Thanks Bimbimbie

THIS PICTURE is courtesy of my Aussie friend Bimbimbie, whose name means "birdie-wirdie" or "place of the birds" in the local aboriginal dialect. She knows red king parrots or "king reds" as I call them are my favourites and this is what flapped down from the trees only a few hours ago.

If you go to Bimbimbie's blog you'll find endless snapshots of rainbow lorrikeets, sulphur-crested cockatoos and other delicacies direct from her garden.

So this is my feathery Friday on Saturday. Thanks Bimbimbie!

As y'all may have noticed I have been feeling down and flat for nearly a month now. I'm hoping the mood swing is petering out. Because that's all it is, a mood swing. Just as my OTT excitements are mood swings too. It's hard to accept that how I feel is labelled and illness. The "sickness" part lies not in the undulations but in the extremity of the the highs and lows. I have been "high" enough to be hallucinating voices from the walls, have seen spirals everywhere, especially in ceilings, which I stared at a lot, seeeing as I was going "up". I once saw a purple face appear in a man's neck at the Nutter Club I used to attend before it was disbanded due to lack of funding (my one lifeline snatched from me ~ thanks NHS) so I have had extremes. I've also had weird ideas when I was low but am too paranoid to describe them in any detail. Not because they're real to me now. More that they're too embarrassingly nutty.

Well I wanted to ask y'all who've followed this space for a long time, do I really seem nuttier now than I was before the last year when I knew I was labelled "schizoaffective"? I'm not sure I'm any madder than I ever was (between the extremes). Just that there's a name to it. I am, I believe, what is known as a cyclothymic personality. That just means someone whose moods swing up and down, in and out, like high and low tides. You could say we're all cyclothymic then, but it's a matter of degree. I'm rarely on a truly even keel for very much more than a week. In bad periods I seem to have been up down left and right all the time for weeks and weeks on end. I am not claiming to have been at the very extreme of how up down left right it is possible to be. Merely that I was to some degree in some such direction.

Well this is solipsistic twaddle yet again. I am trying to heal. I am doing my Spanish every single day for at least half an hour if not 90 minutes or more. Every single day. Without fail. Everything else has been half-cocked as my sleep has increased in line with my depressed mood and low energy. I think some days I must have been sleeping 16 hours. Not in one single go, but endless dozes, then ultra long periods in bed. I haven't timed myself as i'm no longer interested.

There was a time when I knew something was wrong, didn't know what it was, knew most of the doctors were barking up the wrong tree by calling it depression triggered by drug abuse (when actually I abused heroin because I never felt truly well and heroin did make me feel truly well. At least for the first couple of years. Thereafter I was truly addicted. So take from that what you will but don't take this as my blessing that anybody young, lost and vulnerable ought to experiment with hard drugs. I would be horrified if anybody got themselves a habit because of me. I'm anti drugs yet still a drug addict (on 99% methadone; 1% heroin ~ it's that 1% I'm fighting against). Hence the shifting sands of viewpoint you'll encounter here.

Now I must go it's getting late. Have a marvellous weekend everybody thanks again Bimbimbie, and don't get pecked by a king red!