84 Hours Awake ~ and Scarcely Fatigued!

LAST WEEK I got "insomnia" so bad that I stayed awake constantly between Monday evening and Friday morning ~ that's about 84 consecutive hours! And I was barely even tired! And noI had not been taking speed (I wouldn't even know where to get speed.) Binky said that I was "manic" during this time, but I felt normal. A bit elevated, maybe. But I thought I felt pretty normal. I spent most of the time pottering about and scribbling shorthand into a notebook. 

Everybody wonders why on earth I would want to master the dying or almost dead art of shorthand and the answers are these: 1. because it's very handy to be able to write quickly and 2. I love the idea of nobody except retired American secretary types being able to read my scribblings. 

Apart from the fascination I've always had with writing, secret codes etc, I gravitated to shorthand back in my late teens because I was interested in a career in journalism and back then all journalists were expected to know shorthand. Then, in the late 1990s I saw a job offered in one of the music magazines for a "techno correspondent" and I thought "there's no way I'm going to be able to use a dictaphone at a rave, so I'd better perfect that half-arsed shorthand I picked up a few years ago". And that's why I learned shorthand. 

I never perfected the method, however and that's why, the other day when I was poking through boxes of stuff still unpacked from when I moved in, I found a sheaf of print outs of a 1929 shorthand manual I found myself filling notebooks with pages of scibbles all over again.

The style I write in is the American Gregg's shorthand. I happened to chance upon that method because my Gran was a school secretary and that's the system they taught her back in the day. It's far faster than the British Teeline method which is still taught to trainee journalists over here; and much easier to grasp than Pitman's. Pitman's is the traditional British shorthand and it's extremely fast but requires a pencil and lined paper. When I've had cause to write shorthand I have never ever had a pencil to hand and quite often had to resort to scrap paper pillaged from a bin, so I think I was right in choosing Gregg's shorthand over Pitman's.

Anyway I think I'm sleeping normally now. 

But my shorthand is really good!

"Donk Mix 2014" (Otherwise as Bounce or Scouse House.)
I love this type of music...


Illustrated: samples of German (Stolze-Schrey), Dutch (Groote)  and American (Gregg) stenography 

Feeling Better: not so depressed/still writing "great literature"

FINALLY the fog of "depression"/whatever you wanna call it (feeling unamused + sleeping 12-16 hours per day EVERY day... yes THAT is lifting. O and when I did get up "early" (eg 8am) thinking how well I was doing, not only did I feel absolute stygian gloom, barely able to function at all, but I'd flop down on the sofa, maybe a couple of hours later, after I'd done all I had to do for the day ~ getting methadone, buying shopping in etc, so the rest of the day was comparitively "optional" then BAM!! straight to sleep and catching up on every single hour "lost" plus EVEN MORE! ~ meaning I just couldn't win. I told my GPs (both of them) and they nodded understandingly. They certainly didn't try and imply if only I had more mettle and forced myself to stay awake I'd somehow be all right because I wasn't all right. The less sleep the LOWER my mood went. It was horrible. ANYWAY this is all finished now and I'm currently on 9 hours. My mood today has actually gone UP. I'm really excited because I found some yummy blue soft cheese (Cambazola) to put in my French baguettes, which I eat nearly every day. Or is it because I'm busily writing the most amazing children's book of all time? I don't know!

Ukh. As for my brilliant writerly idea... I REALLY need a good "literary agent" with whom to discuss this stuff. My family are good, but really just as clueless as me when it comes to the wherewithalls of publishing. I haven't the faintest idea how that industry works and I need someone I can bounce ideas off who is NOT my publisher, because I feel I should produce (and hence publish) my stuff in a certain way, in a certain order of appearance. Maybe I'm sounding a bit mysterious here: what I mean is, I have so very many ideas for stories it'd take me at least the next five years to write them all. That's if I took up writing full-time. Currently I'm only writing ~ really ~ part-time I haven't the physical energy to scribble away at this hobby of mine full-time.

(Most of the time when I'm "writing" I'm actually watching True Movies 2 on Freesat!)

I was watching French television last night (as you do when you're supposedly writing an intellectual novel) and this brilliant prison drama came on called Unité 9 ~ far better than the present-day rehash of Prisoner Cell Block H they're calling Wentworth. I also saw a good courtroom-cum-prison drama Anybody's Nightmare, starring Patricia Routledge (Hyacinth Bucket) on True Entertainment. The real-life story of Sheila Bowler, a middle-aged, middle-class music teacher falsely accused and then convicted of the murder of her frail and elderly aunt. That was really good too.

You know as I'm getting older and becoming an accomplished intellectual novelist, I can watch TV drama and think "no that's a cheap shot; they should have focused more on that character, added an establishing scene here, rejiggled a bit there, done it this other way". + when I read other people's books I'm constantly blue-pencilling other writers' prose  (I do it enough to my own). I got Sharon Osbourne's latest memoir Unbreakable from Morrisons for £10 (Binky thinks this is the biggest self-indulgence, spending £10 on A book!) ~ no ghostwriter is credited, but some of the prose, at its best is top-drawer. Paul Burrel's book A Royal Duty doesn't credit a ghostwriter either and that's amazingly well done, considering the lengthy, convoluted story he had to tell and, in the words of her brother, Earl Spencer: a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister, the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds. 

I once tried penning my own memoir ~ a "misery memoir" as my own tale would be labelled ~ and I can tell you it is NOT easy ~ not just recalling your own life in brutal close-up, but detailing precisely HOW and why one thing led to another, what was said by whom and how it made you feel. The misery of my own memoiring made me so depressed that  I gave up in favour of fiction. Then I gave up writing for grown-ups because I was so fed up of the shitty world I would have to portray (+ too uninspired to write anything approaching a full-length book), and, in the end didn't even want to feel obliged to reproduce swear-words in print, that I finally gravitated to children's fiction, perhaps the one single arena of innocence left in this dark and nasty world ...

Ukh, every time I post I seem to be writing the same thing. Yes I'm writing a story. By £1 shop pen, on WH Smiths lined refill paper. But I can't tell you what it's about! It's not finished.

OK I've got to go now. Hope you're all OK. Take care y'all...

Illustrated: (upper) WH Smith's "wide-ruled refill pad" ~ what I use for the composition of great literature..! (middle) Cambazola ~ soft and spreadable blue cheese (lower) Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It, to date, the most successful "misery memoir" of all time...

VIDEO: AGATHA CHRISTIE

Most successful author of all time with agglommerated sales of (allegedly) 2,000,000,000(!!!)
Her detectives Poirot and Miss Marple are still on British TV every single week. Mistress of the "whodunnit"! Her books seem incredibly "creaky" by today's standards but she's very popular on television. Her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple can be seen on British screens every week, and new productions based on her 66 mystery novels  are still being made.
Her play The Mousetrap is the longest-running stage production in recorded history. Opening in 1952, it's STILL GOING after SIXTY-ONE YEARS!!!

