I’ve had enough of my toilet seat depression!

Thanks to huntersglory.blogspot.ie

A month ago my friend Soldier Boy gave me a T-Shirt printed with the slogan:
'I hate being bipolar - it’s great!'

Thankfully I’m not bipolar, but I do live with depression. I refuse to say ‘suffer’ from depression, because there are benefits to this condition. When the darkness lifts I enjoy a (manic?) upswing of utter clarity, accompanied by an energetic boost which I would never choose to live without. Anyway, there are an infinite amount of levels of depression. It’s not just a matter of being ‘depressed’ or ‘happy’.

For the past few weeks I’ve been trapped in what I call low-level depression, whereby I’m able to function, exercise and even appear to be having a good time, while privately I’m feeling horribly vulnerable, with tears permanently half an inch behind my eyes, unable to focus mentally, unsure who or why I am.

This present episode, which I’m calling The Toilet Seat Depression, has come at a really frustrating and most unwelcome time, as right now life is good. I am happy, and have much to be grateful for.

It’s bloody inconvenient and I wish it’d just go away. I know that one bright morning I will awake and feel myself again (that didn’t come out quite right, but I’ll leave it to your imagination, my poor colyoomistas). That happy morning will start at 7 or 8 am, and not at 4.56 am, which is where my days are starting while I’m going through this mental chicane.

In my bad old days, depression used to knock me off my feet. I’d be immobile, alienated and useless, but since I’ve been taking omega fish oil supplements, the frequency of truly dark depressions has lessened dramatically. I don’t know whether this is a purely psychosomatic reaction, or whether there are medical reasons why it works, and I don’t care. I’ll take what I’m going through now over my old-style mental prison any day.

But, as I said, it’s very frustrating, because this is a period of time that I want to enjoy, to live to the full, and to be so tantalisingly close to happiness yet so far from fully grasping it is maddening.

So what’s all this about toilet seats?

Well, a month ago it was the Snapper’s birthday, and being a dutiful husband I’d taken note when she complained that the toilet seat in our new home felt so cold on her delicate female butt cheeks that she found it hard to fulfil her lavatorial destiny.

‘Aha!’ I thought to myself. ‘I will buy her a wooden toilet seat, which perchance, unlike the existing one, will be able to remain upright, so that I can finally take a stand-up manly peeper in my own home, while herself can perform her duties without going into shock.’

So in what very possibly qualifies as the least romantic birthday present of all time, I wrapped up the wooden toilet seat and presented it to her on her birthday morning. In my defence, I had also arranged for her to enjoy several extremely romantic presents, none of which were wrappable. A calla lily was planted in the garden, just as she had requested; she enjoyed a tea party with her friends and a posh dinner out with her loving husband.

But you have to unwrap something on your birthday morning, and she laughed as she supped on her glass of bubbles, thanking me as much as anyone can thank another for a toilet seat.

A few days later, when I found myself in this funky mental rut and unable to scribble at this keyboard, I decided to fit the new wooden seat.
Sadly, at the best of times I am far from a wizard with a screwdriver, and this seat came with a dearth of instruction and a plethora of washers, bolts and nuts, but I could not then and still cannot accept that a grown-up almost intelligent man in charge of his limbs might be unable to fit a toilet seat.

So I lay on my back and fiddled and screwed and placed the washer here and the bolt fell off there. I muttered and twisted and pushed and pulled and finally, it all seemed to be done, except as soon as I tested the seat with my voluptuous arse, it proved dangerously mobile, off-centre and unstable - 3 things that you just don't want in a toilet seat.

Since then I’ve had several more bouts with it, lying dirty sweaty agitated and disgruntled on the bathroom floor, scrunched and twisted into several anti-yogic positions, squashed between the bath and the wall, with washers dropping into the bowl, screws falling into my eyes and patience a thing of the past.

As I sit here today, the seat is only attached on one side, and the lid falls down against your back when you sit on it. Despite herself’s request that I replace it with the old one, I’m now unable to remove the new one as there is a bolt that just will not budge.

Yesterday I called my friend The Guru for help, so by the time you read this I’m sure he’ll have sorted it, but the fitting of this damned seat has coincided with those feelings of self-doubt which come to the fore when my poor old brainbox is addled by depression.

I knew I should never have attempted to fix it while in this state, but I’m a stubborn fool, who finds it tremendously difficult to come to terms with my own mental weakness.

