In the post I wrote yesterday there was a quote which said:
Emotionally I feel I can get more stressed out and worked up about little things that aren’t significant.
The quote isn’t in any real context on the site I took it from, so I don’t know whether it’s linked to disability + depression, or just plain depression. But god, I know the feeling.
Yesterday, I went to the theatre and for dinner with a uni friend who’s just started seeing someone new. The night before they’d had an argument in which he’d accused her of being negative/endlessly challenging his views. She wanted to know if I thought that was a fair judgement. As far as the first bit was concerned I think he’s wrong, but as for the latter, he’s bang on the mark. Continue reading
I was just getting to thinking that Juniper from the The Cut of My Jib and I shared similar views on quite a few things when she posted her To Do List for 2014 (admittedly this was at the beginning of the month, I’m late, as usual). I should’ve known from the first few items on the list that it wasn’t going to contain the kind of goals that I would ever set – 30 days of continuous exercise? Ben Nevis? Yep, that’s a no from me.
However, further down it begins to look a bit more promising again. She has a separate list for sex, which is always a good sign, intends to write fiction, and to drive more (personally, I could probably do with driving a little more nervously.) And then there’s the killer: ‘Learn to take kit off in seductive manner.’
Oh, Juniper. How could you do such a massive disservice to womankind? Isn’t it hard enough trying to find an outfit you look hot in, shoes you can walk in, and two halves of a matching set of underwear that are clean and dry at the same time?
I fully buy into the concept of getting dressed in order to get naked, and I’m happy to put the work in there. I’m ritualistic about having at least an hour prior to the boy coming over when I can have a bath, dry my hair properly, do my make up and have my first glass of wine while wandering around in my underwear. I usually also bother to make the bed, tidy up (a bit), and just generally enjoy the sense of anticipation building.
But do I put the same effort in when I’m doing it in reverse? Er, no, far from it. I think the boy is partly to blame for this – neither of us are very good at calmly moving the action to the bedroom and attempting to seduce – often I don’t think we’d even make it as far as the bedroom if it wasn’t for my overwhelming desire to be underneath him at some point. It’s lucky that I prefer hold ups to tights for sex – on the few occasions I have worn tights they’re generally hanging off one ankle as I recover from my orgasm.
I much prefer it that way – I’d hate to be the centre of attention and have him just lie back on the bed and watch as I attempt to shed garment after garment like a high-class stripper. I might be sexy, but I’m sure as hell not seductive – I still haven’t mastered the art of putting clothes on without covering them in deodorant. I have a friend who once expressed surprise that I keep my jewellery on during sex – I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the same is often true of my cardigan.
In fact, as far as I can tell, there’s only one downside to being unwilling to learn to undress seductively. That matching underwear I always bother to track down? It could be peach on the top half and mint on the bottom for all he cares …
I love the fact that I’m not scared of saying what I think. I wouldn’t change it for the world, even though, as you’ll see here and in a post I’m planning to write later this week, it gets me into shit sometimes. In fact, the only detention I ever got at school was because I just couldn’t resist having the final word.
A week or so ago, just as I was trying to get to grips with the prospect of a new year and going back to work, and maybe beginning to organise something to celebrate my approaching milestone birthday, the boy and I came pretty close to calling it quits.
I’m sure lots of you who read this think that might have been the right thing to do – certainly I can see that the cumulative effect of my posts could give that impression, and in fact that was partly what triggered the whole thing. But I’m not ready to draw it to a close just yet, and so we’ve reached a decision that for now we’ll just take it as it comes.
Except. This time I am scared. Scared of blogging honestly about him because, as I’ve said before, I do understand why he finds that difficult and also because I blog so instinctively – what you see is how I feel right here, right now, and yet it’s up here for the world (and him) to see any time they want to. It’s why I haven’t written about it, and partly why I made the decision to maybe lay off the blogging for a while (except, I know, that hasn’t happened).
One of the things that he very accurately observed is that I have such a tendency to run with my emotions that I often take that to the point where it does more harm than good – both to me and the people around me.
