Channel 4 is currently showing, “The Undateables”, which, sensationalist, awful title aside, is a series about…

“People living with challenging conditions are often considered ‘undateable’ – this series meets a few and follows their attempts to find love”.

For one, considered undateable by who?

But the often-overlooked (or at worst, ridiculed) [...]]]>

(An unfinished post)

Channel 4 is currently showing, “The Undateables”, which, sensationalist, awful title aside, is a series about…

“People living with challenging conditions are often considered ‘undateable’ – this series meets a few and follows their attempts to find love”.

For one, considered undateable by who?

But the often-overlooked (or at worst, ridiculed) sexuality of disabled people is a subject worthy of exploration and commentary.  As is the near-universal desire for love.

Instead, we get an hour of, “AW BLESS!” complete with patronising voiceovers (and unnecessary ones, can’t they speak for themselves?) which treat the participants as little children, complete with angelic personalities and superhuman dignity, instead of the rounded, feeling people that they are.

The comments on Twitter aren’t much better...

The people on this program are so innocent!! 10 years and the guy left her cos she was in a wheelchair #heartless #undateables

Retweeted 443 times

Watching #undateables I hate that it’s called that! SO mean! These are literally the nicest people in the world! Shaine is a legend!

But with our wedding day speeding towards us, there are things I have [...]]]>

There are lots of things a bride-to-be has to consider.  What will I wear? Are people going to fight?  How on earth will I be able to wee in a giant dress?  Is it acceptable to be drunk at your own wedding?

But with our wedding day speeding towards us, there are things I have to consider which, quite frankly, I wish I didn’t have to.  Mentalism.  Butt out!  Can’t you just go one day without bothering me?

The first big piece of advice I got about wedding planning was, “Make sure the excitement and stress doesn’t make you ill!”  Well meaning, of course, but it’s not what you want to hear.  Of course, weddings are stressful (I had no idea how much until I got engaged, if anything, it’s the politique that is the most stressful, especially when you do not want a big wedding and are doing it on a shoestring but a lot of cultural expectations dictate this and that) and you hear about people turning into, “Bridezillas” and having a breakdown before the day, being carried down the aisle with a limp arm resting on their minivan-size dress.

The sad thing is, though, I knew they were right.  I have spent nights up frantically clicking on photos of dresses and poof! A night’s sleep is gone, just like that and the next day I am a bit, OOH.  Worse, though, is the happiness side of it, the excitement which can tip someone over the edge, but it’s okay, my deadening, zombifying medication takes care of that.  I’m allowed to be stressed, but not excited.

We are having our wedding at 3.30pm on a Friday afternoon, not because we particularly wanted a late afternoon wedding, but because there is the very real possibility that if I take my stupid medication I will either sleep in or be so drugged I will slur, “I do” and panic my soon-to-be-husband’s family that he is marrying an alcoholic.  Or worse, be so drugged I haze through it, unfeeling and unthinking, as I do a large proportion of my life. I am genuinely afraid I am going to be absent on my own wedding day.

There’s the other consideration, “Oh shit! My arms!” Besides what I wrote in my last post, I really don’t want to have my arms out, I would just be too uncomfortable.  They look frigging awful in photos, too.  So I am less thinking, “I’m going to get a pretty dress” and more thinking, “In what way can I cover my arms and not bake in August?”

And, of course, the expectation that a bride must be A BEAUTIFUL FUCKING PRINCESS and, for someone with body dysmorphia and a past eating disorder, it’s unsurprising that some of my latent anxious behaviours have kicked right back in.  On this count, at least, I have finally admitted some uncomfortable truths to Robert, which is the first step in me taking back control.  But I saw myself on video a few days ago and went into a mad tailspin of being unbelieving I looked like that, and suddenly could not bear the thought of people looking at me, and they will be.  Unless I staple a veil to my face. And body.

I also worry that I will wake up two weeks beforehand and be nailed against the wall by depression.  Robert knows how swiftly, how severely it can hit me, out of nowhere, like the big stupid wanker it is, and says it’s fine if we need to cancel the wedding because of it, knowing the day will not cut through the fugue (because absolutely nothing does). But that is kind of my worst nightmare.

All this said, though, I am delighted to be getting married to the love of my life.  Urgh! I hear you boke, but he really is.  He is my messy, silly other half, my first love, and my last.  He is wonderful and he makes me extremely happy. I am excited about getting up in front of my family (alas, Granny Molloy-less, she is too frail to come, and minus my dad) and friends and saying, “THIS ONE HERE, I LIKE THIS ONE THE BEST”.  I’m excited about having our first dance, eating cake, buggering off back to our hotel and then frigging off on honeymoon for a week.

