Hit by the old age bus (or at least the absent memory bus)

I’ve just passed my 31st birthday. I don’t feel particularly old, but my actions may prove otherwise.

I was sitting yesterday afternoon at my desk. Normally, I lean my iPhone up against the small model of a dragon that my friend James bought me one time. It’s a great iPhone stand.

However, when I glanced at where my iPhone should be yesterday afternoon, it wasn’t there.

My heart leapt. Where was it? Had I taken it to the gym? Was it still in my little handbag from some outing? What had I done with it?

Then, the light dawned.

I was holding it against my head.

And, as it happened, was halfway through a conversation about a job in digital and social media management.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Late at night I was lying in bed and found myself wondering whether I’d put my Adyashanti recordings on. Every night, I drift off to sleep to the dulcit tones of Adyashanti talking about something. I lay there thinking I had no memory of putting them on.

Then I realised I was already listening to him.

*Sigh*

Social media and the Jan Moir scandal

The internet has proved itself to be a very, very bizarre place.

I’m not actually talking about the really weird fetishes that you can find out there, but the things that actually hit the headlines of traditional media, make news and go ‘mainstream.’

The thing I love about Twitter is that it is, basically, the market square of the world. For a very long time we really haven’t had a communal place where we congregate to discuss and make group decisions on what the human tribe accepts and rejects. Twitter does that. It may not have managed to topple the current Iranian administration, but it has the power of the flashmob when it comes to what is and is not socially acceptable.

Homophobia is not in. This is a good thing. Personally, I think it’s fine if you want to be homophobic, as long as you do it behind closed doors and don’t hurt anybody (Eddie Izzard, thank you). However, making ludicrous claims like Jan Moir’s column yesterday about Stephen Gately’s death is just monstrous nonsense. It’s usually the kind of thing that people blog about anonymously. Because this is what happens when you do put your name by the opinion that being gay is somehow fatal.

There’s nothing weird or suspicious about Stephen Gately’s death, or indeed, his life. Speaking as somebody who once flew all the way to Australia to sleep on the floor of a person I’d never previously met, the idea that you’d take a soul you’d only just met home with you to offer them a roof over their head doesn’t seem that weird.

The Telegraph attempts to argue that everybody who denounced Jan Moir and complained about her was basically a bunch of militant liberals declaring that we’re the only people allowed to be nasty. I beg to disagree. It is in society, and in the case of the western 21st century society, and in large groups that we decide what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. The most effective way to deal with bigoted, racist, fascist, and anti-semitic opinions is for society as a whole to declare that they are unreasonable, ill-informed, or downright stupid.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t express those views. But if you do, expect the rest of the human tribe to rise up and tell you what a bunch of bollocks you’re talking. In many ways, therefore, it is helpful for people like the BNP to express their views in public so that the public can say “No, thanks. Go away.”

This isn’t so much politics but the nature of what we define as a society as mainstream opinion. It’s taken a very long time for society to reach a point where the majority are quite happy with the idea that you can sleep with whomever you so please, as long as the pair of you are consenting to what happens (and that, of course, everybody is of the right age and able to make an informed decision).

Perhaps the most effective way to deal with people who promote hatred and violence against whichever group they’ve decided is “other” is for the majority to make known their opinions. And with the power of social media on the internet, you can participate in that without even leaving your chair.

I liked the Times Online’s comment from Daniel Finkelstein best of all. Ignoring the polemic, the bile and the hatred, he went for the technical argument. You can’t prove from a sample size of two (Kevin McGee’s suicide and Stephen Gately’s death) that civil partnerships cause death. You can’t even prove that “being gay makes you dead” from that. They are human stories, and the reasons they hit the headlines is that the people involved happen to be in the public eye.

Her argument would be the equivalent of taking the suicides of, say, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and say that being female and a writer is a deadly combination. Finkelstein does the best job of intelligently pulling apart the piece, demonstrating that nobody on earth should be paid to write the kind of idiotic bullshit you’d normally only expect from one of those ignorant trolls who use anonymity to express the sewerage that passes for their brains. It doesn’t even work on an intellectual level, you see.

To take Jan Moir’s argument further, we could make a lot of unpleasant arguments about the nature of heterosexual marriage, based purely on the ongoing – and seemingly never-ending saga of Katie Price and Peter Andre, or the past love life of Jude Law.

