Underwhelming folk devil

If I'm honest, the only reason I came back from sick leave was the fear that the Sun would somehow extend its deadly tendrils into my Facebook page, and run a story about "She says she's too DEPRESSED TO WORK, but she's been CAVORTING in BRIGHTON with GAYS! And FOREIGNERS! And FOREIGN GAYS!!" and I'd become a national hate figure and be cast out from society and have to wander lonely as a cow for the rest of my days.

Though on reflection, they'd only care if I was on benefits. As my brain-wrong is only financially hurting a charity - a charity which is not Help For Heroes - as folk devils go, I'd be a bit of a disappointment.

(This is one of those moments where you want to fall to your knees in gratitude for the unbelievable luxury of sick pay, and not being reliant on private insurance to keep you in meds and food: because otherwise, looking happy on Facebook could literally take the roof from over your head.)

I'm still braindead, unfortunately. Tell me things to be outraged about.

Insert pussy pun here

Ho ho ho, "insert".

I think we could all learn a lot about sex from cats. My own feline beast has been responsibly neutered, so he doesn't see much action, but his attitude to physical affection is an example to us all.

"Hug me! Tickle my head - cheekbone - right under the chin, yeeeah, chin's good, more of the chin. I'm sitting on your lap now. Keep on the chin stuff. No - no more chin, back to the cheekbone. Don't touch my belly, I don't like it. If you keep touching my belly I will slash you with my gigantic panther paws. Okay, good hug, I'm off now, don't follow me."

There's no obligation, no awkwardness, no "that's not actually doing much for me but I'll tolerate it because I've been socialised to think that if I refuse your ministrations you will leave me and I'll deserve it," no "well, if it doesn't actually hurt, I'll grin and bear it and gently try to hint that actually I'd prefer something else".

Sure, in a hopefully equal relationship between humans you can't really go "THIS IS WHAT I WANT OKAY I'M DONE NOW BYE", but having such a clear idea of what you want - and communicating that to your partner - is surely something a lot of women could learn from.

I wouldn't recommend the 'trading affection for food' model, though. That's just creepy.

"You do not appear to be hugging me. Please address this."

Beneficent boners / dead inside

I feel that the fact that I got out of bed at all this morning merits some sort of parade. That I came to work, in clothes I did not sleep in, and have actually achieved things and interacted with real human beings, is clearly grounds for a national holiday. All of which is to say that given that staying in the shower long enough to rinse off the fever sweat was a feat comparable to a marathon, so the idea of shaving my legs - or wearing tights in this heat, still running this temperature - is to be met with the phrase "you're having a fucking giraffe".

So I feel that my response to the gentleman who passed negative comment on my appearance was positively polite, under the circumstances.

"Oh no! Does that mean you don't want to have sex with me? I am crushed, Random Dude I Have Never Met Before; I am CRUSHED at the thought that I have failed in my sole endeavour in this life, which is, of course, for you to want to touch me with your penis. Want me! Need me! How else will I justify my futile time on this earth? BLESS ME WITH THE BENEFICENCE OF YOUR BONER!"

I mean, he was a hundred yards away by the time I'd finished, but I still felt better.

...

Do forgive the radio silence. Blogging requires an awful lot of feelings, and I am at that very special stage of A Depressive Episode where the most I can muster in the way of feelings is a rolling wave of unfocused 'meh'. I mean, I still want to die, but I don't even give much of a shit about that. Hopefully I'll resurface one day and be able to generate the necessary level of anger of the Daily Mail website sidebar.

Wrong Ex Machina

But what you fail to appreciate, you vapid, vacuous, pollyannaish cunt of a machine, is that I may be entirely accurate in my assessment that I am the worst person who has ever lived! You're assuming that I'm lovely, which is nice and all, but I might not be. You know NOTHING. I have done HORRIBLE THINGS and think HORRIBLE THOUGHTS and it's all a MASSIVE FACADE to hide the fact that I am AWFUL. What if Hitler was taking this test on How Much Your Self-Worth Is Dependent On Other People's Attitudes, huh? He'd score great! That wouldn't have made him any less of a genocidal fuckhead! Because he actually was bad, like I am actually bad, OH GOD I'M WORSE THAN HITLER...

When you're arguing computerised CBT because it refuses to agree that you are the devil incarnate, it's probably time to call it a day.

(Which is not to denigrate CBT! CBT is great, and the only talky therapy to show measurable results in trials (though longer-term therapies are more difficult to study), and I personally found it super-helpful in dealing with anxiety, and if I manage to stop arguing with it I imagine it will be similarly useful in attacking depression. Also you can do it for free at https://moodgym.anu.edu.au. Here endeth today's inspirational message.)

Mental illness: not Darth Vader

I love this. It's a massive poster in a tunnel at Euston and every time I walk past it during the commute home it makes me grin.

In related deliciously dark humour news, my manager now prefaces even minor criticism with "don't kill yourself, but..."

Not that I'm recommending this as a general policy for Handling Your Local Mental, but it's exactly the way I personally like people to deal with it. I might be losing my ever-tenuous grip on sanity, but you don't have to treat me like a bomb that could explode at any moment. Serious Voice and Sad Face will not fix the Broken Brain. Laughter may not be the best medicine - in my case, 40mg of citalopram per day is the best medicine - but taking the piss out out of mental illness (as distinct from taking the piss out of people with mental illnesses) is a lot less depressing than turning it into some all-powerful godbeast. It's not bloody Darth Vader.

