Crappy New Year

See what I did there with the title of the post? How have I not won a Pulitzer?

Well had I had the time, internet connectivity and foresight to post in the few days before Christmas, you might have had some insight into my tone and writing style when I'm genuinely happy.

Reasons I was happy;

• Application to rent the most beautiful little one bedroom apartment on the Brunswick/Coburg border was approved!
• Bit the bullet and decided to go to Europe and the US for a lovely little jaunt beginning in April and ending in June. Visited a travel agent who quoted me $4800 for flights, used my mad online flight searching skills (I used Skyscanner) and got all my flights for just under $2300.
• I'd had a crappy stay in hospital for maintenance TMS but in the last two days two nurses on two separate occasions tried to give me the wrong medication. Definitely a bad thing but I felt suddenly empowered because there was something concrete I could legitimately make a formal complaint about and perhaps get some of my other concerns heard.
• The money from my four years of tax returns finally all came through. And money can buy you happiness. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise,

So what happened?

• Well, the money kind of all disappeared on flights, bond, rent, furnishings for the apartment and Christmas. All gone.
• Moving into my beautiful dream home turned out to have a few little nightmarish qualities. Please learn from my mistakes and never, ever move just before Christmas. I spent days without power, the internet has only just been connected and when you realise that your real estate agent has given you the wrong key he is not around for you to talk to. Also a number of the lights didn't work once the power was turned on and they had expensive, difficult to replace globes. And then finally, I don't know whether this stuff happens to other people but they just never talk about it, but the lock on my front door fell off. On New Years Day. When even the 24 hour 7 day a week 365 days of the year locksmith wasn't answering his phone. Seriously, how am I the only person who has things like locks falling off doors and driveways catching on fire happen? And I wouldn't have been so concerned about the lock falling off since the building itself is pretty secure but my new neighbours turn out to be sketchy as fuck! I couldn't work out who actually lived there for the first week or two because so many people were coming and going at all times of day or night. I've finally worked out it's two guys living there (probably not a couple or the counterstereotype of what a gay couple is) and they like to listen to the races all day long while competing to see how many f-bombs they can drop in a single sentence. 
• I drank a lot of champagne on Christmas day which perhaps wasn't advisable since I was kind of tired and overwrought from the stress and lack of sleep from moving so rather than sensibly going home after drinking champagne for six hours straight I went to a party and drank even more and then ended up having some rather unpleasant social encounters. I won't go into it but it kind of put me off parties, drinking, myself and people, particularly those of the opposite sex.
• So then I spent New Years Eve on a couch with a cat watching a documentary about happiness that SBS had obviously programmed so that people in my situation wouldn't top themselves. 
• The complaint I made about the nurses attempting to administer the wrong medication has had zero response which now just has me feeling insecure about ever going back into hospital.
• And I could have endured it all because I kept thinking to myself 'I'm going to Vienna! I'm going to New York! I'm going to see my dear friends!' but then my bastard government introduced some snaky new legislation which came into effect January 1st saying that recipients of certain government payments could not leave the country for more than four weeks in a twelve month period without having their payments cut off. And because I'd been an online travel scouting genius I had booked almost exclusively non-exchangeable, non-refundable flights. So I have a couple of options; 1) Go. Fuck the government. Hope they don't notice and be prepared to have my payments cut off which would definitely put me in further financial jeopardy. 2) Don't go. Forget all the money I've spent on non-refundable flights. Stay in Melbourne, be miserable. Other people keep putting forth another idea, 'Change the flights you can and just buy new ones', which is a lovely idea if the first dot point wasn't in place. I have no further money. It's gone.

So now I've kind of just given up on pretty much everything. I'm house sitting in the suburbs for my parents which means I'm trapped far from everything with dial up speed internet and too much readily available junk food. I've been wearing the same pyjamas day and night for the last three days. I'm kind of half-watching Doctor Zhivago in the same way I kind of half-watched The Crimson Pirate before this and I'm sure I'll continue to half-watch some crap on the telly until it's nothing but infomercials. I also have a UTI which I'm kind of using as a justification for the pyjamas, couch and tell lifestyle.