This is the wonderful thing about social media, you see. Instead of people writing to us from on high telling us this kind of nonsense, we get to turn around and call them on it. Which should, of course, be done. The same goes for the likes of the BNP. Bring them forth, let them explain their economic policy of sending everybody not native to the UK home. And we’ll call them on it, too. This is how we debate and establish what is and is not acceptable in society.

Get some respect, girls

Two items have been brought to my attention in one morning.

Item 1: The horrifically photoshopped Ralph Lauren model photo, depicting a woman with a head so out of proportion to her body she looks like an alien.

Item 2: German women’s magazine, Brigitte, has declared a moritorium on the use of professional models. Sick of having to photoshop living skeletons to make them more human, the editor is calling for ‘real women’ to be their models.

Let’s add two more items from recent weeks:

Item 3: The Times’ writer Carol Midgley asks readers to write in with their examples of casual sexism. Her initial target is the proliferation of lads mags whose sole focus of interest is women’s naked bodies.

Item 4: The appearance of a woman with a small roll of abdominal fat in a magazine that sent the world into a frenzy. Oh my God, it’s a woman. She is naked. And she has a bit of fat. The horror.

They all have in common a horrifically skewed impression of women’s bodies, and what women’s bodies are like. Designers have even been criticised by the editor of UK Vogue for producing sample clothes so small that the magazines have no choice but to use women who are skeletal in form (hence the decision by Brigitte magazine, presumably).

The “size-zero” debate has been raging for a few years lately, including Spain’s decision to ban underweight models, and London’s decision not to. The issue is blamed for the rise of eating disorders in young women who are desperate to resemble the pictures they see in magazines. In a recent Times article, a writer wondered why young women are so miserable; they grow up pushing themselves to desperate limits from adolescence and even earlier.

It’s not just how they look, though. It’s the fact that they push themselves to get the highest grades, to be the most perfect, to get the best job. We live in a society where women are under immense and terrible pressure to look right all the time.

And the people putting us under this pressure are not men. It’s other women. I’ve shuddered at the shelves of women’s magazines cattily pointing out the tiny physical faults of celebrities. On one cover of Grazia I saw six women picked out. Three were blasted for being too fat, the other three for being too thin. Graphic red circles point out where a miniscule stomach can be seen – after a meal – on an otherwise svelte Paris Hilton.

And then you have the mommy bloggers. If anybody lived in fear of a “sisterhood” of women, they need not fear. The sisterhood is so busy tearing its own members to pieces they’d never get to the problem of unequal pay, maternity rights or real issues of actual consequence. The war rages between moms who stay at home full-time, working moms and working-from-home moms.

They hate each other. They treat their decision to work or not work as a commandment from God and defend it with about as much force as a Muslim terrorist. They are vicious and uncompromising, and they tear each other to pieces.

Men don’t seem to feature in this terrain, or at least, they occupy the very fringes of it. And compared to the campaigns raged by women against each other, the violence of men – while far more obvious – is no more or less damaging. Women subject each other and themselves to torment and abuse. We don’t just attack once and let things lie. Women can hold grudges and wage campaigns of hate the like of which would make Osama bin Laden wet himself.

I spent five odd years researching women’s lives in the nineteenth century and I know what a battle it was for feminism to get us the right to be treated as human beings. Never mind rights to equal pay, jobs on the board or the glass ceiling. It wasn’t that long ago that we were considered to be property.

But what I’ve grown up in is almost as oppressive. I’m writing this because for fifteen years I had anorexia. I had anorexia so badly that it almost killed me, and for a few years I was considered incurable. I have damaged my digestive system with a year of laxative addiction and overdoses of diet pills.My scars from cutting will last me the rest of my life.

I’m writing this because I wasted fifteen years of my life being miserable about myself. My body bore the brunt of it because it was the physical manifestation of me in the world. It was easier, back then. It seems to be worse now. But for fifteen years, I was obsessed with weight, with eating and food. I was a straight A student, I somehow managed to get a degree and a PhD through the worst years of the illness before I let it go.

I look back on those years as utterly wasted. When I consult or contract in offices I find them filled with normal-sized women obsessed with dieting, carrying around great rocks of guilt about every chocolate, every moment they don’t worry about food. They’re constantly starting diets. They never seem to finish them or get anywhere with them. They try one after the other, endlessly.

It’s the thin end of a wedge that on the thick end results in death, or abject misery. Women’s culture in the west – or at least the UK – is suffused with a miasma of self-hatred. Success isn’t success unless you have the kids, the perfect man and the perfect home. Women won’t allow themselves to settle for less and they won’t give themselves – or each other – a break.