AUDIO: ENID BLYTON INTERVIEW
She was the most successful children's author of all time and one of my favourites. When I want "inspiration" I read her Famous Five books, which are delightfully PI (politically incorrect!)
Her prose might be rather plain, but it's really readable.
Americans seem not to have heard of her, but she's a pillar of British culture. Very famous indeed within these shores!

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VIDEO: BARBARA CARTLAND (WITH JAR JAR GABOR (WHATEVER HER NAME WAS))

Barbara Cartland is supposedly the second-bestselling British writer of ALL TIME

(Have YOU ever read one of her books? I haven't!)
In her final years she was knocking out one slim historical romance per fortnight ~ publishing 24 titles per year, each of which would sell a million copies around the world. Frequently appeared on British TV extolling the virtues of vitamins and reprimanding the modern proclivity to sex before marriage!

Literary Brainwave!

I'VE HAD A BRILLIANT IDEA for my book. It's like a new version of my story, which I'm going to do...

Which I cannot divulge. It's so good, if I said it here then everyone writing for children would want to copy me and I, of course want to be first...

(What am I saying? Nobody reads my blog these days anyhow!!!)

Ukh despite the brainwaves, I have been feeling pretty terrible of late. Which is a paradox, I know, but that's life... Sleeping on and on and on. And on. And on and on. And on. Oh yeah: and on again. Terrible, I know. Makes me seem really lazy, doesn't it. If I do manage to be in bed by midnight, which is difficult when you've spent an evening slowly ~ very slowly ~ dreaming up silly animal tales, then it is difficult to sleep afterwards. I write pretty slowly ~ less than a page an hour, which works out at an average of just FIVE words per minute... and that's only the first draft...

Anyway once I do get to sleep, which can be difficult because ironically I sometimes feel a bit "high" of an evening, I fall into an abyss of dormancy and am unfit to be revived until a good TWELVE hours later. FOURTEEN, SIXTEEN, EIGHTEEN on a really bad day. Then I generally get up feeling distinctly under the weather...

OF COURSE I have tried forcing myself to rise at eight, and when I do I think "Wow, I'm doing really well..." until I dare to sit down at around 10am and suddenly ~ WHOOSH! ~ sleep overcomes me once more like a stealthy disease and I'm wiped out all day, making up all "lost" time, and often more. + making it even HARDER to sleep at the right time come midnight... Another thing: when I sleep less than twelve hours I usually feel very depressed during the day. Much worse than on a "standard" day... so I can't win. I'm just SO GLAD I'm managing to get this story done. I'm now a good ¾ of the way through (20,000 words written!). Isn't that amazing!

20,000 words, by the way, can I say to the non-writers amongst us, is NOT a lot of writing. To people who don't have cause to think in thousands of words, let me explain. In an adult Penguin Classics style volume (ie fairly closely-set type) that is just 50 printed pages.  In a kiddies' novel (sans illustration) it works out at approx 75-80 pages, not counting blank patches at ends and beginnings of chapters (which can add a lot; that's one device publishers have of lengthening brief manuscripts into books of more impressive length). So really I've NOT done a lot of writing. My book will not by any stretch of the imagination be "too long"! But hey I'm SO HAPPY to be writing it. I just cannot believe I never knuckled down and did this before.

(Well I AM the author of three failed novels, FAILED being very much the operative word!!)

(Actually I CAN believe it. I spent years feeling uninspired and thanks to that maxim "write what you know" I felt limited to tawdry tales of heroin addicts, petty crims, prostitutes and gangsters ... also I did once try composing a mysery memoir. But walking into WH Smiths one day only to see a five-pack of life-tales of woe on special offer. I remember thinking "no way do I want my own life packaged up like that ~ schizoaffective heroin addiction next to wife-beating, anorexia and incest" and so I proceeded no further. Also just the act of recalling my life and having to join the dots into something that made sense to strangers was more disconcerting (or upsetting, if you prefer) than I had anticipated.

Another thing: as a writer you're obviously known for the genre you write in and I did not want to feel I'd have to spend a career putting in repeat performances of druggy tales. Plus, if I did put in a successful memoir, I reckon my "fans" (if I collected any) would want more and more tales from my own life. Fictionalized stories would feel very much like a second best, and I've always wanted to be a novelist, not a memoirist.

As for children's writing, once I turned my mind to this field I had literally an entire page full of ideas ~ all for separate books. More ideas in one hour for children than a lifetime of "adult popular fiction" (the genre I'd always wanted to write in). What stopped me from proceeding was how difficult I found my first attempts to be. The writing just would not flow... So I put it down, assuming that I just didn't have it in me ~ that I wasn't good enough to write for children. 

Children's writing is a rare talent ~ I can see that by the profuse lack of talent that appeared to be on display every time I browsed the kiddies' shelves in WH Smith ~and I just didn't think I had it either. What changed was that I stopped worrying "will they understand this word; is that sentence too complicated for them" (and I haven't got any and don't even KNOW any children) and just sat down and wrote the story for myself. I'm such a big kid anyway there's no difference between writing for a ten year-old and writing for myself . That's how I found my voice...

Anyway, enought said! Gotta go and put more high-grade entertainment to paper...

Hope you're all doing well. Take care folks XxXxXxX ☺

It's OFFICIAL: I'm a "LUNATIC"...

I HAVE LONG BEEN TOLD, by various readers of my blog, that MY MOOD APPEARED TO CYCLE IN TIME WITH THE MOON... Yet for some reason I seemed never to take this seriously. Perhaps it was because, usually, me and the moon did not make an EXACT MATCH... just a close one. And because I like to think of myself as highly rational and sensible and not liable to believe in old wives' tales, I didn't believe in this one either.

Except that for the past THREE MONTHS or so, I have glanced out of the window, whilst feeling uncannily restless in the middle of the night, and seen FULL MOON floating up there. And when the moon isn't precisely FULL, it's always WANING. Which matches the "lunacy" theory even more.

Because it's as if something inside me has been waxing along with the waxing moon. And though the moon turns a corner and starts to wane, I carry on waxing, so the restlessness or "mania" breaks through while the moon is waning... Hmmm.

Then I looked back to the most severe mania of my life. This broke out on Wednesday 17th January 2011. WHICH WAS THE EXACT FULL MOON!

That was the day I ended up in a mental hospital, having turned up at a dual diagnosis meeting in a floridly manic, psychotic state. Hearing things, seeing things. My head in utter cognitive dissaray. And from that day forth, it only got worse...

ISN'T THAT WEIRD..?

