It's My Lunchbreak and I'll Blog if I Want To

When things are going badly, you need a near-nerdish devotion to detail to pick out the little monads of mirth, those quirks and serendipities that make life worth living while waiting for homeostasis to work its subtle magic, or failing that, for the meds to kick in. You've got to have your metal detector hovering over the shifting sands and your binoculars at the ready to watch those trains come in or those birds fly away. And when something happens, write it down. If big birds make small birds, why don't big trains make small trains? 'Cause the big trains pull out on time. Ha ha ha.

The crew at Bipolar Chicks Blogging recently posted hilariously about some of the search terms entered on their blog... think 'poontang', 'fat sex', 'boob poking' and 'monkey butt itch' among others. So in order to self-engineer a similar level of amusement, I investigated the ways in which people have managed to google their way here, anonymously, that is - I haven't linked search terms to particular IP addresses. Naturally, faeces smearing, Jerry Falwell and good old borderline rage have made an appearance (more on the latter in a minute). But one of the more intriguing search terms was 'locking pants in a mental health ward'. I assume this refers to some kind of restraint technique or device, which I wouldn't know much about, since according to my medical records, I routinely "resisted restraint". (Somehow I'm pretty sure that when they wrote this, they weren't referring to any long-gone martial arts expertise on my part, but merely my reluctance to lie very still and quietly, whether it was in relaxation therapy or when I had two guys sitting on top of me while someone else had the much cooler job of pushing a big red button. My intransigence under the latter circumstances hardly needs explaining; but my inability to lie still on a mattress while some healing-power-of-crystals-proselyte asked us to contemplate the conduct of our own funerals probably had something to do with the guy lying next to me whispering "They'll bury me with a bottle of beer".) Gosh, I am rambling; I must be feeling better. Anyway, I just had to google 'locking pants in a mental health ward' myself, and the first hit was the Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health Userwatch blog, at which

Sue Turner, CEO of Birmingham And Solihull Mental Health Trust now offers one to one virtual (CEOBT) Chief Executive Officer Boxing Therapy for Mental Health Service Users who are getting plenty of rounds of useless treatments elsewhere in Birmingham and Solihull ....

Users who wish to indulge in this completely free therapy can use their keyboard to throw punches and create real laughs.....The Dept of Health is looking closely at combining their failing CBT programmes with this new costless therapy in an effort to save themselves from an eventual public beating ...

And there's a Flash game where you get to left jab, right jab and uppercut her until her eyes blacken and her lips bleed. Now, I don't know anything about this woman and punching her in the face sounds a bit like borderline rage to me, so I've instead generated a similar game in which you can throw cream pies at E Fuller Torrey:

Link: PlayMyGame

You can also spongecake your grandmother if you want, but I think you lose points for that. I trust that the folks at TAC won't consider a bit of sticky slapstick fun as further evidence of violent tendencies among the mentally ill, and hence for the need for broader involuntary treatment provisions. So, please do enjoy this bit of penny arcade arcana. Because, personally, I'm going to head back to Birmingham & Solihull and punch out that Sue Turner chick again, since, come to think of it, she does bear a striking resemblance to my shrink. Ah, never mind, it's just that borderline rage thing I mentioned. Why the fuck did I get up at sparrow's fart yesterday morning to spend ninety minutes commuting to see someone who has become increasingly obsessed with whether or not I like to hang around in bars in the hope of picking up strangers for sex? Not that I would necessarily pass judgement on those who do do that kind of thing - if that's your thing, then play it safe, keep it real, and good luck to you. I was just unable to grasp, as I sat in one of her farting leather recliners, why she would ask me if that was what I was trying to do, after I'd mentioned in passing how I'd gone to my favourite bar in the city after work the night before, ordered my favourite martini and curled up in the corner with a book. I mean, it's not as if I frequently regale her with lurid tales of anonymous liaisons conducted in alleyways under airconditioning units or in one-bedroom flats in one-supermarket suburbs. But how dumb can I get? Back on the train, I'm smacking my forehead:

4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.

I suppose the martini (glass lined with Cointreau, and garnished with anchovy-stuffed olives) counts as substance abuse. And she did ask me about the 'self-mutilating' behaviour separately... "Er, no, why would I do that?" Fortunately the possibility of any symptomatic 'spending' was obviated when I told her I wasn't prepared to pay for CBT.

