Delirious Happiness

O HELLO THERE. I'm running out of computer time so I have to say this quickly. I am feeling so deliriously happy I can't stop smiling radiantly at the most random times eg at the methadone chemists. I was a bit paranoid that they'd think I was high on some drugs. But no drug I know of makes you that happy, except maybe ecstasy, and I don't take that any more. I don't take any drugs at all now, by the way, except methadone.

Anyway having woken up at 1am, as you do (I hadn't bothered going to bed the night before, so I slept a healthy 8 hours ~ 5pm-1am) and having watched lots of Michael Jackson videos and musicals very loudly I finally phoned Binky at 4am. She doesn't mind. She's an insomniac anyway. I can't remember precisely why I phoned her but I desperately felt I needed to know whether the mental unit she was on had any baths. When I'm in that state I tend to be very talkative indeed, with my mind constantly changing the subject. And I did moot the idea of breaking over the fence and coming to see her in the dead of night. But I was terrified of getting arrested and ending up in the nuthouse myself. So I didn't.

Erm, and that's about it. Have a very cheery day everyone.

O wow ~ look at this:

Funniest Birds in the World!

SUN CONURE IN PUBLIC FOUNTAIN
This is really beautiful



"THE BIRDS WAKING UP MY SISTER"
This is really funny



PARTY TRICK
This is really bizarre (and aren't parrots bizarre, doncha think?...?)



SUN CONURE PREENS BABY PARROTLETS
This is really cute



SENEGAL PARROT PLAYING DEAD
This is really entertaining

An Average Day (Sorry I cannot think up a more fascinating title than that...)

MY UNSUPPORTIVE SUPPORT WORKER called at the end of office hours to tell me he's closing my case. See I knew he saw me as a lazy timewaster. I did point out there's a whole sheaf of unresolved poll tax bills from my old house (where they kept altering their bills, then wrote them all off, then billed me again) but in fairness, if I did even mention these bills I certainly never pressed the point. I don't think about council tax or bills of any kind. Hence my failure to mention them, even though he asked me what assistance I needed.  I haven't paid the gas bill in 6 months since I  moved in. But they've altered it from estimated to actual billing, thereby cutting it to a third. All I owe in 6 months is £21 ($33.66).

I haven't seen Binky in a few days. She said something that really annoyed me the other day, also I can't face visiting a mental unit, even though it is easy to get to. The patients are nowhere near as disturbed as last time. Because I was a bit "up there" (on a hyper) last week, she introduced me to the one manic patient on the ward and we had a ridiculous conversation about what a brilliant illness it was. Or indeed not an illness. I'm not sure what I think about that now.

At least two people (neither of whom were mental patients) have mooted the idea that methadone could be poisoning my mind, hence my mood swings. More and more I'm starting to think they're right. My biggest reason against taking methadone daily always was that I suspected it could damage my brain. For years I just couldn't bear to stick to a methadone script because I felt so suicidally depressed on it. A profound state of misery where I just sat around doing nothing all day and could barely be bothered to follow a television programme. (Maybe methadone is a government plot, to get junkies so depressed they kill themselves.) I don't know what to do except get off that crap as fast as I can.

Sorry I know I sound like a stuck record. But it IS my new year's resolution to get OFF METHADONE (wahey!!)  I don't know what else to say. O cripes I'm running out of time NIGHT NIGHT!

Entertaining Animals

SQUIRREL ADOPTED BY CAT LEARNS TO PURR
this is from the American news


I nicked this one off Beverly's blog
to me this garrulous Indian ringneck parrakeet looks like a blue slimline comical hallucinatory pigeon ...


2 PARAKEETS TALKING
... very funny ...



BBC: THE GREAT BRITISH {INDIAN RINGNECK} PARAKEET INVASION
Apparently these bizarre birdies live all over London... (though I've never seen one)...

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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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Meet the Parrotlet

DESCRIBED as "a big bird in a little birdie's body", parrotlets (pronounced "parolet") are so new to the pet trade their full lifespan is not even known! The same size and price as a budgie: in the UK they sell for around £35 ($56.89) though in the USA they regularly fetch prices up to $280 (£172.78). The blue ones are particularly charming...

MY SUPPORT WORKER came round yesterday. I didn't feel he was amazingly helpful. he kept asking my plans for 2013; but I have no concrete plans, only hopes: I hope to get better. Last year he gave me a prospectus for Birkbeck College, which offers a double-honours degree part-time in German and Japanese. But my attention-span is all over the place: sometimes fine but sometimes like that morning I couldn't remember what I'd thought and what I'd actually said, so I had no idea whether I was repeating myself! My head was babbling so. I got more and more agitated as the day wore on. So I have decided to sort out my chi ~ you know, my energy balance. I know of a long-established and very reputable Chinese medicine centre in Niel's Yard, Covent Garden so I'm going there.

I would imagine Chinese therapies could do a lot to improve one's powers of focus. That's if mine really do need improving: I mean, aren't the genuises of academia famously scatterbrained?

I tried calming myself with television but the programming was atrocious. All I remember was a photo-shoot on old Dallas featuring an old-age pensioner lingerie model with massive bazookas arguing with Clayton and Miss Ellie over a murder. I was wishing for in-depth documentaries on chirpy parrots on some channel somewhere, but of course no luck. I tried and tried to think on higher things like feathery chirping parrotlets and not negative ones, but without parrots to look at, I was fighting a losing battle.

I went out and got terrible stomach-ache diarrhoea, so I bumbled back again, where my bad spirits magically evaporated. I went to bed at seven where finally I got my wish: as I lay down my weary head a wondrous dream enveloped me of lovebirds, parrotlets and lorikeets all chirping cheerily away...! How amazing!


TALKING PARROTLET



7 WELL-BEHAVED BIRDIES ON ONE PERCH
Aren't these cute!
The parrotlet is the little blue one.



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No More Obsessing

WELL I'M trying to give up the self-obsession for New Year as well as the heroin. I got lumbered with a mental label that upsets me, so I decided to try and find out what that label meant. Which took a long time [as I had very poor reading comprehension just after getting diagnosed]. I only read 2 books on madness from cover to cover but I did leaf through a lot more information on paper and on line. All this has done is make me more self-centred and confused than ever before.

My family think I am overly fascinated by my own mentality and I asked Binky and she thinks the same. But Binky confuses the issue a lot by calling me "mad". Just because I know I have various symptoms from time to time doesn't mean I think I'm crazy.

So all in all this has become a vicious circle in a hall of mirrors and I'm sick to death of staring at my own neurotic reflection.

Anyway that's all I have to say Happy New Year everyone.




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