Yesterday I felt so terrible, that having done everything I had to (and long string of chores for Binky. Well, actually, one single thing. Which involved going up and down. And up and down. And up and down. The same fucking head-destroying high road. All morning. So I got home in a huge strop and took some drugs and passed out, waking up after 9pm. Then I slept again. All through the night. Getting up at 11 this morning.

And I'm writing a letter to my GP, saying "our relationship is not working. You do not seem to understand me at all. THIS is how it is. I could NEVER TELL YOU THIS with my mouth. So believe me. Because I cannot handle it when you try and challenge me. I'm dealing with things I don't want to be real. Then you tell me you don't think it's real. Which leaves me in utter confusion. I cannot work with a doctor who is not on the same page. Absolutely impossible for me.... I don't know.

Well anyway I just wanted to say all this. Now I have to go. It's nearly 4pm and I have to get home. Take care everybody... ;-)

PS: WHAT IS IT about the FULL MOON that does affect mood? Presently, researchers appear to be obsessed by some connexion with the light of the moon and elevated moods. But surely in this day and age of artificial lighting, the moon will make very little difference...? Personally I think it's MAGNETIC...

Terminally Unique or Terminally Ill?

I HAVEN'T written for ages because I was too depressed to bother to get up and make it this far from my house to the internet cafe. What happened is, I spent a week or so barely sleeping at all. I felt a bit "high" because I was obsessed with Brazil and going to Brazil and living in Brazil and speaking Portuguese. Which I am not normally.

People seem bemused by my last post, but you have to bear in mind I was very miserable when I wrote it, and could not imagine ever feeling any better. So I write about "wanting to get clean" and then say but I will never be happy when I am clean! what this means is I want to get clean and then I want to die! I spent most of the past month angrily plotting suicide and musing on what a deception it is to feel "normal" and how anybody who wants to live is delusional and has been absolutely conned.

Do I really think I'm terminally unique? I mean, yes I am as a person. We all are. But as a manic-depressive junkie, am I unique?

Well most junkies are NOT clinically manic-depressive and I AM. So that does cause a complete comprehension-block in certain circumstances. For one thing, I have learned from the current popular culture to view unhappiness as a kind of illness. And manic depression always has been regarded as an illness. And so when I am feeling REALLY unhappy a kind of schism becomes apparent in me, where I feel ill and will sometimes think "I'm ill" but at the same time I'm locked up in my own head with somebody who I really hate and I will beat this person up severely for claiming to be ill and tell him EXCUSES EXCUSES. ALL YOU EVER MAKE IS EXCUSES. GET A LIFE. BETTER STILL GET A DEATH.

I think all addicts know misery and that many know clinical depression. But my problem, medically, as far as I know is NOT just clinical depression, it's manic depression and that causes a constant shift in self-esteem that is very disconcerting and difficult to live with. In fact the last time I went to see my doctor I was determined to demand one of those agreements that states that should I ever become seriously ill, through any cause I want to be allowed to die. "Unfortunately" my mood brightened considerably a couple of days before the appointment and so my dearly-held desire slipped away from me...

Brooding brooding. I keep brooding brooding. Or planning. Planning planning.  I have so many bright ideas in my head. I call them ambitions. Probably if I told you them you'd consider them ideas above my station.

The "brooding" comes in because I want to know HOW to make these dreams come true. Even in the most elementary sense.

I'm no longer obsessed with getting "clean" because the obsession with drugs has receded, just as high tide beomes low. So I no longer care the way I once did...

I was seized by this feeling the other night, like I'd downed far too much black coffee. And wondered why this strange internal reslessness. Then I happened to glance out of the window (which was wide open as I've installed a satellite indoors that the pigeons flap in and perch on) and the moon was FULL. In fact it was just waning, but I'm convinced the moon's effect on the brain is strongest when first waning. Just as highest summer and bitterest midwinter come AFTER the solstice so the bipolar part of the brain begins to itch the most AFTER full moon.

Mmmm. Binky says I'm starting to act manic. It's true my sleep cycle is all over the place but a skewed sleep-cycle is not mania (though it may be a sign of impending mania). I don't think I'm manic. Just because I turn impressionist a lot these days and talk in loud Scottish accents  doesn't mean I'm "high". I'm normal. I'm just a person stuck in the bogs of Heroin Addiction looking for a rung up. Rungs rungs! Somebody help me please! Where are rungs for sale?!

PS I'm thinking of starting my own internet and satellite station RADIO GLEDWOOD. Eventually to launch on FM across every major city worldwide... Anybody interested in doing their own show please get in touch.

Elevated, Irritable, Expansive Moods...

YEAH, BINKY says I'm "high" today because I won't stop singing at the top of my voice and talking about Hammy (my 1990s late hamster) and Glodemer.(our late 1980s silver-&-grey coated family New Zealand Barking Dog who "looked like a seal"). Our family GP, Dr Grendle, said that Glodemer, who was only medium sized and had the sweetest nature of any doggie I have ever known yet had the deepest, roughest bark was a "New Zealand Barking Dog" ~ a kind of unofficial breed out there. But I just googled New Zealand Barkers and got nothing back so who knows... My sleep pattern has been horrendous. My last-but-one period of wakefulness began when I rose at 10:30pm at some time over the weekend. Then I stayed awake for a good day-and-a-half, if not longer. I was going to trot off to a Narcotics Anon meeting at 7pm on Monday night but drowsiness and exhaustion overcame me before I could leave the house (to my then sleep-pattern the meeting was at 5am anyhow...) so I went to bed at about five pm, slept for what felt like ages but I subsequently found out was only three hours. But even that tiny amount of sleep had totally burst the bubble of my lovely "elevated mood". I was very irritable, tired, acheing all over and starting to feel horribly depressed. I was also craving heroin strongly. So in the end I bought said heroin and did at least get a bit of kind of half-sleep. 

But I didn't sleep that well at all. I was up all night copying Italian Linguaphone dialogues into my mega notebook. Then I had to get to Binky's for 7:30 or 8:00am to lend her £50  ($78.25) I "need" to lend her that money as having blown so much on furniture I know I'll be Stoney Broke by next Monday, which is precisely when said debt is due to be repaid. I think my Druggieworker is in a bad mood with me for having thoroughly avoided her clinic for two weeks solid. Naomi, the Dual Diagnosis Nutter Club lady, who specializes in Nutter Junkie work, invited me to a Drama Therapy Group. Much as I love Naomi (because she calls me "amazing") and do enjoy acting from time to time, I cannot think of anything I'd less rather do when Seriously Not In The Mood than strutting across a public stage in the midst of angry public paranoid depression!

Yeah anyway I'm in Druggieclinic Bad Books for not having attended "MBT group" (which is a treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder anyhow and I don't have that). I don't want to go to these groups because I suspect their agenda is to deconstruct my coping mechanisms thereby eroding my mental health and sending me permanently and intractably mad! I'm not entirely sure how MBT is meant to work but if it IS going to undo my coping mechanisms ~ thereby leaving me unable to cope, then I'm seriously NOT INTERESTED!...

