Illness

Last night I spent a great deal of time on my bedroom floor. Not having got around to hoovering it for a good three weeks, it's not the most pleasant place to be. I can think of Western towns that have fewer dustbunnies than my fake-wood floor, but regardless.

I was looking through boxes trying to find old copies of Artslinks in order to grab the reviews of me to add to my application for the Old Vic 24 Hour Plays which I have been procrastinating over for about a month now in trad Kat style. I singularly failed to find the one I was looking for and instead, i found one of my diaries from when I was 18/19 and in my second year of university.

I don't usually go back over my diaries, mostly because they're filled with mopy teenagery and bad song lyrics, but I'd run out of recorded telly to watch on BT Vision and settled down on a plump cushion of tumbleweed to have a giggle.

You know when you've moved on when you don't actually recognise the person in the writing. Even worse, when you actually worry about the person there. I've admitted to being a Vile Teenager and clinically depressed etc etc, but this is the first time I've been distanced enough from everything to realise that the person in that writing is really fucking ill.

The paranoia and side effects from my lies-induced bout of Seroxat earlier this year gave me a sharp and terrifying flash into what it would be like to fall back into that pit again. Reading my diary, the only thing I seemed to have then due to my pathological hatred of offloading onto people, it was like watching someone drowning in their own head. I felt so sad for her, for this person who didn't get any help, who made other people upset through not explaining, and who was utterly terrified of the future and wanted to be anywhere and anything but herself.

Two of my best friends from that time, Cat and Anna, once told me very gently that I was very hard to be around during that time. Reading that diary, it's a miracle anyone was with me at all. I owe them a lot for putting up with someone who was that ill and didn't know how to do any better.

I wonder what would have happened if I had got treatment earlier, maybe left university for a bit and gone away, and been able to grow up without fighting my head everyday. I might have changed course, I might have gone somewhere else, I might have got the first I should have done in a subject I should have done and been somewhere else.

Yet regardless of all this, all I want to do is to tell that person that it's alright. I achieved all the things she was so desperate for, I have wonderful friends who love me and who I love in return. I love my family as well and that matters so bloody much.

Most importantly, I want to tell her that your head is not meant to be like that: that what she is going through isn't normal and life can be so much better, clearer and more human. I'm just sorry that I didn't do anything more for her, but at the same time I feel a guilty sense of relief that I can close the book and leave her behind.

My life fucking rocks. What's nice, is that it means hers does too.