(We are going to Rome. We have a honeymoon register as we don’t need household stuff here: http://www.honeyfund.com/wedding/robertandseaneen which apparently you are supposed to post on your wedding website?  Who has one of those? All this stuff is an etiquette minefield.  But I’ll be 27 while I’m in Rome!  I lived to 27! Jesus!).

And most of all, of course, I am delighted and excited to be marrying Robert, and to be spending my life with him.  He is pretty cool.

But this all brings uneasy questions to the fore.  Uneasy in their, “This should be easy” and it’s not.  Children, for example.  I do really want to have children.  I have had “those” discussions with doctors that have ranged from, “NO” to, “Be careful”.  And we will be careful.

But can we handle children?  We are intelligent, mature and loving people, but one of us has the tendency to go a little mad.  I spent some days in perinatel psychiatry lately.  And it was terrifying to be confronted with my possible future.  It was another imagining- like my wedding- were mental health makes an unwelcome intrusion.  If you have a history of manic depression (technically, I’m not sure I do, but it is probably that, let’s face it) or if your mother has had postnatal psychosis (mine has), you get an automatic referral to their services.

“Services”.  I spent such a long time worming my way out of them, and I may worm my way back in.  I am glad these places exist, I think perinatal and postnatal illness is something that should be given more attention.  But to exist within them?  It is not how I imagined my pregnancy.  I thought it would just be me, the dad and our big lovely belly.

I have been pregnant once before.  And the circumstances were very different, so it probably affected my mental health with them being as they were.  But hormonally and physically, within a very short period of time, I was a mess.  I was crying constantly. I found what was happening to my body utterly distressing.  I lost my shit and it took a very long time to recover it.  But again- could have been the circumstances.

But I have also seen my mum when she was ill and it was extremely frightening.  And with lack of sleep being der rigeur in new mums, I wonder if I will go the same way as her.  It scares the shit out of me.

And then as a mother.  I know lots of mums with mental health problems who are great mums, but there is a chance I won’t be.  Then again, every one has that worry, it’s not just people with mental health problems.  Who may be viewed by others as an incapable mum.

Well, balls to them.  We’ll be great.  We have love! Creativity! And very sweet cats.

And if I do go psychotic and mad (and it’s quite rare so what’s to say it could happen?), at least there’s the Mother and Baby Unit at the Bethlem.  I’m lucky to live here.  Couldn’t go mad in a better place, really.  Bright side, eh?

It does, though, bring things into sharp and happy relief.  I never imagined my life would be where it’s at now.  Or that I would feel capable of having children, or even committing to another person, one who doesn’t worry about me topping myself.  Or that me topping myself is now a remote possibility, and not a concrete immovable object on the horizon.  To be sane enough to even organise the damn thing, to be sane enough to do it while going to university.  There is the trade off-medication, and I am going to need to have a serious discussion about it because the compromise is becoming too great- but all in all, I’m alright.  To be planning a future, even a rather scary one, is more than I ever expected.

(Though he is rather dangerous)

I remember the first time I realised my dad wouldn’t walk me down the aisle. I was around 20. I can’t remember the date, the month, but I clearly remember that I was sitting on a bus, in the evening, [...]]]>

(Repost from my other blog, given some recent comments I thought this might help people)

I remember the first time I realised my dad wouldn’t walk me down the aisle. I was around 20. I can’t remember the date, the month, but I clearly remember that I was sitting on a bus, in the evening, leaning against the window with my fingers covering my eyes (the sunlight must have been weaving in and out of them, so it must have been summer). A woman got on, and held onto the pole, stared ahead, in that way you do. Something about her made me look. She reminded me of the girl in a Cancer Research advert at the time, one which was being broadcast with the wild abandon of supermarket commercials, between soaps, between documentaries, between seconds and minutes of days and weeks, and was unforgettable, and inescapable. And I had tried to escape it.

The girl in the advert was in her wedding dress. She looked every bit the cake-topper in her ordinary bedroom, in the oval of the mirror, with a painfully empty reflection behind her. She had tears running down her face, and she said, “My mum should be here”.