It's weird though, in giving up I think I've avoided going down the other path I usually go down which is caring too much and falling into a depressive pit. I'm intellectually aware that the things that have happened haven't happened to me. They're not the ammunition of the universe vs. Katie war. These things have just happened. Unfortunately all around the same time. But I kind of like holding onto the idea that something really is trying to break me. It means when a mug breaks or my Android tablet I got second-hand for Christmas breaks (both happened today - whatevs) I have a moment of ire and then I decide I don't care. It's like I'm flipping the universe the bird and telling it it can't break me because I don't care.

Of course I'm going to have to start caring again at some point. I don't think my pink babushka doll pyjamas or stringy bed hair would go down well at work. And I suppose I will eventually want to eat something other than mince pies and corn chips. Eventually. 

And then who knows what happens next. 

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. 

Familiar feelings

I realised this week that I have now had 6 first days at 6 different higher education facilities in the last 14 years. No wonder the creeping sense of deja vu was resting on my shoulder for much of this week. So, what do I think of my new course? Well... Let's see, there are people in my Creative Writing class who confess to not having any fondness for reading or writing which I find alarming but my tutor just took in her stride. My Philosophy tutor is young, cool and slightly good looking and boy, doesn't he know it! He spent most of the class trash talking Deakin, the university experience and philosophy as a subject so I'll be interested to see where he takes us. My Film Studies lecturer clearly has stand-up comedy aspirations but seems to be a decent fellow and my Film Studies tutor told me it's basically impossible to fail the class, so that's reassuring.

This week has also seen my triumphant return to the MTC Box Office following an absence of nearly 4 years. It's all much as I remember it although the staff are all different and I can't work out where I fit in the pecking order just now. I feel like I had such a busy week but since work only made up a small part of that I will only be receiving a depressingly small amount in my pay cheque next week. Already the sinking feelings that accompany poverty are settling in the pit of my stomach.

It occurs to me that I have once again withdrawn from all social interactions. I haven't checked Facebook to find out if any events are happening and I haven't reached out to any of my friends to catch up. It's hard. I feel so tired at the moment and my timetable seems so intractable. Plus I'm broke! But spending all my time curled up in bed with my laptop is not a path to wellness.

I shall endeavour to venture out of my cocoon at least once next week in what will hopefully be a more settled week as I settle into my new routine. Hopefully my new routine will soon also incorporate visits to the gym at Deakin but right now the whole no time + no money = impossible life equation is making that difficult. Still, something to aspire to, one must have goals, even if they are trivially small.

I feel like all my current life goals are very modest. Stay well enough to keep out of hospital, start exercising again, pass semester 1 of a Bachelor of Arts. I wish I had at least one impossible dream or lofty ambition. Perhaps it just means I'm grounded and living in the real world for once. I'm sure I'll find a way to be happy here.

My shitty week

I'm having kind of a shitty week. Let's see, where to start? How about my shoulder? Yeah, my shoulder is in pain for some unknown reason, possibly the result of too much filing which I've been doing at my job, which is another thing that has been kind of shitty. Usually I like my job a lot but this week has just been a whole load of meh with some blah piled on top. I'm working reduced hours, some days only 3 hours, and when the work itself is shitty then getting the energy up to go in for those 3 hours is pretty challenging.

Since I started with a body part perhaps I'll continue and tell you about my jaw, which is also in pain. I was so proud and boastful running around being like, 'look at me, I'm side effect free' and then I've gone and developed a side effect. It's not specifically just my jaw, but all my muscles are tensing up as a side effect to the Saphris. It's most noticeable in my jaw though because it's currently permanently clenched and so it aches and my teeth ache and chewing my food has become an ordeal. Now if only this would noticeably put me off my food I might lose some weight and start feeling better about my body, which is another thing that has made me feel shitty this week. No big changes here, still just lugging around all the lithium weight and feeling like a blimp.