Indeed, the most unerringly reliable first sign of depression coming along is my own refusal to accept that there’s a depression coming along. For a couple of months I live in denial, doggedly carrying on as if nothing has changed in my cerebellum, until such time as I’m forced to accept that I can’t manage to do what I usually can.

I can’t fix a bloody toilet seat.

I might not know what day it is, but I'm sure my wife's not in hospital!

Good day bad day terrible day good day. This is the strangest depression I’ve ever had. The good day comes along and I allow myself to believe that at last the dark shroud is gone from me, only to be followed by a night of either emotional or physical nightmares filled with pure terror.

Waking the next morning I feel shredded. Intellectually I know that they (these particular nightmares tend to travel in threes) are only dreams. I know that my father is not going to collapse into my arms having a stroke. I know that Martin is alive and preposterously well. I know that the woman being hurled along the pavement on her back by an entity unseen does not even exist. She is a figment of my addled old brainbox. 

But it makes no difference. Unlike yer average nightmares, these babies affect me for the rest of the day. My mate Angel, himself PTSD, reckons I’ve got a touch of his affliction. 

Who knows?

I don’t. That’s for sure. 

The bad days come in various tastes and colours. Sometimes I get those familiar senses of detachment and alienation. Driving along the Headford Road, I am suddenly unsure of the reality I inhabit. Am I really driving? Does any of it really matter? Am I coming or going?

Who cares?

Sometimes I feel a little better and wander into town, intent on trying to behave as I normally do. A coffee in Neactain’s, a Jamie in The Quays and then back home to work some more. 

But I’m not up to chatting, shooting the shit, however wonderful the people that I bump into might be.

It’s all very familiar. Each weary evening that has me dozing helpless at 9.30pm; each early dawn morning that is greeted by the thought that I don’t want to get out of bed; but then, I find I do, and oh look, it’s a good day.

No, I’ve never plucked this particular peculiar variety from the Depression Jamboree Pick‘n’Mix bag before. But then, I’ve never had this set of problems before. 

If you go along with the idea that depression is split into two types - endogenous and reactive - then I’m a member of the former group. My dark shroud was woven from the cloth of my DNA. My depression is not concerned whether I’m happy or sad. I can be feeling joyous as a mackerel chasing a sprat, swimming through the ocean of life with narry a care about me, when BAM, turns out the sprat had a hook on it, and the darkness starts to reel me in.

Nothing in nature is set fast and perfect. Nobody, I suspect, is purely either reactive or endogenous. So given the amount of pretty shitty things that have been happening to me recently, there’s a good chance that I’ve been affected by outside circumstances and events. 

Self pity is anathema to me. If I hear myself whinging three times about the same thing, I either shut up or do something about it. I’m not looking to be a victim or feel sorry for myself, yet sometimes the chaos of the universe delivers a series of heavy blows that I just didn’t see coming.

I wasn’t expecting the financiers of my book to move the goal posts and I wasn't expecting to upset and fall out with a good friend and colleague. Most of all, when the pain in my knee warranted a visit to the doctor, I didn’t expect to hear that there was nothing he could do. For the first time in my life I was told by my doctor that this was me getting old, so tough luck. Osteo-arthritis, which is going to get worse and soon include the other knee. The pain seemed to come on very quickly and is almost ever-present, sometimes gripping the whole lower leg and foot.

To be honest, in itself, no biggie. I can deal with pain, but it’s pretty hard coming to terms with the idea of being in pain for the rest of my life. There’s physiotherapy and Cortisone injections and all manner of ways to manage the condition, but that’s the word: manage. It ain’t going away.

As I said, being a resilient bugger, the idea of pain itself would not have tipped me over the edge. But there was a final blow; one which I am still struggling to get my head around.

For nearly 20 years I’ve cured my head and heart by stomping up the Salthill Prom. When I lived in Yorkshire I hiked the moors and the dales. When I lived in Connemara I strolled the fuschia-clad bohreens. When I lived in Killala I walked the magnificent empty beaches. When I lived in San Francisco I walked through Golden Gate Park to the Pacific Ocean. 

Now not only does walking hurt, but unless the surface gives underfoot, it’s actually doing me harm. I’m allowed to cycle or swim, but the Prom is out. 

In no small way my walking makes life worth living. I clear my head, absorb the beauty of the universe, sweat buckets of crap out of me and come home feeling vibrant and ready for anything. Some days now I can barely wobble up Quay Street without pain and a limp. Even if others might not see it, I feel the effort of trying to walk as I used to. 

