On Holes and Ladders

Even if you are VERY unobservant, you may have noticed that there hasn’t been much added to this blog in the last month – in fact, it’s almost exactly a month since I last posted.

There are all the usual reasons & excuses – been busy, been on holiday, been a bit tired etc. but I’m now facing up to the real reason – been a bit bonkers again! If you’re unaware of my bonkersness, you can check it out here!

I’ve been trying to fight this bonkersness for a while, but things have gradually come adrift at the seams – I’ve had to defer my OU maths exam for this year because I reached the point where seeing a maths book was making me feel physically ill with anxiety, I’ve taken the odd day off work here and there, I’ve maybe drunk more than I should, eaten too much cake, stared at the lightbox to help the SAD situation, tested the patience of the Wonderspouse somewhat, and got to the stage where I’m sleeping about 2 hours per night!

However, I’ve finally stopped trying to fight it and given up for the time being. After a very peculiar week in France (being on holiday while bonkers is quite strange), I’ve come home, not gone back to work, booked a doctor’s appointment, STILL failed to unpack (it just seems way too difficult), forced the Wonderspouse to wear trousers that don’t fit because he has no other clean ones, and, this morning, burst into tears at the sight of two Weetabix!!

I’ve also just posted a slightly odd status update on my facebook wall:

“Opposition to installation of ladder currently occurring. Might spoil the view apparently. Strengthening of arms for better grip on ropes is being suggested. Searching for maps so as to find alternative route not going near hole.”

so I thought I might explain it here. At least I’m actually writing something again, which is more than I’ve done for weeks (even before the posts dried up, they became progressively less numerous). Strangely enough, giving up on TRYING to write a blog post has actually produced one!

Some time ago, when I had a small wobble, I described my mental health as having fallen down a deep dark hole. I’ve come across this description before, and it felt appropriate at the time. The resulting conversation on my facebook wall included a friend “fetching ropes” and “pulling on ropes”, and so the analogy continued.

I’ve actually found it a rather helpful analogy. Again, this morning, ropes, climbing gear, pulling me out and so on have been mentioned, and I’ve now continued the analogy even further.

Installation of ladder means going back on antidepressant drugs (which I don’t take for the reasons cited in the post linked to above). Spoiling the view refers to the blocking of appreciation of music, art and so on – all those things I love so much. Strengthening of arms refers to being able to do it on my own (preferred choice if I can manage it). Finding an alternative route means looking (again) to see if there are changes I can make to my life to stop it happening again (or, at least, to lessen the effect or make it less frequent or something – I’m not being too optimistic here).

So that’s the current state of play. The way I felt when I woke up this morning I was almost ready to say “Who cares? Just give me pills!” However, as today has progressed, what I think I shall say to the doctor tomorrow morning has changed. Support from friends online (messages, comments, a poem, and so on) and a bit of reflection makes me wonder if I can carry on doing it on my own.

And, in many ways, life isn’t actually that bad at the moment. There are things going on that are particularly good in fact. Things that give me quite a lot of cause to be optimistic and hopeful about the future. Things that make me feel that the fog in my brain will eventually clear. Things that might just mean I can clamber out of the dark hole on my own and learn how not to fall in again.

Now it’s just a question of how far down the hole I’m actually going to fall this time. Have I admitted the situation to myself early enough not to end up at the very bottom where the sides are steepest? Can I find some way to get inside my rather chaotic head and get it all back to some sort of order? If there’s no other way out then I’ll get a ladder installed, but I’m going to try the climbing route first. I can feel many people pulling on ropes from above, sending flasks of tea & bars of chocolate down to help sustain me on the journey.

Hopefully I’ll see you at the top!

On Four Fabulous Felines

Hello dear blog reader! I’m really sorry I haven’t managed to post anything for so long, and thought you might be getting a bit bored of waiting, so I thought I’d just put up a few pictures of the family for you to see!

I’ll be telling you all about how each of these furry friends came to live with us in future posts (when I have a few minutes to write those posts). I thought you might like to meet them first though.

Felix is our boy! He and the Wonderspouse were bachelor boys together before I even appeared on the scene. He’s big, strong, agile, and loves to headbut our legs so hard we nearly fall over. He also has the endearing habit of coming to the car door to meet me every day when I get home from work.

Tiggy is our little girl. She’s sort of MY cat (although there are no hard and fast rules here – it’s more a case of 4 cats with 2 slaves in actual fact). Her face is my picture on twitter. She’s a prolific and skilled hunter, but has an adorable temperament with all humans except vets.

