Ok, New Plan...

I don't want to go back on anti-depressants again.

The problem is that it's looking increasingly likely that I will soon be in a position where I essentially have no choice. (I know, we always have a choice, but external pressure is a bigger thing than you'd think, as is the shadow of suicide, hence the "essentially" modifier.) I want to stave this off for as long as I can. Luckily, my doctor is almost impossible to get an appointment with, so that helps.

If I want to get anything done I'm going to need to reimpose some semblance of structure into life. I am not functioning at anything even approaching optimal, in fact there seems to be far less than 50% operational efficiency, and I know that lack of structure and routine clouds my mind. Therefore, reinstating this would seem to be a logical thing to prioritise. If my hypothesis is correct, it should at least mitigate, to some extent, the debilitation I currently seem to be experiencing. So, not so much new plan as reinvented old one.

A theoretically public forum may be expected to produce a sense of obligation to maintain standards set, and thus I have chosen this blog as one of the starting points for this regime shift. I will attempt, in particular, to begin using a Word of the Week type premise again, in order to have something in my new routine which is not work related but may be subjected to analysis and is a compatible activity with the need for timetabling.

Any other suggestions, besides "pull yourself together" (or equivalent), would be gratefully received and taken into consideration.

‘Title’ seems to be the hardest phrase…

Howdy folks, it’s been a while.

I won’t bother to explain away my absence, but I can explain my re-emergence: I have a new schedule in place which is aimed at helping me to work more effectively. How does this affect my blogging? Well, part of this attempt to improve the quality of my work involves creating the appropriate ratio between work and breaks – 45 minutes working followed by a 15 minute break, as opposed to spending the whole hour ‘half working’, as well as regular, longer breaks.

As such, I now have specified periods in which to do ‘nothing’. Unfortunately, I don’t like feeling that any time is being completely unproductive, so I plan to use those times to revisit some of my old hobbies. These include things like origami and writing, and the blog seems like a useful place to chronicle the success (or otherwise) of this new schedule – somewhere that I could keep a clear chronology of my own progress, and where other readers could possibly also keep a check and perhaps give me some advice/suggestions to keep it going.

As this explanation has been quite long-winded, I won’t include any additional ramblings, but hopefully I’ll post something equally inane, if somewhat less topical, soon.

End of the Line.

I have tried being a good friend and relative, I've tried being sociable, I've tried to work hard enough to earn my place at this University and in people's company, but I have failed, and now have nothing else to give.

I don't want to play this game any more, or keep trying to stay afloat in the rapids of my life. The failures simply return again and again in rushing tides, causing more trouble or politely hidden exasperation like rocks to smash my head against: and I do exactly the same thing again later in the hope of rectifying earlier problems, though I know it won't. It becomes a compulsive vicious circle, a whirlpool which continues to make things progressively worse, but which I can't get out of.

There are plenty platitudes and 'reassurances': "But we love you" and "Well I'm still your friend" etc. made all the worse by the add-ons at the end where people explain that this is actually momentous because "We don't hang around with just anyone", or "I'm the sort of person that would definitely tell you to get lost if I didn't want you around". What nobody seems to realise that it is a natual human phenomenon for a naturally decent person to be charitable towards someone who wouldn't have a hope in hell of finding anyone who actually liked them. The chance to be magnanimous is something that a person's subconscious jumps at, giving them a feeling of righteousness and nobility, and let's face it, most people like to feel good about themselves don't they? I get that people don't realise that they're doing this, but if they sat down and really thought about it, it would become clear that a friendship with someone like me (whose main character traits are irresponsibility, failure and untrustworthiness), is totally inexplicable and a substantial waste of time

My least favourite platitude, however, has to be: "Just do your best". This is, in my opinion, one the most abhorrent phrases ever. Most people when it comes to exams etc. tend to try their best, but the thing is that their best at that particular time may not actually be their personal best, and may in fact be rubbish. I've spent my whole life being encouraged to do my best; not helped of course by the apparent expectation that my best will be pretty good, and have been working up to University, which now appears to have bested me.

I have been trying my best, and my best has just run out of steam, I have no more best to give, no more effort or energy to be expended on anything. As far as I can see, my life finished the day that I got my A-level results, that's what my life had been working up to, and that's where it stopped. That was hard enough towards the end, and now, I'm done, empty, finished. Other people's lives extended beyond work, and they developed other skills to help them deal with the aftermath of school, but I didn't. This leads me to conclude that I didn't need any other skills, as I wasn't designed to be going any further.

I shouldn't be here.

I will be making a decision about my future in the next couple of days, any job/CV writing ideas would be gratefully received.

Disillusionments

Heed my warning folks, insomnia and a lack of home internet is not an aid to revision.

It is distracting and unhelpful for concentration, hence I am posting here and not thrilled about my progress in the studying area. My head is spinning, and feels as though it's full of soggy cotton wool, so if anybody has any motivational ideas or morale/health boosting suggestions, I'd be grateful.

Thanks peeps.

It's nearly over

Warning; this post is mostly (entirely) a rant; rhetoric spiralling into near-despair. I will try to make the next post better-possibly with another poem.

Right, tomorrow is the start of week 8 in the University calender. There are 10 weeks in the term leading up to Christmas, which means I've only got 3 weeks to go.