The journey I have to make is to acceptance, coupled with doing my physio exercises and taking the injections when it gets too bad to bear. I haven't lost all sense of perspective, and am well aware that there are many wonderful things to live for. I’ve got the best people any human could hope for, offering me love and support in as many differing ways as our species can construct. I’m living in the right place and there are an unknown horde of fellow humans who are suffering much worse than I am.

Yeh, hmm, that last one never really hits me hard enough. The relativism of pain and suffering just doesn’t appeal as a concept. But giving thanks is important and so I do, even when I’m lost to the others, listening to them but feeling distanced, as if they’re on DVD and I’ve lost the remote control.

The one thing I do know for sure is that it will pass. I’m trying to come up with an answer to a question that has none, so as well as seeking counselling I’ll work on acceptance. Therein lies strength and hope for the future. 

In the meantime I’m just getting through each day. Today is a good day. Thankfully last Friday was a good day too. Had it been a bad day I’m not sure I’d have been able to cope with the scene at the hospital.

As the kind older nurse taking some of my blood turned around to talk to her colleague, I felt the needle twist inside my arm. My yelp of pain procured a ticking off from the nurse.

“Ah now, come on widja. It’s not that bad, sure it isn’t. You’ve got terrible jiggly veins, so you have.”

I said nothing, but today as I sit here my arm sports a thundercloud-and-jaundice bruise four inches long, two inches wide, six days after my jiggly veins got in the way of her needle.

A little later, after inspecting the form I’d passed on to her from the Snapper’s doctor, she declared it hadn’t been correctly filled out.

“What’s you wife’s name again?”

I told her.

She rattled a few keys on her computer keyboard.

“Well I’ll just go and have a word with her and check a few details.”

“You will? How?”

“Well, I’ll pop down the ward and see her.”

“But she isn’t on any ward. She came in two days ago for a procedure, waited around all day and then was sent home without it being done. She’s at home.”

And then a wonderful depression-defying, reality-altering question came forth from her indignant wrinkled lips.

“Are you sure?”

As you know, it’s quite incredible how much can go through your brain in a couple of seconds. Given that I had on previous recent days lost touch with reality, I mentally trembled for a trice, wondering if I’d got it all wrong and - but no. 

No no no no no. 

However bad my depression may be, the Irish Health Service as run by the HSE, is worse. Most of the people who work in it are fabulous, but whether it’s the heinous financial cuts or the brainless bureaucratic system, the service itself runs like a derailed train on treacle. You never know where it’s going, yet inevitably it takes an enormous effort to get there.

Was I sure? I was not sure who the person in that bed was, nor how they might feel about being on hospital records as being the Snapper. I was not sure even if there was a person in that bed. But was I sure, absolutely sure, that the Snapper was not in hospital.

Yes. 

Yes, of that at least I was sure. 

Thank you thank you thank you for asking me such an absurd question. At last I am sure of something.

“Yes, I am sure. I am sure that my wife is not in hospital. I am sure that my wife is at home, asleep, in bed.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh.”

“Well, there’s no need to be like that about it.”

“Sorry. I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather.”

Look out - Depression is the new Swine Flu!

After the last colyoom about how fluffy life is in Galway, what with us not knowing what day it is and everything, I started to feel uneasy.

As the votes continue to fly in for an excerpt of the ‘Getting Galwayed’ chapter of my new book, ‘Do I Love Ireland’, I realised that were I to post a 'funny guffaw ha ha' clip from that chapter, it would simply perpetuate the image of Galway that this colyoom has been indulging in for many years.

Yes, Galway is a great place where you can make friends easily. You can find company to get drunk with any day of the year if that is what you want, and even, as in the colyoom below, end up collectively unsure which day of the week it is, and not caring.

Oh ha ha.

Truth is, I rarely if ever drink any more, and on that very afternoon I wrote about in the previous colyoom, I completed three lengthy talks with very different and most excellent friends of mine, all of whom were under the cosh of depression. By the end of the week I had listened to and tried to support 4 depressed friends in total, and another two who didn’t have depression but were suffering terminal cases of the blues.

It’s facile to think that this recession causes depression simply by making people broke. There are an infinite number of recession-induced pressures that contribute to either a spell of depression or feeling down.

Couples where both people earned suddenly become relationships where one earns and the other is lost in status, role and self-esteem. People become lonely because they cannot afford to go out, especially in rural Ireland, where going out invariably means going to the pub.