I have heard it said that it isn’t important that the images of women we are surrounded with are so ridiculously unreal as to be alien. But it is. We grow up looking around us for what’s ‘normal’. We look at these images for what we expect to become. My niece is seven and already celebrating the fact that she has high heels. I’m baffled. I didn’t even know what high heels were when I was that age.

So girls are growing up with images of women that look ridiculous. They are told “this is what is beautiful” in our society, because that’s what they’re presented with. And we foist this pressure to have, be and do everything. I feel it myself, when encountering certain groups of women who find me an alien because at 31, I’m not already married. I don’t even have a boyfriend. They find the idea of not having a man – and it doesn’t matter how awful he is, as long as you’ve got one – utterly horrifying.

A great deal has been said elsewhere about the sexualisation of young women for the sake of male pleasure, but I suspect that even this is done by women, to women. It wasn’t her father who gave her the high heeled shoes and dressed my niece like a tart when she was but six years old. It was her mother. At least the lads’ mags show off women who actually have more than a millimetre of fat on them. The one redeeming feature of the porn industry is that it doesn’t abide skeletal girls.

All of it makes me sad. It makes me most sad to see that we do it to ourselves. That we snipe and criticise in magazines and then in the gym, berate ourselves for every treat, and lumber about the world on a treadmill of guilt.

When I look back at the years I was anorexic now I just can’t understand how I could have wasted so much life on being so thin. It is a haze, an illusion of the mind that unfortunately, has a lot of backing from the messages we receive from the outside world. I look back and see that I wasn’t who or what I thought I was, that through my own choices I cut myself off from life. What is even more upsetting is that while I was strong enough and lucky enough to have the bloody-mindedness to survive, many women don’t.

And on the fringes, women who constantly diet but never lose weight are as disordered in their eating and their thoughts about their body and eating as I was. Just because they don’t successfully starve themselves into bony nightmares, does not mean they’re healthy. I often find myself on social outings with women I can’t talk to because their conversation revolves exclusively around their dieting, their gym attendance (or lack thereof) and their efforts at hair dyeing.

It has taken a great deal to extricate myself from the world of women, which is marked by such appalling, fundamental insecurity that it’s frightening. We’ve come so far and done so much, and yet we beat ourselves up all the time. We are bitches to each other, and men are left on the sidelines. I’ve never actually met a man who said he found underweight women attractive.

I’m often left with the impression that the battle of the sexes is a myth; the real war is between women and their tragic, overwhelming sense that they simply are not good enough, and have no right to exist. So if we’re going to stop all of this, from starving ourselves to over-sexualising younger and younger girls, we need to get a bit of self-respect. It’s no good demanding of men and society the basic freedoms we will not grant ourselves.

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of snidely and cattily denouncing working mothers/single mothers/older mothers/single women/fat women/thin women/any other woman than yourself we could support each other? If we could give ourselves a break for not finishing the washing up/having a perfect home-husband-child/having a bottom comparable to Angelina Jolie’s/doing the ironing/finishing that diet/going to the gym a thousand times a week.

What if we could appreciate ourselves, our bodies, each other’s bodies and selves. What if working mothers stood up for the right of stay-at-home moms to make their own independent decision to mother fulltime, and what if stay at home moms respected the valuable contribution working mothers make to their family incomes?

Wouldn’t that be better. It all starts with our own behaviour, and how we treat ourselves. When we grow up, get self-respect and improve our own self-esteem, then we will see the changes we’ve all been longing for. But it won’t change until women demand it of themselves.

Eat chocolate, love your body. Burn the magazines, not your bras.

A collection of observations and thoughts

That title could apply to my entire blog. I feel like writing about a variety of subjects, and have for a while, but I haven’t been able to formulate an entire post about them. Thus, I decided to lump them in together in a kind of bargain basement rant. This is what happens when I read too much online news…

Caught phishing

Tens of thousands of email accounts were posted to a specialist developer blog, essentially revealing to the world which idiots have been falling for phishing scams. All the online sources are once again spelling out to people what a phishing scam email looks like, and how to avoid them. This is presumably for people who also need instructions for complex activities like eating and breathing.