Oh, I forgot to say about my {inadvertant} "cruelty to pigeons" scandal! Yes I finally managed to keep my errant electricity cabinet shut only to discover, two days later, that a poor desperate pigeon had been locked in there all that time! It's true I DID hear intermittent desperate flappings at the door and yet every time I peered inside, said cupboard appeared to be bare. Until a good two (if not THREE) days into this saga when I finally opened the door only for a surprisingly healthy and rainbow-plumèd pigeon to make an instant flap for freedom the minute the door was ajar. Anyway, I opened my back balcony door the other day, it being a sultry summer's day and all. The door blew my door wide open and when I reached over to shut it, I noticed a brand new nest of long grass and a poor desperate-looking pigeon sitting on this nest. Yes! I have a pregnant pigeon living on my balcony! I know she is "pregnant" because yesterday morning, when she went for a flap across our estate, I could plainly see the gorgeous pair of pigeon's eggs left behind in her wondrously made nest... 

I wonder when they're due to hatch? And will I be able to tame one or both of the babies? Will they end up living in my house? And if so, will the sound of top-volume early-morning cooing finally drive me over the edge...? (Of the balcony...) Anyway I must flap off myself. I've a "dis-appointment" with my horrible new GP in a couple of hours' time which I need to psych myself up for... Last time we met he had the gall to declare that the mousy, depressed and very upset version of myself that he saw was somehow the "real" me (ie that despite claiming depression I was actually "OK" ~ I wasn't OK at all... So now I'm elevated I'm going to give that bastard one in the eye and let him know what I REALLY THINK ..

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The "Cookie Crumbs" Scandal...

WELL, I have spent the last day or two feeling like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards. This is all my "brain's" fault for making me "elevated" all night the night before and unable to sleep. Either that, or the mystical rivers of my Energy Sphere have been overflowing. I'm not sure which. I tend towards the mystical energy explanation nowadays ~ the world is full of mystical energy that scientists aren't even able to measure. I once found a Chinese medicine leaflet on the bus that explained how every "illness" I have ever suffered resulted from a deficit, excess or misalignment of vital energy.

Apart from a few crumbs found wrapped in a cigarette paper (which I wasn't entirely sure didn't come from an old digestive biscuit) I have not touched heroin for something like four days. (I'm not sure as I don't count days "clean". I think it's unhealthy.) The "crumbs" could have been 1/100th of a gram. Not very much. The methadone is holding me again and I don't need any more than the prescribed dose. But I am taking it in two goes. Half around 6am; the second half around 4pm. It seems to work much better that way. I feel really sorry for Americans and people from other countries where methadone seems only to be available on Supervised Consumption. It's not so much the "supervised" bit I disagree with (although it is rather demeaning to have to drink it in a public pharmacy in front of althelete's foot sufferers, bachache pensioners and pregnant women) ~ it's the compulsion to drink an entire day's dose at once. It just doesn't last 24 hours. If I drank my entire dose once a day I might need 1.5 or x2 as much. And I would still probably wake every day feeling crap. My dose has gone UP to 30mg a day now. At least 30mg works. A few months ago I was down to 14mg and I didn't exactly feel brilliant on that little. You know methadone is more addictive than heroin?! (Which the clinic never warned me, by the way. I think that would make an interesting court case, don't you?) More to the point though: how on earth am I ever to get off that crap??! I asked not one but two workers at my present clinic could they exchange my dose to one of (far less addictive) morphine instead and they said no. (Without explanation.) When I pointed out that on heroin I was able to drop directly from £80 or £100 a day (this was years ago) straight down to £20 with no withdrawals they looked confused. (My point being if morphine's easier to titrate down then I want morphine.) But it's not in their interest to understand common sense when they're a methadone/suboxone clinic and hence blinkered to every more effective treatment option.

At the peak of my habit, by the way, 100mg would barely hold me. Even when I gave it four or five days in a row. So my dose went up above 130mg. I'm not very proud of that...

I really need a savage guard dog/bodyguard. I'd like one like this from the Pedigree Chum advert.

Really I'd like an Akita (of course). They look really ferocious when annoyed.

I HAVE BEEN reading The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Age 13¾

Here's the TV adaptation starring Julie Walters as mother and Beryl Reid as Grandmother. None of the male actors seems to be famous, except Chris Gascoygne (Nigel).

When I say I want a dog, I mean one like Adrian Mole's. With scruffy fur. Except mine needs to be savage and ferocious. I need a guard dog/bodyguard too.

Oh by the way, I found out why Korean boybands look like girls. It's because they dye their hair ginger...

The Depressing Red Bucket Affair

COUNSELLING: IS IT A GOOD THING? As regular readers might know, I'm currently undergoing group therapy towards an end known as "Mentalization". (Aka MBT.) But mentalization involves not just jumping to conclusions regarding the thoughts, feelings or motivations of others and "mentalizing" ~ ie thinking them over and, in many cases asking. Eg: "What is it you meant when you said that? Could you explain?"

Well I'm starting to think that if NOT FEELING is my coping mechanism, and if THINKING TOO MUCH is a personal fault in many people, not just me, then undergoing this group is going to achieve nothing except a persistent erosion of my mental health. I mean: are they actually TRYING to send me nuts? It's a question worth asking. I've been wondering just WHO I can trust in the world. Friend. Family. Anyone. It makes me really sad to think this way and maybe I am extraordinarily narcissistic and self-centred but I do feel certain people out there ~ namely doctorly-type people and employees of drug clinics are DELIBERATELY trying to do my head in. All saying different things that I cannot thrash my way out of.

Eg my druggieworker keeps saying she's worried about me and that if I'm not careful I'm going to have another mental breakdown. And she says I should see a psychiatrist again. I'm much more straight and open with her than I would ever be with a GP. But my (new) GP who has only seen me twice, says he thinks I'm totally OK. I didn't feel at all OK when I last saw him. I was very upset that day. Binky says I should "bring my feelings into the room". But how can I possibly do that? If you go around appearing as OK as possible (like any normal person who isn't a teenage girl with emotional problems would) then suddenly act out in a dr's room isn't that self-indulgence bordering on fakery? She also said that in answer to his question what could a psychiatrist do for me (which I took to mean I was beyond help. Because I don't actually believe he thinks there's "nothing wrong" I think he wants me to think that's what he thinks (mind games again) ~~ in answer to his question I was meant to say "to get a proper diagnosis and the right medication". Well I don't want yet ANOTHER diagnosis, which, knowing my luck would be added on top of and not replace the existing one. And as for even more pills. No I don't want MORE. I'd rather be off everything!. The absolute last thing I want is something that's going to completely block any "high" moods and "higher" states of consciousness. Obviously I want to be ("bipolar") high all the time. I just don't want to lose my mind as well. If I could break the light barrier again I'm hoping I will never ever ever come down. I'm talking about mind and body sublimating to a Higher Level. But I obviously DID come down. I just can't believe that I had to... Why does life have to be SO SHIT~~??