Point is, I felt fraudulent by making light of the dark and heavy loads presently being carried by my fellow Galwegians, and myself. We are living in depressed times and it is hard to shake a tail feather of joy and exuberance without attracting a begrudging or bemused stare.

So in solidarity with those friends and all you strangers who are living with depression right now, I’m going to break my own rules. That’s the great thing about making up rules; you can break them and nobody can say ‘pooey!’.

Tomorrow, as promised, an excerpt will appear from the chapter most-voted for in the poll 2 colyooms below (get your votes in today - last chance!). But now, as if in defiance of all your votes, my beloved colyoomistas, I am going to print a clip from a chapter that not one single person voted for -

Chapter 10 - My body, blue bag and black dog’, they being topics that each in turn relate to my lardy belly, my hitching spirit of adventure and my depressions, as they appear to me.

So, rather like depression, in that you didn’t ask for it, almost certainly can live without it, but are getting it anyway, and in support of all of you out there living with the burden of your own black dogs, this colyoom offers something that ain’t funny, ain’t light but is truly real and relevant. Thankfully, Irish attitudes to mental illness have moved on since this colyoom was written.


November 2000.
I’m possessed buy an invisible malevolent twin!

Rather than accepting it as an illness like the ‘flu, Irish people are terrified of talking about depression. I feel no stigma whatsoever in saying I live with depression, (preferable to admitting I suffer from depression), but whenever I mention the illness, my Irish friends seek to console me by saying that they’ve been down in the dumps too.
Despite their best intentions, all they are doing is showing that they don’t understand what I’m talking about. Depression has nothing whatsoever to do with being down in the dumps.
We all have rough periods, when personal and professional trauma hit, and we stumble on our journey through life, taking shelter in sadness and grief.
But depression, or at least my own depression, arrives as an uninvited guest, out of the blue.
It can visit when absolutely everything in my life is rosy. I can be sitting on a cliff top, looking out over all the Arcadian splendour that the west of Ireland has to offer, thinking how lucky I am to have such wonderful friends, such a loving family, and the next instant I’m gripped by an all-encompassing empty melancholy that negates the meaning and purpose of life.
Many years back, I was walking up Lenaboy Avenue in Salthill when a supremely fierce depression hit me as a punch in the guts, actually forcing me to physically double up, as if to retch. There was nothing going on in my life to feel down about, but – Bam! - the darkness was upon me.
Over the years I’ve learned to live with these bouts. Indeed, as with many other creative genius types over the course of history, I’ve even come to understand that the relative loss of sanity is an intrinsic part of the artistic process. Periods of depression appear to me as a mental chicanes, times when everything seems exaggerated, distorted, squeezed into the wrong holes.
I know that on the other side of the depression there exists some kind of catharsis that will reveal to me the hidden process that my mind has been undergoing.
It’s like being possessed by an invisible malevolent twin, a persona that robs you of all your energy and self-confidence.
That’s the worst part of depression for me, the way it sucks my energy levels. Instead of powering up the Prom to Black Rock several times a week, I find a gentle stroll to town absolutely exhausting, and whoah, how I long to have that spring back in my step.
Of course this depression will pass, as have all the others, but my short patience is tested by the inability of my fellow Galwegians to understand that the illness even exists; that it is neither a self-indulgence, nor a reaction to things going wrong.
As I explained to my good friend The Body this week, normally I like my life and I like myself, but right now I have neither the positive thought nor the physical energy with which to trade as a human being in the outside world.
He dug deep into his humour bag, searching for appropriate wit and pathos.
“Sure, why would you feel self confident? What do you have to feel self-confident about?”
Of course, many of you reading this will live with depression too, so hey, you’re not weird ... well, even if you are, you’re in good company!

I can tell you what I’m not going to write about!