It's this cookie-cutter crap again. I've been fingered, and now it's her job to squeeze the incriminating evidence out of me. The me(n)tal outline of a gingerbread man is pressed down into a reality rolled as flat and permeable as tissue paper, and everything external to it is torn away, rolled up and rolled flat again to serve as the template for the trivialisation of someone else's experience. If you're in the dayroom and you're reading a broadsheet newspaper while sitting on the floor, because there's not enough room on the table to open it flat, that's called 'regressing'. And I do recall with affectionate bemusement the Secret Symbol in Blue Ink incident, where I was interrogated for hours about the real, talismanic meaning of a bit of scribble in the margins of said newspaper next to the crossword (my pen had run dry and I was trying to get it to work again).

Tsk, tsk, now I've gone and gotten myself all worked up. But all in all, what a splendid and absolutely necessary waste of time this has been, writing myself out and in and out again of the mood from hell. There are people out there who have happened on my blog 'feeling rubbery from Geodon' and looking for 'illicit sexual experiences' with a 'socially isolated genius'. But out of all of the search keywords used to locate my blog, my personal favourite has to be 'bipolar boss idiot'. You know how the song goes, now, don't be sad, 'cause two out of three ain't bad.

And if you've ever had anyone quote that Meatloaf song to you in a ham-fisted attempt at either justifying or consoling you regarding the withdrawal of their affections, you'll know how rotten I felt when I started writing this post.

Undead #2

I came to this hotel because it was the closest place on the list to the train station. Little more than a shopfront on the corner, it was dilapidated, verandah-less, a hole to crawl into. Instead of a sign, there was a blackboard: ROOMS TO RENT, LONG OR SHORT STAY, REASONABLE RATES, TV ROOM, and squashed in the lower margin as an afterthought: FRIENDLY ATMOSPHERE. The ground floor windows were boarded up. I pushed the front door open, nudging my suitcase in ahead of me. The front desk and its keeper were suitably retro; a sliding glass window and landing strip tie. A filing cabinet, a fan and a Thank You For Not Smoking sign that had gone yellow around the edges.

Because the refuge I’d come from didn’t charge any rent, I had enough saved to put down straightaway and obviate any serious inquiry into my age, history or lifestyle. But because I was dressed in head to toe black during the fiery end of February, and even had my coat on - since it didn’t fit in my suitcase - the landlord or his lackey picked me for the particular kind of refugee that I suppose I was. “We don’t want any trouble, you hear? No disturbances, no making a nuisance of yourself, nothing broken. Understood?” “Yes, of course.” I said, staring blandly at the clock behind him. He let himself out of his glass cage and I followed him up the stairs, being careful to maintain a tranquillised tempo. My room smelled of cigarette smoke and shell shock; the fallout of a thousand divorces. George, the man with the keys, grunted over the stuck window like a ravaging soldier and I was careful to remain between him and the open door. After he’d gone, I pushed the chest of drawers in front of the door and lay on the bed, a thing that thinks, making a sweaty angel in the stale bedclothes. I waited for a while, as long as I could stand, then stripped down to my underwear and got the whiskey out of the suitcase.

The booze gets you to sleep to start with, but it’s a sleep like deep end of a swimming pool; sink to the bottom and you’ll rise up again soon enough. Even when your head’s above water you can’t breathe; the air is thick with the air molecules discarded by those who have discarded you, making breathing as intimate as kissing. I turn my head, hold my nose and clench my teeth shut, resisting. The edges of my vision become charred, a bubble rises in my head and I black out momentarily before letting go and sucking it all up: words in blood and a blue fountain pen; tennis balls aimed at puddles, a lost tennis match that I have to thank for all this; threats, tethers and tiredness; that morning on the roof, dancing and dodging the helicopter; a declaration and a long gone flight to Sydney. Waves of despair, nostalgia, betrayal, humiliation and plain old disbelief wash over me; I grab the bottle before the tsunami of shame and heartbreak can kick in.

Psycho-the-rapists

My psychiatrist likes to remind me that no treatment is risk-free, including talk therapy. She can be rather snotty like that, but that's another story.