You see the great thing about blogs. Because nobody supposedly knows who I really am I can speak what I actually think and mean. No way in hell would I say something like the above to a friend, let alone any doctorly person.

I told Binky some weird ideas I had had when I did have a mad episode and she laughed until it looked like her sides were going to split. She said (hopefully jokingly, as nothing involved potential harm to self or others) that if I ever told a dr anything like that I'd get sectioned and never come out again. (To those on foreign shores: a "section" means involuntary commitment and it's REALLY HARD to overturn a British sectioning under the mental health act.)

I NEARLY had a "nervous breakdown" just now over picking a bucket to wash my clothes in. I'm still feeling ridiculously depressed. (Ridiculous, considering it's JUST A PLASTIC BUCKET~!!) I DID used to own a bucket, but it got filled with paint after I took dodgy heroin some time ago and kicked dregs of a can of paint over in my hallway. I need this new bucket to wash my clothes in, because it's cheaper than going to the launderette. But the launderette costs £4, whereas this bucket was £3. For £2 they had a round black bucket, but that one doesn't have mop-squeezy-out attachment. Then I looked at this bucket after purchase and it does look RIDICULOUSLY TINY. I don't know how many clothes I'm going to be able to wash at a time, but not many.

Well it's been raining most of today. It matches my mood. All weekend through Monday we had spectacular weather but I stayed in to avoid it. I really wasn't in the mood. Then one night, completely at random, I did start feeling "high" and couldn't sleep at all. But I made up for it by sleeping most of the day yesterday. Plus 2:30-6:30am. Then methadone (eventually) sent me off from 8:30 to about 11:30.

My life is so depressing. I know nobody wants to hear this. I just don't know how to get out of it all. Giving up drugs is very much JUST a first step and it never really helped that much in the past. It wasn't as if I stuck to methadone and was miraculously OK. Oh but the drugs clinic NOW say if you have other issues or health problems, methadone isn't even supposed to help with those (even though heroin does ~ it makes just about any affliction of mind or body feel better). This OF COURSE SUITS THEIR AGENDA. Which is all about deception and lies. They can't handle it when I tell the truth unvarnished. Now they don't just WANT to, they NEED to believe I'm nutty because otherwise time has shown them out to be LIARS. Ie "if you stop crack you won't be paranoid any more" (I've been way more paranoid months and years after stopping it than I was on it). And "alcohol is a depressant so that's what is making you depressed. If you stop drinking you'll feel better". Well lots of ANTI-depressants are also CNS depressants (eg dosulepin (Prothiadine), mirtazapine (Remeron)) and I certainly did NOT feel better after kicking alcohol. I've felt just as bad, if not worse off it than on it. I could go on but this is the gist of their lies. Of course they want to conveniently forget the times eg that a floating duty worker snapped at me that if I stopped heroin I would "feel much better". (In what time-frame? I was certainly NOT OK before I got addicted to heroin age 28. And I don't think I'm that unusual. There are LOTS of people using methadone clinics who feel permanently run-down (as a symptom of hep C as much as anything else, suffer from constant or recurrent depression. And have terrible presents eg involving imprisonment or the threat of it, and children in care (often both). Plus horrendous pasts (very often involving sexual abuse) they still want to escape from. I think, compared to people like that, and there are a LOT of them out there, I've got it easy.

I don't think I had any period of adult life, and probably not teenage years either when I was "OK". Growing up I had almost zero self-esteem or self-confidence. And almost no "social skills" either. And I do mean almost NONE. Everybody, friends included, thought I was a "weirdo". I was prone to depression but wouldn't characterize myself as depressed all the time. I managed to catch what was then called CFS or ME and is now known as CFIDS. I was not "on drugs" when I came down with that particular condition in late 1995. In fact I became intolerant to alcohol and wasn't well enough to dance all night at raves (only types of drugtaking I was interested in back then). I never knowingly tried heroin until 1997, although I may have taken it once in 1993 ~ I don't know for a fact that actually was heroin (not knowing what to do I snorted and ate the greyish powder that looked like it had bits of demerara sugar in it). Whereas the 1997 stuff looked like heroin, melted on to silver foil just like it, smelt like it and had the effects generally ascribed to heroin so I'm pretty sure that stuff WAS it.

O am I ranting again..? I don't know. I have to go. 

I've given up on Spanish and am now learning Italian. Very very very very VERY slowly!!

(Molto molto molto molto MOLTO lentamente.)

BTW: I've just found out MBT (the therapy I'm doing) is for BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER. I keep wondering whether I've got that and now they've somehow got me into therapy for it without even telling me!!!  (They just told me they thought it might be good that I did it.) 

Yesterday Naomi, the Dual Diagnosis lady, called offering me a place in a drama therapy group she's doing. So hopefully I shall be doing both. Surely you can't have "too much therapy"...? CAN YOU~??!?

 

WISHING YOU A PLEASANT DAY!!

Council Thievery Scandal and a New Hairdo...

I'VE CHANGED MY HAIR STYLE. The new one is slicked back with lots of mousse (courtesy of Poundland). I washed and moussed it in one of the mental hospital bathrooms when I was visiting Binky this afternoon. I really like the new style. It does make me look a bit public school (a public school in Britain means a very exclusive expensive posh one. I wish I COULD have gone to public school. A Level Japanese would have been right up my street... Ho hum. But anyway, the hair looks good. Quite dashing, if I say so myself. It's about as long as it can get and still count as "short". I'm looking out for a good barber who can "tidy it up" ie cut straggly bits off without really shortening it...

Yes Binky is STILL confined to a mental ward. Bloody hell ~ it's not as if everyone's raving mad. Mostly you can't tell the difference between nurse, patient, visitor and sundry NHS-floaty-through-type-person. But after a while the accumulated insanity does get to me. One lady who pulled most of her hair out and looked exceedingly confused before Christmas is still in there but sporting a healthy head of (short) hair (shorter than mine), wearing glasses, talking normally and looking pretty with it. I wonder when they'll let HER out... I noticed the coffee tables were littered with scraps of people's personal correspondence bearing details like "you are being kept here under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act because the doctors believe you need treatment and care for a mental disorder..."... ukh. My family say I should make some non-mental friends. But WHERE??! Everyone I know is mad or on drugs. Or both. What a life!!

