So it hadn't escaped my attention that two weeks ago I was melting faster than a snowman on a lava flow path.
I had to do something. I did something. I ended up in hospital. I hoped this would mean I'd get help, not just medication, which I've tried for 6 months and hasn't really helped.
My mental loops gather dust in their eternity, their resilience to any interuption by ration or reason.
However, help on the NHS is a long time in coming. It turned out that my psyhiciatrist never actually got round to referring me for therapy when he said I needed it urgently back in July at the beginning of this journey, when I began wading through the psychedlic effects of one pill and the comatose-inducing apathy of the next, at his insistence. I got a label. Great! Bi Polar Disorder. But it doesnt change anything - I've always had a problem with getting ecstatically over excited and grotesquely miserable.
I see the world through a technicolour gauze one day - quite literally. The grass is acid green. The sky, heart crushing blue. People look at me. I look at them. I feel I can hear their thoughts. Everything oozes sex, vibrancy and I am exhilarated. Sometimes I have to stop in the street because I am so excited sexually and mentally I can't walk anymore. I ride the waves. Sometimes I speak to a stranger. And I take them home.
But the next day I can see the same blue sky, the same green grass, the same passing strangers and it's grey, nuclear, starkly barren. The thoughts I hear are devastating. Sometimes I stop in the street and it's all I can do not to weep for all the faces etched with crevasses of disappointment. The old man trudging in front of me carrying his meagre shopping and a newspaper full of terrors under his arm. It's there to reassure him that there is always worse, always worse somewhere else. Even the children in their push chairs look despairing. My heart is as heavy as an anchor and it catches along the pavement as I drag it home and tell myself I won't go out again. No I won't.
I decided that if I can't get help soon, then I probably won't make it a lot longer at this rate. So I found a counsellor, booked an appointment and am just going to pay for it on cards. Considering it an investment, in a future, a stable one where I can receive and return love and not trample it.
And that was yesterday. I was nervous, a bit. I don't leave the house often. Certainly not more than once every few weeks now if I can help it. I don't speak to people in person either and only when at crisis on the phone. I pulled my cap down low and dark glasses on, so I can be as invisible as possible.
I allowed far too much time to get there. I am masochistically early. I walk slower and take in streets I've never walked, churches I've never seen. I find a church that has been made into the community theatre and wander towards it to pass the time. Yellow corned posters twist themselves away from crucifying drawing pins in the February breeze advertising Elvis impersonators and Clairvoyants. I don't think I'll ever be coming here, I think to myself. I get to the doors of the red bricked church, maybe it was methodist once. And the pungent odour of death is overwhelming. Don't ask me how I know how death smells, but I do. It's unmistakable. I retreat quickly and check my watch.
I walk down a long straight surburban street and wonder at the incongruity of it being February and that there are trees full of pink blossom flourishing side by side with palm trees. In England! 2 out of every 3 people I pass are speaking in other languages. Are they foreign? Or am I? Is it the palm tree which is alien now or the blossom tree? How much the world changes, just in one short life.
Finally I find the right street I need. I don't know what I am looking for, I think I sort of expected an office/clinic. I didn't expect a smart, but not affluent terraced house. I checked out the cars in the drive. BMW - fairly new. Red Mini - reminded me of Elsewhere. If he were a reasonably successful counsellor, I guess I reasoned that the cars would reflect that.
He was very welcoming, in his fifties I guess, tall, beardy - like Gandolph. I loved the room he ushered me into. Smaller than my own living room, but dimly lit. I hate bright lights. If I could live most of my life by lamp light I would. Actually I do. He asked me to fill out a card with my details and then offered me refreshments. I felt quite relaxed but not really sure where to begin. So I outlined what had immediately brought me here, which was my propensity to self harm and destroy when I get anxious, when my brain simply won't stop and let me sleep. To drink too much when I can't calm the feelings of uncontrollable elation, which are always ice capped with a nameless fear.
He explained to me some of how the brain works. I observed throughout the session that he was quite evangelical in some respects as to his profession and that made me feel a little resistant. But I listened. I asked lots of questions, far more than he did. I think he was trying to put me at my ease perhaps, but I think I learned far more about him than I did about myself. Maybe that's a trick, I thought, so that i will feel in control of the situation. I told him i thought that these "mental loops" which just shorted to the same behaviour all the time were what I needed to change but hadn't totally figured out how to do his and he explained how all our senses are attached to emotions. For instance I listen to music, some music and I want immediately to drink. A lot. But he seemed confident that therapy would help me address this and the other problems, the hyperactive sexuality, the need to "reward" myself and blow a gasket when I complete an essay or assignment or anything productive and that I'm not rewarding myself, but in fact punishing myself. It made sense.
I told him that I'd be raised in a cult and lost every single member of my family. And that part of this cult had rendered me in many ways unable to think logically or reasonably. I said most importantly it's affected every single friendship and relationship I've had, not altogeher terminably, but that I have a future now with someones that I love very much, that I am quite keen to make a success of and I need some tools to help with that. He asked what cult and I told him. He said, well that's not so bad. I asked why he said that and he related how when his father died he'd worried about where his father was and that his father would be worrying about him. But that a JW had called on him and showed him a scripture about "soul-sleep" and that his father would not be aware of anything and this had helped him finally to be at peace with his father's passing.
He then came to hypnotherapy and described what it would involve. I'm not completely resistance to that. He said I'd be aware of everything and there'd be no swinging gold watches or pendulums. He said that what he'd like to try is EDMR, which would help me put to rest things like past traumas that I may have and that my next session I should bring something, something small and we could see how it works. The thing is I don't really know what to "bring". I'm not sure if I want to, even if I had something and I am concerned about disconnecting from myself past things that way.
So I wondered does any one else have experience of hypno therapy or this thing called EDMR? If its too private to share please email me or PM and if not please post so I can consider before I go ahead with anything like this.
After the session, which was a double one to begin with, I felt okay. I walked home through the throngs of schoolchildren, some defiantly lighting up cigarettes at bus stops, jostling one another, black felt tipped notes on their hands, green blazers and skewed ties.
I thought what would my life have been like if I knew what I know now when was their age.
I thought what my life will be like once I am better equipped for it.
The future is seductively lit.
The Beginning.