One day, will it all make sense?

Are you sure you want to delete it?

Right, before this becomes another whiny blog - some good stuffs.

This weekend was bloody hard, but I arranged some fun for the Monday and it paid dividends. I had an awesome lunch (20oz steak and my only ‘meal’ of the day - yum) with Husky and Lou; a lovely afternoon catching up with the other Lou in my life and snagging a huggle or two off Kimbo; and a fantastic night out with Kate, which took in Lava Lounge (dead...) and Revolution (quiet, but very entertaining...)

Was also great to see Tonia, Daz, Arry, Lauren, Bish, Jo, Povey, Chloe, Kent and the other doorman plus assorted old face on Saturday night.

I also had a good chat with Charlie today - thanks matey. :)

Now the shite. Still no counselling and I’m finding it harder to open up. There’s a lot of secrecy in the social group I know and I’m finding it hard to be open with people who won’t share anything of themselves with me.

To top it all off I’ve managed to upset and hurt two people I care about very much,

I need someone who I can talk to without hurting them. People claim they understand and make allowances for me right now but I am raging with pain and hurt and that is hard to take.

I really need some release. I know what I need, but I’ve never been someone who can just get… that.

Seriously, is there a big reset button? I keep wondering if there’s a way to induce retrograde amnesia to myself. Ignorance is bliss, though are memory and personality linked? I’m assuming I’d have a chance to form a fresh and bolder personality if freed from my memories. It’s this concept that Dollshouse has explored i part. I hope it does more in the second season.

I want to see Drag Me To Hell, plus I have various films to watch so if anyone wants to be sociable drop me a line.

But be warned, I’m not reliable company right now.

A long day...

I am very tired, but feel the need to write some of this down.

Left Swindon a little after 10am today with my Dad to drive down to West Wittering on the south coast.

Most of the journey was smooth but it being a Bank Holiday weekend, everyone was heading for the beach so the final leg of the journey took almost as long as the rest of the journey down.

This made us over an hour late in meeting my aunt Carol.

Mum was one of four children, all girls. Mum was the youngest. Various family fueds have divided the sisters. in the recent years, Mum spoke to both Carol and Jackie, but not the eldest sister Judy.

Jackie still spoke to Judy. Carol spoke only to Mum and would have been angry if she knew Mum had stayed in touch with Jackie.

Family eh?

Carol was always someone who Mum represented as very critical of my life and I have been wary of her since my teen years.

Now, all three sisters came to Mum’s service and Carol was very much isolated and clearly finding it harder than the other two, for obvious reasons.

So many the times I’d been told how judgemental she was of me and my actions - much of which I can now see as the folly of youth. I carry them around as mistakes and feel the guilt of them, but I feel it was unfair of someone many years my senior to judge me so harshly when I was indeed only a kid.

Despite this, my heart went out to her. I have been feeling so very isolated and I felt empathy for a woman who had lost the only member of her family she was still close to other than her own - now grown up - kids.

Dad and I had decided we wanted to scatter Mum’s ashes at West Wttering, which Mum loved os dearly. In the past decade she and Carol would take off for an almost annual holiday/pilgrimage to West Wittering and their childhood hometown of Chichester. They would build sandcastles and sand sculptures and eat Mum’s beloved Mr Softee ice creams cones and generally have a good laugh.

And bitch about me. And Dad. And Carol’s partner Dominique (nice guy). Etc.

I thought Carol could show us a spot Mum had really loved and by inviting just her and not the other two sisters we would give her one final connection to Mum. A way of acknowledging their bond. Dad was worried about cuasing offence to Jackie and Judy but accepted that we didn’t have to tell them and that they were unlikely to ask.

So the beaches themselves were jampacked, especially with the glorious weather.

Instead Carol lead us round the bay to a more secluded part behind the sand dunes, where dinghys were moored at low tide and the landowners and even organised a small crab pool. It was pretty cool, I have to admit.

We found a secluded spot away from others and walked out into the bay on the low tidealong a ridge of shingle.

Dad did the honours, scattering Mum into the water in a brisk channel of water flowing back out to sea.

It is very strange, to see one of your parents reduced to a green plastic bottle of ashes, with a white lid and her name printed n a white label.

So Mum is off and away on the tides. She can circumnavigate the globe, visit her old home in Guyana, see the sights she always dreamed of, or just stay where her heart was. Her Mum and Dad were scattered in the same bay, though further round.

