Sour Saturday!

DONCH' ALL LOVE MY LEMON TREE? If you want to see some wondrous colourful birdies go one post below. Two of the pictures are purloined from my Aussie friends' back gardens. Baino and Bimbimbie live along the Eastern Coast of Aus where rainbow lorikeets flap about in profusion.

Last night I was up until past four. I was intending to stay up to go to the chemist then languish unconscious all day. But I slept till nearly midday. Then I went to Morrisons and got Value cheesy pasta (boil in water and milk for ten mins, add grated cheeese it's wondrous, considering especially that it costs 35p a pack and has nearly 500 calories, so you can literally live on 2 of thsoe da day (if you want to be thin) or 3 a day (if you want to be normal). Shit I keep getting my calories wrong I used to live on about 1250 to 1500 and was pretty skeletal but I wanted to be thin. This was the stage where everyone thought I should see a psychiatrist but I didn't want to go. The opposite to when I was on heroin and I thought I needed a psychiatrist and my undertrained drugs workers didn't. Then I get diagnosed clinically manic which means I most certainly DO get depression and I'm putting in a formal complaint. Not naming or shaming, but saying look this is my tangled history please train your staff to spot the obvious. I was an absolute mess.

Anyway I went to sleep all afternoon and had vivid dreams about squating an enormous theatre-type building (one that would seat about 4000) and meeting these nice girls in the foyer. They were hippie chicks. Ie my own kind. The old ones wanted to mother me and the young ones kept following me around, like when I went clubbing and gave out vibes. Sometimes I gave out a vibe that made everybody smile at me. I was very into energy and vibes ta that stage of my life.

Well I got up between 7 and 8 pm meaning I've slept approaching 14 hours today. But I was highly "somnolent" and very tired and slow and sour and down. I managed to put off the idea of glugging back alcohol and bought brown bread instead.

I glugged back a lovely huge dose of methadone and now feel better than I did.

I am forcing myself into daily exercise. I only got myself into bed today by telling myself I was "ill" (an excuse to laze). I don't over-analyse myself (bear in mind my blog is a way of capturing how I was, I don't think how I am by day I just am how I am). The dislike of self-analysis is what puts me off counselling, which I've done three times majorly. The second time, when I was tilting down into full-blown heroin addiction (but not yet physically addicted) was when I had the most issues. My counsellor said I spent one session "in the foetal position, crying" that I "needed more help than she could give me" and all this stuff I hated to hear. I don't remember curling up in a ball crying, I just remember being very upset.

I can't remember why I am telling all this it's supposed to be my diary of my winning the battle over depression. If you want some info on the condition, take a look at the three Youtube screens from the Open University a couple of posts down.

I'm not very good at taking the middle path. I have to not self pity yet self care. And not despair when I hear other people talking about similar problems and realize I'm in more of a mess than any of them. Not more ill, just more of a mess.

The Shawshank Redemption is on. I got it because I thought a little trumpet-ears tonkie was in it. In plain English that equals a wild house mouse. I wanted to see the mouse. And I like prison films. Anything in a prison or a mental institution is for me. Next time someone asks do I want to go in a nuthouse I'm saying YES.

Mental hospitals are nothing like prisons, not as far as I can see. Though long ago I made a decision that no matter how bad I suffered for it, me and prisons were NOT coming together. NO WAY would I tolerate being a junkie separated from my drugs. No way. You can get heroin in a mental hospital dead easy and it's proper dealer bags not "prison bags" (a match-head sized dose of heavily adulterated brown). So the drugs issue was a non-issue in hospital. Guess what's the 2 most popular drugs in the nuthouse? Cannabis and crack! Thee two substances most likely to send you fruiloops are the two drugs fruitloopers most likely smoke. But I asked someone what cannabis did to him: this man was paranoid schizophrenic. He didn't get instant hallucinatory voices. He didn't get extreme paranoia (he had paranoia but the meds brought it down to mild/moderate). In other words his symptoms on cannabis were nothing like mine. I also asked someone whether he ever hallucinated so much he couldn't tell whether he was thinking or hearing and he looked at me like WHAT!??!

This had only happened once at the time when I stood up and voices rushed into my head for a few hours. But it happened again when I was manic. I was very surprised a repeat hospital inmate, and one of my own posse (I hung out with the paranoiacs, the schizoaffectives and the maniacs: birds of a feather, as they say, flock together!)

I hope this isn't too boring for y'all this is personal journal stuff. Not really for public consumption but y'all are welcome to read through.

I have had depression for over a week, apart from Hypomanic Thursday when I felt FANTASTIC I've been down down down. Next week all my care gets transferred to a mental health methadone centre. This fuckup occurred because the idiotic council who housed me put me in a different burrough, so I'm shoved pillar to post but it might be a good post because I'm dual diagnosis now. I'm scared of coming in there down and out as they'll laugh at me. I talk a lot when I'm up. I talk so much they barely ever ask a question. I know the shit they want to know. How much do I eat and sleep, how high (or low) how fast (or slow) and is anything upsetting me or anything transcendently amazing (like the lights are when I go manic) and is my thought process intact. They can tell this last thing by how I speak so I don't need to self-analyse.

When I feel down I have very little to say so I either put on a big act and fill the void with babble (very deceptive babble, so it seems as nobody ever thought I was in desperate need of help when I really was) or when I'm badly off I can't say very much at all but no point dwelling on this. If that happens it happens.

I feel I was meant to say something here that I didnt say. I hope y'all are having a good weekend. Good evening America; good night UK and good morning Australia. And hello to everybody else!

BOY GEORGE: THE CRYING GAME
i love this song; it's from a fantastic film of the same name