the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Category: frustration

June 12, 2015

The mystery that surrounds the exact colour of my therapists teeth…..

Twice in the last week I’ve demonstrated that I’m as deep as a puddle. The first occasion was when I met Simone, a potential care worker that my agency had sent to me in order for me to assess her suitability. When I was asked what my impression of her was, I remarked that her bingo wings were so big that if she were a bird she’d be flightless – there was simply too much weight to get her off the ground! (If you think that’s a bit bitchy might I remind you of the first line of my first blog when I said that I put the me into mean.)

The second occasion occurred yesterday. I have therapist from a nearby hospital who makes home visits. But that’s not important right now. What is is that yesterday she attempted to throw me a curveball by means of having her stomach making noisy and frequent protestations about her having skipped lunch. This I could have overlooked, were it not for the fact that she had patently cut her own hair. This is not me being bitchy – she freely admitted doing this when I asked if she had had a haircut. However these pail into insignificance when I come to the frankly mysterious colour of her teeth. Quite how one is expected to remain focused on one’s own problems when sitting opposite you is someone who has clearly some of their own. She has clearly not bothered a dentist in a good many years. She may be able to help with my mental health but it would seem she’s neglected her own dental health.

In point of fact, if one had teeth colour chart hers would be on the faint tobacco stain yellow / smeared dirt grey border. With thin vertical brown streaks as a finishing touch. When one is discussing matters that do not normally get aired this is one of the last things you should be thinking about. Namely, why do her teeth look like that, has someone told and she doesn’t care, and what colour ARE they. Her teeth are worryingly distracting and at times I have to consciously make an effort to avert my gaze from her mouth, lest an intently quizzical yet fascinated look spreads over my face. It’s interesting but irrelevant. What we were discussing was how I positively abound with dichotomies.

An example being the following: on the one hand I feel anger and frustration to various degrees quite a lot of the time. Yet on the other hand because of my innate sense of good manners I feel unable to express these. I’m aware that this puts me in conflict with myself and that expressing your feelings is a healthy thing to do. Except that as a child I saw my parents being healthy to an unhealthy degree. I learnt as a child that people said things in the heat of an argument that they soon regretted but as they were in the middle of an argument they couldn’t take it back – rather like an angry genie, released from lamp. As a child when you witness this happen again and again it necessarily has an effect. On one occasion my parents had had an argument in the morning and a friend of my brothers came around in the afternoon. Now at this time my brother would have been about 11 or so and me about 13. My father however, saw nothing wrong in referencing the argument he’d had with my mother that morning by asking my brother’s friend a direct and embarrassing question.
For this and many other reasons I’ve become rather selfish with my bad moods. By that I mean if I’m in a bad mood I remove myself from company until it has abated. I see no reason to rain on other people’s parade. Other people are selfless with their bad moods – they’re in a bad mood and they want every one else to share in it.

Anyway, I was talking about dichotomies. Here’s another one: the fact that I don’t want to do things because they would not be as good as I would have done them before my brain injury. Yet I don’t persevere with any exercises that will help me improve any. My handwriting is a good case in point. Every time I sign a cheque I look at my signature and despair. This despair however doesn’t encourage me to do anything about it. I could of course by now have made significant improvements into my handwriting but no. The fact I’m aware of this dichotomy only makes it worse. But if one knowingly does something against ones own best interests then that’s madness, right?

Speaking of madness my therapist is keen to grade my progress thus far. One of the questions she asks is “How many times in the last week have you had feelings of suicide?” My reply is always as follows: “Yes I have suicidal thoughts at least once a week, and yes I have a viable plan but as it is a viable plan I tend not to dwell on it. So my thoughts are theoretical and not practical. Just because I don’t like living doesn’t therefore mean I want to stop living, it simply means I really can’t abide it.” She looks at me and then at the small box on the form and wonders how on earth she’ll squeeze it in. I leave that up to her.

Now, in case any of you reading this are under the misapprehension that I’m a nice person allow me to disabuse you.
Some years ago I was sitting on a park bench and on the other side of the park I could see a guy walking whilst eating his lunch. Now this guy was huge. I mean he was like a bin bag full of yoghurt and he was stuffing his face with a baguette. At any rate chomping down on the food was a single-minded determination of his, so much so that he fell over and people rushed to his aide to see if he was alright. For me however, it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen! I couldn’t stop laughing and my laughter was so loud that I received some angry glances from the passers by who stopped to help but really…I mean come on, if someone is so busy eating they fall over its impossible not to laugh, well for me it is!

Next time…Glastonbury 2015 and how it isn’t only the cows that are getting milked at Worthy Farm..