Still no emotional release.

There is a bench nearby that overlooks this small bay and it was one Mum used to sit on everytime she came down. The plaque on the bench dedicates it to a Commodore, so it should be easy to find.

That’s it for tonight. Just wanted to get that down.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

Back on the sauce...

Actually I’m not really. Had a couple last night, in a friendly and already very chilled environment. At home. Although it did signal the end of my evening as I started to wind down and withdraw, so my current assumptions on booze and me stands.

I’m back to Swindon tonight. Taking the double bed and getting set to stop a few days with Dad.

I’m out tonight for a sociable curry and catch up. All good. Not going to drink much, but may have one or two. Shall see how it feels and try to use my best judgement.

Then Sunday is the day. So we shall see what that stirs up.

I started this thinking I had something to say, but I don’t really. Things are OK. Nothing has improved, but I have had some pleasant evenings and it has halted the slide into misery. So thank you.

If wishes were horses is a thought that comes to mind with regards the future. Who knows.

Have just picked up the US Blu-Ray Star Trek Trilogy - Star Trek II, III, IV. A nice way of packaging three of the better films without the rubbish of some of the others - I’m looking at you, Shatner-directed V! Ugh. So that’s a nice marathon of geeky filmage for me sometime soon.

Still want a puppy and a kitten and am cursing living in rental property. Still miss having company first thing in the morning and last thing at night. But am trying to stay proactive and face forward.

Even if it is front towards enemy somedays.

I played the demo for InFamous last night. Not bad, but basically the sandbox Spidey games of recent years with electro powers. So, meh. Like it, but not enough to pay full price.

I’m quite pleased with The Surrogates trailer - looks good so far, despite the director’s baggage so fingers crossed there.

My pride-swallowing is netting mixed results. Still not really sure what to make of it, but worth a go.

Want to finally get swimming again next week. My eyes have gone down enough for me to have my passport photos done, so I can probably face hitting the pool without feeling people are looking at me for my black eyes. Just have to shrug of my usual feeling that people are judging me for being overweight. But that goes after a few minutes of being there, so I know I can do that.

Huh, I’ve just remembered why I wanted to write something. I had a conversation with a shadow from my Mum’s past yesterday. A man who had always been presented to me as my Mum’s ex-boyfriend. A man who’s presence in our lives as always been somethng that Dad has had to avoid, manage and suffer.

Well now it’s been suggested that Mum made it all up. That they never had a relationship in the past. That their friendship was just that, except in Mum’s head. That Mum who prized honesty above all else had lied several times in their association and that she had made it all up.

Why tell me? Why blacken my Mum’s name? It appears to me that this man is annoyed that he wasn’t invited ot the memorial service and won’t be joining us for the scattering of the ashes.

Which undermines what he says about not being that close to Mum. Why want to downplay any threat he may have been to my Dad in an attempt to get ‘in on the action’ of our grieving my Mum if you weren’t something important?

Lying. Destructive. And it will come out. Live your life as honestly as possible. And if you are caught out in a lie, come clean as easi;y as possible. Don’t compoiund it with more lies.

I’m a hypocrite there. Lies are essential in life, to minimise pain and avoid offence when the full facts can’t be disclosed.

But if you can avoid creating a cat’s cradle of untruth in your life you will be much happier. Because this shit always comes out.

And if it comes out when you’re gone, you can’t do anything to fi it or atone for it.

I’m managing a lot of anger right now and yesterday’s conversation didn’t help. He has the shop number. He rang me at work. Let that sink in. He rang me at work.

And then told me my Mum was a delussional liar. Ha. A woman who punished me as a kid for white lies. Taught me that omission of truth and obfuscation of fact is as bad as a lie. One of my biggest pet-hates is double standards. The dichotomy of which is that I know I have double standards of my own! Aaaaargh!

The worst thing is, he may be right. I still love my Mum very much. I accepted long ago she was falible. We all are.

But I’m afraid in lieu of a counsellor I’m going to have to offload these weird moments here.

What really angers me is the way people use other people to make loved ones jealous. It’s passive-aggressive control and I hate it.

If you have been, thanks for reading

Back on the horse

I haven’t given up writing but last weekend was really hard.

For a number of reasons, I crashed really badly. A good friend of mine used to listen to Nine Inch Nail’s The Downward Spiral when he was feeling really down. By the end of the album he’d be so miserable, he’d have hit rock bottom and the only way is up.