The advert, up until then, had annoyed me in the way that all cancer-saturation annoys me. I know that cancer is a horrific illness (my fiancé’s grandfather died of it on Boxing Day, the day we got engaged), I know the pain and despair it causes, I know it is awful and I know I am terrified of it, too. I know this because it is everywhere. Money is pumped into cancer charities, and cancer is the illness of bravery, of determination, of halo-dom. Automatic sainthood bestows upon the cancer patient, which, I believed, saccharined the reality of a terrible, destructive illness. All people who are ill are brave, because it requires bravery to live through any awful experience, through anything, really, through life. Whether in tears of laughter.

In my bleak little cocoon of grief (what is it like outside? I still don’t know), I felt resentment that people like me were not represented in these adverts. Or anywhere. No brave adverts for alcoholism and drug addiction, for mental illness, for the less glamourous, not-so-”blameless” (how horrible a concept) battles that steal our loved ones every day and which leave the children, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers and friends silent under the weight of shame, of blame themselves (“couldn’t you stop him drinking? Put him into a hospital or something? Five children and it’s still not enough? What kind of children are you?”). The well-known by now turn-away of the face, the lowering of the gaze, not of death, but of a socially unacceptable death. One that does not proffer forth, “Ah, how brave they were! How wonderful. So much a life lived, and now the suffering is ended. They fought a battle”, but a defence, a, “But he was good. He was. I know he was. I remember it. Inside, he was good. He wasn’t himself- it wasn’t his fault”. The scrabbling for old memories, good ones. From childhood, maybe, or a glimpse, one day, in between drinks, of who he was, who you loved, who you would miss so desperately even when you hated them sometimes, and even when they so clearly hated you sometimes to, and even when you both said as much. And cancer patients are alcoholics too, have wasted, desperate lives, and die young. There is no sainthood, everyone is the same, everyone is human. A kind of death doesn’t make a kind of life. But so it is for the alcoholic, the drug addict, the mentally ill. Because they were so, then they must have been so.

And moreso than silent, invisible. I wanted, so desperately, to see someone represent my experience. To do it publicly. Please, please don’t let me be alone. I want to talk. I want someone to say something about what is happening to people and to the people left behind (My wonderful friend Brendan, who battled alcohol addiction too, died the year after my dad. He was the person who understood the most and I had wanted to shock him with my grief- it never works, it didn’t work with my dad, either. He saw people in his group die, and then he did anyway). It is why I wanted to write a book- not just one about mental illness (of which I have little to say about my own anymore) but about the experience of growing up with an alcoholic, with another who was mentally ill (It was like having half a parent most of the time. They ebbed and flowed, sometimes, one could be capable, one not, and vice versa. Sometimes they both were, and those were the best of times). Two parents who you love but who are flawed so deeply, but you love. Of not being a Jeremy Kyle caricature nor a placid professorly drinker, of being taught to read by someone who had misspelling on their gravestone, all too soon.

So this woman on the bus, her face like the advert girl. And I thought about it, her standing in front of the lonely mirror, and realised that my experience is there. It is there because I, my siblings and millions of people have lost a parent- forever and ever- and lost the futures we had in our hearts for ourselves, and for them. I had always imagined my dad walking me down the aisle (and probably getting drunk and ruining my wedding, but at least being by my side, genuinely proud and composed, for a few minutes. Like the childhood memories of making Toasted Toppers, it would be worth it for the rapidly fading memory of his true self), I had imagined smiling at him and getting one of my decade-kisses (only 3 times, not out of lack of love, but he was not that kind of man, he was shy) and then being released by him.

It struck me with shuddering, sickening force that it wouldn’t happen. It would never happen, it was gone, gone and could never be taken back. I had a new future and it was one without my dad. Without my children having him as a grandad, without my future husband meeting him (he did, when he was 18, and my dad baldly asked him, “Do you love her?”, to which my future husband replied, “Yes”), without arguments, without tense Christmasses, without shouting, without anything at all. He was gone. Was he even my dad anymore? Do they exist as parents, if they are dead? When they are 47 and I have friends older than that, who are alive?

I wanted to be sick. I shoved my head against the window and let tears roll down my face, too immobilised by shock and grief to even move, to get off the bus, to spare myself the embarrassment. When I finally did it was with fingers clenched in and drenched. I walked, I don’t even remember where- nowhere dramatic, probably home- trying to push the thought out of my mind, as I had done so many times before. But it wouldn’t go, it kept floating back, the awful reality of what had happened, that I had to accept and couldn’t bear to.