Another story still was told on a website, that has now been taken down as far as I can tell, so I'm relying on my less than perfect recall here. The story was that of a woman, whom I'll call Jane, who was referred to an eminent psychiatrist, whom I'll call Dr X, after experiencing some difficulty sleeping. Dr X provided psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy, and by Jane's account, chose to ignore her presenting problems and instead focus exclusively and obsessively on the developing transference. In particular, Jane accused Dr X of deliberately fostering her dependence on him by forcing the transference - putting it to her that she had sexual fantasies about him, encouraging her to talk about them, assuring her it was appropriate, and so forth. This, according to Jane, had the effect of producing such sexual thoughts and feelings where none had existed before, culminating in her own obsession with Dr X and the therapy, and driving her to the brink of an emotional breakdown. Jane did not, however, allege that any sexual contact had actually taken place.

Such was the gist of Jane's complaint to her state medical board. Predictably, it did not find in her favour - Dr X received a slap over the wrist for not adequately documenting his sessions with Jane, but no further action was taken. (Psychiatrists, take note... take notes, preferably accurate ones. If you even suspect you are within a fifty metre radius of one of them darn borderlines, whip out that pen and paper and note down the fruits of their futile efforts to seduce you.) This sent Jane into a frenzy of righteous indignation, enough for her to decide to make her complaints public, setting up a website onto which she uploaded copies of her email and other correspondence with Dr X's lawyers, and otherwise exhibiting the kind of behaviour that tends to prompt reactions like hard luck, but isn't it time to move on or, more crudely, just get a fucking life.

Some psychiatrists will do their best to force the transference, which is both pointless and inappropriate. At the more benign end of the spectrum, you have shrinks who do a big song and dance just before they go on holiday, in grandiose anticipation of you doing likewise while they are away. Any arguments or other unpleasant moments that might occur in the periods immediately before and after the shrink's time off are are automatically and relentlessly interpreted as expressions of the patient's resentment of the shrink having a life of his or her own.

Then you have the shrinks who will quite openly suggest that you want to sleep with them, and who will do their best to cajole you into believing it. These guys will really fuck you in the head, insisting that you're fucking them in your head until you're fucked in the head. They may justify their behaviour to themselves and others by reference to some theoretical underpinning - the it's just part of your treatment excuse - but it is nevertheless clearly predatory, narcissistic and self-serving. By Jane's account, this is what Dr X was doing. It seems likely that at the very least he mismanaged the transference, and when the situation became too intense and he had to refer her to someone else, she was left feeling blamed for the unfolding of a dynamic that she had not even anticipated, hence her subsequent outrage.

But let's not talk about sex for a moment, and just talk about talking, and the risks that go with just talking.

For confession or disclosure can be so much more intimate than sex. When you tell somebody something you can't take it back once you’ve done it, like you can with a part of your body, leaving the other person with nothing more concrete than the memory of some diffuse physical sensations that do not vary too much from one encounter to the other. Confession is specific, and the range of conclusions that the confidante may draw about the confessor extend well beyond that allowed by the usual insulting sobriquets.

You are always bound to your confessor; even if he abandons you, or disbelieves you, the larva of confidence he once inspired grows into a tapeworm that eats away at your insides until your outsides cave in and what is hidden has prolapsed for all to see. Or the binding might be, in essence, an intersection: you become Siamese twins. You share his heart, liver, lungs, kidney; he shares you with the footpath, you’re a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Only he will survive the separation, which is why you know, deep down, that some things must never be revealed. On pain of death. Confession is, in a sense, losing one’s marbles; like a kid on the first day of school you don’t know that you’re supposed to exchange them, not just give them away. Or else they roll into drains, cats-eyes following their namesakes, iridescent meteors meeting their liquid selves in puddles of petrol; galaxies disguising themselves as birds’ eggs, clownfish masquerading as candy, blue jays as lost to you as NASA’s Big Blue Marble. You barely have time to grasp the entropy of the spheres, the distortion of your narrative, as a sharp shooter is catapulted into your forehead. Confession becomes indiscriminate, indistinguishable from small talk. Needless to say, friendships dry up, as do invitations to parties, as the marbles are picked over by filthy hands and the tapeworm eats through your brief career as a risky raconteur and leaves you wallowing in a state of total self-absorption.

