My relationship with technology

For the most part these days, I'm pretty good. I mean I've got the whole getting-out-of-bed-shower-breakfast-medication routine down pat, though it does still tend to happen a few hours after most people's mornings have begun.

I've gotten past my despairing 'life is unfair and therefore not worth partaking in' phase and have even moved past wishing horrible things upon other people just so I'd have someone to relate to about how rough it is when everybody else seems to breeze through their charmed, little lives.

There's just one teensy area of my life which if you were to observe you might believe I were not past the state of needing close supervision in an inpatient environment. And that is my relationship with technology.

I try to keep the swearing to a minimum because my nephew's bedroom is next to mine and if he can hear me snore he can probably hear me cursing, 'you worthless piece of Steve Jobs' soul, I want to throw you under a truck.'

See the thing is, between study, getting sick every five minutes and working in The Arts, I haven't had a stretch where I've been receiving a decent income for over half a decade. And that means I haven't had any money to splash around on technology. Right now my laptop, my iPad and my iPhone are all second-hand and pretty old in tech years. Now I know that in the grand scheme of things, what with having just spent five months in hospital, now having to spend one in every five weeks in hospital and not knowing when I'm going to blow a gasket next, and all this is not even taking into consideration the much larger problems that exist in the world; genocide, war, famine, whatever that stuff is that's going on in Ukraine (seriously, I was sick when it all started and now it's really challenging playing effective catch-up) it should seem pretty small fry, but my old, inadequate, built-to-be-superseded technology is bumming me out because I just can't get anything done!

My laptop, which I just upgraded from running Windows 98, was slow to begin with but then on just one occasion when I decided to live outside the rules and not wait to find out who won Season 11 of So You Think You Can Dance, I downloaded about a million viruses along with the episode from Pirate Bay. And yes, of course I have antivirus software but it seems to be useless. I've looked up about a million geek pages hoping to find some way to purge my computer of these demons but they all tell me that I need to download this software and I think some of those have actually been viruses themselves and now the viruses have somehow locked down my antivirus software and really, I don't know what to do, except maybe hang around university lecture theatres for IT courses hoping to meet a nerd who'll settle for a relationship that consists entirely of cleaning up my hard drive, holding hands and watching old Firefly episodes with me (that's really all I could handle at the moment).

So I'm doing most of my web stuff at the moment on my iPad. But since it's 5 years old, which is like 90 in Apple years, it's just a temperamental little fucker that fails me more often than not. It literally just shuts down every 3 minutes. The best advice the interweb can offer me is to make sure there aren't too many apps running at once (nope, just one. Safari, you know, that one that came with the iPad) or otherwise to buy a new iPad (thanks Apple forum, you cultish home to douches).

So my most reliable gadget for the myriad of things one must do on the Internet these days to be a part of modern society is my iPhone 4. And while it doesn't automatically redirect me to sites where I can 'learn how to earn $3847 a week like this single mom' or usually drop out just after I've put in all my credit card details but before I've hit confirm, web browsing is not really optimised for the iPhone screen. It's so tiny and my eyesight's poor and I'm becoming paranoid that I must have obese finger pads. And mobile optimised sites are just the worst! They almost always abandon every practical function you might want in a web page and instead insert you into generic, unhelpful loops which results in me stamping my feet like a toddler, crying 'Nooooo!!!' and angrily throwing my phone as softly as I can on to my bed (I'm so angry, but I also don't want to break my phone. It's the most reliable technology I've got).

Anyway, I guess the point I was trying to get at is that it's harder to blog than it should be. This post took 3 devices, 2 hours and all of my patience. It's harder for me to repin witty Sherlock in jokes on Pinterest because the writing is too tiny for me to read on my iPhone. It's harder for me to win online arguments with Daily Telegraph readers about the Disability Support Pension going to "bludgers who say they got like mental probs but u can't even prove that lol" when my browser just shuts down, deleting my 7 paragraph scathing response.

So what I'm thinking is I should start a charity collecting functional technology to give to the mentally ill so that we can all commune online and give each other support, as well as buy socks without having to leave the house. If you're interested in donating please comment below. Your reward will be more rambling posts such as this. Dig deep. 

And exhale...

I'm back.

I'm sure you've all been holding your breath wondering what happened to me. Some of you may have worked out from my last cryptic 'Oh god, oh god, everything's turning to shit' post which I followed up with 7 months of radio silence that things were not going particularly well. Well, you were right. Your prize is in the mail.

I could give you the long story but it's long and my fingers are kind of tired, plus it's a total bummer! The short story is I was bad, I went to hospital, I got worse, I thought I got better, I left hospital, I got worse, I went back to hospital, we tried this drug, we tried that drug, I thought there were conspiring men hiding in my bathroom, I had my appendix out (not as a treatment for mental illness, I had appendicitis), I tried more different drugs, I started a treatment trial of TMS (Trans-cranial Magnetic Stimulation), I started a double blind trial of Mito NAC (N-acetyl cysteine), things started to improve but I was undergoing so many treatments that nobody knew why I'd improved, we didn't care, we threw our hands up in the air and danced to Kanye West.

Ok, that last bit only happened on Saturday night.

I could have blogged earlier but I was scared of the Internet and my days consisted of trying to get enough oxygen into my lungs to stay alive and not much else so it would have made for a pretty boring read.

Now, well, my life's a virtual treasure trove of interest and intrigue. I'm back at work at the MTC but keeping my number of shifts to a minimum lest my head explode and also to keep Centrelink off my back (I'm on the DSP (disability support pension) now. When I went for my interview I told the woman I'd been admitted to hospital 11 times in 2 years and she conceded that that might be a barrier to maintaining full-time work. It's great that I'm on it but the current government is gearing up to bend all DSP recipients over and collectively royally ream us so I'm not getting too comfortable).

I've been catching up with friends a lot lately and that has helped tremendously. I convinced myself in hospital that I was the loneliest, saddest, most unloved being to ever be shut away and forgotten about but it turns out my friends just didn't really know what was going on with me so they thought I needed to be left alone. Friends out there, for the record, even on my worst days seeing people who care for me lifts my heart a little. Please always feel welcome to visit me in hospital, even unannounced. But I also totally understand if you can't get past the overwhelming beigeness and lingering smell of antiseptic and stale cigarette smoke that goes with psych hospitals and just can’t force yourself through the doors. In that case just send a text. Or flowers. Or chocolates. Or money.

I need to send out a big thank you to my family (I'm sorry, this seems to have morphed into my Oscars acceptance speech) who stood by me through the worst and the weirdest of it all. I can’t ever repay them so I think the only thing I can do is try to stay well for their sake. Although thinking about it, if I can’t stay well for my own sake (like it’s a matter of will, anyway!?) then I’m sure I can’t for them. I don’t know then, maybe I’ll bake them all biscuits and give them nice socks.

So to summarise; was bad, better now, friends good, family great. I’ll delve into details of the whole saga at some later point in time if the mood so strikes me and I can find an interesting way to frame ‘despondently stared at wall for 7 hours’.

P.S. Oh, and happy Mental Health Awareness Week everyone!!!