And now it is almost six years later. I’m getting married in August without my dad. Hopefully my mum will come, hopefully Robert’s dad will come, too. My little brother is giving me away. We’re having alcohol and I wonder if that’s like putting out lines of coke for the drug addict funeral. Should I raise a toast to my dad? Is that like saluting the Grim Reaper with a scythe?

But I know alcohol didn’t kill my dad, and that alcoholism did.

My dad should be here.

Christmas was good. I got engaged! Christ, I feel like a proper grown up now.

Robert came to my family’s for Christmas, which meant the unromantic setting of dog wee in the kitchen (he is a very excitable boxer dog, who [...]]]>

I keep forgetting I have this website! So I’m crossposting from Secret Life…

Christmas was good. I got engaged! Christ, I feel like a proper grown up now.

Robert came to my family’s for Christmas, which meant the unromantic setting of dog wee in the kitchen (he is a very excitable boxer dog, who kept trying to shag him). But the more romantic setting of introducing Robert to my extended family and getting fat together on the sofa with the Eastenders Christmas special.

On Boxing Day, Robert was rather adamant that we go for a walk in town. He was very nicely dressed- unusually so for a tramp like him- so I followed his lead and dressed up a bit, too. He was quite insistent in walking to the River Lagan, as when we were first together as teenagers we used to go for walks there. Then we went to this little bandstand area, in blue lights, little steps, a bench. He gave me a kiss, extremely nervous. I realised what was happening and asked to sit down, and he knelt down in front of me. I’d gotten him this notebook he loved, an old, leatherbound one, which I said he had to put something lovely in as it was too nice for hastily scribbled swearwords. He pulled it out of his pocket, started to read me something he had written, and asked me to marry him. When he took the ring out I said, “I bloody knew it!” as he had been somewhat dropping clangers. But it was lovely, all the lovelier really as it meant I was as nervous as he was.

Anyway, we kissed and walked back. On the way across the bridge, a woman barked, “Let me see the ring!” and I thought I was being mugged. She worked there, and the whole thing had been caught on CCTV. Hooray!

The ring did not quite fit, so we choose a new one together, a pink sapphire, which is beautiful. The ring which doesn’t fit me is now his wedding ring, which I’m wearing around my neck on a chain, and will put on his finger on our wedding day. He gave me the new ring at the bus station where we first met, when he came to visit from London when I was 14 and he was 18 after eight months of phone calls and letters, and where he looked all shy and pretty in is suit and make up and took my hand, and I pulled it away because I was dissolving with nerves.

Afterwards we rang my sister who came into town with my brother and we had a bottle of Prosecco. We want to get married in August as it’s the only time we have free. I got a bit excited talking about it all but truth is, god knows what will happen. We are completely broke and neither of us want a big do. We don’t know if we will have it in Belfast or London yet- Belfast would be good for my family, but for the ceremony I really only want a very small number of people there. We are not traditional, and we’re not formal. I asked my sisters and Robert’s sister to be my bridesmaid (and my big sister to be my maid of honour!), which is one of two concessions to tradition we’ll give as they mean a lot to me. But they can wear what they like! Since my dad obviously can’t give me away (being dead and all), my brother wants to give me away in a leopardprint tophat and we are finding uses for the battery powered LEDs I have, so. We’ll see. A party afterwards would be nice but the whole thing boils down to the fact that we just want to marry each other and have a day with people we love! No white fancy bullshit!

(This stuff is already making my head spin. I want my London friends at my wedding and I can’t afford hotels in Belfast, but my family cannot afford to help AT ALL so it’s all on us. Also, Robert’s mum can’t take any time off in August so she wouldn’t be able to come to Belfast for a wedding. AAAAAARRRRRGH).

It was a bittersweet day. When we came back to my mum’s, Robert got a phone call informing him his grandad had died. We knew it was going to happen and the love his grandparents had is what spurred him on to propose. His mum told his grandparents- his granny was delighted, and his grandfather (who was a lovely man) died knowing, so she said that was nice. But it was kind of heartbreaking. We had a big cry- about him, about the possibility of losing each other and the inherent madness involved in spending your life with someone, and in being in love. It is strange to be engaged to Robert, after our messy, complex history together. I have loved him since his first letter dropped on my door mat when I was 13. He makes me happier, more comfortable, more myself (as myself as I can be drugged to the nuts) than I ever imagined I could be. Now we are getting married I feel the pain of losing him one day acutely- but it’s worth the life we could have, I know. Then we went to sleep.

