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Tuesday, 15 March 2011

I know I said I've only lived in London for seven years (not forty) but - when I lived in Zone 4 in the first year and used to go out to nightclubs I'd read about - I definitely, while knocking back 'bus juice' (plastic water bottles of vodka and lemonade), smoked on the tube sometimes. Swear down. Maybe I was just confident enough to style it out?

Going to make my brother lock me up in Manchester for the rest of the week, so tonight I'm very tempted to get the Central Line into Soho and revisit some of those places.



Monday, 14 March 2011
Beauty is in the street

I've lived in London for seven years now, almost to the day. I heard it takes seven years for your body to completely renew itself: for each cell of skin or bone or the-ends-of-your-hair to be freshly created, and the old ones flushed away. So, when people divorce after seven years saying "you are not the man/woman I knew", they are technically accurate.

There's this super-funny, super-harsh messageboard I used to frequent. They were the kind of clever, seen-it-all bitches I wanted to be friends with when I first arrived - with a back pack and a one way ticket - in this unforgiving city. But things didn't go as stellar for me as I wanted or expected and some of the jibes from the other on there hurt me. I was too thin-skinned, so left.

But I still check back in there occasionally and one day last summer someone mentioned my name. "She's a sad, lonely drunk these days" another replied before listing - some accurate, some exaggerated - my frantic efforts to avoid being alone over the last couple of years. I suddenly had that feeling - which maybe you internet heads might know - a sickening drop in my stomach and a speed of pulse. It's all catching up on me. They know.

I was under-employed at the time, so I bought a day bus pass and just got buses all day; stary, upset and hungover. Just got on one bus after another until I reached an unknown terminal somewhere in zone six before doing it again. I did this for five or six hours, stopping once to buy a disgusting margarine sandwich somewhere under some railway tunnel near Brixton, with a side order of sexual harassment.

Always on the top deck, level with the shop signs of the betting shops and chicken houses and corner stores and Tesco Metros and Queens Heads and Tanning Special Offer Sunshine and empty shops with sofas and kettles again and again. London is massive.

And I've done this again today, in my strange purgatory between leaving my job and starting my medical detox. I got on my bike, without any real route or plan apart from intending to stay outside all day (I believe the situationists and the psychogeographers have some philosophy behind this 'drift' or 'derive' - but I would not claim such meaning).

I went along Regents Canal past the place where I fell in (with my bike) once, alone at 3am, after a night of booze and drugs. I sat in the spot in Trafalgar Square where I left a bag full of new clothes and make-up after a shopping trip turned into a solitary pub crawl. Through Soho and familiar doorways to clubs and all-night bars. Down Brick Lane where, each year, a new influx of 22-year-old girls walk dressed up in groups of three. There have been many fun times but, over the seven years, they have been gradually outweighed by the lonely, embarrassing and awful. I am coming to see that alcoholism is progressive, almost exponentially so.

What did I discover today? That spring is, relentlessly, on its way. That, despite the huge volume of tears I have shed over the last few years, I have never cried when I'm on my bike. That the booze I am desperately trying to throw down my gullet before my deadline (which an editor of mine used to call a "life line") is actually being rejected by my body in convulsions which I fight.

It is time. I am a different person than I was seven years ago. I think.




Sunday, 13 March 2011
We scream in cathedrals

When I used to take drugs - when a friend of ours experimented on us with "2cis and 2cbs" and American "mood stabilizers" off of the internet - I would swallow something then wait nervously. Like standing in line for a rollercoaster. I know I have agreed to do this, but just how amazing or terrible is is going to be?

And that is kind of how I feel now again, after agreeing to this medical detox and 12-week treatment programme. The logical, intellectual, long-term-thinking part of me know it is the right thing to do. But the part of me that controls my immediate needs and desires is freaking the fuck out. Jolting and bucking against my 'true path' like an out-of-control horse.

I've already sobbed with grief, knowing I have to leave my best friend booze. Now I just want her to die.