Jane's story resonates with me tonight, her unshakeable belief in her own rectitude providing a stark contrast to my intuition that no one in the world could truly understand what happened to me when I was 'in the system'. I believe that if I try to describe it to a friend or professional or anyone, the feeling I will be left with is that they just don't get it; that they'll be waiting for some further violent denouement; that they will think that all I have endured is, as Maureen Dowd once put it, the "ordinary brutality" of love and life. I still have access to all the old feelings, rising and turning like seals in that hypnopompic state between dreaming and waking, but not the words that could adequately convey them, or the precipitating incidents; the original sins.

At first, there was just guilt, shame and more guilt, what ifs and why nots. It wasn't until I was 21 that I began to perceive, in the face of crippling agoraphobia, some (very ersatz) nobility in what I did, and some months later, I found myself in a dim bordello-style boardroom, discussing "some stuff that happened" with a sombre lawyer and a gung-ho social worker who had every free set of steak knives out, urging me to sue, sue, sue. The lawyer went through the options - civil action, conciliation, mediation, and warned me that I'd be dealing not with individuals but with institutions, with deep pockets and a legal policy of offense rather than defense. He also pointed out that any civil proceedings would possibly attract the attention of the tabloids and all their ilk. He was just doing his job, and no doubt his advice was sound. But the contrast between his demeanour and that of the rabid social worker was disconcerting, and at some point I said, "This is stupid, nothing really happened, let's just forget it." I was still shuttling between the extremes of experiencing a strange kind of gratitude towards one of the people involved, and even a (very hypothetical) yearning to see him again, and the understanding that something very inappropriate and damaging had taken place. Later, when I got a letter from the lawyer saying "Thank you for your courage in telling of your experiences", I felt like he was making fun of me.

It's so easy to be rational about these things on paper. The mediation of keyboard and chewed fingernails, coupled with the aesthetic impulse, leave bottles drunk dry and thrown only at the bin. Time destroys all things, as the paedophile butcher says at the beginning of Irreversible, but for the things that it leaves covered in ash and waiting to be excavated, I need a drink to destroy time. It renders everything fragmented, devoid of context. Psychiatrists want to know where I’ve come from, friends and intimates want to know where I’m going, and I don’t know how to make them understand that history has stopped, that all that’s left is an interminable present, and the only way to break time up, to prevent the accumulation of the crust of dead experience, is via the bottle.

I Wanna Be Bipolar

Yeah, and shoot twenty foot of jism too. And fuck up the Jews.

I wasn't gonna go near this with a ten-foot pole until this morning when I was over at Polarcoaster and Soulful Sepulcher and spotted a couple of comments by Jon, the author of the blog Living With A Purple Dog, about the blogosphere's response to the SBD diagnosis:

I can’t decide if all the outrage I’m reading about this is really pointed at big pharma, or if it’s because a private club will suddenly be adding marginal members.

Doesn't it almost seem like many with bipolar disorder are threatened by SBD? Like everything else, it's black and white. With us or against us. Pro or con. Bipolar.

These comments struck a chord with me first and foremost because I was privately questioning the assumption that SBD was all the doing of evil psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies trying to maximise profits by thrusting evermore constrained definitions of normality down our throats. Of course, Jon's comments don't address the issue of what is motivating shrinks and pharmas to come up with this stuff, but instead go straight for the jugular, attributing the criticism of it to a perceived elitism on the part of those diagnosed with 'ye-old-style' bipolar. I'm actually more interested in the former than the latter, but will return to his most contentious of contentions later on.

For the record, I do have a problem with SBD, largely because I have a problem with the way psychiatry is currently practised. It is practised in a way such that the more exposure someone with mild-to-moderate emotional difficulties has to it, the greater the likelihood that those difficulties will be exacerbated to the point where they do meet the criteria for one or more Axis I or II diagnoses. For example, injudicious use of SSRIs and antipsychotics, coupled with the disinhibiting effects of benzodiazepines, can provoke a miserable but otherwise calm person into a frenzy of restlessness, impulsivity and self-destructive behaviour - in other words, drug-induced akathisia that can easily be taken for some kind of bipolar or personality disorder. Furthermore, one's induction into contemporary psychiatric modes of thinking encourages them to view every form of emotional discomfort as an expression of their 'illness', and thus as a source of panic ("Have the drugs stopped working?"), leading to a diminished sense of their own resilience and the failure of once-useful self-soothing strategies. With the patient now more distressed than ever, the cycle then repeats itself.