We went to my friend Stephen’s the next day, Robert rocking up drunk as he sold his Dulwich Hamlet scarf in a pub for 4 drinks and £12. Stephen and Aislinn’s house is fairy tale beautiful, and we couldn’t believe someone we knew lived there.

We played a board game called, “Us and Them”- about the Troubles. It had green cards with questions about Catholicism on them, and Orange cards about protestantism. There were also Innocent Victim cards, with questions like this:

No questions about punishment beatings, though, bollocks.

Back in London now and it all feels quite surreal. But I keep looking at the ring. I’m still happy, so is he, so, all good!

HOLY SHIT SHINY ETC!

My family, and Robert and Freddy would both be even if we never got married. But it’s nice to make it official.

And I start my placement on Tuesday, argh!

We are putting on a comedy night to celebrate his life and raise money for MIND, It would be wonderful if you could all come down a [...]]]>

In honour of the comedian, Mackenzie Taylor, who died last year, there will be a comedy fundraiser in aid of Mind on December 15th-  Here are the details:

We are putting on a comedy night to celebrate his life and raise money for MIND, It would be wonderful if you could all come down a support the night.
The Laugh Goodbye – Comedy Fundraiser
Date December 15th 2011
Time 7.30 -10.30
A cracking comedy line up to celebrate the life of Comedian Mackenzie Taylor and raise money for MIND.
Line Up  Tom Wrigglesworth, Kevin Shepherd, Joe Wilkinson, John Gordillo, Holly Walsh, Richard Sandling and Tony Law
Cost £10 in Advance £12 on the Door (all proceeds go to MIND)
Venue: New Diorama Theatre
Box Office Number:
+44 (0)207 383 9034
Nearest Tube: Great Portland Street/Warren Street/Euston Square
Bus: New Diorama is directly on the following bus routes: 18, 27, 30, 88, 205, 453, C2, N18

Many Thanks

http://thesecretlifeofamanicdepressive.wordpress.com/

and there are 2 things I’ve recently written floating about. The first is an article for One in Four on working post-mental-illness. (Which made it into the Guardian’s society daily, hooray!)

Working it out

After four years of [...]]]>

Hi chaps, I have been writing, but not here! I have been blogging about mentalism at:

http://thesecretlifeofamanicdepressive.wordpress.com/

and there are 2 things I’ve recently written floating about. The first is an article for One in Four on working post-mental-illness. (Which made it into the Guardian’s society daily, hooray!)

Working it out

After four years of treatment, three years on benefits and two interviews, I finally found myself one job.

I thought I’d never have a job again. My employment history is fractured at best. In attempting to work when I was ill, I made that situation and my health worse. Claiming benefits took a long time, but when I was finally successful, it gave me the space I desperately needed to get well. It gave me time, above all else. Time to sort out my housing, time to attend appointments, time to process what was happening to me and learn to live with it.

After three years receiving benefits, I realised I was no longer ill enough to justify claiming them. At the same time, I lost my entitlement to the support that came along with benefits and therefore lost all help toward getting a job. For the first time in four years, I was absolutely on my own. At that point, though, I felt that was where I was ready to be. Well, sometimes. At other times I almost crumbled with the fear that I wasn’t ready for work, that I wasn’t prepared for life without stabilisers.

And a piece with the mental health campaign, Time to Change, on stigmatising yourself.

used to be a very prolific blogger on the subject of bipolar disorder. That was, until I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Bipolar disorder, through the visibility of sufferers such as Stephen Fry, could be construed as one of the more acceptable mental health conditions to have. It is associated with great creativity. Borderline personality disorder, however, is a less acceptable condition to have, if anybody knows what it is at all. It is portrayed in the media via the prisms of films like Fatal Attraction, with the terminally attached Glenn Close cutting her wrists as she waits for the disinterested Michael Douglas to call. Within mental health services, its image fares little better. In this study, 84% of mental health professionals said that people with borderline personality disorder were the hardest client group to deal with.

I hope you like them. And hooray for feeling able to write again! It’s been months!

This is a quick, somewhat toothless post as I feel quite hopeless about this bill, as a person and a student nurse who didn’t sign up for this.

The Health and Social Care [...]]]>

Edit: I wrote this yesterday and was right to feel hopeless. The Lords have declined to submit the Bill for further scrutiny.

This is a quick, somewhat toothless post as I feel quite hopeless about this bill, as a person and a student nurse who didn’t sign up for this.