My fear is that honesty for me is like chocolate – I’m an all or nothing girl. I haven’t yet figured out how to reconcile wanting to be honest with not letting that honesty run away with me. Both here and in the stuff I say to him directly. I’m worried that the only solution is to go cold turkey – to not mention the stuff that bothers me, to keep correspondence infrequent and bland.
Any yet, he likes my sassy mouth, so I can’t think of anything that would kill it quicker than anodyne back and forth text messaging. It’s a learning curve, I guess.
Enter your password to view comments.
Girls are supposed to love shoes. A fully-blown obsession with what we wear on our feet seems pretty much essential for female bonding, understanding half the plot lines in SATC and looking hot when out drinking/dancing.
I don’t love shoes. In fact, mostly, I really fucking hate shoes. In the past week I’ve gone from falling over the way I normally do (ankle gives way, I fail to recover and end up on the floor) to being on my feet one minute and sprawled across the ground the next, with no idea how I got there. It’s embarrassing, not to mention pretty painful. Still, I suspected that the blame had to lie with my ankle boots, and that buying a new pair was something that could no longer be avoided.
A friend heroically dragged me round a number of shoe shops yesterday, most of which were in that horrible sale phase where you have to dig through piles of mismatched shoes in an attempt to find out if they actually have what you want in your size. She also wisely waited until I had wine with my lunch before she ventured the following:
‘Jones the Bootmaker?’
‘Urgh, no, too frumpy!’
This is bullshit. Many of my best/comfiest boots in the past have come from Jones’ and I know they work for me. I reluctantly agreed to look and tried on a pair of black suede ankle boots with a minimal heel. They were, y’know, neat, elegant, sensible. The kind of thing that most women would wear with no fuss. I put them back.
We went to Kurt Geiger. I stroked a pair that were similar, but with an extra 3 inches of heel. These were the ones I wanted, even though I knew that, while I might get away with wearing them in the office, the chance of being able to walk any distance in them was minuscule. There was no point even trying them.
You can probably guess how this ends. I stroked a lot of other sexy boots that I wanted but knew wouldn’t work for me, and in the end I went back to Jones’ and bought the flat ones. They are fine, honestly, and I’m making a fuss about nothing, but for once I really want to wear sexy shoes, and by that I don’t mean boots with a heel, I mean proper, vertiginous ‘fuck me’ stilettos.
I’d really love to buy a pair that I could get away with wearing just in the bedroom. I want a guy to undress me until I’m wearing nothing but hold ups and the shoes, and then fuck me against the wall, hard. Is that realistic, ladies? How much balance does it require? And, if it’s feasible, where’s best to buy cheap but pretty shoes?
I think I’ve said in a previous post that I would hate it if the boy blogged about me the way I do about him. I’m pretty uncomfortable with anything that forces me to face up to the reality of the way I really come across to the world – whether that’s video footage, bad photos or overhearing what other people say about me. I daydream all the time, and the version of myself that’s in my head is a far softer, funnier, slimmer version of me than the flesh and blood reality.
But then, why would he blog about me? I’m not the only girl in his life, and his blog isn’t usually in quite the same vein as mine – it’s rare for him to write about specific people. Plus, I doubt my antics are blog-worthy – have you seen how few times I’ve actually blogged about sex since I set this up?! In fact, I tend to believe that he doesn’t really think about me at all in between the occasional evenings when we see each other.
That was perhaps an error. After all, I knew he was reading what I wrote. But: there were two things I never really considered when I set this up. The first was that the few people I mentioned it to might actually start to read it on a fairly regular basis. I only realised this when friend with the obnoxious ex-fling texted me out of the blue: ‘I read your blog post.’
Ah, that brings me back to what I said before. If I’d hate other people writing about me, why the hell should I expect to get away with writing about them, especially without their permission? She was upset that I’d blogged about being pissed off about her reaction to a particularly unfunny comment, rather than telling her how I felt.