On the other hand, I have no problem with the idea that bipolar symptoms exist on a continuum; in fact I find it quite sensible, much more so that the notion that there exists a discrete subset of the population in which a genetic switch gets thrown, causing them to swing from suicidal to berserk with ever increasing frequency. The problem is, as many bloggers have pointed out, when mild, infrequent mood changes begin to be seen as variations on more serious mood disturbances, as opposed to variations on normal. This broadening of the range of emotional and behavioural states that are deemed pathological has a variety of causes and consequences, that are often difficult to disentangle. So what's really behind SBD? Is it really Big Pharma, in cahoots with prescription-happy psychiatrists, or are Big Pharma and friends merely capitalising on an already well-entrenched demand (which, yes, they are probably responsible for instigating and/or perpetuating) for comfortable, non-ego-dystonic, mild-but-somewhat-serious-sounding diagnoses for those for whom something isn't quite right?

Now, no one wants to be a schizo of any stripe; that's no fun. And don't get me started on personality disorders - they probably represent the biggest market for subthreshold bipolarisation. It would have to be so much nicer to be considered to occupy the fringe of a condition with positive connotations (e.g. artistic creativity) that is also taken seriously as a source of occasional disability, than to be called rude names by psychiatrists who just don't like them, and who couldn't be bothered doing their jobs and trying to figure out why they're behaving the way they are. From the lazy psychiatrist's point of view, the arrogant, the attention-seeking, the suspicious and the traumatised can be bundled up and onto medication, conveniently ignoring the fact that diagnosing them as bipolar will only feed their grandiosity by invoking comparisons to Vincent Van Gogh/Lord Byron/Sylvia Plath and all that crap. And of course it is all that crap that makes subthreshold bipolar such an attractive and flattering diagnosis.

I've commented elsewhere about the stigmatisation within the consumer/survivor/ex-user community of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. As this is the only personality disorder whose diagnostic criteria emphasise affective instability, it makes it the most susceptible to bipolarisation, and so it wouldn't surprise me at all if some are keen to draw the line between 'us' and 'them', because you know what difficulties those darn borderlines have with boundaries. (Of course, if you're bipolar, 'affective instability' is just 'rapid cycling'.)

But does this go beyond routine borderline-bashing? Is Jon right, and is this a sacred turf war? Will expanding the concept of bipolar to include mild hypomania dilute and sully the sense of positive difference associated with bipolar I and II, and more to the point, would anyone diagnosed with bipolar care enough to wage a false war on SBD by setting up Big Pharma as the sole bad guy?

Sad to say, but many of the people I've met in real life (as opposed to on the web) who proclaim their bipolar diagnosis to the world, especially those I've encountered lording it over consumer groups, make me ever so slightly inclined to say yes.

d has already responded forcefully to Jon's comment at Soulful Sepulcher. But she and the rest of you should feel free to rip me a new asshole.

Unemployment the first time around

Gianna's comments on my post below got me reminiscing about what it was like to be unemployed the first time around.

At 19, I somehow orchestrated my 'escape from psychiatry' as it were, although 'orchestrated' perhaps implies a greater degree of conscious planning than I was capable of at the time. I left my parents' house in the middle of the night, walked to a phone box a few kilometres away and called a friend, who came and picked me up and took me to his girlfriend's - who was less than impressed at having an unexpected house guest. Since staying there was out of the question, the next day they arranged emergency accommodation for me through a local housing program for homeless women. I lived in various safe houses while the social workers got me set up on unemployment benefits and I failed to fill my repeat prescriptions, sweating Prozac, Largactil and friends out onto a bedsheet that even after steam-cleaning looked like the Shroud of Turin. (Excuse the messianic overtones of that simile; it was one that the social workers made.) After a few weeks, I moved to Melbourne, found a share house, and settled into a year of self-medication.

