2091: Singular Sensation

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In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Singular Sensation.”

“If one experience or life change results from you writing your blog, what would you like it to be?”

I’ve talked about how this blog is helpful to me personally on a number of occasions in the past. It’s an outlet, mostly, albeit one I’ve chosen to make public as a means of sharing “who I am” with the rest of the world. You may like what I say, you may hate it, you may judge me harshly or you may empathise with the things I’m saying, but you can be certain that everything I write here is the honest truth at all times, warts and all.

And, to be honest, I’ve already had experiences and life-changing results from writing this blog, though I didn’t necessarily know what effect I was having at the time. My particularly tough year back in 2010 is something I keep coming back to, but I don’t mind admitting that sitting down and getting some thoughts down on “paper” on this very site each day helped me through the worst of a terrible situation. It didn’t immediately resolve anything, but it at least gave me the chance to feel like I was able to express the many, many conflicting feelings swirling around in my head at the time.

And this is something I still keep in mind when I write something here every day now. I write from the heart, without particularly planning things out or attempting to compose something with good structure; instead, this is a scratch pad for random thoughts, a place to jot down memories so I don’t forget them, a place to enthuse about the things I love and a place to rant about the things I hate. I do try not to stick to the same topic all the time, but you know what people are like — everyone likes what they like, so even with the best of intentions, I know that I inevitably find myself drifting back towards the things I enjoy writing about the most.

Actually, my occasional adoption of these writing prompts from The Daily Post is an attempt to mix things up a bit; the prompts aren’t always particularly appealing or relevant to me, but when they are, they can providing a good starting point for something to write about. Plus I’ve found that posting a pingback to The Daily Post via the link at the top of one of these posts brings in some new people who perhaps wouldn’t have found me normally. Sometimes those people stick around; at other times, they may linger for just one or two posts before disappearing into the darkness of the Internet once again. Either way, it’s nice to come across new people now and again, and know that I’ve touched their lives, even in a minor sort of way.

So, then, I don’t think I have any particular grand plans for something I want to achieve using this blog. By this point, it’s something I just keep around because I’ve been doing it for so long — and, well, I kind of enjoy coming up with something to write about each day, too. It’s part of my routine now; so much so that whenever I’m away from home I always make sure I have some means of posting while I’m away. After 2,091, it’s a hard habit to break — and I don’t particularly want to, either.

So whether you’re a longtime reader or someone who’s just dropped by after seeing a pingback on The Daily Post, thank you, once again, for listening to my nonsense, and I hope you got something out of it, even it was just the hint of a smile for whatever reason.

2049: Dear Diary

0049_001There are times when I wonder whether this blog is the best way to handle getting thoughts out of my head in some form or another.

I used to keep a diary when I was younger. I’m not really sure why; I think it was partly due to the fact that I very much enjoyed the Adrian Mole books and fancied myself as being a similar sort of person to him in some ways. (I later realised that Adrian was a bit of a twat — or at least became a bit of a twat in the later books — and rescinded my earlier appraisal.) Mostly, though, it was about the fact that I enjoyed writing and found it cathartic, particularly if there were things bothering me.

I remember my first diary. It was a really nice leather-bound book with lovely paper, and it said “Journal” on the side of it. It was a souvenir from somewhere or other; I forget exactly where, but my first entry recounted a trip with my parents to the thrilling-sounding National Stone Centre, and subsequent entries had a touch of the “scrapbook” about them, with bits and pieces stuck in and all manner of things.

Then one day I decided to change things up a bit. I decided to use my diary as something a little more personal. Rather than effectively doing what I would do in a school English class — “today we went to [x] and did [y], it was [z]” — I decided that I would use the diary as a means of expressing the thoughts, feelings and emotions that I felt unable or hesitant to talk about with anyone, be it my friends or relatives.

My mental state throughout my school years was a little turbulent, to say the least. I suffered dreadful bullying at primary school, and this continued in secondary school until I punched my main tormentor in the face just as the school principal was coming around the corner. (I largely got away with it, because frankly he had it coming.) Although the instances of outright bullying calmed down somewhat after this watershed moment, my social awkwardness and inability to understand the concept of being in any way fashionable — a trait I maintain to this day, though it matters a bit less now — meant that I was occasionally still the butt of jokes, even from people who were my friends most of the time. If the cool kids were around and there was the opportunity to make a joke at my expense, people normally took it, and this didn’t do much for my self-confidence.

