real. I didn't say it, because how do you explain something like that? But I get up and all that I do is wait for the day to end. I wait for things to happen because I don't make them happen. Even on the days that I get things done - like today I went to an appointment and hang the washing out to dry and got some online things done. I still feel like the day's been utterly empty.

It's like I'm functioning, but my mind's hovering above watching it all happen.

Better Days

Thus far today has been significantly better than the past few. I've tidied the flat, and last night I got all the washing up done so it actually feels like I'm not living in some sort of sty. I've been listening to music and I'm generally feeling quite alright, actually.

I am not entirely sure that I have a great deal more to say; but I think I am realising that there's only a certain extent to which I can yank myself out of down days. Sometimes days really are just down. It's definitely, definitely worth trying to get out of them when you're in them - but I think I expect that I ought to be able to. It doesn't work like that really.

My support worker will be over in a bit, and it will be nice to sort some things out with her. Then I have raiding this evening, and tomorrow is free of anything. I'm still sleepy all the time at the moment, which is usually because my energy levels are low thanks to being so depressed.

It's not all down though. Will get there eventually.

Getting Angry

Last week's psychotherapy session was one of those ones where I left feeling like I'd been twisted inside out and then dragged backwards through a hedge.

One of the things that my therapist said to me during that session was that she was really pleased to see me getting angry. We were talking about - well all manner of things really, benefits and labels and all sorts. I got riled up about things and was swearing and I think I got a bit shouty at one point. It's very difficult for me to do this for a number of reasons. It is my default reaction to blame myself, and that isn't something to get outwardly angry about - I will tend to be frustrated instead. I spend a good deal of my time feeling frustrated actually, because that's what happens when I hide my anger inside instead of venting. I also feel often like I don't have the right to be angry or that no one would want to hear my anger.

So over the past couple of days I've been feeling really quite awful. To the point that I slept for about 20 hours almost straight, and couldn't even bring myself to say how bad I was feeling to other people because I didn't want to be a burden. This relates to something that my therapist and I were talking about, which is that although I have an amazing group of friends I often don't tell them just how awful I'm feeling sometimes. On Sunday I was at LRP and although I was having a nice time, I felt like I was losing control of my head a bit. I was playing a really quite complex character and this might have partially set it off but I don't think it was the sole trigger or anything. I didn't tell anyone, just ignored it and went home when we were done. I pretty much went straight to bed, and that's when I slept for so long.

What happens is that I don't tell people how bad I'm feeling. I mean I tell people I'm feeling down, but not how it feels like someone is crushing my insides and my head won't stop running at a hundred miles an hour. So when I am feeling that bad my friends can't recognise it, and that's not their fault at all. I mean it's not like I've said how bad things are. So why don't I say anything? It's partly not wanting to be a burden, or to get in peoples' way and I worry that they've got more important things to deal with than me. I think it's also because I expect people to not be able to understand. It's a few different things that cause that, including the fact that when I go out into the wider world a lot of people don't understand. Hell, even amongst my friends people don't understand it sometimes.

It's difficult. I feel lonely a lot of the time even when I know I'm not.

Passive Aggressive

This morning upon going out to the doctors, my boyfriend and I found a Christmas card that had been posted crudely through my letterbox. It hadn't come out the other side properly so I hadn't seen it before, but I remembered hearing someone come downstairs and post something through there the night before. Wondering what it could be, I opened it. The envelope wasn't addressed, it just said "Merry Xmas".

Inside, it said "Buy a fucking new bed. From [building name]".

Obviously it did actually have the name of my building, rather than some weird bracket thing. I just don't really feel like advertising my location on the internet for all and sundry. So anyway, I found this and immediately thought - hm, were the boyfriend and I especially noisy when he was there two nights ago? Both of us didn't remember being especially so - and if there was noise then the source was certainly not the bed. Unlike Kochanski (blast from the TV past here), I do not make noises like a creaky gate. Or indeed a bed.

This upset me. I already don't feel safe in the building and knowing that there's only one locked door between me and a threat is not helpful - previously of course I could count the door on our building too. Now I don't feel that I can. I don't feel bad about the noise; frankly, it's nothing compared to the constantly barking dog, the people that stamp up and down the stairs and the obnoxiously loud music played by the flat above me punctuated by blazing rows.

What gets me is the rudeness, and the fact that it feels like such a big threat to me. I called my housing support worker and spoke to her; she offered to send a formal letter to the rest of the building but I really don't want her to do that. It would make me feel even more unsafe. I have however promised that if a similar incident ever happens then I will tell her and she will do something about it. As it happens she's going to use it to help prove to the homelessness unit that I'm really in need of moving.

But when your housing advisor says to you "you know what, I think the best thing for you to do is to go to your boyfriend's"...you know that really, things aren't quite right. I am now at my boyfriend's and feel a good deal safer, not to mention warmer and less lonely, but the knowledge that eventually I will have to go back to that flat is like a ten-ton weight on my shoulders.