Oscillation

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve published anything (I’ve written things, but they were, to me, deeply unsatisfactory.  Can something be deeply unsatisfactory?  That’s like being extremely mediocre, or vastly tepid).  Anyway, let’s just sum up the last two months of my life as periods of general general-ness, underpinned by a slow...

Thank you!

I just wanted to write a brief message to say thank you to everyone who sponsored me for running the marathon and helped me to raise money for the charity Rethink.  I raised around £260 in total, which I am very happy about.  I especially want to say thank you to those people who donated...

#79

Some bucket list items are small and can be knocked off in an afternoon, some are a little bit longer in the making.  So it is for #79 - Run a Marathon. Although, technically, the actual running did just take a few hours (no, I'm not going to say how many). I've got to be...

Dead Man’s Curve

Trigger warning:  Some discussion of suicidal feelings and planning, one brief reference to methods.  Fortunately, I’m not too worried about labels, so I wasn’t upset this week when my psychologist told me that I was psychotic and retarded. I’m half joking. She was most concerned that I understood and was not upset by the words....

Bucket lists, bonus items and …… Brazil nuts

It’s been a little while since I last wrote a blog post and I’m feeling a bit out of the rhythm. I thought I would ease myself back in gently by just updating my progress on The Bucket List. The bucket list is, to some extent, why I haven’t posted in a while – like...

A week in The Lodge – anti-ligature rooms, craft clubs and Jaffa cake dodging

So, my last blog ended with me driving away from A&E in the back of a car with 2 staff from the Crisis Team. If this was a short story, that is where we would leave things. Nice cliff-hanger. Full of possibilities. But life isn’t like that. You don’t get to skip past the crap,...

How I ended up in psychiatric care (the first time around)

Trigger warning: I’m going to tell you about the antecedents to my first stay in residential psychiatric care. Inevitably (for me) this involves some fairly in-depth description of planning my suicide. So, if you think in any way that this is going to be triggering for you, just give it a miss. Please? For me?...

I went to Wales, oh yes I D.I.D.

I do love a good pun. D.I.D, as I have mentioned before, stands for Dissociative Identity Disorder. It’s been a bit of a feature for me over the last couple of weeks. Upon contemplation, I have decided that it sucks. However (always looking for the positives), it is about a billionty times better than clinical...

And…. I’m back in the room

Gosh, it’s nice not being depressed.  It happened in the course of about half an hour the other evening and has been holding strong (barring a few hours this afternoon - a blip, I hope - thank you A~ for listening to me and picking me back up) for 4 days now (everyone touch wood,...

The hero’s journey and self-aware doormats

A couple of weeks ago my friend D~, looking genuinely upset, said that he ‘wanted the old Caroline back’.  That one has really stuck with me.  It hurt, almost a physical sensation of being stabbed in the chest, not because I think he shouldn’t have said it, but because I agree with him. The problem...