I first heard about phishing years ago on the Radio 4 programme You and Yours. A woman wrote in saying that she’d been phished out of her account details when she basically handed them over in reply to an email purporting to be from Halifax bank. She added that she was concerned at the time because – get this – she didn’t actually have an account with Halifax.

Phishing scam emails are blindingly obvious. They very often don’t spell the bank right, when they’re supposedly from a bank. I’ve had them from Halifax, Abbey National (idiots: Abbey National changed its name to Abbey), Bank of America, and loads of others. I have an internet bank account and they very clearly inform me what an email from them should look like.

And they manage not to write as though English was a language they’d learned off a cereal packet. Phishing scams spell everything incorrectly. Even the best ones, from fake Paypal and eBay systems are obvious. All you have to do is look at where the email has come from. You don’t have to visit the site – just hover the mouse over the link and you’ll see it doesn’t say “www.ebay.com”.

And the fake lottery wins, of which I get about ten a day? The Nigerian “you are the nearest relation of this dude who’s just died and we want to give you 15 million”? Too. Damned. Obvious.

I agree with the writers of Tech Central. The recent phishing palaver was a demonstration that despite many technical advances, stupidity is still as rife as ever.

Boris

Not exactly a rant, but here goes. Winter in Manchester landed with a thump and the arrival of the Tory Party Conference. Or the Boris Johnson and Friends roadshow.

Boris Johnson bemuses me. He appears to be a character from a PG Wodehouse novel brought to life in entirely the wrong era. His behaviour reminds one of the days of Empire and the British Raj. It’s a characteristic of that sort of Britishness that expects the entire universe – quarks and all – to simply bend to one’s will because you asked in a cut-glass accent.

He also appears to have lent the real estate of his scalp to an albino angora tribble. Having taken up residence, it is now plotting to take over the world.

The Emperor is not Benedict, it’s Tony

Speaking of which, whispers abound that Tony Blair might be Europe’s first President. When he was first Pope, Benedict was compared to the Emperor from Star Wars.

They got it wrong. It’s Tony.

Never has a man so clearly been in the planning phases of his own personal Death Star. Having neatly sidestepped the economic crash and let the blame fall entirely on Gordon Brown (the man for whom the phrase “bumbling fool” was so obviously designed), he has been touring the world, using his dynamic smile in a manner that I think he probably compares to Superman.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I suspect that even now Tony makes notes on those Star Wars films. He’ll be announcing a cull of Ewoks before we know it. He’ll claim they damage the landscape, like badgers.

Back to the boys in blue

Back to the boys in blue, and the Conservatives. They consist mostly of the same angry, repressed old men, now fronted by David Cameron. He is to Tony Blair what Microsoft Vista is to Mac OS X 10.5. He probably has teams of people to tell him how to look “authentic” and to “be himself.”

He rolls up his sleeves and talks about broken Britain, to the people he largely thinks are the cause of it. He wants to be Tony Blair to the Tories, but the Conservatives haven’t changed, and next year’s election contest might as well be replaced by Upper Class Twit of the Next Four Years.

And to finish up, back to online stupidity

If you ever worried that the world was running out of stupid people, look no further than Google search terms. In recent weeks, two terrorists were convicted of planning to blow up planes. They weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, however; it was revealed that when they sought to bury their equipment, one of them Googled “how to dig a hole.”

I’m not the most outdoorsy of girls but even I know how to dig a hole.

Yet this is not uncommon. I have had search terms finding my blog that range from “My hair is on fire, what should I do?” to “Smoke alarm on high ceiling, how to reach”. Once upon a time, people were stupid in private and nobody really knew about it. Now, thanks to Google, any blogger (or indeed anybody who can see the search terms used to find their site) can discover just how dumb some people can be.

Experts complain that Google is making us idiotic. No, I think it’s just revealing how ignorant we already were.

Various assorted C-words

I have been transformed into an episode of Sesame Street. Today’s post will be brought to you by the letter C.

Catharsis.

According to the various definitions provided by Google (font of all knowledge, or at least, font of all knowledge on the internet – and let’s face it, if it isn’t on the internet, does it really exist?), catharsis is the release of tensions, the purification of the emotions.

It’s also a Russian power metal band, incidentally.

I could possibly supply some useful material for the Russian power metal band, with a deluge of catharsis over the last month or so. My emotions shift so fast, and so vastly, that my internal landscape appears to be less predictable than the British weather.

