I feel crap today and what is more I feel guilty for feeling crap. I had a lovely, long, surprised phone conversation with the boyfriend last night. When I say surprised, this is because he was going out with friends and I knew he wouldn’t be back until late, so I didn’t expect a phonecall, however, his evening finished earlier than planned so he rang me. Our conversation made me feel amazing, and special, and very very loved and this is why I feel so bad that my mood has dipped so low today. After a nearly 2 hour conversation with someone telling me how much they love me and how much I mean to them and how special I am, in the early hours of this morning, and spending most of the night awake thinking wonderful thoughts, I did not expect to feel like this less than 12 hours later.
I hate this fucking disease. I hate all the fucking labels I have. I hate the fact that I can swing from one extreme to the other in the blink of an eye, with absolutely no warning and no trigger. I hate the fact that I have to swallow god-knows how many tablets every morning and evening just to put me on this level of stability, which let’s face it, isn’t exactly stable. I hate that I have had to quit my MSc and therefore have lost my funding and place for the subsequent PhD because of it. I hate the fact that my tutor emailed me the other day begging with me, almost pleading, for me to reconsider my options when it came to my university course and was telling me that we all have ‘bad spells’ and maybe getting back into academia would help. Plus apparently I was one of the best PhD studentship researchers he had come across. He sent me details of a PhD studentship the Health Protection Agency are advertising for, but I can’t apply. I can never apply for a post-graduate course again. It was meant to be my fresh start after a whole pile of shit on my under-graduate degree. I was meant to enjoy it, and have fun, and feel like it was my calling. Not dip out, have numerous breakdowns and feel like a complete failure.
Something I really don’t want to face has been brought forwards from 10 April to 3 April. I don’t want to go into too many details about what thi sis until it has happened and I know how it is going to proceed but needless to say a lot hangs on the outcome. When I say a lot I don’t mean my future, well I guess in essence I do because my emotional state depends entirely on the decision and this will affect how easy it is for me to pick my life up and move on in the next few months.
The mother is being lovely, as always. She is very practical, pragmatic and logical. When something awful happens, she doesn’t go into a state of blind panic, like I do, but she sits down calmly and works out the order in which she needs to deal with things to make things better again. I wish I could be more like her, but I’m not. She is a realist, she works on what has happened and what needs to happen and how this can happen. I am an idealist, I freak out at what has happened, sit and daydream about how much better things would have been if it hadn’t happened, stick my head in the sand in the hopes that if I ignore what has happened then it will disappear and then a bit later realise I have to deal with it but have no bloody clue how to go about it.
I hate my body. I hate the fact it bends so much and because of this hurts. At the moment I don’t know which hurts most… my ankle (which is healing and thank god I have a cast on it because I have this bad, bad urge to itch and pull at the sutures), my back (which hurts from time to time – a side effect of ankylosing spondylitis), my joints (I have hypermobility syndrome, or Ehlers Danlos III, or the ability to be a contortion artist when I choose) or my head.
I am cracking up, both physically and mentally, and there is a large part of me which wonders whether it is actually worth trying to glue me back together again.
Ruth