I wonder if I'd lose the weight if I went off my medication? I've been wondering about being off my medication ever since my psychologist asked me what I thought I'd be like off my medication. I've been having a few issues with this psychologist and I don't think this has been helped by such portent questions as this. I think I'm going to stop seeing this psychologist but then I have to go through the hassle of finding a new one or try going it alone for a while, I don't know, it's all just a weight on my mind right now. What I do know is that I don't need to wonder what I'd be like off medication right now because the agreed upon course of action decided upon by myself in consultation with some very well trained health professionals is that I'm going to take my damned medication.

And that is medication that from tomorrow is going to start costing me a pretty penny more as Centrelink have decided since I'm working all of about 15 hours a week now I no longer qualify for Sickness Allowance and they've cut off my health care card. And what really irks me is that I'm really not earning very much money. Certainly not enough to have saved anywhere near enough money to move out on my own despite leading an austere existence at present. And what I'd really like more than anything right now is to have a place of my own. I miss having that haven and I am losing hope that it will ever be mine once again.

So that's a brief summation of the things going on in my shitty life this shitty week. However, I'm not feeling depressed, despite there being numerous things I could feel depressed about. I'm not suicidal, not even a jot, so even if my life is shitty at present I still fully intend to keep living it. And finally, this week will pass. It may be replaced with one much worse but it may be replaced with one much better. (Please be one much better.)

Returning to work

I feel guilty calling in to say I won't be at work. Even though I ended up in the Emergency Department this week, I feel like because this illness has happened on the tail end of my sick leave for bipolar disorder, somehow it's illegitimate.

Something makes me feel like there is a decision that I make to take time off work when I'm sick with bipolar disorder, which is simply not the case. When i get sick, everything falls out of my hands. I guess because my illness is so caught up in my own psyche and thought processes, it feels like I should have more control than I actually do and I perceive that others must believe this.

I know it must be hard to understand the pain, the exhaustion and the danger of mental illness if you have never experienced it firsthand. This also makes it difficult to explain to someone why I needed to so urgently take time off and for such an extended period of time. If you were to perceive mental illness as merely mood swings, this would seem unnecessary and indulgent. I can assure you though, there was nothing indulgent about my stay in hospital.

I don't think any of my uneasy feelings are being aided by the fact that there is one distinct aspect of returning to work that I'm really not looking forward to; answering the question of where I've been. I'm hoping it won't come up. We're a pretty transient workforce so people do come and go a bit. But if anyone does ask, I'm then stuck with the dilemma of either lying or telling a half-truth or telling the whole truth and dealing with the reaction to that. Most people are inoffensive in their responses but almost everyone seems really uncomfortable when I tell them, and this doesn't wear off immediately. I wonder if people who reveal they have diabetes are given wide berths and sympathetic looks like I've received.

Anyway, back at work tomorrow. One positive note I can concentrate on is that working = getting paid, something much needed after my long, finance-depleting period of illness. Returning to work also marks a return to some sort of normality; I'll no longer feel like I'm wasting water when I shower in the morning, I do in fact need to shower before going to work as opposed to other recent days of being housebound.

So, concentrating on those positives I will boldly make my way to work tomorrow and face whatever challenges lie ahead. Wish me luck.

Honk If Your An Aussie

I spent the long weekend with my parents at their beach house. I even went to the beach one day and waded out into the water in my grandma-style, green, striped, skirted bathing suit that I bought at Savers. And everyone on the beach had the good grace not to gasp, point or sneer at my irridescent skin or luscious underarm hair growth.

Australia Day was the Saturday and we had no real plans to celebrate this auspicious event but drove in to Rye to see what was happening. Celebrations were afoot there. A childrens entertainer was singing interactive songs for the offspring of the nearby campers, a sign promised there would be fireworks later and a group of thick-necked Meditaranean looking men were engaged in a game of soccer.

There were also a large number of young people (oh god - how old am I, really? But you know who I'm talking about when I say young people, you know, young people, yoof!) getting about with Australian flag paraphernalia; t-shirts, hats, singlets, crop tops, temporary tattoos and of course the traditional flag draped around the neck as cape.