Pretty on the outside: fuck elegance

I don't drink much these days, but when I do, I wake with The Hangover Of All Misery. It's not physical as much as it is emotional: I am utterly crippled by the knowledge of having done something awful. Sometimes there are specifics - public vomiting or bad kissing decisions have featured prominently over the years - but recently it's just a vague sense of having been a bit of a prick. Too loud, too argumentative, too sweary. Not elegant. Uncouth. Unladylike.

Like pretty much every other mid-20s woman who likes cats and hangs out in Stoke Newington, I am a little bit in love with Audrey Hepburn. The style, the poise, the elegance; the capri pants, the pearls, the delicate little cashmere sweaters. That late 50s/early 60s aesthetic is always at the back of my mind when I gaze at my teetering clothes rail, always what I'm aiming for on a charity shop budget.

But it was only last night, when I was bemoaning my lack of confidence in social situations (it is SO HARD TO BE ME) that I realised that elegance as a personality trait is not actually something I should be aspiring to.

Elegance seems best expressed by the oft-quoted Victorian aphorism about the proper place of children: seen but not heard. Elegant, and its sister ladylike, are about looking fabulous and shutting the fuck up. Which is exhausting.

The 90s moral panic about "ladettes" - god forbid we drink pints and have fun! - has, I think, infected my thinking on this. It's a deeply class-based prejudice, this - I don't actually know anything a bout the family backgrounds of Zoe Ball, Sara Cox, Denise Van Outen et al, but the Daily Mail's objection to them was "they're acting like our nightmare vision of working class women!" as much as it was "they're acting like MEN!".

What I'm worried about when I wake up wracked with shame is that I have acted like a Ladette, desperately needy to identify as One Of The Boys.

So what's the alternative? Smile sweetly and express the occasional opinion in a gentle, womanly tone, too demure to be heard over the Saturday night hubbub? I like getting into ridiculous arguments about sexism over several pints, setting the world to rights as we queue at the bar. I like using my chic little dress, with its teapot-print bodice, to mop up the lager I spilt gesticulating too enthusiastically. I like the contrast between ladylike dress and entirely unladylike behaviour, sitting cross-legged in a foofy 50s picnic frock while punctuating my points by stabbing the air with a cigarette.

It's all very well pointing out that subscribing to the aesthetics and hobbies of the 50s doesn't necessitate embracing their mores, but if I'm still aspiring to elegance, I've got a long way to go.

Hanging out with a gang of feminist types yesterday, I was struck by the brilliance with which the birthday girl synthesised the perceived incongruity of hairy armpits and elegant, feminine frock into something sublime. (Also: spending a hot sunny day with people who couldn't give the flimsiest fragment of a shit that you haven't shaved in a week is so restful.)

And with that, I am - no word of a lie - off to the pub.

Suicide lolz

Can one conjugate 'parasuicide' into 'parasuicidal'? Asking for a friend.

The thing about suicide is that once you've tried once, you can't unknow what you have learned. You couldn't manage x, y didn't work, but z... Your body is permanently changed, and so is your mind. Immediately after, it's common to feel a surge of elation: you survived an attempt on your life! Personally, though, I just felt flat, ground down by the awareness of one more thing I'd failed at; that the acute crisis had passed and not taken me with it. That I might never get up the gumption again and would have to go on feeling this nothing forever.

That and feeling this way is just fucking embarrassing. It's acceptable at 16, even expected; but aren't we all supposed to be over that silly little phase now? What, are you listening to the Manics as well?

(Then again, the nice thing about going nuts at 26, as opposed to 16, is that when you tell your friends they respond with, "Oh no! Can I help? Do you want company/Japanese pancakes/a warm shoulder to lean on/booze/me to thoroughly take the piss out of you?" (Yes to all of the above.) They do not say, "Wow. That's so deep." With age we've finally figured out that mental illness isn't cool and creative and proof that we're such tortured artists, man, it's just sad and difficult and endlessly, grindingly boring. If I hadn't wasted so much time a) being brain-wrong and b) shaving my legs I'd probably be Prime Minister by now.)

I have an entirely psychosomatic ache in my left wrist, a pang that shoots up my arm at times like this. All you can see is a shimmering white one inch scar, a grim memento from a grubby and painful and thankfully interrupted evening back in my teenage bedroom all those years ago. I'd thought the knowledge I'd dug into my arm had faded too, but it was just hibernating.

Suicidal people are information-gannets. Every conversation, landscape, shop window display is mined for tips and hints on how best to go about the deadly deed. Every news article, as well. Research shows that a report on a suicide which goes into detail about the methods used will be followed by a surge in the number of people killing themselves the same way. No, it didn't make them do it - it just showed them how.

(It's fine. I mean, it's not fine, but it's not an emergency. I didn't even attempt the dreaded deed, I'm covered in cake and company and going back to the GP to jump on the meds-tinkering talky-therapy train; management strategies are firmly in place and I am not in need of an intervention. Stand down the guard.)

"Cake or death?"
"Cake, Hannah, CAKE! Give me the butter knife!"
Suicidal lolz.