Each fortnight I presented a medical certificate from my GP to the dole office saying I was too depressed to look for work. I may have been theoretically capable of looking for work at the time, but as for actually holding down a job - forget it! I was drinking two litres of wine a day just to stay numb. Casks of rapidly oxidising cab sav and riesling, not to mention Fruity Lexia, the stuff fondly known to Australian teenagers as the demon drink, filled the recycling bin each week, their bladders ripped out and wrung to the last drop.

The following year, as I began to emerge from my stupor, I went back to school (on study benefits), and, as the haze further dissipated, I grew increasingly sick and tired of living in poverty and being subject to the tyrannical ravings of my landlord/housemate. So I decided to get a full-time job - any job - just so long as I could afford to rent my own place and buy some aspirin when I had a headache. (Even the latter was often out of the question while on welfare.)

So, at first, I was motivated primarily by financial considerations. But once I started job hunting - and getting knockback after knockback - like Gianna, I too, suddenly felt like I needed to explain myself to the employed. In fact, I felt like the cast-off cocoon of an especially ugly moth. I eventually became near-delusional to the extent that I was terrified that one particular person I had dealt with in the mental health system was behind every knockback I received - that he was somehow popping up everywhere and saying "Don't hire her, she's nuts." The fact that he was (presumably still) employed, and I wasn't further served to underline what I thought would be my eternal marginalisation. I was in a constant state of paranoia and panic, with no one but me to talk myself out of the myriad stupid things I felt like doing as this idée fixe threatened to overwhelm me. At its worst, it seemed like everything, every window, every copy of every newspaper, every coke machine was his; even my own clothes sat on me reluctantly like a thoughtless shoplifting haul. His fifty thousand brothers and sisters sneered at me from behind the counter at McDonalds, and there was no sooking to Lifeline because he was always posing as the bleeding heart at the other end of the line.

After three months of applying for anything up to a dozen positions a week, breathing deeply in elevators on the way up to interviews and asking myself what are the odds, what are the odds? I finally landed a job as a filing clerk. Apart from a couple of weeks over the Christmas break after I was laid off a few years ago, I've been in full-time work ever since. I don't think I can feasibly swear that I'll never work full-time again, but perhaps I could do with a break now.

21 Ways to be Subthreshold Bipolar

(with apologies to Paul Simon)

"The problem is all inside your head", he said to me
The answer is easy - you just take it orally
I'd like to help you in your quest for normality
For there are 21 ways to be subthreshold bipolar

Have you increased your goal-directed activity?
Are you subject to distractibility?
Engaged in an unrestrained buying spree?
There are 21 ways to be subthreshold bipolar

You been flat on your back, Jack
Making grand plans, Stan
Cheatin' on your boy, Roy
Well, listen to me
Hop on the shortbus
We don't need to discuss much
Just drop this off at the pharmacy
And get yourself free

He said that your pleasure-seeking can cause you so much pain
I wish there was something I could do to calm you down again
I said that's diagnostic bracket creep and I am not insane
In any of your 21 ways

He said I'll give you something to help you sleep tonight
And by the morning you'll have developed some insight
He patted my arm and I realized he probably was right
There must be 21 ways to be subthreshold bipolar
21 ways to be subthreshold bipolar

You been flat on your back, Jack
Making grand plans, Stan
Cheatin' on your boy, Roy
Well, listen to me
Hop on the shortbus
We don't need to discuss much
Just drop this off at the pharmacy
And get yourself free

***************************************************************

There are 21 ways to choose two symptoms from Part B of the diagnostic criteria for Subthreshold Bipolar Disorder as quoted by CL Psych in his critique of Merikangas et al's paper that was recently published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. (Choose more than two symptoms, and you're talking Bipolar I or II.) At Furious Seasons, there is also an analysis of the social implications of this gradual stretching of Bipolar I into a diagnostic black hole.

Nothing much, just life

I had a job interview last week; I suspect it will be the first of many while I try and figure out what to do next. Should I try and get another full-time job, one I believe in, one I can get my teeth into, one that will have me boring people half to death as I go on and on about the importance of what my colleagues and I are doing? A job with a decent amount of pay and responsibility, so I don't have to forgo the comfortable assumptions that go with being part of the childless, debtless partnered middle-class? I don't think I'll have time to go to Europe next year, but if I feel like it, then maybe next year. But, yes, let's go to the opera next week, and let's see if we can get a booking at that fabulous new three-hat restaurant as well.