I’ve been writing about the catharsis, and its cause, on Zen in Heels, which is reserved for anything Holosync-focused. This has actually rather confused me (there, another C-word), because very often my personal life and writing are affected by my Holosync usage. The boundaries between these blogs are blurred.

However, writing about the experience of using binaural beats to change my brain (or at least make it a little less volatile), leads me to the next C word.

Centerpointe.

They make the product I’ve been using for two and a bit years, the one that is producing a great deal of catharsis in the process of calming me down and making me saner.

The story goes something like this. A little while ago, I found an original Centerpointe community of Holosync users on the web. The heyday of the community was several years ago, and as the users have moved on with their lives (and presumably their Holosync use), their appearance on the forum is rare. However, I stuck up a post with my testimonial and gave out the link to the blog.

One of those people who has actually finished the program (it takes anywhere from about eight to twelve years to do this, so it’s no mean feat to stick at it to the end), left me a lovely comment on the blog, with some suggestions for coping with overwhelm. I was delighted enough, but it appears somebody also thought to let Centerpointe know what I was doing.

I had considered the idea of telling them that I was blogging the Holosync experience. Somehow, though, I never really got round to it. Perhaps I thought it wasn’t actually that important. When one of their support team left me a comment, however, I decided to get in touch. I await developments.

This leads us smoothly to the next C-word: Correspondence.

One of my ‘fans’ has written to me, letting me know I don’t need to blog if I don’t feel like it. I blog the experience only partly for me; there is a constant stream of hits to my site from people who are curious about Holosync. While Bill Harris himself blogs, he doesn’t write about what all of these people want to know.

Holosync, for those who don’t know, takes a long time to do, and is a pretty hefty commitment of time and money. It’s typical of me to want to take up such a challenge. Deciding you want to try something like that is tough. What’s even tougher is sticking with it when the catharsis shows up in some unpleasant way. People hunger for somebody who can detail personal experiences and how they manage to survive. This is more helpful than a simple testimonial, and better than a review done by somebody who’s listened maybe for as much as a month and nothing more.

So I set myself the challenge of blogging my time spent with Holosync. I’m the kind of person who, when she decides to do something, would not let anything get in her way – from ice ages to the actual apocalypse, I’d still be listening for an hour every day even if I had to make God wait.

As my correspondence indicates (and from the time I’ve spent on the phone or emailing back and forth with other users), it appears I am turning into the Voice of the User, or at least providing as much practical information on handling overwhelm, emotions and daily listening.

I like doing this. I’m one of those people who likes being of service. I like to know what I’m doing helps people. It gives me a sense of worth, if nothing else.

This leads me on to another piece of correspondence. A little while ago (before Centerpointe found the blog), I received a strange email. It suggested I was one of “the very best writers” at describing my internal emotional landscape. Why, therefore, did I write science fiction?

I didn’t know how to reply to this. My first thought is that I don’t write science fiction, I write fantasy. I’d have added a comment to the effect that I didn’t see much use in my endlessly writing about my emotional upheavals. Except that, it appears from what’s happened in the last few days, my doing exactly that is very useful indeed.

So I shall keep going. Zen in Heels stands a good chance of rapidly overtaking its motherblog here. What exactly Centerpointe and His Billness make of what I’m doing, I don’t yet know. But it’s all very interesting, no?

I am not blogging this

You know what sucks?

Doing something that is fantastic blogging material, but having to sign a waiver saying you won’t.

Not that it’s an incredibly exciting thing that I’ve done, but I will be on TV at some point in the future. Very briefly. However, I can’t tell you why, what I’ll be doing, where or when.

If only we kept our national secrets as secure as TV shows keep theirs.

Since I can’t blog about the thing I’d really like to blog about, I shall talk about tea. Specifically, how I have begun to drink tea.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve been addicted to Pepsi Max. I have managed to quit once before, when I was in my twenties. I survived for a couple of years without it, but then I caved in and had a can and… that was it. I was hooked.

Recently, I’ve tried a couple of times to give it up. This resulted in agonising pain and last minute dashes to the dodgy corner store to pick up emergency supplies.

Then, last weekend, I started craving tea.

Not any kind of special tea, but your bog-standard English tea that is so ubiquitous in this country and arguably got us through the Blitz. I bought myself some milk and tea, and that was it.

I stopped drinking Pepsi Max. I am no longer their number 1 customer. I consider myself cured, as I haven’t suffered a single withdrawal symptom. Of course, I have spent the last few days being slowly turned into something like the blob but with snot, thanks to a head cold.