I tried to explain to her that I didn’t blog about it because it was a massive deal, or an unforgivable error on her part – I blogged about it because it was bothering me at the time, and because I thought there was a wider lesson to take from it. It was a snapshot of my feelings at a particular time, but now it’s consigned to a list of ‘Earlier Posts,’ it can be easy to overlook the fact that I’m over it by now.
Which brings me to the second thing I didn’t realise. I sort of overlooked the fact that, if you blog on a regular basis, not only about sex, but also about your emotions, likes and dislikes, it’s not that difficult for someone to get a pretty good sense of how you see the world. I’m not sure how this happened: maybe I didn’t think anyone would come back and read more than one post, or maybe I didn’t think that I’d be quite as open and honest as I have been, but anyway, that’s what’s happened, and people, the boy included, have been taking what I write here seriously.
I like to tell him he doesn’t care about me, as often as I possibly can. I like things that reinforce my view of myself, and that’s one of them. But then the other day he sent me an email, outlining the reasons why he does care, and also what he’s learnt by reading the blog, and fuck, was it an accurate character study. It turns out that it isn’t just uncomfortable to read about yourself on a blog.
There’s something disconcerting about someone getting it like that. Firstly, it makes you realise that, even if you don’t think you express your feelings particularly well in writing, you might be surprised at how vivid a picture of yourself and your relationship you’re painting. Secondly, it forced me to reassess my view of him: it’s harder to write someone off as an uncaring git when actually, they’ve been watching and assessing quietly all along.
I can’t help but be reminded of the bit at the end of Bridget Jones, when Mark Darcy finds her diary, and all the nasty stuff she’s written about him. What was true when she wrote it has huge destructive potential at a later date. I don’t draft my blog posts, nor to I wait for my emotions to settle before I publish them. I often find it easier to write about the bad stuff than the good. Somewhere down the line it’ll probably fuck up my relationship all over again, and I’ll wish I’d never told him about the damn thing. Right now though, I’m glad I was honest about it.
I’ve been thinking, since the post I wrote about depression, about long- and short-term happiness, both of which I’ve blogged about before, and which you should prioritise at any given moment. The depression thing has taken off since I last wrote – I’m now weepy all of the time, and the thought of using this blog to write about sex, love, boys, or anything that’s fun seems completely out of reach.
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with a friend. I cried; she fed me milky tea and tried to make me feel better. Actually, she was full of great advice: find a new GP, one who understands mental illness, make sure they’re near work, so you can go often, and make sure you always see that doctor, not whoever happens to be available. With their help, try different anti-depressants, until you find the ones that work, both in terms of maximum mental health benefits and minimal side effects. Be kind to yourself. (I keep saying that, right?’)
Those are the things that I know will help me: but I also think it would help to step aside from the long-term goals for a bit and focus on creating a life which is happy and healthy, and where I make the most of the people around me and what they can offer.
It seems that inadvertently in my blog posts I’ve been putting across the message that what I definitely want from life is children with a long-term partner. In reality, I think that yes, that’s possibly what I want, but not definitely – right now I value my space and solitude way too much to want a long-term partner in my life. Plus, even if I do decide that’s what I want, it doesn’t have to happen by 30 – that’s just society’s fucked-up view of the timeline to which women should live their lives.
One of the things I do want to do this year is take back control of my life – one of my worst habits is looking at a diary that contains free weekends and either booking something in for all of them, or hyperventilating. As a result, last year I missed a shitload of stuff I would have loved to have done because I’d put stuff in place just to stop the weekends being empty – but an empty weekend isn’t going to kill me.
The other thing I desperately need to stop doing is sabotaging my relationships – questioning things; starting arguments; being negative – just because, as a therapist once told me, when those things do inevitably lead to the relationship breaking down, yes I get the satisfaction of proving to myself that my deeply-held belief – that I’m completely unlovable – is correct, but that satisfaction is pretty hollow compared to what I’ve given up in the process.