There have been times, thankfully few and very far between, when depression has hit me like a hammer to the knees. What’s going on at the moment is nothing like that; more like a bad head cold to pneumonia; half a shandy to a double whiskey.
‘Twould be strange not to show and feel some repercussions, having just buried my father and married my wife (simply wouldn’t do to marry somebody else’s), and I’m nothing if not tremendously human.
My dad’s death came at the end of an eleven year decline, during which time I lived increasingly on permanent stand-by to return to London. Dad’s many hospital emergencies necessitated frequent visits over there, which were inevitably announced by the ringing of the phone, and gradually I grew to fear the landline.
So now I’m eager, willing and ready to embrace my new life, support my beloved family and nurture and love my wife. I want to lose weight and walk miles and finish the bleedin’ novel and knock out tremendous colyooms for all you loyal and accidental types who are sucked into reading this.
But I can’t.
If you do not live with depression then it’s quite possible you imagine it comes in a singular way: the same dose each time.
Speaking personally, I know that I am at the moment displaying and presenting symptoms that I recognise as some of the ingredients of depression, but equally I’m able to function; not knocked out; not feeling alienated; not disoriented.
I was disoriented a few weeks ago, stumbling down Shop Street as if on the deck of a galleon sailing the high seas.
And now I’m not, and that’s it. That’s why I am not accepting that I’m depressed at the moment. I’m not a kid who wants to stay home from school. I don’t want to shrink away from life right now. I want to go out and live it and sit here and write it.
(Bravado pumps through me as, sitting here with held breath, I barely allow myself to put commas into these pompous and inconsequential pronouncements.)
But there are some things I cannot do.
I cannot stay awake very long, of an evening.
I cannot force or rush the grieving process, much as I would like to. My feelings of loss and sadness are seeping through, as marble in stone, and it’s irritating. I want to feel a rushing flooding gush of it, yet instead I have mini-blubbers, like when I found myself crying at a bloody re-run of Scrubs when JD’s dad died.
Surely I can do better than that? Please god.
The germane and most immediate thing that I found myself unable to do was to decide upon a topic for this week’s colyoom.
Over the last 16 years I have naturally developed several fail-safe mechanisms that guarantee you the chance of reading something vaguely cohesive and very occasionally, maybe perceptive or witty.
I have my notes, and clippings. I have my life and each week presents the chance encounter that might and probably will happen with somebody on a Galway street that’ll set my mental cabbage soup to simmer.
And then, like so many of us, I have my working ritual: my pre-colyoom Sunday morning walk on the Prom , the leisurely breakfast and finally, the moment which has delivered more colyooms than any other device: the last visit to the bathroom before sitting down to work.
Week after week, despite having no clear idea of how I am going to produce these 1,000 words, for some reason I feel very calm, both physically and spiritually, and while I brush my teeth, sloosh the mouthwash and have a final peeper, a thought dribbles into my brain and nudges a nerve-ending.
And by the time I am sitting here a few short seconds later, it’s all coming together and I’m off.
But today, it wasn’t like that at all.
Today, Mr. I Am Not Depressed could not for some reason prioritise what he wanted to say.
And an hour later, (YIKES!) he started writing in the Third Person.
So evidently for me, depression comes in many ways. Although I become tired, I do still have energy that would be completely lacking during those rare dark times.
But while my black dog is not sitting hard and heavy on my chest, he is still out there, prowling the perimeter fence.
Even though I am able to function fairly well as a human being, the simple truth that I cannot decide what to write about is, for a columnist, at best an inconvenience, at worst, some might feel, something of a drawback.
For the reader it’s nothing less than an imposition. You entered into this page in good faith, expecting a theme, a topic at least, noch!
And what do you get for your troubles? What kind of colyoom action are you having to accept as reward? Not a whiff of humour; not a single arrogant finger-pointing lecture mocking either you or your life-style; not even an outrageous piece of hyperbole by which you could have become instantly disgusted and appalled.
Given this massive deficiency on my side of the writer-reader pact, it seems only fair that I should offer something in return, for your troubles, as it were.
So after not very long and ill-considered reflection, I’ve decided that the very least I can do at this stage is tell you what I’m not going to write about.
Enter if you will the tremendously anti-climactic territory that is this scribbler’s brain. If you are condemned to read this colyoom week after week, there will doubtless have been many when, upon either finishing the entirety or giving up at some earlier point, you thought to yourself:
‘How the hell does he get away with this drivel?’
To you, I say, consider this: by revealing to you all what I was going to write about and yet decided against, you will realise that that ‘drivel’, madam, that ‘drivel’ was, at the particular moment of its writing, the very pinnacle of my own creativity.
When you see what pathetic and inconsequential musings might have made it onto the sacrosanct pages of this Noble Rag, I will have nowhere to run.
My craven lack of talent will be forever exposed.
Aw shucks, we’ve run out of room.
I’ll get back to you about all that drivel.

If I pay you not to pack my bag, does that make me a control freak?