So instead of blogging about appearing on a TV show last night (in a dramatic role of Pleased Customer of Unnamed Restaurant), I’m blogging about having a head cold. For this loss of blogging standards, you can complain to the BBC. Just because.

Spam: Not what it used to be

Spam. Not the tinned meat, but the constant bombardment of emails and comments selling things, is going downhill. It’s just not what it once was.

If you keep a blog, you know about spam comments. WordPress uses Akismet filters to keep the offenders at bay.

We know what it is to be deluged with invitations for penis enlargement, breast enlargement, pharmaceuticals and videos of Britney Spears having sex. Lately, however, spam has moved into new markets.

After years of HOT CHICKS GET IT ON!!!! type comments dropping into the Akismet spam filters, spammers have moved into different territory.

Specifically, ladders.

Ladders?

Yes, ladders. And I’m not talking “ladders” here, some euphemism for something very dirty (you make it up, if ladders is a euphemism for anything, I don’t know what it is). We’re talking the things with rungs that you use to climb up to reach higher locales in your home.

Why would the ladders industry need to spam? It’s hardly in the same league as watching Paris Hilton doing whatever it is she does, or Britney Spears, whose sex life has been the scourge of countless Twitter accounts over the last nine months. Ladders? Since when do men sit alone in darkened rooms, faces lit by the glow of their computer screens, masturbating over the B&Q website?

This isn’t all, though. Spam has also moved into a new and thoroughly middle-class area: Conservatories.

The big glass constructions you attach to your house if you have a need every summer to sit in a stifling cage for collecting flies that gives you a chronic headache and looks fifty years old and delapidated from about a week after having it installed.

Conservatories. Not even girls getting it on in hot conservatories, or even two girls one conservatory (or perhaps, two girls one ladder – what you need for changing a smoke detector, perhaps?). Just “get your next conservatory here”.

How boring.

If I’m going to be subjected to spam comments, I want them to be at least moderately salacious.

In related news, spam comments have been getting more and more subtle. Instead of being a selection of links, they now pretend to respond to your blog entries. “Great blog! Keep it up! Buy a ladder.” This is what they say.

But spam has a lot to learn about playing this game. I recently found a spam comment that, along with the link to a website selling conservatories, left an attempt at a “real life” comment on my blog: “This is punctilious crap! I am emailing you now.” How do they expect to sell anything by insulting the customers?

Rude it may be, but you have to commend the use of ‘punctilious’. If I’m going to be insulted by spam, I’d rather it was done with literary panache.

Finally, today brought a new spam fail into my inbox. One of those emails telling me a relative had died and left me £15 million that I need to give my account details to receive. Except that the entire thing was written in Chinese – barring the sum of money involved. I can’t read Chinese. What do they expect?

Spam is definitely losing its calibre. If I’m going to be bothered and irritated by it, I’d much rather they made an attempt to be salacious, or at least, tried to sell me something more interesting than DIY tools.

If I could have anything in the world, it would be a Pensieve

It might be the cleverest (or at least the most appealing) idea in the whole Harry Potter universe.

Put your wand to your temple, extract a thought as a long strand, and drop it into the Pensieve for later perusal. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate cure for depression?

I would have all these thoughts whistling about in my head extracted, and then since I don’t feel they need later perusal of any kind, would have them knitted into garments for orphaned dolphins. Then, at least, they might be of some use.

Imagine a world where we could extract our thoughts with a wand. Deposit them for later review.

I’d probably realise just how much garbage my mind produces in a single day.

Yesterday, I sat opposite a friend in the Cornerhouse cafe, drinking English tea from a glass mug (this is somehow, fundamentally wrong; tea should be drunk either from fine china – if you’re upper class or upper middle class – or a mug). I put my hands down on the table and tried to explain how I was feeling.

There’s two of me, I was saying. I wiggled my left hand, slicing the air over the table. This hand represents the shriveled up bit, the bit that lives, really and truly, as though it was fifteen years ago. Then there’s the right hand – air gestures – which has moved on, and lives in the present. I am firmly stuck in the past.

My head felt heavy.

“I think this is going to be a major breakthrough,” I said. “Either that, or I’m getting a cold.”

My eyes were sticking out on stalks, watching the buses go by. A cold, adjusting to being on medication and Holosync all combined to give the world a slightly swimmy feeling. As though my brain was floating on a sea of porridge.