I'm frustrated at the wonderful NHS. I had been meant to start my detox programme on Monday and had been preparing myself in my head for it. Spent that last week thinking of the Last Day (meant to be today) and the Last Drink: the glass (bottle) of champagne (cava) that I would drink alone; straight-backed and clear-headed overlooking the Thames in some nice bar (park bench).

But due to bureaucratic confusion about what borough I live in (moved house from Hackney to just inside the Tower Hamlets border a couple of months ago), it looks like it's going to be delayed for one more week. I've already left my job and have neither the funds nor the muscle for a week of sparkling wine by the river. I need to be locked up for a week, because - now - I do not have it within myself to stop drinking until I am forced.

In AA, there is a pattern on speech which I noticed and hated immediately, but - after XX months keep finding myself falling into. It's basically "I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn't" - and it's all based on that fucking AA thing of submission and denial of self. "I thought I knew what sobriety was, until SIX YEARS after I stopped drinking when I realised it was something else", "I was trying to do the right thing, but it was the WRONG thing". Never show any confidence in your own thoughts or behaviour, turn your will over to the programme or some sort of god.

I find it hard to submit, although that's perhaps what I will have to do. I cannot decide whether agreeing to do this is taking control or letting go of control. It is something, anyway.



Wednesday, 9 March 2011
SHOCK ME SANE

A text from my flatmate this afternoon: "Can we all have a chat this evening?"

Not this again.

I quit my job yesterday. And now I am being thrown out of (/asked to leave) my house. I don't know if I can take this again. (And X blocked me on Twitter and Facebook).

When I first got the triple whammy of unemployed/homeless/heartbroken in 2008, I just about the strength and optimism to handle it - although I think I'm still recovering from the shock of those few awful months (which included losing weight and spending time on both sides of the law - as a convicted drink driver and as the victim of violent attempted rape).

I'm not sure I can do this again. The suicidal feelings are increasing in both frequency and strength. I've let people down once too often, and can't bear to tell them I've fucked up again. For the last week, I had this 'day treatment' programme in my head as my last chance - but now that's been taken away and I don't know what's next.

When I told Dad I was probably maybe doing this for three months, his response was "I've spent three years of my life in psychiatric care, I hope it's less for you" (he's doing ok now). I was not unexpected.

Very self-pitying and boring I know. Bye. x




Monday, 7 March 2011
Sour abbatoir

It wasn't the out-of-the-way location, the tatty waiting room seats or the blank bureaucratic dealings that made me sob while I was waiting for the appointment: it was the smell.

It was the same sour odour that Dad noticed in the tiny caravan bedroom where I'd spent 48 hours hiding out after I got sacked from my job on the local paper, almost two years ago. He is a farmer and equated it to the smell from an ill sheep you are going to have to spray with a 'Red X' and send to the abattoir. A horrible all-too-corporeal smell that can can mean no good.

Not the same as simply the smell of booze, it's a sickly sweet or sour fragrance omitted from the pours of those of us whose internal organs - our livers and kidneys - are no longer able to process it all, so push the poison out though skin and fingernails and eyeballs. And although I rated myself "17/20" for physical health (and 4/20 for emotional and psychological health) in the dumb dumb forms I've had to fill in, that whiff - which I've known in bedrooms of ex-council flats and in "chilled out*" houseshares - will never not give me me the Howling Fantods.

So, while I usually only have to deal wth just me, by wilingly admitting myself, I will have to gag on the consequences of others. This is probably what I deserve.

*On gumtree flatshare ads, always thought this was code for what drugs they took. "Chilled out" = weed "Up For It" = pills, "Creative" = coke



Sunday, 6 March 2011
Assessment

While it's over-dramatic if I say that I'm trying to get myself "committed", I have been asking to have myself "referred into residential treatment" AKA rehabilition AKA rehab. And I remember discovering, at 16 or so, the slogan "rehab is for quitters" scratched into a Primal Scream 7' and thinking it was the coolest stance ever.

But things at work, at home and inside of my mixed-up my head have become intolerable. (Or "unmanageable" as they say in AA meetings - aproximately 70 of which I have attended over the last three or four years, while trying to hold down various short-lived jobs.)

