I do not remember my dreams any more. I prefer being asleep to being awake. My life is over.
Frail dreams fade,
Shrinking away from the hot, bright light
Of the day
Until evening falls
And they rise once more
(By day
As I sit in the classroom
Only half awake
I sense a presence,
A thin wire
Linking me to them)
My incorporeal allies
Those who do not walk,
But fly. Soaring through the skies
The caress me with their wings
They are God’s precious things.
A recurring memory has taken up residence in my head. When I was twelve, at the height of summer, my family and I took a vacation to Majorca. As a child I was a loner and I felt as though I were being slowly suffocated in the hotel room I was sharing with my brother and my cousins. So, one afternoon I took myself, a book and an inflatable floating mat down to the beach. I climbed onto the mat and lay back. I accompanied the tide on its way out. And then I fell asleep.
I have no idea how long I was out. I awoke with a heavy head. I looked around me. i was surrounded by the sea. The beach had disappeared. I was alone. I sat up. My book had fallen into the water. At first I panicked. I was a poor swimmer. The tide was going out. I was sure I would drown. I think I may even have prayed.
By some miracle I managed to doggy-paddle myself back to the shore. I collapsed, exhausted onto the beach.
I returned to the hotel and never uttered a word of what had happened to anyone. I told my family that I had fallen asleep on the beach while sunbathing. And that raised hysteria, so heaven knows what their reaction would have been if I’d told them what really happened.
I was so badly sunburnt that for the next three nights I had to sleep on my stomach.
What is the point, you may ask, of this random anecdote. I recount it now because I feel now like I did that day. Floating in an expanse of ocean while the tide carries me further from the shore, praying for some small miracle that will save me from drowning and get me back to the place I started from.
‘For instance, as a young teacher in Pontypool I had the heartbreaking task of teaching children whose fathers had never been in work.’ (Circa 1931)
Action Replay, Jeffrey Hamm
He goes on to describe the petty criminality that arose from this situation.
Nothing new under the sun, huh?
There was a letter in The Daily Mail/Hate/Fail/Misogynist from someone who claimed that his sister had ‘the worst possible case of depression’ and managed to get up every morning to go to work. That’s funny but when I had my ‘worst case of psychotic depression’ I could barely move off the couch. I could do nothing but rock backwards and forewards, shaking and crying while a disembodied voice in my head told me that I was an ugly, evil witch and that, by rights, I should burn at the stake. I was eventually sectioned and taken to hospital. I wonder if that Mail correspondent suggests that people who have been hospitalised for depression should get up from their hospital beds and work.
I’ve lost the appetite for doctor-bashing but I downloaded two free books written by young doctors on my ipad. Now these newly qualified doctors seem as though they are sweet, sensitive little souls but they can’t write for toffee.
From In Stitches: The Highs and Lows of Life as an AandE Doctor [Paperback]
Nick Edwards (Author)
‘Patient says : I’ve got a personality disorder’
Patient means: ‘I used to be known as an attention seeker. Now I am medicalised by a hippy psychiatrist and you have got to be nice to me.’
Oh, well, I guess humanity has always needed its scapegoats and for the foreseeable future the personality disordered is it.
Here’s another little tidbit:
Chaviest/ugliest girl ever: someone spiked my drink.
Doctor: People only spike your drink if they want to sleep with you
I expected something a little more sophisticated from a doctor. At least Dalrymple is laugh out loud funny, charmingly self deprecating (on occasion) and he’s also a damned good writer.
Depressed to the point of catatonia. I feel as helpless as broken doll, trapped between the teeth of a rabid dog.
‘Don’t be so eager to tell people that you have a mental illness,’ someone once advised me.
‘You mean I should be ashamed?’
‘Not exactly but sometimes people you admire and respect don’t react as you expect them to.’
My room is suffused with the scent of tearoses and jasmine. But all I can smell is my own fear.
At this moment I would like to go to sleep and never wake up.
How do I get out of this abyss? I’m calling out for help but there’s no one there. Or maybe there is but they can’t hear. I wake up crying. I’m still here. I’m not supposed to be here. I should have left a long time ago but there is always the thought, in the back of my mind, that maybe things would get better. But they haven’t and I am still paralysed by this all-encompassing fear. I’m pushing people away because I don’t want them to be hurt when I have to leave them. Even my mother. Especially my mother. Now, at least, she can say I am a work in progress, that one day I won’t feel like this. But the thing she created will destroy itself. I keep waiting for it to pass – this hopelessness – but it isn’t passing. It’s getting worse. Anguish, an ache inside with no discernible physical cause. And I can think of only one cure.
So Sick of Drowning 