Athena is the younger of the two old dears. She has an extremely loud voice, different coloured eyes, and very fine white fur that sheds absolutely everywhere. She can also be quite stroppy at times, and would eat herself to death if we let her. She loves being brushed though and can be calmed with enough fuss.

Pebbles is the quiet one, and the oldest (she’s around 17). She’s absolutely terrified of anything mechanical, especially the hoover, but she’s become increasingly friendly during the years we’ve had her. She’s very small and light, but still quite an agile old thing, and she loves climbing all over her humans!

So there you are – four fabulous felines, our little family. Of course, they can be quite troublesome, and we often call them the fearsome foursome. Anyone who’s ever been in our kitchen at suppertime will know what we mean – allegedly cats don’t hunt in packs, but it often feels like they might!

On Trying to Get Comfy

This morning I’ve been trying to solve a number of semi-long-standing problems with the set up of my computer at home. By the set up, I don’t mean software, that’s all tootling along as well as can be expected, but the actual physical set up of my workstation.

The fact that I decided to do it this morning was triggered by pain in my wrists when I sat down to type. Inspection showed them to be red and rather sore. I decided that I needed a wrist rest, like I have at work. However, I have no such thing, and the fact that our local town centre is currently closed off for a funfair means that going to search for one would mean a 30 mile round trip, so I fetched a hand towel from the airing cupboard, rolled it up, and discovered that even if I did have a wrist rest, it wouldn’t fit on the desk in any case.

I decided it was time to install the small flatscreen monitor that a friend loaned me over a fortnight ago. The giant (really giant) old fashioned monitor that I’ve had for several years started off with a beautiful screen, but has now got to the stage where (a) it looks all white & milky, (b) all the windows have wiggly edges and (c) it has irritating diagonal stripes crossing the screen. It is also so big that even if I have it right up against the wall at the back of the desk, my nose is almost touching it when I sit at the desk, which is probably not very good for me.

In my office job I am trained as a DSE (display screen equipment) assessor, which means that I’ve been on courses that tell me how people SHOULD sit at a computer when they’re working, and tell me all sorts of horror stories about RSI (repetitive strain injury) or the even more catchy WRULD (work related upper limb disorder). Partly because I spend so much of my life stressed and tense, and partly because I’ve done a lot of jobs involving data entry, I do have various problems with my shoulders, arms, wrists and fingers. At work, where it comes from the health and safety budget, I have a special rollermouse device, a workstation properly set up, and a chair that does almost everything except stir my tea.

Home, however, is a different story. Buying a rollermouse is beyond my budget, so I have two mice, one each side of the keyboard. When my right hand starts to hurt, I use my left, when my left hurts, I use my right. When they both hurt I get a glass of whisky! The keyboard sometimes wobbles a bit, so I wedge it with a piece of tissue, and the chair (a cast off that was headed for a skip) provides no support, and doesn’t really fit under the desk (which isn’t a desk at all, but a table with drawers, also rescued from a skip, sanded down and repainted by me). Furthermore, the printer has to go on the floor, so I often rest my left foot on it and end up sitting lopsided too.

None of this was a problem until about 3 months ago when broadband entered our lives. Before then, internet time was just a couple of short sessions each evening, I didn’t blog, didn’t do very much on facebook or twitter (it was all just too slow and cost a fortune on the phone bill), and just typed up the occasional document or did a bit of household budget stuff on spreadsheets. I was never on the computer long enough for it to be a problem. Now, however, I’m online all the time, I read & write blogs, I footle around on facebook, try constantly to keep up with e-mails, watch digital TV stuff on the iPlayer, and as for twitter – well, let’s just say that I’m more than an occasional user!!

And my body knows it. So, I thought replacing the screen would be a good idea. Furthermore it would mean that I could tell the friend who loaned me the monitor that I’d set it up, so I wouldn’t look like an ungrateful so-and-so! Like everything, it turned out not to be that simple. Getting of torches, crawling under desks, locating wires and so on, was followed by a gargantuan effort to move the giant monitor out of the way (hampered by the chair getting stuck in the doorway – everything’s a bit tight round here – we have way too much stuff), then the discovery that I needed to reset the screen resolution because the new one wouldn’t work (more unplugging etc) then dropping the giant monitor on my toe (why do this job in slippers?) then needing to find polish to dust the desk properly, then setting the whole lot up properly.

