The Public Private Life

How do you write about things you are not in a position to share but which are making your life untenable? Should you even try?

I don’t know the answer to the first one. I really wish I did. For me, the answer to the second one is yes.

When my daughter was in treatment for her eating disorder, she made me promise that I wouldn’t write about it. I tried my best to honour her wishes, but the problem with stuff like this is that it’s a dis-ease that likes to share. If you find yourself in close proximity to it, there is a good chance you will be sucked into it. Like a fly in a spider’s web. It becomes your problem very quickly.

How do you manage when something like this becomes yours by proxy?

Another question I can’t really answer. I attempted it with my previous blog and largely failed. Then I stopped writing for a long time, because there seemed to be nothing that I could say that was real and the things I could write about were meaningless. I know writing helps me, but it only helps if I can write about what I need to write about. For a while I bumbled on, writing trivial posts, but the more I wrote them, the worse I felt, so I stopped. That’s when I started to get properly, old-school mad again.

Of course, not everybody wants to write about what they’re going through in a newsletter. There are other methods of coping available which are not so public. For me, though, this kind of writing has proven to be a lifeline. There is magic in the process of publishing the writing. That moment of bearing witness but on my own terms is some of the best medicine I have found.

Therapy though? you might suggest, because there is nothing that people who are not going through it like to do more than offer advice on how best to cope with the unendurable. Therapy, I point out is extraordinarily hard to get if you haven’t got the wherewithal to pay for it, and often crappy if you are lucky enough to get it.

If your problem doesn’t ‘fit’ the mental health fad of the moment, you can forget it. I am on a waiting list. The six weeks of free therapy for depression that the kind NHS administrator managed to wangle me is currently about three months out on the horizon. By the time I am eligible I will be living in a different area and will probably have forfeit my right to it and have to start again with a new waiting list and possibly not even get on that if I don’t find another sympathetic ear.

Private therapy is extremely expensive. This is where people like to say: ‘But what price can you put on good, mental health?’ To which I reply; ‘Usually a minimum of £70 per hour’. Two people in my immediate family are currently getting private care, which they desperately need. If I demanded it, I could be the third, but being mad is a privilege that would then cost us and our precarious finances over £200 a week at a time when we have put our entire life savings into buying a boat and the coffers are bare.

Talk to sympathetic friends. Have you tried that?

I have and am uniquely positioned to tell you that I have some of the best, most compassionate people on earth amongst my friends and family. They listen to me without complaint. They work very hard not to say things that anyone would say faced with the litany of disasters that have just assaulted their ears. They check in on me regularly and are kind enough to save their more brutal assessments of my situation for their private lives. They know I know ‘all this’, and that them telling me what I already know, won’t help. I can never find the words of gratitude strong enough to appreciate their fortitude in not screaming: ‘For fuck’s sake,’ every time they are compelled to listen to me. They send care packages. They take me out to lunch. They let me cry in big, ragged sobs down the phone so that I can put my big girl pants on and carry on.

I do all this. I take anti-depressants. I walk miles every week. I have hobbies. I have deleted Twitter from my phone. I watch distracting television and read distracting books. I sleep well. I eat well. Apart from swallowing The Little Book of Calm, I am doing the stuff.

And. It. Is. Not. Enough.

Not for what I am carrying. Not nearly enough. Because what is happening in my life at the moment is ongoing and horrific and complicated. It’s not my stuff, but it is my stuff and every day I find out that there are new levels of fuck-wittery and sadness, stupidity and cruelty, selfishness and hurt that are just barreling their way towards me.

Every day I get up and try to be grateful for the chance that things might be different today. At the moment, every day (and this is not an exaggeration) is different, it’s just worse different. I try to practice detachment and changing only what can be changed and what is mine to change. This is hard when you are dealing with your children, not least because they are legally your responsibility and tying them to railings and fucking off to a painting retreat in the South of France is frowned upon.

My heart is broken and it breaks more every day. I am unbearably sad. Bereft is a word that covers it. I am so very scared for the future and yet the future is where we’re headed. I am attempting not to catastrophise but trying at the same time not to be a gullible idiot who walks into situations anyone could have seen coming a mile off. I am trying to find ways to speak my truth, without minimising or negating anyone else’s experience of things. I am trying to set boundaries in a landscape that is constantly shifting. I am not doing it very well.

I don’t think the situations I find myself in are over, not by a long chalk. Without a miracle, there is more of this to come. The only way out of this is forward, one step at a time. I wake every morning and from somewhere I find the wherewithal to get up and dressed and go about my day. The world doesn’t stop for this stuff, more’s the pity.

It feels like I’m trying to build myself a life raft in the dark while the water rises all around me. Only it’s not as much fun as that.