Ups and Downs Katie Goes Away

Regular readers of my irregular blog post might have picked up that I like blog post titles that have layered meanings. This one I’m particularly proud of as it could refer to the fact that my blog has essentially ceased to be due to neglect. Or it could be that I don’t feel so much like Ups and Downs Katie these days. The past eight (?) nine (?) months have seen me on a fairly even keel. I’m still prone to maudlin outbursts and the occasional full scale tantrum. I cried while listening to a Taylor Swift song very recently too but I’m beginning to suspect that these things might actually be the guts of my personality and no amount of lithium or mild, medically supervised head trauma is going to get rid of them. Mores the pity.

And the third, and my most favourite, meaning is that I have literally gone away. I am typing this from Shanghai Pudong airport where I’m waiting for my flight to Paris.

I was in hospital last week for some maintenance TMS and a good once over to make sure I was right to travel and one of the nurses suggested I chronicle my journey, both as a means of recording my tales for posterity but also so that perhaps if my mood does start to veer off we might have some clues to what preceded it and how things could perhaps be remedied e.g. “April 27^th Paris, stayed out until 5am drinking and smoking heroin with some skinheads who also happened to be experts at negging and believed mental illness was just people showing off to get attention. Just realized I haven’t eaten in 3 days. Not feeling crash hot today.” Remedy for that would be bed rest and confiscation of funds once leafy green vegetables and restorative broths have been purchased.

I was going to just write in my actual travel journal but to be honest these days I’m really slack at finishing writing anything I start writing by hand. I’ll be in the middle of artful prose and then lose interest and the rest of the page is given over to doodles of cats (they’re the only thing I can draw), shopping lists and attempts to rewrite the lyrics to catchy pop songs so that they’re not so laden with internalized misogyny and I can sing my own version to myself (once I crack Bang Bang by Jessie J I will post the new lyrics for you to see.)

OK, so if I’m going to be candid about how I’m traveling I should start now. I’m feeling pretty crap.

I left Melbourne with what felt like the fixings of a cold brewing and while it hasn’t come to fruition my overall wellness has not been improved by 10 hours in a tin box. I am well past the stage of believing there is anything luxurious about air travel but this flight from Melbourne to Shanghai was bad. There was the usual crap food, crap seats ordeal but I was also unfortunately surrounded by people who in no way felt the need to be shy about their body functions. I had a woman actually coughing on me from one side so I scrunched myself to the other edge of my seat. I had a centre aisle seat but on the aisle across from me there was a man who snorted and hocked up god knows what, he must have gotten to vital organs by the end of the flight, at regular intervals and then spat it into either the airsick bag or after the meal had been served, a clear plastic cup. Mmm…

So I spent much of the flight reviling and shuddering and trying to block out the noise of coughing and spluttering on one side and hocking and spitting on the other. It made for a pretty tense flight and I had already been pretty tense when I boarded. On top of the usual pre-travel anxieties I got stuck literally but fortunately not figuratively in the middle of an argument in Customs. The lines were immense and a number of people were muttering about whether they’d miss their flight. Then a group of young people from the back of the line pushed their way forward, unclipping the retractable barriers as they snaked their way to the front. They went past me but I assumed that one of the customs officials must have told them to do this but when they cut in front of a couple who had been craning their necks and anxiously checking the time the guy stopped them and asked what they were doing. They said they thought they were going to miss their flight and he replied, quite rightly, that many people in line were in the same situation. They kept moving forward and the guy called out to the people in front, ‘Oy, stop them, they’re queue jumpers!’ Now what I haven’t mentioned is that this group of young people were almost certainly all Muslim, four of the young women were wearing headscarves. As soon as people heard ‘queue jumping’ and saw Muslims it was an open invitation it seemed for the more racist amongst the horde to start calling out such helpful things as ‘Go back to where you came from’ and ‘You should all be deported’ and the ever so helpful in a secure airport area, ‘Terrorists!’

The staff responded pretty quickly to restore order but there was a moment in there of absolute dread that my holiday was going to be over before it started due to a race riot or suspected terror plot based on the inappropriate outburst of a yobbo.

So, I’m in Paris now. By the time I was due to board my flight in Shanghai I was so exhausted that things weren’t making sense. I asked a flight attendant a question and then I thought she was laughing at me. She wasn’t. She was a cardboard cut-out. I left my passport, medications and laptop in the box at the security clearance and when I finally made it on to the flight I forgot that you’re not supposed to clap when the flight attendants finish their safety demonstration. Even if they are really good. Just don’t do it, they treat you really weird all flight.

But all that is done. I scored a new PB of 8.5 hours of sleep on an airplane and arrived in Paris, well still fairly rooted but perhaps not the danger to myself that I was at Pudong Airport.

I read that the best things to do to kick your body into a new time zone are to move your body heaps during the day and get as much morning sun as possible. So I walked the streets of Paris from 8am – 6pm. I walked from Gare du Nord to Marche Saint-Quentin for some pastries and coffee and to ogle the cheese, past Gare de l’Est, past the Metiers Art Museum and le Centre Pompidou to the Viaduc des Arts and the Promenade Plantée and Marche Place d’Aligre and back along the Promenade Plantée past Monument a la Republique (I forgot to put this on the map, but I also then got very lost looking for the Picasso Museum which was only going to be open for 1 hour by the time I found it so I didn’t go in) and then along Canal Saint Martin to this hipster haven bar/second hand trader/ DJ venue/ museum of African culture called Le Comptoir General. Then I was going to walk all the way back to the hostel but I couldn’t work out which way to go so I caught the Metro and it turned out I was only two stops away.

Usually I think I have a fairly good sense of direction. Today, I was useless. I would look at a map and get a simple route clear in my head like turn left then take the third right but after fifteen minutes I would look at the map and I’d realize I’d walked in entirely the wrong direction. Even with the map in front of me and a sign posted intersection in front of me I’d take the wrong turns. So I hadn’t really intended to walk to any of those places but that’s where today’s wandering led. And no wonder my feet are sore if I walked, I’d say at least 13 kilometers!

I had un délicieux croissant au beurre et une centaine de grammes de fromage. And then I kept seeing windows with more pastries and chocolates and meringues and other things that I don’t even know the name of but they looked sweet and potentially creamy. And I walked past pizza places and pommes frites and I didn’t feel like them either. So in the end for lunch I had some fresh baby radishes, cheese, baguette and ham and some strawberries. I had a snack of yoghurt in the afternoon. And for dinner I ate the rest of my radishes with a green salad and tuna.

Doctors tell me occasionally (only occasionally – it would probably be more often if they thought I’d listen) that I should eat less fried chicken and more vegetables and get more exercise. I think I’ve found the answer Doc! Just write me up a prescription for living in Paris.

Having said that tomorrow is a new day. And while I fully intend for there to be lots of walking and maybe even a bike ride there will probably also be some new pastry I will immediately need to eat four more of. And cheese. There will always be cheese in my life.

Now I’m nestled into my dorm room bunk bed. My roommates seem nice. I’m adding the words ‘like’ and ‘totally’ into more sentences in the hopes that they won’t realize I’m a million years older than them. I may still earn their disdain with a remarkable effort of snoring throughout the night.

I’ll try to post again soon and often after that, although knowing me that could mean it will go either way. And I will add some photos once I can find the cord that connects my camera to my laptop (I have taken some Mum!)

And new candid statement on how I'm feeling: tired but good.

Jetlagged but happy

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.