Realisations don’t get much bigger than this. It’s like waking up and seeing the world for the first time. I had never realised how fundamentally, how deeply I was stuck in the past. Somehow, I never left school, and my brain was convinced that I’d open my eyes and find myself there. I’m only just hacking away at the strands of conditioning, the ropes that have kept me tied there. I awake out of meditations with a brief view of my life now, and it’s like being a different person.

I feel like saying, “Oh my god, here I am. It’s now. It’s not then. It’s over.”

I have been slipping in and out of this for the last few days, which is why I haven’t been blogging, or writing, at all. For the last month I’ve been hit, like clockwork, every other day, by a sudden explosion of thoughts, of memories, details. It hurts like a bitch and then it’s gone, and I’m over it.

I told my friend that it was like having food poisoning, and knowing that every time you throw up that’s another bit of the poison out of your system. He was rather disgusted by the metaphor but it’s appropriate.

My whole life collapsed, but I feel as though I am waking up out of a dream. I have gone to the very depths of me, and possibly beyond, and untied all the ropes around me. If I had the time and the inclincation – and if I didn’t have a cold – I’d go back to the work of Jean Piaget or others and tell you about developmental stages, and how I seem to have been trapped in one.

Or not, or something like it.

For part of me, I never left school. It had such an impact on me and my life, those years, that I trapped myself there. On the first day I consciously set up a means of survival, but I forgot to leave myself a note to drop the survival techniques once I left. Instead, they’ve still been running, and my life has crashed in the process.

It was inevitable, of course. Accelerated by Holosync, perhaps, but eventually, my life and my self-description became so detached from current reality that it stopped functioning at all. I wish, I dearly wish, life issued warnings of these things. I could have done with an email in December last year, perhaps, mentioning that all my mental systems had run out of time and I needed to get them replaced.

It would be a bit like a form of the millennium bug.

Instead, my life crumbled before my eyes, and I seemed to be falling to bits. Nothing worked, nothing went right. And I felt as though I was in a prison, and paralysed, unable to move forward at all.

There are now weird moments when I slip between being who I was then, and being the person I’ve grown up into. I don’t actually have to do all my growing up in one go, fortunately, it’s just a matter of realising, on a deep and fundamental level, that all that is over, and I am free to move on with my life now. In the present.

The secret pleasure of the notebook

Is diary keeping out of fashion now?

I have to admit to having a secret pleasure. I’ve kept an online diary for several years (2001 to 2007, to be precise) and this blog for over two years. But nothing compares to keeping a hand-written journal.

It occurs to me that this might be an incredibly dated thing to do.

I was advised, when I was very young, that the best way to learn to write well was to keep a diary of your life. Diaries aren’t easy when you’re young and days last for aeons. It took time to learn the discipline of maintaining the diary habit. Much of what I wrote during the depression of my adolescent was dross.

However, I have kept one diary from ten years ago, written from the time I started university to the summer of 1999. The book came from a shop that sold Chinese clothing on the Barbican in Plymouth. It was an odd little place just off the fishmarket, the atmosphere hazy with the smell of incense, and a jolt after walking in from the fish-stink outside.

The journal was bound in green embroidered silk and it has stayed with me all this time. When I looked back at it recently, I was stunned to find not the tired, embarrassing ramblings of a teenager with depression and anorexia and no short-term memory, but a quirky, witty intelligent young woman who, for some reason, could see no value in her own existence. It was poignant and painful both.

Two years ago, my hypnotherapist recommended keeping a hand-written journal. In these days where everybody keeps their lives on display in blogs and online diaries, it seems antiquated. But it’s a glorious habit.

I took a trip to Paperchase. They sell the perfect notebook for journaling. Not a Moleskine. I’d rip through one of those in a few days. The notebook I chose was a simple spiral-bound with plastic cover. Paperchase make them in a variety of styles. They last about three months each, given that I write in them copiously about everything.

This has now become a dedicated operation; the purchase of “the next journal” is a special occasion. Do I feel like I want soft and fluffy, or pink plastic cats, or aliens? What will my mood be? What does this notebook say about me? The choosing is careful, and I have made an effort always to pick a different design.

Then there is the integration of the journal with the others. Which volume is this (I’m now at volume 7)? I carefully fill out all the relevant dates (start and finish left open to be filled in as appropriate, when the time comes), and all the information.

