Out of the blue

Life was traveling along just swimmingly then out of the blue I got hit with a nice, healthy dose of crippling anxiety. Totally out of nowhere! I was at work, drinking my morning coffee when suddenly the room started to shrink, a ball of lead appeared in my stomach and my chest started aching like I was having a heart attack.
I tried my usual trick of ignoring it but it's like ignoring a room full of crying babies with megaphones. Not easy. Eventually I gave in to it and excused myself from work, went over to my parents house, took too many Valium and went to bed.
I hate that it happened and it sucks that my coping skills are still so unrefined. If I was a blogger of any substance who you could turn to for words of wisdom and inspiration I would have no doubt written about how I employed my mindfulness techniques and visualised a soothing waterfall but I'm not that advanced, I'm honestly just getting by most of the time and when things turn to shit I still need to duck for cover (and call my Mum!)
Anyway, today was better but the whole episode has me a bit shaken because frankly, I'm tired of this all and just want to get on with my life in a really normal way. That's all I want for Christmas this year. A big box of moving on tied up in a bow.
I suppose I can only wait to see what Santa leaves under the tree.

Getting past the language

My first session with the new therapist was a success. Lucy is lovely and I found it really easy to talk to her, even as she was asking the probing questions about my life that a new therapist must ask. She was confident that we'd be able to work together to address the issues of guilt and anxiety that I specifically want to address and she even gave me a brand new diagnosis! Turns out I have a generalised anxiety disorder as well as bipolar disorder. Who knew?!

The only real downside is that Lucy is incredibly popular and I can't get in to see her again for another month. The upshot of this is that I have a month to do the homework she assigned to me. This might be for the best as one of the things I have to do is read a self-help book.

You might mistake me as the sort of person who gets in to self-help books. Certainly my ex-boyfriend's mother did and gave me one for Christmas one year (don't ever give somebody a self-help book as a gift, it's a strange kind of cruel). Truth is they make me roll my eyes into the back of my head and make gagging noises. It's the language! It's so dumbed-down and condescending. Plus I just don't buy into the idea that somebody has "the answer" for the very personal and unique predicaments I face and conveniently it's succinct enough to be put into a book.

So the book I'm set to read is called 'The Happiness Trap' (rolls eyes, makes gagging noises) and Lucy actually warned me that it was badly written. I've ordered the book online but the first chapter was free to download from the author's website. I'll spare you the ordeal of sharing any of it with you here but needless to say I turned into an eye rolling, gag-noise making machine as I waded through it.

The thing that's getting me is Lucy wants me to read this book and has acknowledged that it's poorly written but clearly there are some ideas in there that warrant attention. It's made me wonder if there are other things that could be helpful that I am missing out on because I don't appreciate the vehicle or the packaging for them. One prime example that comes to mind is exercise. I have now cancelled my gym membership due to poor attendance. I know that exercising regularly would be beneficial to my mental health but I really can't get in to the whole gym experience. Vitamins are another thing. I'm inclined to scoff at the world of natural medicine but other people swear by supplements they take.

It's unlikely I'll reconcile myself to self-help books, the gym or vitamins overnight but it has got me thinking that perhaps this recovering little mind of mine should be a bit more open rather than the tightly curled up little creature that it is.

Between starting this post and finishing it Lucy has had a cancellation so I'm off to see her tomorrow. Maybe she'll enlighten me some more on my close-mindedness.

A place for things

Last year, when I had my psychotic episode and ended up in Tasmania, I was in the process of moving out of a one bedroom apartment in Footscray.

There were many good reasons for me to move out of that apartment. Items of washing of mine would go missing off the communal washing line. To begin with I suspected the wind was blowing them off, but even on still days I'd still find a pair of underwear gone or sometimes a t-shirt. I began to suspect the man who lived downstairs who had a habit of coming upstairs and knocking on my door when he was drunk. He seemed harmless enough but the frequent 11pm visits to offer me a biscuit or ask if I'd lost some pegs were a factor in my decision to move.

I woke up one morning and went downstairs to ride my bike only to find it had been dismantled. I also thought initially that the bike seat had been stolen until I found it discarded down the street. One of the most infuriating things was that my bike was locked up and there was another bike less than a metre away just leaning against the wall. Not that I would wish anybody's bike to be stolen or dismantled of course.

