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We're All Crazy Here





The thing about totally losing your mind is that it takes so damn long to find it again. Even when you think you may have finally rounded it all up, it's really difficult to know how to put it back again neatly.  Like trying to stuff a double duvet into a single duvet cover.

I never thought I'd find myself blogging about  this, because I had so many other fish to fry.

I wanted to start tilting at windmills once again, and fighting the good fight, and speaking out

 But I couldn't. Because I couldn't admit that actually, I couldn't. Because I haven't been fixed yet.

People were tactful and supportive when, in May last year, I finally lost the plot completely, But no-one can go on being tactful and supportive indefinitely. It is a very finite state.  Making Allowances wears a bit thin after a while too.

So you try to remember who you were when you were well. Then you remember that while you may have switched off all the lights last May, you'd been using the dimmer switch for quite some time before that happened.  And besides, which 'you' were you at different periods of getting yourself  alone and sobbing, into that dark place?

So you give a huge grin and say "I'm good" when people hand you the ritual, and whistle a happy tune and trip blithely off-stage.

 Because no-one wants an answer. What are they going to do with: "Funny you should ask but I'm convinced I'm barking; and I can't fit myself into a 24 hour framework properly and at anything over a week I go into default mode and it all gets wiped and starts all over again. And I need to go back to the GP but I can't make it and am scared that now I've broken so many appointments I'll be blackballed.  And I can't get broken things fixed; or get dressed without lengthy forethought; or find out how to do things or remember peoples names or even the names of objects sometimes and all the practical things like remembering to eat or take the washing out the machine, completely defeat me. And I can't get my teeth fixed and my passport runs out this year."

But that's how I am, thanks. Being very English and hanging on in quiet desperation.

Now, the worst thing is that They have won.  No, not being all cryptic and conspiracist.  I mean the faceless people in government offices and bureaux when I first got to Brighton.  The ones who told me I wasn't really English.  Or that I'd never get a job because I was too old. Those who see people in homogeneous clumps - i.e."Us."..... vs.... the homeless, the indigent, the criminal, the immoral, the lazy, the mind-numbingly ignorant, the bad seeds the ill-bred, the uneducated. Everyone on benefits.

So I'm getting tireder and more tired as each day goes on.  A day that goes whirling, speeding, racing past me till its 2.30 in the morning and I haven't eaten all day and I make myself get into bed.

 I  fall into little micro-sleeps at the computer looking out the office window. I sleep through alarms and by Friday night I'm so buggered I just go home and sleep and surface sometime Saturday afternoon and miss out on everything I should be doing that I love.

The best I can say is that I'm trying. But I just haven't got it right yet.  And so I've written tons of stuff but I bin it all because I don't want to sound judgemental or whiney or didactic or mean or vain or do-lally or non-English or too old or too broke.

But to whom? Who's my target audience? What's my demographic? Who am I dropping my pearls of wisdom to?

And answer came there none.

So, in a way, I think maybe, at last, it really doesn't matter. Because my demographic would be so niche as not to exist.  Which frees me up to write for me.

And really, at this stage, I'm probably the only audience I'm going to have to worry about.  So maybe now I can stop worrying about HOW I'm going to write, or what register I should use, or who I must take care to placate, or who I might offend.  My audience won't be offended or judgemental. My audience is just as bitched, buggered and bewildered as I am.  I reckon the two of us will rub along together quite well.

Unless I begin to develop schizophrenia. Though, even if I do, my audience will probably follow all of us.

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