So, starting from now I’m going to stop sabotaging my life – I actually can’t remember the last time I went out and got drunk with a big group of people, but I’m going to stop feeling guilty for not doing it. I’ll see friends when I want to, and give myself peace and quiet when I need it. I’ll spend more time doing the things I love, like reading and writing, WI meetings and craft workshops, even if those activities are predominantly female and aren’t going to help me meet a man (thanks mum!). I’d like to keep having fun with the boy and not destroy the time we do have together by over-thinking the future – that one though is slightly less in my control at the moment.
So, what does that mean for the blog? Honestly, I’m not sure. Right now, I’m so low that I feel like every post is at risk of being a rehash of this one – and that’s the kind of writing that’s best kept out of the public domain, due to the fact it’ll end up boring everybody stupid.
Alison Tyler has kindly agreed to let me review her new novel, The Delicious Torment, on February 2nd, as part of her blog tour, so I’ll be back for that. Until then, I think posts might be somewhat more infrequent than they’ve been thus far. We’ll see, I guess.
Thanks for reading up till now x
Writing about depression consistently loses me Twitter followers. I don’t care – the ‘of sorts’ part of my blog name was always designed to allow me to write about other things that are important to me, and that’s exactly what I plan to do in this post. I wrote a shorter post on this earlier, but I’ve since deleted it, because I have so much more I want to say on the subject. If you don’t like it, go right ahead and unfollow.
I hate New Year, and this year was no different. I find the pressure of statements like ‘2014 is going to be so much better than last year’ almost unbearable, especially because depression always seems to catch up with me in the weeks after Christmas. This year, I should have known it was on its way. A few days after Christmas I was in a restaurant with my parents. They made a slightly critical comment and I burst into tears. The weepiness lasted the rest of the evening.
My parents are not great in this respect: they tell me repeatedly that I’m not actually depressed because my depression is always triggered by specific, upsetting events. There’s some truth in this – it often is – but part of the reason they think that is because often when I’m low I avoid telling them, partly because I know they don’t really get it.
What really upsets me though, is knowing that depressive episodes are almost always triggered by people I care about. Sometimes it’s my friends, more often it’s the boys in my life. A couple of years back, I was pretty involved in a complicated situation with a depressed male friend and ironically, as he recovered, I succumbed to it more and more. He ended up offering to pay for me to have therapy, thinking I was resisting it because I couldn’t afford it. Nothing could have been further from the truth: I was resisting it because I couldn’t handle the stigma that came with being depressed. He was lucky I refused his offer though: to date it would have cost him more than £2k in therapy sessions.
I’m slightly more comfortable with the stigma surrounding mental illness now (good therapy will do that), but less comfortable with the way it’s treated. Therapy is risky – I did have a great therapist, but when I moved halfway across the country I had to find a new one, and I’m pretty sure that in the six sessions I saw her for she did way more harm than good.
Anti-depressants make me even more antsy. I take them, on and off, but as soon as I start to feel better, I stop. This is a pretty irresponsible thing to do: they’re known to have side-effects, including mood swings, as part of the come down, which is why you’re supposed to reduce the dosage slowly and under a doctor’s supervision. Sheer bloody-mindedness means I never do: as soon as the depression subsides I get resentful about reliance on drugs to control my emotions, bitter about the fact that my emotional range is so curtailed and really, really fucked-off about the weight I inevitably gain when I’m taking them. And so I stop, just like that. And just as day follows night, several weeks later I’ll have a day just like today, where I get up, shower, start to cry, and have to go back to bed because everything else feels like too much of a struggle. Today, I thought I might make gingerbread. Then I thought of the mess it will inevitably make and couldn’t face it. The same goes for cooking meals. Drying my hair is too much effort. Watching TV gives me too much time to think. Basically, I just want to be asleep, but I’m not tired enough to get there. It’s on days like this that I wish anti-depressants could be given intravenously, just so their effect would be more immediate.
None of this stops me laying in to other people though: I’ll do anything, anything, to turn the self-hatred outwards for a bit, so god forbid that anyone should say or do anything that hurts or upsets me – I can rant and rave for hours because that’s what’s going on inside my head anyway.