I'VE FOUND OUT why I'm in rent arrears (paid 2/3 of the £50 ($77.73) off and about to pay the rest tomorrow, if the council insist... I was wondering how on earth I managed to get into arrears, having paid more than TEN WEEKS up front in advance... And it's because I had arrears from when I was in emergency accommodation, the council say it's written into our contracts that if we overpay rent for a new place they can take backrent to pay off another account. It's actually NOT written into anything I have signed and I intend to take them to task about this tomorrow. See if I can get 77 lovely US Dollars refunded to me. (Of course it won't be in dollars, it'll be pounds sterling but dollars sound so much more exciting...

My druggieworker was less than impressed with me after my testing positive for heroin and benzodiazepines. I promised her truthfully that I have NOT been pillpopping. The benzos were mixed into dodgy brown heroin. No wonder I'd been feeling so unaccountably sleepy after "using"... Sleeping during the day is just not my style, if I can at all help it. (It's depression that has made me sleep the most excessively. 19 or 20 hours a day, usually in two bursts, on my worst days. And if I try not to sleep so long I just end up dropping off in public places. And that really does make me feel like an old dosser. Depression is bad enough, without everyone thinking you're an old drunk to boot!

The weather here is still subtropical. I found a brochure of world and Asian cruses (would really like to go on one, now that I'm over 40 and OLD!... but why bother when the weather's so brilliant back home. I'm reading Freaky Dancing by Bez out of the Happy Mondays... A most interesting book, though I WISH the publishers would have translated his vernacular into normal spellings ...

On a benda in the Haçienda...

WHOOO! What a gaff. It feels like enterin a cavernous, cold storage room at the meat factory. I'm half expectin to see rows of headless animal corpses hangin from massive hooks above the dance floor ~ an yes it was that cold back in pre-ecstasy days...

(The Hacienda was a legendary Northern ecstasy rave club... People still rave about having "been there" to this day...)

Anyway I've gotta go and get my beauty sleep for when I REPRIMAND THE COUNCIL OVER THEIR SHAMELESS THIEVERY TOMORROW MORNING!!

TAKE CARE EVERYONE ☺

 

HIGH TEA: Feelin' Good and My Theory Behind It

FEELIN' GOOD. Yup, I do feel OK. PROPERLY OK. Not semi-down, not half-depressed and tired but PROPERLY OK.

It's true my sleep cycle has gone and cycled off into a ditch somewhere because since about midday yesterday I haven't been to bed at all. I don't follow any "New Age" philosophy, but one author who's into such stuff says on sleep loss:

Sleep deprivation somehow acts as a blanket neurotransmitter re-uptake inhibitor. Your brain stays saturated with neurotransmitters leading to elevated mood and euphoria.

I have to say I never found that true in the past. Sleep loss has never made me anything else but REALLY KNACKERED. The sleep loss I get now happens BECAUSE THE ENERGY'S ALREADY THERE. Other way round!

My mood feels THE WAY IT SHOULD to me. I don't think it is elevated. It is Normal. What has gone up is my energy. I stayed up all night last night writing in Spanish.Afterwards, I've decided I'm going to master Italian, Romanian and Portuguese too. And to perfect my French. They're all offshoots of Latin, so it shouldn't be that hard. It's said that it's easier to become fluent in four Romance languages than to master Korean (or presumably any other Asian language)...

I have some theories, based around realizations that came to me fully formed (not as the fruit of interminable pondering) that don't exactly weave together into a magic carpet of Enlightened Truth (they're not meant to ~ they're my Pearls. So I hope that by alluding to them below I'm not casting them before swine...(!)

Earlier on ~ both this morning and yesterday ~ I thought I was High  ~ until I realized I couldn't possibly be, because I hadn't taken anything... But I had! I'd taken tea and tea is laden with caffeine, theobromine and so-on. Stimulants. I've had two cups of caffeinated tea today. Yesterday I had one tea and one coffee. I now drink Nescafé decaffeinated but I can still feel hyper on just that. Turns out there IS caffeine in decaffeinated coffee. Just less of it.

I've tried drinking Cup-a-Soup as an alternative, but that's laced with MSG and that perturbs the brain's glutamate receptors (inhibiting them, as far as I know). There is a connexion between glutamate, GABA, serotonin and dopamine ~ the two main monoamines that regulate mood. So I'm doing myself in there as well. Sometimes I switch to lemonade. My folks point out that most lemonade is chock full of aspartame and acesulfame K ~ both of which are "sources of phenylalanine" which has a supposed mood-elevating property. (Aspartame has also been implicated as a causative factor in a whole range of mental disorders.) Well I absolutely loathe the taste of artificial sweeteners so the lemonade I drink is Sainsbury's own, which is sugar-only. But sugar is well known for making kids hyper and I'm nothing if not a big kid. Which casts sugar out the window too...

Which leaves me with plain drinking water. Sugar-free, non-calorific and (presumably) undrugged ~ water is actually one of the Greatest Energy Sources of All. Water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen being, of course the very breath of life itself. While hydrogen ~ as the lightest of all elements ~ is fundamental to the most powerful nuclear reactions in the known universe. The sun ~ a humungous ball of liquid hydrogen ~ produces heat and light via continuous nuclear fusion... has been doing this for about 4,600,000,000 years, and has an estimated 7,000,000,000 years of fuel left.

Controlled nuclear fusion is the "holy grail" of nuclear scientists. If we did ever manage it, we'll be able to power the entire planet on just water. Human blood is 83% water. The Bible says that our life is in our blood. Water is described in the Bible as "living".

I don't know how I did it, but I have accessed a special source of energy and power not open to or attainable by most other people. I think in the future all humankind will drink from the same Fountain of Life. Hey maybe I got a little sip in advance...?

This is a time of Rising Energy. Spring is springing as we speak ~ can't you feel it? I woke up one morning last week and, despite feeling otherwise completely horrible, I felt this weird sense of light behind my eyes... in my head... I don't know how to describe it but I get it every year and it makes me feel "weird". OK, I know people who live Down Under can't. But everyone else...? Does anyone get what I get? This semi-migrainey sensation with ultra-intensely saturated field of vision and a sense that the weird flickery multicoloured visual effects of migraine "aura" are just about to intrude. I had this for about four days straight. Right before (and especially behind) my eyes, the building blocks and motifs of the phone game "Edge" were everywhere. So some days I was seeing the computer game on the pavement as I trotted to the methadone chemist...

Yes: I think I had been playing Edge a bit too much. I completed level 46 and that's the top level.

(Edge is a game where you roll a cube around a surreal world. There are no baddies and you don't have to shoot anything and that's why I like it. Your "enemy" is the edge: fall off and you die and have to try again. But it's really really really addictive... and it reminds me of a recurring daydream I used to have as a child... Very psychological...

Well that's all I have to say. Somehow it has taken an hour to write something that came to me in a flash earlier on. I AM going to try sleeping. It's supposed to be good to sleep it's just that... sometimes it seems such a WASTE OF TIME. You know what I mean?