But then again, what have I always said that having money in the bank is for? It's not just about being able to buy pretty, shiny things, but power, the power to walk away from an unacceptable situation, and not have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. I found myself in an unacceptable situation, so I handed in my resignation, even though, as yet, I've got nowhere else to go. Fine dining, the opera, and Paris will now have to wait, perhaps indefinitely. I can't have my cake and eat it too, especially not at a three-hat restaurant.

Maybe I should look for something soft and part-time instead, so I'll have time to write and study. I could drift in and out the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, both physically and metaphysically near-invisible to the suits and she-wolves as I answer the phones, file the files, clean the printers and load the photocopiers. The trays would rise into place with a smug whir, as I gather my skirts and staplers and skitter back into the stationery cupboard. You'll be bored, the office manager will warn me. But I want to be bored, I'll implore her, with a wide Maggie Gyllenhaal grin, that endearing confection of wisdom and naivete. I will invest nothing of myself, and thus lose nothing - my self-esteem, my stability, my sanity shall remain intact. I will get nothing either, just a bit of pocket money for occasional indulgences - a properly made martini, or a bookshop spending spree.

I suppose this desire to retreat from the world, to choose not to 'work to my potential', is what that idiot shrink was referring to when he diagnosed me with 'simple schizophrenia'. I also suppose this desire is far from uncommon, perhaps overtaking most of us at some point in our lives, and that I'm not out on a heretical fifth limb in supposing so. Just as I had some deep wounds to lick back then, in the past few years, culminating in the past few weeks, I've sustained the kind of work-related injuries that no health and safety advertising campaign will ever warn us about. Nothing's been dropped on my head, except me, at three o'clock in the morning, and from a distance of ten thousand miles, as the crow flies from Paris to Melbourne. Someone, a senior colleague, former lover, and supposedly close friend, sat on the redial button of his phone on the Metropolitain while treating a mutual friend to a crude psychoanalysis of me, one that unmasked his contempt, disloyalty and lack of discretion even through the thick static and burr of background noise. Confidences were broken in the service of constructing the necessary mise en scène, and actual events were ripped from their context and repackaged as evidence of my incorrigible fucked-up-ness.

Only hours beforehand he had been lamenting my lack of trust. It seems that lack was justified. So of course I don't want to be here, or there, or anywhere; I barely want to be. I trust that, in time, this feeling will pass. But for now I want to keep myself from unfolding, keep my scalded, shrunken limbs, my frostbitten fingers and toes, underneath and behind me, away from the dust and germs and anything else that will slow their healing. I feel unfit for the world of work. My skin is thick, but swollen, and hurts like hell when touched. It's not just that awful phone call, but an accumulation of events, and the accretion of corresponding sensitivities, that have left me feeling like a powder keg - one look, one condescending remark, one more jumped-up arsehole introducing me as his 'executive assistant', one more whinge from the bosses' boss about how he knows it doesn't matter but it just doesn't look good when he knows perfectly well that nobody's even watching could set off an explosion that would appear quite deranged and devoid of all context if it happened elsewhere. Obviously, that's something I'm reluctant to risk. I guess the challenge for me now is to strike the right balance in time between staying at home and hiding under the covers, and re-entering the world of work, so that I give myself time to heal, time for my sensitivity and hardened cynicism to abate, without running out of money or losing touch completely.

Mental Health Days

No, I haven't gone all loopy as may be inferred from my most recent post - I'm just taking a few 'mental health days' off blogging to attend to some rather pressing work and study commitments.

From www.urbandictionary.com:

Mental Health Day

A quasi-legitimate excuse to take a day off from school or work. Although the person who takes the day off claims he needs it to finish up some work and regain sanity from the rat race, he usually ends up sleeping in, masturbating and accomplishing less than nothing.

Sounds like a reasonably accurate description of what I've been up to. In other more exciting news, Neurotransmission is back up, and newly updated. (I mentioned it some time ago in my Thinking Bloggers post.)