But as much as that’s me saying It’s not you, it’s me, I can’t help but wonder if the solution is to return to the kind of single girl independence I last had around 2007, when I was doing my finals and boys were the last thing on my mind.
I’ve mentioned in a few posts that I had more to say about this post. The way Juniper describes sitting on the harbour, wiling away the hours made me wistful as hell. I used to be that girl, the girl who could sit in a bar with a glass of wine and a book, watching the world go by and not fretting about the present, or worrying about the future. In recent years, I’ve lost the ability to do that – now I always seem to be checking my phone for messages from an AWOL boy, or worrying about the fact that I’m not doing super-exciting stuff with other people.
Depression has taken away my ability to enjoy my own company, and that’s the shittest thing of all.
I walked around all day yesterday in scorching heat, and by six o’ clock I was knackered. I was browsing through dresses in Jigsaw and as I moved from one rack to the next, the shop assistant looked at my feet and said ‘I can tell you’ve had a tiring day.’
Ah, well yes, but that’s not why I’m limping. I look like I’ve had a tiring day just as much first thing in the morning as I do last thing at night.
People’s comments are well-meant, mostly – I know this. Women comment more often than men, middle-aged women comment more often than younger ones. I get it. It’s a motherly concern for me, probably – thinking I’ve twisted my ankle or that I’ve been wearing silly shoes again and I just need a plaster. Except this is my life all the time, and those silly shoes you think I’ve been wearing? I haven’t. I never get to wear flip flops, or stilettos or pretty court shoes, and I would kill to.
You’d think, after knowing me for 29 years, my parents would get me better than the average stranger, but that’s not always the case. Last week I went out with my mum wearing wedge sandals I haven’t worn since the summer and I tripped. This is common with the disability I have and while I hate falling, I can deal with it much better if people ignore it (if you’re worried I’ve hurt myself, ‘You ok?’ is fine, but if I say yes, drop it.)
My mum can never drop it. My mum says ‘Right, they’re clearly not supporting your ankle, let me buy you some new shoes.’ It might sound like a dream; it’s not. I hate shoe shopping, a) because I can never buy the shoes I really want and b) because it takes me ages to wear new shoes in until they’re comfy. Often, when I fall, one or other of my parents will keep on and on about it until I end up crying. All I want is for them to understand and accept that tripping and falling frequently is just part of who I am – it’s not a bit I want to focus on, that’s all.
Which brings me to the point of this post. Guys my age don’t often comment on the way I walk (apart from one guy who hit on me, realised I was limping and then asked if I’d be this way for life – he nearly got punched), but I notice them looking at my feet all the time. Nothing to see there boys – all my limbs are intact and I don’t have some huge, gaping wound that’s causing me to walk this way. Why not look at the good bits instead – my tits are amazing and I did nice eyeliner today. Plus, you not looking at my feet will make me feel so much better about myself.
This would be an easy post to write if it was as simple as ‘Let’s all pretend there’s nothing wrong with my body,’ but sadly, it’s not. People give me evil looks for sitting on the very front row of seats on the bus, the one that’s meant for old and disabled people, all the time. Why do I do it? Because my balance is shit and when was the last time you saw a bus driver wait until someone sat down before he pulled away? This might make you think that you should give me your seat on public transport, but don’t. If the front seats are free, I’ll sit there because it makes my life easier, but I can stand, as long as I’m holding on to something. Offering me your seat just confuses me – you might have spotted my disability or you might just think that my rounded tummy is a sign that I’m pregnant. Either way it doesn’t make me feel good about myself.
So boys, here are my guidelines – if you like me, try to turn a blind eye to my disability (that includes surreptitious glances at my feet) except in the following two situations. If a) I’m standing at the top of something steep and uneven, looking at it with terror or b) we’re walking along a road that’s icy as fuck – in either of those cases then please feel free to offer to hold my hand.
Sex blog (of sorts) 