Oh I just remembered I'm due down the druggieclinic tomorrow where I've 99% persuaded a lady called Marjorie to be my new Worker. Me and my old worker don't really click. The missing 1% is all down to me. I have to remain abstinent from heroin or Marge won't have me. Ukh: I'd be so ashamed if I used and she found out. Marjorie was BRIEFLY my worker in about 2009 when I really wasn't tuned into cleanliness or sobriety in any sense of either word ~ so we didn't click at all. I'd just sacked Maple Syrup ~ bullying Bitch Worker From Hell and found it hard to open up to or trust anybody at all who worked at a methadone clinic. Marjorie has been Duty Worker for the last few weeks. This means she's the person you see when you miss your keyworking appointment. Or if you're like me and your worker never makes the appointments to start with then vanishes off sick with no explanation. (I think he's got "Depression" by the way. Everyone seems to be depressed nowdays...)

Uuuuuurrrrrr... I've lost my thread. Yes ENERGY and LOTS OF IT. Back again. I wish I could Return to the Source and STAY THERE. That's the big reason I gave up on drugs of the Transcendent variety. The gates of paradise are opened. The E-pixie grabs that pot of gold at the rainbow's end and pours it out all over you, bathing you in stardust. Then come Tuesday morning you're bedridden, crying, totally distraught and feeling lied to. What was so wonderful has now turned to shit.

What I want from life is some value that lasts for ever. I'd rather have just a little bit of that than a whole load of Money. Though to be honest, it would be nice to have the money too...

OK I hope my musings weren't Too Amusing. I've got to go and find another Pot of Golden Pixie Dust...

COMPUTER GAMES

There is something intensely dreamlike about computer games. The kind I like are relatively sedate and do not require lightning reflexes!

This is the one I'm talking about. EDGE. This is the PC version. The phone version has the theme music but no other sound-effects...

POOYAN プーヤン (Konami Arcade game: 1982)

I got the top score on this down our local arcade. And doesn't it look incredibly primitive 31 years after its conception...? I was only good at it because you go up, down and shoot. I LOATHE games with complicated controls.

JET SET WILLY (Platform game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Programmed by school boy Matthew Smith. Released 1982).

This was only fun when you nobbled it to get infinate lives, protection from death by falling, cured the "attick bug" and neutralized the "sprites"... really great fun. I used to spend hours just wandering around....

Remedy Transcendent Rapturous Sublime Life Is So Meaningful Why Was I Ever So MEANINGLESS For So Long...?

 I AM HAVING A PAKISTANI chicken pastry poof for breakfast. And it is a real poof. Every time I gnaw into it it exclaims "oh really, dearie ~ must you bite in so hard?!" etc. Makes me feel like a real lesbian. I decided to have a Glodemer Breakfast since leaving Binky at the gates of the mental hospital. I gave a nearly Brand New pair of shoes to another inmate called Lulille, who is a sweet old lady who got dragged in there for threatening her neighbours who she said were intertwined in a torrid Black Magic Plot against her. But at size 8s they're too gigantic for little old Lulille. I told Binky to give them to Manic Girl instead, but Manic Girl has disappeared. Probably pinging round the heavens on a magic carpet. Then I told her to give them to Bo Peep Little Miss Wrist-Slasher Borderline Personality Disorder but she's vanished too. She might get a place at Binky's house. Bloody hell, the two of them together. Alternately idealizing and demonizing one another plus everybody else. Emotional chaos 999.

I feel overwhelmed by emotion. Binky can't handle me this morning as I spent all night up listening to music and feeling manic.

Well life is going swimmingly up at 79 Pancake Towers. I've been watching South African soap operas on Oh TV (Sky 199) and Edge/Loaded/Controversial TV (Sky 200) (all about UFOs and Big Brother Girls slagging off Katie Price) but I'm tuning in with my German TV box so I get absolutely everything you don't have to pay for. Including QVC's "mosaics" and a feed seemingly into Sky News's back room where you can hear random people arguing on the phones. Oh bloody hell I forgot to watch Footballers' Wives last night (CBS Drama: Freesat 134, Sky 149) . I must really be losing the plot.

There is so much beauty in the world. I am dying of so much splendour, drowning in transcendent light. Olympian, angelic, astral, beatific, blessed, divine, elysian, empyral, empyrean, eternal, godlike, hallowed, holy, otherworldly, immortal, seraphic, spiritual, sublime, supernal, supernatural, transmundane.... oh wow. And raptures of delight!

And Beverlybabe and Anna Grace and Bugerlugs WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOU ALL..??!?

Bloody hell listen to this tune. It is transcendently beautiful.... Like being in paradise.

ARMIN VAN BUUREN: SERENITY
The 2nd one down ~ original mix ~ is particularly impressive...

VIDEO ft VAN JAYNE



ORIGINAL MIX



LIVE ORCHESTRA



And last but not least
THE CHILLOUT MIX...
... you can never have too much of a good thing

Hey I saw Doctor Lovelace yesterday. For the last time ever. Trust that to happen. First time I find a doctor who likes me, who is younger than me, who wants to understand me. Who is sexy. And I have to move out of her catchment area. She found out, by scrolling back through my notes, that I was on methadone and I said I hadn't wanted to tell her because I'd get treated different and she said "but I wouldn't treat you any differently" and I said I know. And now I feel so sad I want to cry. She also told me it is normal for bipolar people to feel high and low in the same day.

A Lazy Ice Heart full of Excuses

THE WORLD is icy cold and snowy and my heart feels cold as midwinter London. All the excitement (over nothing) of the past few weeks has gone and now I'm feeling gloomy and down. And tired, and achey. And I've been making up for lost sleep ~ snoozing round the clock, rather than spending a day and a half or so up, then going to bed and STILL not really wanting to sleep. I'm fed up of feeling like a road accident. Some days I went to bed feeling like I'd been dragged through a hedge backwards and was covered in scratches. No pleasant drowsiness at all. Just a feeling that I'd totally overdone it, and now I was ill. 

These days, when I have been felt "high", I have avoided moving around too much or pacing, because that makes me exhausted and the whole process worsens. You know a lot of people feel there is nothing wrong with me and, in a way, so do I. 

Looking back, apart from wanting to know the name of whatever it was that had been bugging me for years, the One Reason I every chased a diagnosis was that I was so fed up of having to deal with the consequences of SOMETHING, which was far in excess of ordinary drug-addiction (I'm the only person I know who ever let my benefits which could pay for drugs RUN OUT ~ not once, but twice ~ because I felt too depressed and unworthy to claim them)... My life in a mess. Bills not paid, debts not sorted out. Most other drug-addicts I know were like this to an extent. But in me, things reached an extreme. I don't know what it's called except DAMN LAZINESS. Then I find out Laziness is actually a symptom! And so I find I've got my "Excuse". Except that psychiatric labels excuse nothing. I still have to cope with life and I'm still not coping. I don't think that I will ever be OK.

