Catching you up (12)

(Selections from April, 2009)

I am 'between' therapists. This is my 'regrouping' period.

I change jobs soon. This change should be enough to keep me going for a while. It's also fixed term, which means I am not obligated to stay on in a new contract. Most people probably see that as a negative, but it gives me a sense of relief. There is closure, already, and I have not even begun.

I have been listening to myself but still not treating myself well. Vitamins, flossing, moisturiser -- much of the time. Not most. Indigestion, spots, and now cramps. A year now since I started therapy and also a year since my last proper menstrual cycle. In many respects, the lack of cycling hormones has helped me achieve a certain stability. But not being able to have children means we've stopped trying. Or rather, I've stopped trying.

--

I'm trying to use my 'powers' for good.

I recognise the transition into detachment (depersonalisation?) now: that horrible and condemning feeling of deathly solitude. It glides underneath a layer of frenetic anxiety, like slipping through quicksand, and I will do anything to avoid it. Give me the years of depression back. I will trade this mad cycle in: to be quiet and sad again.

The take-home message is that I do not deserve support. Not as much as the next person, who does not have my strength, who cannot see herself as clearly, who does not learn as fast. These gifts.. I refuse to see them as the cause and certainly not as the solution. They do not make it easier. They make it different. I am different. My body has different failings. My life has different challenges.

So I need different tactics.

It hurts (a lot) that there is no single answer. Not for any of us. I wish more experts would acknowledge that a single human being -- one brain, one body, one life -- is far too complex for us to ever know (muchless heal) completely and correctly. Medicine is an imperfect science, as most science is imperfect, based on small pieces of sound logic and then applied statistically across a sample. The actual equation, in reality, is far too complex for us to ever get right. There will always be outliers. Always be exceptions.

Not that this should stop you from trying.

It certainly does not stop me.

---

I keep trying to write and fail.

Vitamins, Exercise, Sex, Laughter -- these things get me to tomorrow, but really, what's the point? Why do we all even bother? I'm not considering nor recommending suicide. As safe and secure as I am, though, I can't help but think I'm better off being too stupid or too dead to care about 'why' like I do.

Two days. On the third day, I broke.

Most people just sit around and watch TV on their days off.
But I don't seem to have come with an off button.

Read on the NHS Choices blog.