I went to be assessed. All afternoon I'd been reading a book written by a smug comedian, so it was hard not to adopt his smartarse, analytic tone when the nurse asked me questions at Tower Hamlets Drugs and Alcohol Advisory Service (logo: A representation of Tower Bridge with the towers replaced by wine glasses. Sweet).

The questions including "Why do you drink?" and "Do you have any cultural or spiritual needs?" had a two-inch grey box for answers.

I don't really understand the question or what you expect me to answer here. While I find these concepts - in particular that of the "spiritual" - difficult to define, I think that everyone has some needs in these areas: nebulous and vast and stupid. But, in particular, those of us seeking help for chronic and disastrous alcohol and drug problems obviously have some kind of "needs" - but our inability to fulfill them, or to capture and destroy the reasons why we drink is the very reason why we are here.

At this point the nurse looked at me straight, blinking, and handed the form over to me to fill in myself (I'd already told her I was a "journalist" and she kept referring to my "lovely job" and my "learnedness" although I had, crying/pale/broken, described things as neither). In swift, slanted handwiriting, overflowing the grey box and ending by saying "I am desperate".

An awareness that the above question were facile doesn't meant that I need to be here any less that any of the other white-knuckled, tense-jawed 'cases'. I am not doing this lightly. This is my last chance.

But, on refection, the question about cultural/spiritual needs (which I knew at the time was about if I need a prayer room but chose to take literally), is aptly apt. The need or "lack" that I have within me is most immediately answered by my regular terrible compulsion to drink loads of booze which gives me temporary relief followed by trouble.

However, I recognize this same feeling in the way I can smoke a cigarette - inhaling like a motherfucker - in 30 seconds, or how I fixate on a new friend and want to obliterate my personality with theirs, or how I crave my regular outdoor swim, to be submerged in cool water where I can't breathe, or - by extension - drowning.




Friday, 25 February 2011
Gales

I grew up beside cliffs, on an island famous for its high winds. I have never been afraid of heights. A physically brave child, I climbed onto shed roofs or threw my sturdy body from high walls onto hay below.

Always seeking sensation, raging against those who warned me away from the edge: My life was rough and windy and tangled.

Once, on a night of gales, our puppy sheep dog, chasing rabbits, was lost over the cliff. Once, when my Dad was high, he killed another dog, although when I've asked him about it lately he does not remember.

When I was about 16 a teacher showed us a video about Leah Betts. "This is biased propagnada," I said (I was an annoying precocious teen), "when I leave this small-minded island, I intened to try all the drugs I can - in an educated and inquisitive way - I'll never die."

I stand-by my teenage myself which is why I find it so hard to face up to where I am now: a 29-year-old woman about to admit myself into residential rehabilitation for a longterm chronic alcohol problem. What happened?

Lately, I've been reading some old diaries. In September 1999, just before I left home for university, I wrote a hilariously arrogant list of all the things I wanted to achieve after I escaped 'the rock', including, 'be top of the class', 'join the newspaper and modelling agencies', 'read and collect everything', 'take drugs', 'flirt with the best looking boys (and girls[!!]). I was so full of potential and hope.

However, I also, perceptively, write: "this world of art/fashion/literature/rock and roll that so attracts me - could be my downfall".

So, 12 years later here I am with a lot of stories but also an alcohol problem and a whole heap of dissatisfaction and loneliness.

In three months time I will turn 30 and I do not know where I will be.

When I was about 11, my Dad was so ill that he went round the farmhouse smashing all the windows one-by-one. It was October and the northerly/westerly winds flew through the farmhouse, whisking my adolescent papers from my desk. But when the doctors with sedatives and ambulances arrive I still shouted at them to go away. He loved me. He'd been taken by something beyond his control.

As the sedatives kicked in, I crouched with my Dad in a corner of my bedroom, sharing a banana. "You are my girl," he said. I wholly agreed even as he was sectioned and flown to the mental ward In Aberdeen - the same as the day I was born (but that's another story). And you ask where sense of drama come from?

And there's that, underlooked, Sylvia Plath poem about the gales in Yorkshire: "and the wind pours by like destiny, bending everything in one direction".

The north west winds have left me diagonal. No right angle to follow.