Doesn’t work for me. Listening to that CD anyway. So instead, I pissed and complained and moaned to a select few friends. I raged that when I needed people on Friday I ended up down the pub with two friends - a couple - feeling even more alone.

No one teaches you how to grieve. No one teaches you how to handle being unhappy. And we all are at some point or another. Some people are more with more balanced chemicals in their brain, so it desn’t last long. Others inherantly know how to force themselves to keep swimming (just keep swimming) till all is good again.

It must be hard to stand by me through all of this. I feel guilty when I feel fine - and I feel fine sme of the time. When I’m angry, I’m furious and lash out verbally at friends. When I’m unhappy, i’m miserable. Truly dark. Anything you say to try to cheer me up will be shot down in flames.

So I would like to take a minute to thank my friends. For the suprise visits. For the planned visits. For the nights in with a DVD and pizza. For allowing me to turn up on your doorstep in the evening with a Starbucks because things are shit. For the hugs. The text messages. The advice. The spontaneous visits to drop in and say hey when the bus has dumped you the wrong side of town and you’re running late. The small gifts. The messages and comments on Facebook. It all helps and it is all taken in eventually, even if at the time I may be too black of mood to see it.

Thank you.

This week I went to see my GP. MY new GP. He was running late - about 40 minutes behind and as soon as I opened my muth to talk about why I was there, he turned his body language away from me. He didn’t give a fuck. He told me to call Cruise - whose number I already have, but I find that realy impersonal, top cold call a support group.

I went to see a real human being in a professional capacity to ask to be referred to another human being, one who specialised in counselling people like me.

Mum’s death has hit me hard and I’m finding no way to express that isn’t destructive or whiny. I am putting too much pressure on my friends to save me. But I was unhappy, lonely and really low before that. A friend blogged that he missed New Year’s Eve, when everything was fine. We were all content. I’m afraid I read that and disagreed. Everyone else in that room seemed happy. I was really sad and lonely, not helped by feeling really ill. I remember thinking good riddance to 2008, will 2009 be any better though?

Nope.

I had hoped the need for some sort of therapy in my life was past me, but apparently not. Sadly this GP just saw me as a way to catch up with his schedule and rushed me out making me feel like I’d wasted his time. If I wasi n a more stable place I’d complain.

I need to watch Sicko again. Between this idiot and the way Mum was treated by her GP, mental health and that fucking nurse that turned her, I have lost all faith in the NHS. I need to be reminded that the alternative is no better…

I’m still trying to do positive things. I have some interesting news about the shop that I’m very pleased about. More on that another time. I’m making plans for the future. I’m about to send off my passport application too. And I’ve taken some other steps that I’l keep to myself, but it has taken some swallowing of my pride and climbing down off my soapbox.

So I haven’t given up. Yet.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

Giving up

I wrote a blog about how low I was last night, then deleted it because it was self indulgent.

But here I am at 10:30am, still feeling wretched and hopeless.

And so alone.

I’ve read that a lack of self worth can be part of grieving. Great. For a man already riddled with self loathing, this is cold comfort.

When the bough breaks...

Today has been hard.

But in a good way.

A few days ago, I was recommended to listen to the Radio 4 Afternoon Play from last Friday, Do’s and Don’ts for the Mentally Interesting, based on Seaneen Molloy’s blog The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive, her account of learning to live and love with bipolar disorder.

Yo can find it here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00k4kkl/b00k4kj9/Afternoon_Play_Dos_and_Donts_for_the_Mentally_Interesting/ - until 3:02pm, Friday 15th May 2009.

I’ll be honest at first I put it off.

Then I was just too busy.

Until today. The comic delivery arrived and I like to have something to take my mind off the more montonous parts of Thursday’s tasks. So I put it on.

And it opened the flood gates. I cried. Not big, sobbing buckets - I still fear they are to come. Well, not fear - welcome. I need to, but have felt numb or unable to thus far.

I merely welled up, but it happened several times whilst listening to the radio drama. Seaneen’s horrors were exacerbated when her father died. At one point she cut herself in an attempt to release the pressure building up inside her.

It sounded very much like my feelings when I made the decision to get into a fight that lead to me getting my face haphazardly rearranged.

Her words helped. Her honesty helped. And I finally felt a bit of release.

It then happened again whilst watching the latest episode of Bones. And again whilst showing a key moment from the episode before to a friend.