Here I am, in the checkout queue at Tescos, building nervous tension and breaking a sweat because there are teenagers helping pack the bags.
Yes, you read that right. After months of suppressing the needs that have to be satisfied to preserve my sanity, my neuroses are now spilling forth like farts in a colander.
Teenagers per se do not disturb me in the least. Thankfully there are many children I come into contact with in my daily life, and that pleases me and eases my heart. No, it's not the fact that they are teenagers, but more the fact that they are lined up in yellow T-shirts and blue baseball caps, eagerly happily helping the weary shoppers with their bagging, whilst raising money to buy as many three-legged rabbits as they can so that they can send them off to cheer up the children of Chernobyl on their long journey to Lourdes to play hockey with the local Police Force Youth Team.
Why the madness?
This colyoom tends to be spilled from addled brain on Sunday mornings. At this quiet hour the world is calm and I can disappear - some might say up my own backside - and scribble.
It is no surprise that the production of novels requires more time and separation from the madding crowd.
Two of the three novels I have completed took three years each, but the one I wrote whilst living alone in Connemara was rattled out in a year. The freedom to live in an uninterrupted fantasy world, lost between the realms of fact and fiction, with time to walk the back roads, beaches and bohreens; the absence of demanding human contact: for me at that time was ideal.
But we do not stay the same person throughout our lives, and for the last few years I have been participating in society. Living and working the city life does not offer the same time and freedom to inhabit the writer's happy place.
I tell myself that if I am the same man who found in peace in the countryside, I can achieve that mental state anywhere.
Yet upon waking up, my mind is automatically writing lists of people and places to see and be, and the day is gone again.
Faced with this challenge of how to create a vent for my creative steam, I flail around like a walrus, whingeing and crying and wailing, trying and failing to impose my needs, either by attack or terminal retreat.
I think writers seek to control their environments more than all other creative artists.
Deprived of the rhythms of the empty house and vacant day, I try and fail to isolate times and spaces wherein I can sit and be at peace with my scribbling urges.
If that fails, all that controlling energy has to be to dumped somewhere else.
Hence your colyoomist is not well in the head.
Having negotiated the weekly shop, I want the entire process of paying for it, packing it up and putting it away at home over and done with as quickly and efficiently as possible, to hasten the hour that will allow me to be sitting down at home, calmly contemplating what it is I might write today.
Hence sadly, I am twitching as I prepare to be served. All the frustrated controlling energy that is bursting out of me has already sorted the stuff in my trolley so that the heavy stuff can roll down the conveyer belt first.
The fruit and veg are all together, and the eggs, bread and breakables are at the end.
Shit, it ain't rocket science. It's only the goddam shopping, but today I am Mr. Neurotic Creatively Frustrated Crazy Guy, and I want - nay, need - to be left alone.
As nice as pie, I ask the unsuspecting young lass not to pack my stuff. I smile at her, trying to look non-threatening and relaxed, but she isn't fooled for a moment. She quickly retreats, as I rather ostentatiously place a few euro in her collecting bucket, to show I mean no harm; that I may be weird but i still have compassion
Sorry love! Quite possibly I looked a lot more frightening than I thought I did.
So I end up paying her not to help. In fact I end up paying her more money not to help me than I would if she had helped me.
But when does help stop being helpful?
Yes, yes, it's all very bloody wonderful and just marvellous that these young people are so well intentioned and well dressed and well mannered; it's just dandy that they are working; that indeed they are out of bed so early in the day, considering they are young people and it is morning, but I do not want to help the three-legged rabbits and little children of Chernobyl by giving gastro-enteritis to my friends and family.
I do not want my raw meats squashed into a bag of leafy vegetables. Nor do I want my eggs crushed under 2.5kg of Rooster potatoes. The frozen stuff goes in the freezer bag, and yes, I know this looks like complete control freakery, but that's the point.
If had more control over when I was able to write, I am sure I could let go of the need to control other aspects of my life.
There is no pleasure in all this control. It's not as if there's a target you reach, when you sit back and become happy. Into the bargain, I have been in a mild state of depression since mid-December, so there is precious little sanity to spare.
In order to write fiction, to completely let go and have those winds blowing free through my mental doors and windows, I have to know that there is nothing else I should be doing.
I find it so hard to stop giving a shit; to let the household run out of stuff; to let the bills remain unpaid, so instead I walk the earth with entry-level O.C.D. and eruptions of control freakery.
Perchance when the depression lifts I will see that there was time and space availiable all the time; that I was simply blind to it.
At least I know that one day the depression will lift. I suspect that my neurotic behaviours might be here to stay.
cadley1@eircom.net
http://doubledoublevision.blogspot.com/