The Health and Social Care bill passes to the Lords today. On Sunday, thousands of people assembled on Westminster Bridge in protest at the widely unpopular bill that is without mandate and which will privatise by stealth the greatest asset the public has. I love the NHS on principle- I firmly believe that healthcare is a human right. It is one that should be available to everyone, regardless of where they live, what they earn or who they are- from the cradle to the grave.

The protest was great.  It was populated by doctors, nurses, student nurses like me, the public, the left, the right.  But it received scant media coverage and had largely broken up by 5pm. I wondered if people there felt as I did- impotent. This government has steamrollered policy through- from welfare reform to tuition fees to this bill- with little consultation and against much opposition. Being in front of the steamroller and getting flattened anyway seems to be making people- myself included- feel increasingly disillusioned. Especially after the Hardest Hit march, which got nothing at all. No coverage.

Frustrated at being unable to express my own feelings beyond showing up, I pulled up my sleeves and scrawled this on my arms.

Anyway, impotent as I feel, there is stuff to do.  You can write to a lord expressing your feelings here on the 38 Degrees website. 

More after the jump.

There [...]]]>

This is an absolutely beautiful little video.  And close to my heart.  I spend most of my time alone.  The nature of living with a night shift worker means there are seven days in every fourteen when I am alone.  I don’t see people other than him so much.  Not much of a social life here.

There are times I feel very lonely.  That’s exacerbated by the internet- of having many connections but few with whom I truly connect.  With someone always on chat but never on the phone.  With 600 tagged photos of faces I never see in real life.  Sometimes I do feel very lonely.  I feel bad to admit to it.

But being alone. The older I’ve grown, the more I enjoy my own company.  I realise how much I value it when it’s taken away.  I get a little image of myself sitting here, drinking a coffee, being alone, and I yearn for it.  When I was working I was late home every day because I liked to look in the shop windows and run my hands through the vegetable racks and sniff the tomatoes.  I would rifle through my pockets for the change for tea.  6.30…7.30…head still in the paper.  I am used to getting looks for eating alone.  A £5 meze plate, my favourite treat, with just me eating and people taking my empty chair.  No, no-one is coming.  It’s just me.

In a way, I am halting about making new friends or polishing the friendships I already have because I like to be alone so much.  I like the space to think.  I feel bad admitting to that, too.  But I’m working on that.  I need to make the time for people.

Anyway, look, this is so lovely.

If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were you were not okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find its fine to be alone once you’re embracing it. We can start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library, where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the box, your not suppose to talk much anyway so its safe there. There is also the gym, if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in. There’s public transportation, we all gotta go places. And there’s prayer and mediation, no one will think less if your hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation. Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on avoid being principles. The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by “chow downers”, employees who only have an hour and their spouse work across town, and they, like you, will be alone. Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone. When you are comfortable with “eat lunch and run”, take yourself out to dinner to a restaurant with linen and silver wear. You’re no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo desert and cleaning the whip cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were. Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst fleeting community. And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you, stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no ones watching because they are probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely move to beats, after-all, is gorgeous and affecting. Dance till you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things. Down your back, like a book of blessings. Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, they are always statues to talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute, these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might of never happened had you not been there by yourself.

Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile no one is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it. You can stand swaffed by groups and mobs and hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company. But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them maybe lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy slogans from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens for holding the lonely at bay. Cause if you’re happy in your head, and solitude is blessed, and alone is okay., Its okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one has the same synapses can’t think like you, this be ?, keeps things interesting, lifes magic things ?, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, the community is not present, just take back to you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it. Take silence and respect it, if you have an art that needs practice stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it. You could me in an instant surrounded if you need it, if your heart is bleeding, make the best of it, there is heat and freezing be a testiment.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mentally-Interesting-The-Secret-Life-of-a-Manic-Depressive/

I intend to get back to writing here shortly- unfortunately my brain has gone wonky in the past month or two making it a bit difficult.  Doh and indeed DURRR.

I was also at the Block the Bridge, Block the Bill protest against the Health and Social Care [...]]]>

It is here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mentally-Interesting-The-Secret-Life-of-a-Manic-Depressive/

I intend to get back to writing here shortly- unfortunately my brain has gone wonky in the past month or two making it a bit difficult.  Doh and indeed DURRR.

I was also at the Block the Bridge, Block the Bill protest against the Health and Social Care bill which will remove the duty of care from the state and sneak-privatise the NHS.  I’ll write more later as I have some photos, but you can look at me Twitter <over there and read about it on the Guardian here.