It remains hard to feel able to let it out in the shop. People have walked in at points when I have tear stained eyes which I’m finding really embarrassing. But I don’t want to stand on the hose any longer.

This doesn’t come in isolation. I had a revelation on a different matter last night - something that I realised has been a barrier to me dealing with Mum’s death.

I was already emotionally broken when Mum died, but I can see I’m moving on now. It’s something I don’t want to talk about, I’m open about my life for the most part but some things aren’t for public consumption.

Now I may be able to deal with the loss of my Mum.

Next Monday I’m seeing my new GP to ask to be referred for grief counselling.

We scatter her ashes next Sunday. I have made sure I have someone who can catch me the day after.

And I’ve put various fun and exciting things in motion for the rest of 2009.

I found a card from Mum and Dad in my filing cabinet at the shop just before I started writing this. It commemorated the day the shop became one year old. Mum had written it, in the larger writing that characterised her last few years as her sight continued to fail. It was still recognisably her handwriting.

This is probably the last card I ever got from my Mum. It’s full of love and pride.

I miss her very much.

Thank you to everyone who has/is and will continue to help me.

That final month

Apologies to those who find these blogs hard going or inappropriate, but I need to keep on.

Mum’s death came after an awful month and in some ways it was a relief that she was free.

In the ice and snow at the start of the year, Mum had a fall and hurt herself badly. The hospital missed it at the time, but she had fractured her hip. She got frustrated by her slow recovery and lack of mobility and eventually checked herself out.

A fiercely independent woman, my Mum suffered threefold. Her remaining eyesight was failing and had been for some time, having already lost the sight in one eye before I was born. Always an artistic woman and a keen reader, Mum found it harder and harder to do the things she loved.

She had enjoyed long walks and hiking too, but over the past few years she had found it much more difficult to get around. She was only 63, but years of wrestling with an eating disorder had caught up with her.

Mum had suffered from bulimia in the Seventies, at a time when ignorance of mental health made people think such things were a weakness or a madness. Whatever you think of Princess Diana, she raised awareness of eating disorders and Mum always valued that.

You never recover from an eating disorder. Like any addiction, you learn to manage it. Mum strictly controlled her eating, never eating more than she was comfortable with. All to avoid feeling the need to throw it all up again.

She ate apart from me and Dad. Food was always an issue between the two of us. I have always wrestled with my weight. I was born with jaundice and had to have a low-fat diet. Mum kept me eating this way for years. When other kids had crisps and chocolate biscuits, I had cottage cheese and carrot sticks. Anything that makes you different at school, makes you a target and I resented her for it. So my youthful rebellion was binge eating, which lead to weight gain and so on. Mum hated having a fat son, it created a lot of tension.

But I digress. When Mum fell, the hospital tests revealed she was as malnourished as someone living in a Third World country. We knew she was underweight, but we had no idea she had all but stopped altogether. Eating apart from us as she always did, it became easy to hide it. And I had lived away from home for many years.

Mum initially resisted the doctors’ findings, claiming she was being victimised for being thin. Not helped by the fact that one of the GPs involved was quite overweight herself.

Then finally, Mum admitted she had a problem and asked for help. She rang me and pledged to get it together. She wanted to be admitted to a respite home of sorts, where trained staff would help her by teaching it was OK to eat and monitoring her meals and food intake. Such a place exists in Bristol, but they deemed she was too thin to be covered by their insurance. Something I’m still angry about.

Instead she was given two choices. Return to hospital to be monitored and fed but not closely supervised. She could have discharged herself again at anytime.

Or be sectioned and fed through a tube down her nose.

This terrified Mum. She talked about going away and hiding somewhere in the country. On April 8th 2009, some mental health workers tried to gain entry whilst Dad was at work. Mum freaked out and I happened to call in the middle of all this. I rang off and got Dad to leave work early and head home. They didn’t come back and Mum seemed to calm down.

Then on Good Friday after I’d closed the shop, I got a phone call. Dad told me Mum had taken an overdose and would like to speak to me. She came on the phone, sluggish and incoherant, and lied to me saying that Dad was making it up and asking how the shop had done that day.

It was one of our last conversations and she lied to me. After almost three decades of telling me she prized honesty above all else and making my life hell if I was caught out in even a white lie, I found this very hard.

