progress ·
9 May 07

I’m looking at the papers I got and took away from my session this morning. I’ve had a look at them, but without my psych present it’s difficult to understand what has been written. This is partly due to the handwriting, and partly by my inability to read bad hand writing.

It’s like encrypted text, only readable and deciphered by the person who wrote it, for everyone else it could easily be Swahili. I was going to write about what was written but as I’m having difficulty reading it, I’ll have to recall from memory. The only problem is that my memory is worse than the writing, so I’m screwed.

Today I felt I had the most productive and progressive session for quite some time. I was led along a small journey of sorts, which brought me forward mentally where I was lagging behind in all honesty. It stimulated my mind in to action, to think a bit, not to be brain dead or even comatose.

If I recall correctly, today’s session was about getting older, how I worried about getting older, how I was anxious about hitting 30 and still being stuck in some sort of therapy.

For me it was difficult but important to confront some daunting realities. The first reality was that I am getting older, and that’s not going to stop. That wasn’t the problem, but what was attached to getting old, namely that I’d be dead. Since I’ve been in my mid teens, I have always had this belief that I would be dead by the following birthday, year on year for the past 12 years.

I’ve always accepted that I might not be alive the next year, or the year after, or that I might be dead sometime soon. Part of that is suicidal tendencies that I’ve had since being a kid, but also that depression hitting me around that time.

In all honesty, looking back now, I think the depression and voice hearing began as early as the age of 13-14. The reason I say this is because I was practically torn out of Lancashire to move to London leaving friends, relatives and a good education behind and ending up in a shit hole of a school, below my expectations and capabilities as a good student.

Everything changed and had to change when I moved to London. Though my schooling was not arranged until November, and I had left Lancashire during the Summer holidays. I was isolated from my family, by staying in my room all the time. I was isolated from fellow students, by choice, because it was a school without discipline, lacking direction, and money – it wasn’t a school of thugs, but it felt like it especially being isolated and alone. I’ve always been a loner.

Even during those early years I heard the voice, but at that time the voice was not the malevolent voice that it is now. Now the voice is a creepy masochist of sorts, delighting in my weakness of will and control. I remember my first suicidal thoughts were around the age of 7, which at the time I had no idea what suicide was, nor that the compulsion I had to jump out of the windows was suicidal.

I wasn’t depressed then, I don’t think, but I was sad and confused as my mother was looking after me with one hand and on the other hand disciplining me with the other. It was tough for her to act as both a loving parent and hard lined disciplinarian. I was loved and beaten with equal measure, though I think the scales favour the beatings as being more common than the parental loving care.

Well I digress, as always, but sometimes I get caught up in the past and it’s like dragging your legs through mud. One memory is all takes for me to think back to the worst days, of which there too many, and to think about how I tried to deal with the depression and how the voice hearing was normal for me. It was and continues to be a disaster.

I think it would be far too easy for me to blame the depression and voice hearing as the reasons for my utter failure to achieve anything, or for me to believe that I have achieved nothing this past decade. It is, however, true that it did affect me immensely. Friends sometimes commented that I was never this withdrawn at college, that I just seemed like a normal teenager. I was a normal teenager, I just happened to add a touch of voice hearing, and a dash of depression to go with that normality mixture. Not, of course, of my own volition.

END