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. 

Fatigue

Forgive the infrequent posting.
Crap technology continues alongside busy weeks, jumbled thoughts and a lack of faith that these words mean anything anyway.

I ran out of Seroquel last Friday. There was a box I thought was full, it turned out to only be half full so my supply ran out and I didn't have a prescription. No matter, I had an appointment on Tuesday with my psychiatrist, it would just be a few missed doses. 3 in fact. 3. I took one Friday night so it was just getting through Saturday to Monday.
Predictably it was a bit harder to get off to sleep but I managed alright. I have an audiobook of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland read by a narrator named Peter Yearsley and there's a soporific quality to his voice which when combined with the dreamlike words of Lewis Carroll acts in a manner I find far more effective than Temazepam. So I got through. Although there was this big party on Saturday night so I didn't get a great night of sleep then. But no matter, I was fine and Tuesday came and I got my prescription and my drugs and all was to be righted in the world.

Tuesday night I took my normal dose of Seroquel and went off to bed. I was staying with my parents (another story) and my Mum came in to wake me around half past 9. Dragging myself out of bed felt like dragging myself out of my own skin it was so painful. I spent the morning in a stupor, my body weighed down with the weight of the most overwhelming fatigue. After lunch I couldn't take it anymore and went to lie down for a quick nap. I was woken six hours later.

Wednesday night I dutifully took my Seroquel again, shrugging off the day and thinking to myself that it must have just been a temporary readjustment to my brain chemistry but that Thursday would be better. Thursday I wrenched myself from bed around 10 and came home from my parents house and rather than doing laundry or going to the gym or attending German class I dozed in my bed, occasionally getting up to wander dumbly around the house wondering at what it was I was supposed to be doing.

Friday morning I was due in at work at 8.45am. I knew there was no chance I could risk being in a Seroquel haze so I didn't take it Thursday night. I woke up before my alarm on Friday and made it through the day clear headed. That was until the work Christmas party when my head did get a little cloudy and yes it was a bit of a later night than I had anticipated and when I got home and held the Seroquel tablet in my hand and thought about how I had to be in at work again today it just seemed like too great a risk so I tossed it into my pill box.

This morning, despite the still cloudy head and the late-ish night, I was awake by 8am. I wasn't due in at work until the afternoon so I spent the morning catching up on laundry and puzzling over why I was feeling so fractious and hungry and overwhelmed. Fatigue. Of course. Without the Seroquel and with a social life I don't sleep enough so I am fatigued. With the Seroquel I have the chemically induced paralysing fatigue.

I know eventually my body adjusts to the Seroquel and then even though I still sleep too much and spend my mornings staring into space I somehow accommodate it and muddle through. But right now I'm just so tired. And I'm so aware of how tired I am and I'm also so acutely aware of how rapidly my mental state starts to unravel just because I get tired.

I should have gone to bed already tonight.

So it's 1am now. I have things to do tomorrow so I can't risk another day of dozing or afford a six hour nap. No Seroquel it is.

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!!!

Words fail me

There are things I just can't tell you, blog.

Whether they're things that I'm too ashamed to admit I have stupidly done or longings I might describe that would alienate any individual who reads them. There are things I can't describe. Like how I'm desperately feeling both the desire to disappear and the urge to be more present than ever and how those clashing feelings are turning me into a puddle of confusion. There isn't the space on these pages to transcribe the narrative that is going on at warp speed in my head. Nor is there a font or size I could choose that would truly express the significance or shockingness of the denouements of some of these garbled plot lines. There are secrets that aren't mine to tell. Or at least I'm sure they can't be mine because that's not my idea in my head or at least I was a different person when I thought it and I'm not even sure really how this person who is inhabiting me now got the password to my account. There are things too dull, too inane, too related to the bodily function (which is disfunctioning) to relate that if I told you all of them I'd bore you to sleep, even though these are the very things that keep me up at night.

In short there are too many words in me that have nowhere to go and they are ripping me apart. They seep out of my eyes at inopportune times. I built a life around words but now I want them all gone. I want the peace that must exist in the absence of language.

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.

Transition times

It's laughable sometimes what I write in my blog.

Like in the last post when I was all 'rah rah, gonna sleep well, do yoga and be organised' and then proceeded to partake in the most exhausting, disorganised, yoga-free weeks I've had in a long time.

Sleep has been a real issue these past few weeks. Being particularly busy on top of feeling mildly depressed and highly anxious has left me exhausted. I got into a terrible habit of getting home from work around 6.30pm and going straight to bed, waking up around 11.30pm, starved and wired, browsing the internet for pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch for a few hours and then finally going back to sleep between 2.00-3.00am. Not good.

Because I was sleeping through all the useful hours of the evening it meant that I didn't organise myself well for moving house, I didn't make it to yoga and I'm woefully underprepared for starting uni.

But I did move house. That happened and now I'm living in a sea of unpacked boxes and bags. It does not aid with my sense of my life being disorganised. I must say it is nice to come home and be greeted by hugs from my nephew Max and dinner being made by my brother Nick, so I think it has overall been a step in a positive direction.

Uni orientation was this week although I only made it to one day as work asked me to stay on an additional week and I'm not really in a position to be refusing money right now. I have bought all of my text books and looked up all my assigned reading and quite frankly I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. The sheer volume of reading is immense. I was a few paragraphs in to Plato's Symposium when my wandering mind remembered that I urgently needed to update my blog. Tiredness doesnt help with this distractedness and I just hope that the first few weeks of classes aren't marred by this.

There is a small slice of good news and that is that I have been offered a job in the MTC Box Office. Hopefully this means I'll have enough income (along with whatever measly amount the government sees fit to proffer) to keep me in lithium and chicken nuggets for my uni days. It does mean I'm going to be busy though, already my next two weeks have jam packed schedules.

I'm not going to be so foolish as to discuss my plans for coolly breezing through these next few weeks of transition. That would just be bullshit and I do want to keep this a BS free zone. My psychiatrist summed it up for me when I saw him the other night, he said, "But hey, look at you surviving all this crap." And he's right. I am surviving. If I can make it through these transition times it shows how far along I've come.