Paramedics arrived and she refused their assistance so they left. When she finally lost consciousness, they returned and took her to hospital. She and taken 60 paracetomol, 30 cocodamol and washed it down with wine. This was the third time in my life Mum had tried to commit suicide with an overdose.

I was furious and didn’t want to go to see her. But then Dad rang to say she was getting worse.

I went down one Friday afternoon, having closed the shop early. She didn’t look anything like my Mum, and refused to acknowledge me. She kept begging the nursing staff to let her die.

I talked to her telling her about fun things of recent weeks - The Inspector Calls at the theatre, the preparation for FCBD, conversations with old friends - and then told her I forgave her, I understood and that she shouldn’t hold on.

I tried to prepare myself that Mum wouldn’t and indeed shouldn’t pull through. Her quality of life had become awful and this latest suicide attempt would make it so much worse.

Then the bastards at mental health came and assessed her, decided she need to be sectioned and put a tube down her nose to feed her.

What Mum was most afraid of came to pass.

I was furious. She wanted to die. She had got Dad to ring me and hold the phone to her ear while she begged me to let her die, to stop them keeping her. That was appaulling.

Years ago, she made me promise that if something horrible happened to her I would stop my Dad from letting them keeping her. She wanted DNR, whereas Dad is more a ‘life by any means’ guy. It felt like she was asking me to honour my promise and there was no way I could. Trust me, I looked into it.

But as the feeding tube went in and as the days went by she seemed to be improving. I tired to accept that she wasn’t getting what she wanted but that she may have some quality of life if we all pulled together.

Then on Saturday 25th April, Mum was in pain. She had had all her painkillers for the day, I was no longer allowed morphine. So the attending nurse suggested turning her as that sometimes helped.

She made Dad and my uncle Chris leave the room. Mum asked Dad to stay but the nurse insisted.

Waiting in the corridor, they heard a horrific scream and then the nurse came out. She said Mum was comfortable now.

Dad went back in and went to sit by her side. Her eyes were open but Mum was dead.

Today we had the preliminary coroner’s report.

It’s all being blamed on Mum for being frail. Her heart was enlarged ad could have gone at any time. The nurse in question has been cleared of all wrong doing.

And I just don’t know how I can accept that.

So...

Are you sure you want to delete it?

I’ve been struggling at the moment.

On April 25th 2009, at around 8pm, my Mum died.

It wasn’t unexpected in many ways, but it was sudden and shocking. I won’t go into details now, but things ended for her in agony. Which is heartbreaking.

I have all sorts of emotions rolling around, but I felt numb. This has begun to get scary. There were no real tears at the service. None the night she died. And with my past, this was very troubling. It was like i was stood on the hosepipe.

So Friday night, I went out with some friends to Judder at the 2 Pigs. Went out looking to have some fun, maybe make a connection, who knows.

Instead I ended up walking home alone feeling hideous and disconnected from the world.

Then a bloke mouthed off in the kebab house. Usually I’d let it lie. But this time I reacted. I won’t go into details but whilst I didn’t pick a fight, I certainly didn’t walk away and things escalated because of my actions.

Well, I was shitfaced and got my head kicked in. He got lucky and shat himself when I got back up from his beating. I intended to kill him. Thankfully he ran away, calling a mate for back up as he went. I was dumb enough to go looking for him but he’d gone.

My face is a mess, there was a lot of blood and pain.

But I could feel it.

Suddenly Fight Club made a lot of sense.

Now, before you judge me - someone has beaten you to it. I have made a loved one a promise not to do this again, and I mean it.

And another dear friend pointed out I’m not numb any more.

I intend to seek professional grief counselling. But I’m also going to try to blog about some of what has happened. What is happening. And how I feel.

Bottling my emotions up never works. That’s one thing I know.

Mum’s death has left me feeling the keen sense of loneliness I have had for sometime in 5.1 surround sound at full volume. It’s possible I wasn’t numb but so scared of being completely alone it drowned out everything else.

The hardest times are last thing at night and first thing in the morning. It may sound pathetic, but I wish there was someone to hold me in the dark. And to greet me as the painful memories of who I am and what is going on return with the morning.

There so much more to talk about, but I’m tired.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

Testing, testing. One, two, three.

There’s a lot going on right now. I’ve been botting it up, which isn’t me, but I’ve been scared of seeming crass during a massive trauma.

A dear friend has suggested I try writing it down. I was unfairly resistant, as she’s right.

We’ll see…