I'm having mixed feelings about this and many things at present. I'm getting used to Uni, the panic attacks are less frequent, but at the same time, I still have no energy/inclination to do work outside of lectures, and this is getting frustrating, because I want to do this properly, but there's another part of me that just switches off when I start work, and it's hard to do what I have to do when half your thoughts are somewhere else.

Also not helping is the fact that the only coursework I have to do this year is Electronics which involves 3 hours of lab time every Tuesday afternoon for 4 weeks, starting last Tuesday. This would not be so bad apart from the fact that I have a few problems with electronics:

1. The lecturers are boring;
2. The lecture contents are confusing;
3. The confusing contents are complemented by badly written lecture handouts and poorly presented lectures;
4. There is no incentive to try and get over such obstacles to find the heart of the subject as this too is incredibly boring and comes across as not worth the effort.

I went to the first lab, and found that as I had suspected might happen, I had no idea what I was doing. Looking for something positive I noticed that apparently almost no one else had any idea either, so at least we were all in the same, somewhat waterlogged, boat. The lecturer of course was no help; any question that was asked would be answered in the patronising and slightly annoyed tone that implies the answerer is convinced of it's obviousness and the fact that everyone who isn't a congenital idiot has done it before and should therefore be fully conversant in the details.

Needless to say, it was one of the worst 3 hours of my life, I left with no more idea than I had gone in with and feeling rather worse than a bug which has been squashed under a boot which had not long previously stepped in some fresh fox excrement. And, joy of joys, I have 3 more weeks of this to come.

This and other events this week which I cannot so specifically lay my finger on, have left me swinging wildly between feeling okay and so black that pitch shines as a beakon of lightness before being totally swallowed in the depth of my unhappiness.

Although so far I have been able to act/react pretty normally when in conversation, particularly with my parents, my sleep which has never been good is now at a stage where I can either get absolutely no sleep or my body relents and I sleep very deeply at all the wrong times and for too long. I'm also starting to feel, as I mentioned, mixed feelings with regards to the end of term: I'm happy because of the holidays and the end of the labs, and I'm looking forward to Christmas; but at the same time, I'm worried, among other things, about how my change of schedule will affect my already pretty rubbish health/sleep patterns, and how I will be able to make use of the holiday which will be my best chance to consolidate what I've done this term and actually make sure that I know all I need to know about this term's stuff before we start learning more new things next term and I have to start again. Those and other worries which I can't quite work out how to articulate are all pretty banal and irrational, but they are what they are, and I can't shake them.

Right now, I really wish I was in bed, or working, but while being to tired to concentrate on work, I'm not tired enough to sleep. So I'm doing this: hardly productive and sounding pretty pathetic, leading me to decide that I'm going to stop, give up, and go to bed anyway. At least it'll be warm in there.

Today I am very low; I have no internet at home and am suffering from 'flu like symptoms. I have sat half comatose through all my morning lectures and I don't anticipate being any more lively in the next one.

Hopefully my Doctor's appointment will give me some help, if I survive until 4 O'Clock, which feels like an age away.

"And Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now"

Some days are better than others. Today is certainly not one of those days.

The Doctor, when he prescribed this new medication, did say that things would probably deteriorate quite a lot before they started to get any better, and he was definitely right. I feel rotten. My sleep is getting worse, something I didn't think could happen, and my moods are now so unpredictable that I really don't know what's going on from one minute to the next. It doesn't help of course that without Uni or anything like that, I don't have any structure which I feel obliged to follow; and please don't suggest I get a job, because the way I feel, and the way I am with new things, that just isn't an option. I wish it was, but there's no way I could handle that at present, I just couldn't.

With the short bursts of sleep that I do manage to get, I wake up feeling an even more intense sense of disappointment that the death dream didn't fullfil itself during the night. I've had a death dream on a pretty regular basis for as long as I can remember, and it's always left me feeling at a bit of an anticlimax in the morning: that nagging regret that it didn't happen for real and the hope throughout the day that "tonight it might work". However, as is fairly obvious by the presence of this post, it has never happened, and over the years, although it never went away, I had, I thought, learnt to live with the gutted feeling that lived inside me and took over my thoughts. But then recently it started to become more pressing, a far more active and distracting thought in my mind that I can't seem to work through; nor do I want to if I'm honest.

Well there's not really anything I can do about it except try and practice my bluffing technique for tomorrow so that I don't ruin my Dad's birthday, not something I'm terribly optimistic about, but I do want him to have a nice day.

I wish I was dead

'nough said

Bad, Bad Day

I would imagine the title speaks for itself doesn't it?

Damnation

There was me thinking that things were looking up...

Yesterday and Monday I did manage the whole going out thing, but it made me feel really sick; today I stayed in bed until one and would have stayed longer if I hadn't heard the call of nature and then forced myself to get up. I felt truly shite, and to top it all, when I did get up I discovered that my Nan (who was with us for a few days when she came back from holidaying with her brother in Jersey) had given me her cold. Not happy.

On the plus side, my cousin eM should by now have the keys to her new house ready to move in tomorrow. She's not feeling too well either though, so here's an official 'Get Well Soon' from me.

Mood Diary

Date: 10-11-07
Mood: 3
Events/Activities: Watching Star Trek
Emotions/Feelings: Shite, panic, Chest pain