On the road in to Rye there was a bunch of flag-clad young people camped on the side of the road with a cardboard sign reading 'Honk If Your (sic) An Aussie'. I found the whole thing distasteful, not least because of the grammar gaff or the fact that as a nation we should be able to find a better day to celebrate than the day our genocide of the indigenous population commenced, but also because I wonder what particular brand of Aussie-ness these young people are so fervently in support of. I fear it's an Aussie-ness that embraces sport watching, larrikinism, sportiness, a 'she'll be right' attitude, sportsman idolisation, male dominance, anti-intellectualism or at least dismissal of those considered 'up themselves' and sport. This is tar I do not care to be brushed with. Mostly because I greatly enjoy being up myself.

But I do love Australia and some of the fine things about being an Australian. But my love is a cautious, tempered love and not unerring.

I love that we have an elected Prime Minister who is a woman, unmarried and atheist. Yet I was appalled by the party politics that initially led to her appointment and I consider it a great shame that so much political dialogue still revolves around party politics rather than the issues at hand. And while it's great that she's a female and unmarried we should not see this as a sign that women's struggles for equality are over or that we're shifting anywhere away from a heteronormative society.

It was one of the things I waxed lyrical about in the U.S., my prized affordable education. But I'm angered by the cuts to universities, particularly as they are hitting hardest the Arts and Humanities.I need art, literature, history and philosophy to have any understanding of life. You can get a scientist to tell me about the atoms I'm made of, but I'm more interested in the stories that as people we can make.

I also often discussed our brilliant universal health care system with my friends in the U.S. But mental health is one of the areas of our public health system that desperately needs an overhaul. I have received excellent mental health care for one reason only, money. I'm lucky that I have family that support me and can help foot the bill for my private health insurance, psychology appointments, psychiatry appointments and medications. Most people are not as fortunate as I am. Mental illness impoverishes people and then further frustrates them by being expensive and difficult to access. Beds on public wards are hard to come by and many mental health professionals attest that admission to a public mental health ward can actually exacerbate mental health issues due to the environment on the ward.

I feel guilty sometimes that there are people out there suffering from far worse conditions than I but without the supports that I have. It is only because of these supports that I have any chance of living something that resembles a normal and productive life. I really do wish we had a true universal health care system in Australia, that cares for the health of every Australian, not just those lucky to be born like me.

Bipolar is expensive and time consuming

I broke with routine this morning and got up early to get to work early so I could leave work early to make my appointment with my psychiatrist. After my $220 appointment I went and spent $66 on medication and it looks like I'll be doing it all over again next week! Oh yeah, because that $66 is for only 2 of my 5 medications and I'm running low on others now. One of them costs $50 a month! 

Yesterday I had an appointment with one of the counsellors from the Outreach program at The Melbourne Clinic. Those are fortunately covered by my private health insurance but she wanted to know when I had another hour free next week. The simple answer is I don't. 
I have work and appointments with my psychologist and my psychiatrist plus I'm trying to minimise running around so that I actually get some time to rest. The counsellor seemed highly unimpressed, like I wasn't prioritising my mental health but I really don't know what to do. 

 I feel like my life is overrun by the logistics of bipolar disorder. I have to carefully plan my time so that I have at least 2 hours plus travel time per week to see various health professionals. I constantly draft up budgets to make sure I have the funds available at the right times when I need to see one of my health professionals or refill prescriptions. It's a job in itself. 

 And now, I have something wonderful and big to look forward to and it's feeling like this trip is going to be really positive but I find myself fretting about how many hours I'm going to need to take off work and how much money that is that I'm losing out on so I can go and spend more money on dealing with bipolar disorder. 

 I'm tempted to put a stop to the Outreach visits. My experience has been that they're not there to build a long-term therapeutic relationship, they're heavily based on CBT and mindfulness which I know enough about and find to be of limited value and quite frankly they're taking up time which I would rather be spending at work or taking a walk or reading my book or just not thinking or talking about bipolar disorder. 

 I think the easiest way for me to become a lifelong victim of bipolar disorder, like some of the people I met in hospital, would be to let it overrun my life and at the moment I feel a bit like that is happening. I might even ease up on blogging about bipolar related shit and instead treat you to lyrical prose about other things, like my memories of and cravings for American hamburgers or my sudden desire to get a dog. I want to be more than just bipolar Katie. Perhaps I should have thought of that before I named my blog.