I learned quite early on in my life that I was the sort of person who was prone to falling for people pretty quickly. My crippling self-doubt meant that I was ecstatic anyone would even give me the time of day, and even more so if said person was a girl. Having little to no understanding of relationships, though, I didn’t really know how to approach girls and try to take things anywhere beyond friendship; this was about the time Friends was airing on TV, so I found myself relating very much to David Schwimmer’s Ross character, and would watch the episode where he and Rachel got together over and over again while fantasising about one day being in that situation myself.

Anyway. The upshot of all this is that I found it difficult to express my feelings about people that I found myself liking. I was embarrassed if anyone found out who I “fancied”, and my friends would often take advantage of my squirming by hijacking the middle pages of my exercise books, scrawling my beloved’s name in huge letters and decorating the page overly flamboyantly. I’d protest, but secretly I actually quite appreciated the fact that they were acknowledging my feelings, and in their own strange, mocking way, I think they were trying to make me feel better, because it almost certainly became clear to them over time that regardless of my feelings towards any of these girls that I fell for during my time at school, I would never, ever do anything about it.

It’s not that I didn’t want to, though, and that’s where the new part of my diary came in. I would use the diary to express myself and try to figure out my feelings about the people that I liked. I’d even — and I realise that this is probably depicting me as a weird sort of creepy psycho — plan out how an “ideal” encounter with my beloved at the time would go. I’d script a conversation — like a play — as if everything was going exactly the way I would want it to, and on one memorable occasion I even drew diagrams of how I’d get my friends to occupy my beloved’s friends so I could get her by herself and talk to her alone. (I actually followed through on this on one occasion of uncharacteristic courage; it didn’t work, though I did get a hug and a “let’s be friends” out of it.)

None of the romances I dreamed of in my diary came to fruition — I had precisely two girlfriends in secondary school, one of whom I became involved with when I was actually trying to get it on with someone else, who cheated on me at the school prom (and is now, so far as I know, married to the dude she cheated on me with, so, err, good job, I guess?) and another with whom I got together during a recording of the BBC’s Songs of Praise at the local animal shelter, kissed precisely once, didn’t see for three days and then got dumped by proxy because she “wanted things to go back to the way they were before”. And, at times, this lack of “action” got to me a bit, particularly as I saw some of my friends getting started with what would turn out to be pretty long-term relationships. But the diary helped. In some ways, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t muster up the courage to go and talk to these people that I was attracted to, because my diary provided me with a means to express myself without having to put myself on the line, without risking humiliation, and without threatening my real-life friendship with the objects of my affections; my greatest fear was telling someone that I liked them, and them promptly never speaking to me ever again after that. In retrospect, this was a silly fear, but it was a big deal to teenage me.

I’m not sure when it happened, but one day I looked back over my diary and I suddenly felt ashamed of myself. It was a fantasy world, I knew; these conversations I’d script, these scenarios I’d describe, these fancies I’d indulge — none of them would ever be real, and that got to me. I also became absolutely terrified at the prospect of my diary ever being found by someone I really didn’t want to read it, so one day while I was alone in the house, I took one last look through that lovely leather-bound journal’s pages, stared at it for a few moments, then took it outside to the dustbin and buried it beneath a number of stinky, empty cans of cat food. I can only assume it ended up on a rubbish dump or landfill site somewhere, but occasionally I wondered if anyone would ever actually find it and read it — and what they would think of the clearly troubled mind that scrawled in its pages on an almost daily basis.

To my knowledge, though, no-one ever did read it. And for that I’m sort of grateful, because it would have been mortifying; but at the same time, I wonder if I might not have been able to make myself a little more understood if people had read it. And I guess that’s partly what this blog is about; it’s not quite the same as my diary and I’m certainly not going to start scripting fantasy conversations between me and people I fancy (largely because I’m married to the person that I love and thus have no need to), but it lets me get the weights off my mind at times, and, since it’s public — the journal left lying open on my desk, as it were — I hope it makes me at least a little more understood to others.

And if not, well, you can have a good old giggle at how messed up I am, huh. Either way, thanks for reading.