2 Comments
April 13, 2015

How necessity is the mutha of re-invention…

A few blog posts ago, I rashly suggested that compared to other peoples depression, mine wasn’t that bad.
And then events of last week proved me wrong. Or rather, the non-events of last week
Firstly I wrote a blog, which although I thought one of my best, no-one else did. I know this because WordPress has a handy statistics page, where you can check exactly how few readers have read an individual blog. (Only the nation they logged on from by the way, not in an Edward Snowden type way.) That was the first thing that didn’t happen.

The second thing that didn’t happen was that Matthew – my support worker on a Tuesday – was needed elsewhere, to work another shift for a client with ‘higher tier’ needs than I. Receiving notification of this by text on Sunday from the agency Matthew works for, means they would’ve known that there was little I could do. Monday was a Bank Holiday, so it was a fait accompli. There was no discussion. Just ‘Here’s our problem and here’s our solution.’

Which as a way of highlighting my dependency on others was a stark reminder. One that got me thinking, and not in a good way either. I don’t like thinking like this, about my situation. It isn’t good for me to ruminate; rationally I know it’s a bad idea, but emotionally. Well….
Or more accurately, not well.

Here’s what I was thinking.
‘My whole pitiful existence – as it isn’t a life in any meaningful sense of the word – is just endless journey of frustration and despair. One that now consists of necessity, of accommodation and above all drudge. The sheer, mind-numbing, joyless drudge of knowing that each day will be repeat of the one before. Yes, granted, tiny details that are out of the ordinary may occur, but in essence, nothing changes. Nothing.’

‘I could do exercises to help with my walking and speech sure, but I’ve been typing away at a keyboard pretty much continually since after the coma and guess what? No substantive improvement. Yes, granted, some incremental improvement, but I won’t be getting a data entry job anytime soon. In fact, I don’t think I’ll ever work again, I mean I know how good I am and I wouldn’t employ me.’

That’s hard to deal with. Not working. Not doing anything one considers worthwhile. Don’t get me wrong, blogging isn’t worthless, but neither is it that far removed from technological graffiti – that title belongs to Twittter. But I’ve always worked. Not because I didn’t get any pocket money, but more that I didn’t want to be beholden to the whims of others – what they could give, so could they take. So I worked, doing paper rounds, after school jobs, jobs to pay my way through college, jobs when I left college, evening jobs to supplement those jobs. So to go from that to….this, is not something that sits well with me – given that I spend enough time sitting down. Which is why I tend not to think about it.

In fact, I tend not to think about a lot of things. As I’ve said before, it’s better to be stupid than clever. Because a stupid person may not be able to fully grasp the possible consequences of a course of action. Or to realise that there exist many possible courses of action. But a clever person can and if they put their mind to it, envisage differing scenarios that might occur, as a consequence.

One consequence of this is the disparity between want I think and what I say. A good example of this occurred late last week at Moorfields eye hospital, for a fitting for eye weights. A doctor asked me about my medical history. Upon hearing of my brain injury, she asked, “How did you get it?” Tempted, but knowing that replying “In a raffle.” was the wrong answer, equally I toyed with asking her was it in any way relevant. But I said nothing of the sort, I just inwardly raged. Having been such a private person before the brain injury is deeply infuriating. And to paraphrase Winston Churchill, ‘Never, in the pursuit of legal entitlement, has so much information been asked of one person for by many people for so little.’ Even worse when a support worker has to share it on my behalf for, as my speech isn’t always understood call centre staff who are tasked with finding out this information. So even more people know things about me.

Whoopief*ckingdo.

Another consequence is that things that had never bothered me before, bother me to distraction now. Other people have always been a case of botheration to me – in much the same way as I no doubt have been to them. But me being in the house so much has exacerbated this to an alarming degree. This can partly be explained by me spending so much time in the house, and partly by the fact that there is comparatively little else to occupy my mind. But mainly, however, because things are not done properly. I used do things in the most efficient and quietest way possible. I hate waste in all things almost as I hate needlessly generated noise. But since the accident I’ve had to bite my tongue so much it must’ve scar tissue on scar tissue. I didn’t realise I was such a control freak until I didn’t have any. I mean I could point out the error of peoples ways, but again, one of the many unpleasant consequences of my accident is my mental cost benefit analysis. Namely, what is the likely outcome of any course of action? So more often than not, my reaction is inaction.

This cost benefit analysis is both instant and instinctive and I hate myself for needing to think this way. I’d never put myself in a situation where I needed to do that before, not since childhood anyway, and I hate myself for doing it now. I’ve had niceness foisted upon me, not through choice but by circumstance. Not that I was deliberately not nice on purpose, but neither would I allow circumstance to dictate my actions. Now however necessity deems otherwise.

And I woke up from a coma for this?

Whoopief*ckingdo!

Next time…Nigel Farrage isn’t ‘a pound shop Enoch Powell.’ He’s more Alf Garnett reborn as a snake oil salesman…

Leave a comment