Hierarchy of Needs

I love the way that even among the marginalized there is a hierarchy.

What’s that all about?

Is it ’cause I is ugly?

I’m so tired.  Curl up and sleep.  Deep.  Never wake up.

And I didn’t choose anorexia/bulimia/schizoaffective disorder. I did not stop for them, they stopped for me.

Now the drugs don’t work · They just make you worse · But I know I’ll see your face again ·

Am I hopeless at everything I do?

Mental illness in a sentence: The universe is not your friend.

Did that do?  Was it good enough  for you?

Addendum: I went to L’s place for dinner on Friday and told her about ordering meds from over the net and she went and told my mother.  I don’t know whether to feel betrayed or flattered that someone would take the trouble to do such a thing.  Mother (a psych nurse) said that I should agree to into hospital to wean myself off them.  Unlike most people I hate being in hospital.  As soon as I arrive I am planning my escape.  In my area they are quite heavy handed.  The last time I ‘absconded’ they sent the police around to my flat.  I was bundled in a van and dumped at the doors of the hospital like an unwanted parcel.  The police, however, were for the most part professional and courteous.  I don’t think returning escapees from mental asylums is a task they enjoy.  And I can’t say I blame them.

Stolen From ASE-D

‘I don’t understand how I can be so unimportant.  I want to believe that I deserve a chance, it is the rest of the world that seems to tell me I do not.

I know a lot of people here complain about weights and numbers and sizes and calories and foods and spoiler this and spoiler that but honestly those things do not trigger me at all.

The unequal distribution of love is my one and only trigger.  Always has been and always will be.  I don’t care if you post that you weigh 22 pounds.  I don’t care if you shop in the infant section.  I don’t care if you’ve eaten nothing but celery for 19 months.  What bothers me is when someone cares about you, or is willing to help you, or when you have an opportunity and squander it, when you get some form of love and act like it is nothing worth having.’

How can I expect people to empathise with me or indeed me with them when I don’t even feel as though I have a right to inhabit this planet. My weird combination of illnesses means that I will never be fully understood.  What then is the point of it all?  What is the point of even trying?  I can’t get past this wall I have built around myself.  I am a prisoner in my own skin.  Ugly and worthless.  ‘You don’t belong here,’ says the voice in my head.  ‘And you never will.’

The Loss of an Imaginary Friend

Unreal Sister

She was full of life and laughter and light, like Blake’s Tyger, tyger burning bright.’ I would follow her everywhere.  I was devoted to her. She was my friend. She was my constant companion. She never betrayed me. She was never duplicitous. She was the kind of girl anyone would want to be friends with.  She was the kind of girl my mother would have chosen as daughter. The only problem was that she didn’t exist.  She resided in the long, dark halls of my imagination.

She was an my oracle.  She made the mundanity of everyday life magical.  But real or not it had been I who had invited her in.

My greatest gift became my greatest torment. I was losing myself. She grew more solid every day. I began to feel as though I were the ghost,  something insubstantial. A piece of blank paper blown this way and that by a capricious and ruthless wind.  For My Perfect Friend had adopted the voice of the anorexia .

She was my invisible sister. She was my keeper. She was my guide it and I would be the keeper of her memory.  She intercepted my every move.  She was the one who stepped in to stop me devouring that bag of salt and vineger crisps or that open box of luxury Belgian chocolates or that last thick slice of iced birthday cake.  She was the one who told me that emptyness was the sweetest feeling of all.

‘You are spoilt and undeserving. I am worthier of life than you are. You are grotesque. I am beautiful. I am as light as air.  I am nothingness.’  Once again my body became a burden. ‘ I am pure.  You are tainted.’  She whispered insults and profanities in my ear.

At first she was a pale phantom but as the year progressed she grew stronger until she was more substantial than the living.  She had been fully ressucitated.  I found herself hovering between twinned worlds that had become mutually antagonistic.  ‘Don’t let them fool you. They are your enemy.  I am your only true friend.’  She was sucking me into some desolate netherworld.  She cheered me on as I tightened the belt of her jeans.  ‘Just one more notch,’ she would say. ‘You’re not quite there yet. Tighter and tighter.  It did not occur to me that she was trying to kill me. She was the rent collector and she had come to collect her due.  ‘Just pay me what you owe me.’  Our roles had been reversed and I was now the one feeding off her. My Perfect Friend was unencumbered.  She was free.

Sometimes I loved her, mostly I began to hate her. And I discovered that she was a a fair weather friend. For when the storm closed over us she backed away. ‘I’m going now, little girl,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t need me anymore.’

But sometimes when I wake up in the night, afraid and alone, I would do anything to get her back.

War of Attrition

War of Attrition

We have fought a war of attrition

And I will make this single admission

Your troubles were doubled by my return

For I have been reborn

And rebirth is agony

Crossing points at porous borders

At three fifteen.  Dark mornings

In winter

Every year we pursue this path

We drink coffee out of paper cups

In the station cafe

We board the train

We were wanderlusts

Their eyes were watching us

Some demon descends

The North wind steers me off my course

I force myself through the fetid, heavy air

We were duped

A diplomatic crisis ensues

The natives flee from me

For I am the one with the extra eye

Merciless and ruthless is my inner eye

I have been cursed

With  a flawless memory

And in the market

We trade in a sparrow

For a swan

Then we decorate dead birds

And dance around them

Men For Sale at River Island

Men for Sale

Variation of Me

Distorted Me

Taken by Sony Ericcson W995.

Distorted by Pixelmator

Maybe I will look like that, face down on concrete just after I hit the floor.

They said I was talented.  Why did they lie?  Or maybe they just wanted to make me feel better about myself.  That is the cruelest thing you can do to someone.

The world is inhospitable.  For me it is uninhabitable.