#oneaday Day 684: The Great… You Know

I am depressed. That much is probably self-evident to those of you who have been following me for a while. Writing about it is often a cathartic experience, though talking about it in person is somewhat more difficult. That’s why if you have ever met me face to face, you might not think anything was wrong. But there is, has been for a long time and probably will continue to be for a considerable period to come.

I shan’t get into the specifics of this particular bout, as some of them are personal to me and I have no desire to share them or make them public — the whole “losing my job” thing is a contributing factor, but there are other things, too. What I did want to talk about was the effect of a visit from “Des”, my own personal black cloud of despair, personified as, well, a big black cloud in the comics I did on this blog a while back (and will be returning to in the New Year).

Depression is different for everyone, and everyone copes with it differently. Some cope with it better than others. Others turn to self-destructive coping mechanisms which cause a spiral of upset both for themselves and — often unwittingly — the people around them. I’m not quite sure where I fall. My behaviour when I get depressed isn’t conducive to feeling particularly better, but I don’t abuse my body in any way — the closest I come to indulging in any kind of vice is going out and getting a coffee and a cake because I feel like I “deserve” one. That’s probably not particularly helpful in and of itself, but it’s a different kind of coping mechanism to drink, drugs or self-harm.

“Coping mechanism” is a bit of a misnomer, because very often, it doesn’t involve much in the way of actual “coping”. For me, when depression hits, it hits hard. I feel like a darkness has descended on me and all I want to do is lie down, close my eyes and let it engulf me. And it does. And once I’m in there, it’s very difficult to get out again. Even if I open my eyes to eliminate the physical side of the “darkness”, once it’s wormed its way into my mind, it’s very difficult to summon up the motivation to do anything — even move, at times. It takes an enormous strength of will to break out of that cycle — it sounds ridiculous, I know, but ten minutes before writing this post I was lying on my sofa simply staring into the middle distance, the occasional thought of “I should move” or “I should do something rather than just lying here” being quickly swatted away by a general feeling of complete and total apathy towards everything. The feeling of wanting to cry came and went several times, as did the sense of frustration at the fact that there wasn’t one concrete “cause” of the way I was feeling to do something about, or lash out at. Eventually I succeeded in my Will check and managed to lift myself up and muster the strength to sit down and write this.

I’m not sure if writing this is actually helping matters or hindering them. I’m not sure if sharing this sort of thing is a good idea. But getting these difficult thoughts out of my head is my main “coping mechanism”, and the way in which I can do that most ably is through writing. Talking is good, too, but that carries with it its own particular set of unique anxieties, too, whereas while I’m writing, it’s just me and the blank page in front of me, the words falling into place and explaining the feelings I’m experiencing.

I have never been to the doctor about depression. Actually, that’s not quite true. Towards the end of my first stint teaching in UK classrooms (music, secondary) I eventually reached “breaking point” one day. Behaviour of the class was just so appalling that I had to walk out of the room and immediately burst into tears. I was swiftly escorted into the nearby Arts office in the drama department and plied with soothing words. They didn’t help. I needed to get out. I left that school that day and didn’t come back, getting signed off by my doctor at the time for “work-related stress”, which is exactly what it was. Had I not taken that step to say “whoa there, this is too much to handle”, I’m not sure I’d be writing this now.

Since then, I haven’t returned to the doctors — for anything, in fact, let alone depression. The problem is, I don’t know if it would help, were I to show up and say “I think I’m depressed”. I don’t particularly want to go on medication as that carries with it its whole own set of considerations, and the prospect of counselling makes me concerned about money — particularly as I’m now out of a job. And beyond that, the suggestions are always the same — eat well, get exercise. I know all that, and most of the time I am doing all that.

Depression is an uphill struggle, and every time you reach what looks like the summit you get a period of respite. But before long you’re climbing again, scrabbling frantically for a foothold. The goal is always the same: to lift yourself into the clear blue skies above the cloud layer, free from all the darkness below. Some people manage it. Others aren’t so lucky.

As for me, I’m a fighter. I’ll keep going. I’ll get through this shitty period, just like I’ve got through every previous shitty period in my life. And doubtless there will be more in the future. I just wish I was one of those people who can laugh off adversity and see every annoyance as a new challenge to overcome, rather than a spike trap smacking you repeatedly in the face, sort of like this:

Unfortunately, I very much fall into the latter camp.