I started, ostensibly, because I was going to keep a log of my Holosync reactions. But this has become so much more. I fill out one page with a hand-written calendar, crossing off the days as they pass with details of gym visits and special events. There is something so special about this act of careful reproduction.

It’s a shame that we’re losing touch with the art of handwriting, with handwritten letters and journals. I do wonder if I’ll look back at myself at 30 and cringe that I was so immature, that I was so fixated on trivialities. But the trivialities are what make up life. I have recorded, especially over the last few months, such a radical personal transformation that even I can see the difference between how I wrote in, say, January, and my writing now.

I don’t write for other people, but sometimes I wonder – having been a historian of personal lives in the past – whether anybody will look back at my scrawlings after my death and find them… useful? Entertaining? Who knows?

From victim to survivor (a short account of depression)

I used to hate it when I encountered people who called themselves “survivors”.

For a very long time, I really couldn’t see the difference between being a “survivor” of something (rape, abuse, bullying, whatever) and a “victim” of something. It didn’t matter what you said, I thought, essentially you were still defining yourself by an act of violence in the past.

Time to eat my words just a little.

But first…

This is, without doubt, my oddest encounter with depression. For a start, it’s hard to say when it began. I could go back to 2006, and say that really, when I attended the surgery to see my then doctor, a small man with apparent gerbil-related ancestry, who moved his skull cap up and down prior to every statement, as though it was some kind of precursor to informed thinking.

Or, alternatively, that perhaps the latest phase began in December 2008, when I first wrote about having a “life crash”. I’ve been up and down, and much of the shifts in mood have been related to my ability to gloss over deep and terrible feelings that I couldn’t quite name but desperately wished to be rid of.

What makes this dance with black moods and thoughts with huge, shark-teeth biting down on me so very different, is that I haven’t been wound up in the thoughts themselves, or entirely believed in their truth. I know, deep down, they aren’t true. It’s just that this knowledge hasn’t helped one bit.

Well, it has a little. It’s made it possible to sit through long, investigative meditation aimed at finding the exogenous cause, buried in my past. And during these, I’ve discovered that the feeling of being trapped, held down or imprisoned came from something quite specific. I’m like a hamster in a wheel, running over the same territory again and again.

Essentially, what it boils down to is this. Part of me is living, and re-living, the past, over and over. Since I left my parents’ home at 18, I’ve had recurring nightmares, and always woken with the feeling that I’m back there, and about to have to get up and go to school. Over the years, it has lessened over time, but until this week, when I closed my eyes I was still there. For a large part of my mental make-up, nothing since I was 16 has happened, and it’s trapped in a kind of timewarp, convinced that the next time I get up, the next time I open my eyes after every blink, I’ll be back there again.

Scary.

This is what it is to be a victim. A victim is in a constant state of suffering, re-living whatever happened over and over, even though the event itself has come to an end. You see everything through the haze of the past, as though what’s happening now is just a puppet show, an illusion that will shortly be over.

Over the past four or five weeks, I’ve felt increasingly aware of this fog. Self-loathing and self-depreciative, hopeless thinking is common in depression, but I can’t keep it up for any length of time because it simply isn’t true, and I know it. There’s always a part of me going, “But this isn’t true, is it?” So I dip in and out, rather than being conclusively, resolutely depressed. After each dip, the haze gets a little thinner, and more of the now replaces the weird aura of the past-as-present in my mind.

This afternoon, ending a week when I’ve felt blurred and washed out by going back onto medication (at a thankfully low dose), I sat down to play with a kind of meditation that takes you through your past history. I’ve spent the last twelve years or so running from it. I’ve been burying it and it keeps raising its ugly head again, despite my attempts to get away. So, time to face it, I thought.

I found the meditation hard, I won’t lie. I was deeply uncomfortable for the last section in particular. I came out of it, sat up and went about my evening. But I noticed a shift. I felt an energy I hadn’t felt before, and a definite change in the way I related to the past.

Now I do understand the difference between being a survivor and a victim. A victim is still running through it, convinced by it, over and over. It holds back their life, so the incident or the time period may as well still be happening, because a victim behaves as though it is.

For a survivor, it’s in the past. It’s over, it’s ended. Instead of being a scary, horrifying event or time, it’s something to draw strength from, because you survived it, and it ended.

Do I need to call myself a survivor? No, I’m not a big fan of labels or of trumpeting them. But I can feel like a survivor feels, knowing that what I experienced ended, that I survived it and did not die, that it’s over and I can move on with my life anew.