At that point I tweeted “I want my mummy”, and the Wonderspouse tweeted back that my mother would actually be one of the least helpful people to have around since she is even more OCD than me and would be even more stressed. He then rang me up to tell me to keep calm. I would say that the battle between me and my workstation has now reached some kind of uneasy truce. The rolled up towel now fits on the desk and is an adequate enough wrist rest for now to stop my most paranoid fears about nerve damage preventing me from ever playing the viola again. The screen is almost at the right height (assisted by Donald Jay Grout’s “A History of Western Music”), although my desktop icons have all gone haywire and it’s so small that I can only see about 5 tweets to a screen. It isn’t stripey or faded or wiggly though. The chair & desk situation remains poor, but to sort that out would require serious removals, which will need much preparation (there is a bookcase on top of the desk for starters), and maybe financial outlay.

And all the time, the maths books sit on the other desk, where I should be working. Maybe I already knew that I wasn’t going to get enough assignment done to gain the marks I need to get a higher grade. Maybe all the computer moving activity was just a diversion to confirm the inevitable. I can almost hear my ambitions of a decent mark dropping to the ground like a giant monitor onto a toe. Maybe it’s time to listen to the wise Wonderspouse again, when he tells me that all I need to do is pass the course – I can worry about degree classifications later. I’d never think of chastising somebody for not getting high marks in every assignment, so why do I do it to myself?

So am I comfy? Well, not really. The knowledge that the computer set up is still not finished unsettles me. A few of the physical problems have been solved, but many remain. The unfinished maths assignment also unsettles me. But I have simply reached the end of my resources with it, having been under so much pressure for so many months. Most of this pressure, I hasten to add, self-inflicted. Perhaps it is time, as the Wonderspouse suggests, to draw a line under the maths coursework situation, to take a break, and then to revise gently for the forthcoming exam. Then, if I can manage that, I might try to indulge in an activity very foreign to me, which I’m told is called “relaxing”.

This wasn’t what I intended to blog about at all this week, but, like computer set-ups and maths assignments, things aren’t always exactly as we would wish them to be. I think it might have been good for me to write this, even if a little dull for you to read. If there is anybody out there still reading at this point, then I admire your perseverance – thank you!

On The Big One

Eight years ago today I got in the car to go to work as usual (it was a Wednesday, not a Saturday as it is this year). I’d had a very usual sort of morning: drag myself out of bed, drink a glass of orange juice, sit in the bath and cry for half an hour, nibble a bowl of cereal, then get into the car. Rather different from my morning routine today, but that was how it used to be.

I left my flat, drove the 20 or so minute journey to work, and pulled into the car park of the large comprehensive school in the London borough of Haringey, where I was Head of Music. All seemed as usual until I tried to get out of the car.

My legs refused to budge. I couldn’t move. I called the school office from my mobile phone and told them I wasn’t feeling too well. I then drove straight to the doctor’s surgery. After a tearful appointment with a very unsympathetic doctor, I headed for home with a medical certificate and a stash of antidepressants.

I then went to bed. I didn’t get up again for two weeks.

In fact, the next date after that time that means anything to me is November 5th, when I was visited by an old friend, the same old friend who would eventually become my husband. He had to visit me at my flat because at that time I was still leaving the house only to go to my psychiatrist appointments.

The weeks between September 12th and November 5th are largely lost to me. I know that the world was full of turmoil, and I suspect I watched a lot of news (in those days I had digital TV and was in the habit of leaving the rolling news on 24 hours a day). I know that I still wasn’t driving again in November, and that I gave the car keys to a friend who had the car while I was too ill to use it. I know that I saw my psychiatrist, and I have vague memories of walking through Grovelands Park to visit the hospital from time to time. I remember huge pain in my head. I remember one night that nearly didn’t have a following morning (and am thankful to this day that the main effect a large amount of alcohol has on me is to induce sleep). I know that I must have checked my e-mail at some point, because I read a very significant e-mail that resulted in the meeting on November 5th.

Almost all other detail is lost, which is strange, because I usually have a reasonably good memory. I do remember the date though, every year, and not just because of the events unfolding in the world at the time. Eight years ago today was the breakdown that I now call “The Big One”, where I went from functioning human being to complete wreck in the space of a few hours.

I can hardly believe how much life has now changed, how much I have learnt about myself, and how my plans and ambitions have changed since that day. One thing never changes though – every year on 12th September I think about the years I nearly didn’t have as a result of what happened back in 2001, and every year the sun shines just a little bit brighter that day as I consider the wonderful things I would have missed out on if things had turned out differently.