All in all I can't wait till this is over ...

First Light of Dawn

MY LANDLORD came and tamed our Rampant Bush, then his handyman came in and polished all my cookertops and kitchen surfaces. With an explosion of magazines, papers and carrier bags on every available surface, the hanchman asked how I ever sat down. I told him the mess was my attempt at tidying (well that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it).

With all the mess cleaned up and the lake mopped up (caused by a dodgy fuse that made the fridge go off nearly all weekend causing a mini Lake Baikal to accumulate under the washing machine) and a new light in the bathroom, which I nearly brought the ceiling down trying to change, the place is looking wonderful.

My sleep has been seriously all over the place. My appetite is down. My moods are swirling. I've been feeling very anxious and a bit hyped up. I've been trying to keep a journal of my feelings but they're so all over the place, just writing about them makes me very supset again. I'm not "depressed", but three things happened in the past week that upset me greatly and this is what triggered all that heart-stopping anxiety that has been killing me so un-softly.

I realized that one person, who I thought I could trust, doesn't understand my viewpoint at all and doesn't really respect my feelings, probably never has, and wants me to take a course of action that is dangerously irresponsible. I got a message saying DO NOT TRUST HIM. And though I doubt the Messanger's motives, I sadly realized this message was accurate. I've received frightening messages before, and they also turned out to be true.

My feelings around Binky are confused, too. I say I'm confused; she's seriously confused. Binky has a lot of health problems, her body is collapsing. O, and to add insult to injury, we both have common colds. But because she's more fragile than me, she has a chest infection on top.

I just deleted a load of stuff on my mixed feelings on her torrential emotional torments. But it's not fair to write like that behind my friend's back. And as I say, my feelings are so swirled up, it's hard to say what I really think. Anything I put now I may disagree with in half an hour's time.

My family think I should make new friends who are sane and clean; but frankly, who would have me? I feel so comfortable around psychiatric patients because they seem to accept me for who I am. The junkies certainly don't (and the ones who did are all dead). The old "Nutter Club" that I used to find so supportive (before it was axed) was actually a Dual Diagnosis group for addicts with severe mental health problems. It was the one support group where I felt I could speak freely.

This is my biggest problem: I don't feel I have the support of anyone who really understands me. I do have the support of my family and they try to understand me. I don't know how successful they are. A need that was uppermost when I was younger has started to resurface; a need to be Understood. Perhaps behind this is my own need to understand myself. With so many conflicting emotions and moods in strange admixtures, it's hard to say what I feel about anything.

I feel in need of some kind of support, but I'm not getting it. I do have an official Support Worker but I get the impression that, like so many others down the years, he thinks my problem is that I just don't give a shit and just need to pull myself together. Well I used to think that, too. Whatever I said, that is what I actually thought in my heart. Then I tried to pull myself together and found I couldn't do it. And I don't know why.

My family, the only people in this crazy world who I do trust implicitly, seem to expect that once I'm finally ffree of all drugs, and this of course includes methadone, then my turbulence should resolve.

Well if it does, I don't expect anything to happen straight away. Various NA members have told me that the first year Clean is a real challenge. Moods and emotions no longer blanketed by opiates burning brighter than ever before. The rehab I emailed some months ago with brief details of my situation and meds emailed back saying the methadone might actually be acting as a mood stabilizer (though it doesn't feel like it is). So that, without it, unless they up my psyche meds I'm likely to be more unstable than ever before.

So I don't know what to make of any of this. Anyway I'm not scared of getting clean. I've spent about 30% of my life addicted to heroin. Which means that 70% of that journey was travelled without chemical dependency. Contrary to stereotype, I never got hooked on my drug of choice until 28 years of age. So I have vast experience of living and surviving without needless crutch of opiates and there is no doubt in my mind that I can survive again. I don't expect it to be easy; but I don't expect it to be too difficult, either.

Before Heroin I was a much more complicated person than I am now, with a poor sense of self-identity. But I have matured despite my drug habit (which some addiction experts say never happens). People who knew me back then say I'm so much more comfortable in my own skin. Even my old drug worker from about three years ago seemed astonished at the change in my demeanour. Perhaps she's seeing the swtich from constant low-grade depression to constant low-grade hypomania... But perhaps not. I think it's something more. Despite everything I feel more at home with my Self ~~ turmoil and confusion aside I'm far happier now than I was even two years ago.

They say the longest journey begins with that first step... I just hope that finally I'm stepping in the right direction...

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MOBY: HONEY (LULU ROUGE)

I love this video...

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Nobody's Victim

I AM WRITING this down the local internet shop. I just had to get out of the house. Something happened today that probably counts as "bizarre". I don't know what to do about it. Every time it crosses my mind I feel excitable. Well that's better than

feeling paraniod, or worse still panic-stricken with worry. I refuse to indulge in pathological worry as I did when I was younger. I am 40 years old: way too ancient to be victimized by thoughts induced by ridiculously stupid people who don't even know me, much less warrant my attention.

My sleep had cycled so far back, that I ws lying awake past 9am and getting up after 3. Last night I managed to drop of at 3:30, after seeing Dynasy The Reunion (which I don't recommend you watch). I thought 3:30 was too good to be true, because I woke up three times in the next three hours and then decided to get up. That terrible Genie Bra infomercial was showing, yet again. But no Sheer Cover or Insanity Workout. (O why do I watch that crap?) And then my head went into a ranting torrent of ideas. I can't relax. I don't want to relax. I'm starting to feel high. Again.

Anyway, then at 1pm my Odd Encounter occurred. I slept again: 2:30 till 5:30. I wish I could stay asleep for longer than three hours.

Then I found out how bizarre this Thing That Happened actually was and nearly flipped my lid, but I managed not to. I am trying to sit still and not exhaust myself. Staying still keeps me a lot calmer. You know they say exercise alleviates depression? What they don't tell you is that if you're feeling over-excited already, just trotting down the corner shop can send mania spiking through the roof. I'm not that extreme today, but I did end up wandering up and down my local cigarettes and jaffa cakes dispensary this afternoon feeling a bit inanely Elevated.

Well I can't go on. That's all. See you tomorrow.

Oh PS tomorrow is the last day, according to my Agreement With Myself, when I could indulge in that LIFE-RUINING CRAP they call heroin. And I still don't want to...

SHEER COVER

Binky finds my own Emma Forbes impression hilarious...

TAME LOVEBIRDS

Not that I'm obsessed with these birdies or anything...

BABY LOVEBIRDS HAVING A CHAT

"ARE YOU CHIRPING AWAY?... YES YOU ARE! CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP!!..."

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