There was also the evening that my sister was driving me home and when she went to pull into the driveway, it was on fire. Somebody had poured something flammable down the driveway drain and then it had either intentionally or not been ignited. The firefighters seemed unsurprised by the event and in fact mentioned they'd put out another drain fire around the corner not long ago.

The final thing that made me realise I had to get out of that apartment was the night that someone came to my door and smashed all my potplants and then cracked eggs on my door. I was in the lounge room on the other side of a very flimsy window listening as the whole thing happened. I was terrified. I think this attack was definitely a factor in my later delusion that I was in danger and being persecuted, particularly as that reached fever point in that same lounge room only weeks later.

So I knew I had to move but it was a bad time for me to be looking for somewhere to live as everything in my life; work, relationships, health, was in flux. My aunt and uncle very kindly offered that I could stay with them temporarily and put my things in to storage. That was the beginning of November. I'm still at my aunt and uncle's and my things are still in storage.

This weekend I just retrieved the last few things that got scattered to various people's houses during and after my psychotic episode and I've put them in to storage too. I've brought my broken bike back to my aunt and uncle's and I'm planning on finally getting it fixed this week. It has made me really happy to have it back, even in the condition it's in, and I think part of that is purely because it's mine and I think my things belong with me.

It's hard going to my storage facility and seeing my furniture upended and stacked or boxes with 'books' or 'yellow kitchenware' written on the side in thick marker. I miss my things. I want to be amongst them. This longing, this homesickness of sorts has me scouring domain.com for apartments where I could house my things and myself, round the clock.

I know that I'm probably not quite ready emotionally or financially to be moving out but I'm hoping the day I will be ready is quite soon. Deciding on the circumstances of where my future home might be and what it might look like has been challenging.

I've been told repeatedly and unnecessarily that Footscray is out of the question. I know my family would love me to stay close to the south in the St Kilda/Elwood area but it's inconvenient for all my doctors appointments and for seeing all of my friends. My doctors practice in Clifton Hill and all of my friends live in the north so it would make sense to live over that way but nice one bedroom apartments are rare and the costs are prohibitive. I have toyed with the idea of not living alone but I would need to live with the right person and when I think of them existing, I can't imagine them wanting to live with someone like me with all my baggage.

This quandary is causing significant anxiety in my life right now. If I could somehow skip this bit and get to the bit where I'm living somewhere furnished with my things all around me I would be the happiest girl alive. It's funny, writing that, I just realised that I really will be so much happier once I am in that situation. No wonder I'm so anxious to get there.

In the meantime, I have a bike to reassemble and I'll enjoy riding it around the flat streets of Elwood. After all, I probably (hopefully) won't be here for much longer.

Ups and Downs Katie Goes To A Party

I left behind Doctor Who and my pyjamas. I left behind Eurovision and the comfortable armchair. I left behind the safe familiarity of home and I ventured out into the night.

I had received the invitation to my friend's 30th birthday party on one of my last days in hospital. At that time I had imagined that by the time the party rolled around I would have transformed into some effortlessly cool social butterfly, flitting around the party with ease and grace. As it was, I was more of a half squashed moth, limping around the party, trying not to brush up against anyone lest I leave my stain on them.

It was awkward not drinking. I almost accepted the offer of a glass of champagne. I didn't want the people I was talking to to know I was sober as I hoped they'd assume I was slightly drunk and this was why I was failing so dismally at the art of conversation. Conversations were hard. I was so anxious about being at the party that I couldn't fully follow everything other people were saying to me. And I would get distracted midway through my talking part of conversations by helpful thoughts like, 'you've just used the word 'good' seven times in this last sentence' or 'these people probably remember you as the girl who flipped out and went missing'.

If I was my usual self then I would have gotten drunk and drunkenly engaged in conversations with the confidence drunkenness bestows and I would have found the whole evening to be an absolute corker. As it was, I did meet some really lovely people, I divulged all my secrets to one particularly nice girl who then told me all of hers and I made it through the night without fainting or vomiting, two things I was scared there was a very real possibility I was going to do. So I'm calling it a good night.