I know I will probably die by my own hand.  It is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

I am taking 100 zopiclone every other day…gotta love United Pharmacies.  I must be invincible.  Like Bruce Wills’s character in Unbreakable.

Mea Culpa (No999)

I feel somewhat guilty about my attack on Ms. Myerson and her decision to tell the world about her family problems.  Telling the world about problems within the family can often be cathartic and if you’re too afraid of what others will think of you then maybe its time to have a purge of your circle of friends because those who matter don’t care and those who care don’t matter.  My family were the ‘brush all their troubles under the nearest carpet’ type.  It was only when I went radio rental that this all changed. After that they had no choice.  I’ve just finished reading her biography and that has softened my feelings.  Look out for a review soon.

If only I could see…

…what’s going on inside your Marshmallow Head…

Marshmallow Head

A Burden on the Parish II

'Rentawomb'

<satire>

Addendum:  I gotta say for someone who has churned out thirteen brats and has one firmly ensconced inside her Theresa Winters has quite a decent figure. Shapely legs and no sign of bingo wings.  You certainly can’t accuse her of letting herself go.  If I were you though, Theresa, love, I’d grow that fringe out because it simply doesn’t suit you and ditch this dress (Did the stylist at The Daily Mail suggest  you wear it?) – that’s most definitely not you.  Why doesn’t the Daily Mail fix Ms. Winters up with their middle class readers who’ve found it almost impossible to dispose of the blubber that was their new born baby’s gift to them?  And that many of the columnists whine about incessantly.  Funny, isn’t it?  How some ‘chav’ on the dole can work out how to get rid of her baby blubber and yet many female Daily Mail columnists still have it, firmly cleaved to their bones when their brats are off to university – Oxbridge, of course.  Anyone ever noticed how every middle class brat is Oxbridge bound?* They’re not, of course. That would be a statistical impossibility.

And here’s another business proposition: why doesn’t  The Daily Mail try and hook up Ms. Winters with a few middle class readers who can conceive but can’t carry the baby full term?  I can see it now: ‘Rentawomb.’  Now I’m off to draw up a business plan.

</satire>

*http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1178070/8216-We-stand-skunk-8217.html

Remember the Myersons. Proof, if ever proof were needed that the Middle Classes aren’t infallible and omnipotent to a man, as the Daily Mail would have you believe.  ‘Jake Myerson had been a straight-A student destined for Oxbridge; skunk addiction had made him menacing, unmanageable and morally erratic.’ Sure you were, mate, sure you were. Oh, and another thing: I grew up in a working class family and my parents would never permit my brother or I to ‘smoke a spliff’ in their house (or anywhere else for that matter) just so they could look ‘cool’ in front of their offspring. ‘Ooh, look how liberal we are!’ They adopted a zero tolerance approach to drugs. And I knew no one in our (working class and even ‘underclass’) circle of friends who would offer their younger siblings drugs. This is exactly what Julie Myerson asserts that her son Jake did to his younger brother.  So, a question directed at my many social superiors.  Should I still emulate my betters?

And I bask in the warm glow of schadenfreude. Is that a bit mean of me? Well, damn it – I’ve earned it!

A Burden on the Parish

I had to reread this article in The Daily Mail to establish whether or not it is satirical a la Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. It is not. The fine specimen of the master race pictured above uses the extreme example of Theresa Winters, a woman who in her relatively short life has given birth to thirteen children all of whom were taken into care, to justify eugenics. He takes pains to emphasize that this is not what he is advocating. Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.  He is more candid about his views in this article in The Telegraph:

“Eugenics, as advocated by kindly figures such as its pioneer, Sir Francis Galton, or its most eloquent exponent, Dean Inge, was simply the notion that the useful and intelligent classes should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to breed, and the murderous morons, who are never going to contribute anything except misery to themselves and others should be discouraged. No one need be killed.”

The article in The Daily Mail is replete with inconsistencies much like Wilson’s own life – he has oscillated between atheism and faith in God for most of his adult life and has pontificated endlessly about this in various right wing newspapers.  Indeed that is what he appears to do in this article.  It is the very embodiment of cognitive dissonance.

‘Human life is not for playing with. Human beings, each and every one of us, are of unique and equal value. And, as I will explain, it is precisely because I share this view that I believe women such as Theresa Winters should be sterilised.”

He then reduces each ‘unique and valuable’ human being to their economic worth and their worldly success.

‘If we pay for these children from the moment of their conception and through their whole lives – of being taken into care, through their early convictions for petty crime, through drug and drink problems, through healthcare and eventually to sickness and old-age benefits, state-funded housing and hospitalisation – why on earth should we not ask ourselves whether we wish to foot the bill?’

He also uses this case as a stick with which to beat benefit claimants. He does not seem to realize that if her children do not reside with her then Ms. Winters is unlikely to receive benefits on their behalf.  He also seems to be unaware of the fact that if these children had been taken from their mother from birth or before the age of two then it is highly likely that they would have been adopted.  By a loving, caring and probably middle class family.

The views expressed in this article are so repugnant that even the average Daily Mail reader would find them hard to stomach. The children AN Wilson refers to may also be future cannon fodder in wars started and sustained by their social superiors.  I wonder if that thought has occurred to him. ‘You are a burden on the parish’ Mr Bumble said to the eponymous protagonist of Oliver Twist.  It appears that little has changed.

Addendum: : Just noticed this: ‘As a society, we already accept abortion on demand, we already experiment on human embryos and we are on the verge of legalising suicide.’ This intellectual colossus is so dim that he isn’t even aware that it is not suicide that the law forbids but assisting a suicide. Didn’t they teach you basic research techniques at New College, Oxford? Or even how to make use of your minions (aka PhD students.) I’m sure your alma mater is very proud of you.