It’s been a difficult month as my mood has gone really shitty and I’m really struggling to stay positive and to keep fighting.  I don’t know where this has come from.  Things were going okay they weren’t brilliant but I was getting ready to go back to work or more aptly starting to do some permitted work with the view to try and go back full time next year.  But that just seems like a distant dream at the moment I’m constantly exhausted and yet I’m sleeping for England, the anxiety is back in force and I’m having to force myself to leave the house at the moment and so it goes on.  Suffice to say I’m fed up of all this and I’m struggling to see the end of the tunnel.

Last Saturday my landlord came around and got me up and out of bed at midday – oops!  I couldn’t be bothered to pretend that I was awake so I greeted him in my pj’s!  Anyway after much bullshit from him including he was advised by his CPN to call the police to evict me he dramatically opened a letter from his landlord and low and behold the eviction notice that I’ve been waiting for, for months has been issued and indeed my landlord has been taken to court.  The court have awarded his landlord a possesion order and thus I should leave my flat on Monday oh yes he left me a week to find myself somewhere to live.  Stupid twat then handed me his rent card, suggested I pay of the arrears and I could live there happily ever after – yeah right!!  On Monday I saw Sam and she rang up the council (who have agreed they have a duty to house me) who said I need to wait for the bailiffs to turn up – apparently the court will instruct them to come in a few weeks.  So I am now imminently homeless and shortly I will be loosing my lovely home or more aptly flat and I’ll be moving to some form of temporary housing.  I have so many questions but at the moment it’s to early for them to be answered but I’m hoping soon I’ll have an idea if I’m going to be moving out of the area which will mean changing GP and thus losing Sam and potentially Holly (depending on how far away I am moved).

If I’m honest whilst it’s good news in the sense that I can finally start to move forward I am also freaking terrified and it all just feels to much.  If my landlord hadn’t of been a twat who played games I would of had the news when my mood was okay and it wouldn’t of all felt so god damn daunting.  Hopefully things will become clearer next week as the lady I’ve dealt with at the council is back of annual leave and I see Sam again.

Anyway today I’ve spent the evening watching Children in Need but bed is calling as I have to be up early as I have a tutorial for my next OU module.

xox

On Friday one of the girls from the volunteering place agreed to go to the local fireworks display with me.  I was really worried about how crowded it would be but I put a brave face on and in the end it wasn’t to bad and not only did I enjoy it but I was pleased that I went in the end.  I love fireworks they are just generally happy making as they just inspire that ‘oooh’ response in people!!  My only moan was the fact that there wasn’t a bonfire or a guy but other than that I had a lovely evening .  The rest of the weekend I hibernated at home watching trashy television, eating crap and trying to stay awake!

I saw Sam this morning and we looked at the thoughts I need to process it all and I am currently thinking about writing a response to try and get my point across so we will see how that goes.

Today I saw Sam it wasn’t the best appointment I’ve ever had because as I think I’ve said on previous entries my mood has been on a downhill slope recently.  I arrived and we were in a group room which was kind of odd as it was huge and there were just the two of us in it.  I was really anxious throughout it which I think is in part due to the fact that I am generally really quite anxious at the moment and then there was the whole bundle of joy relating to the fact that I’d cut myself over the weekend.  I was just shy of 3 months free and I just feel so guilty because I let Sam down we’ve done quite a lot of work relating to self harm and every time I’ve seen her and I’ve not done it she has been so chirpy about it.

She asked whether I’d tried to journal my thoughts down and I haven’t so I think I’m going to try and put them down here.

(edited out thoughts)

I’ve been resisting and fighting and so far it’s working to a point and I have to keep trying to fight it and hope that in time the thoughts ease up and things get better.

Today has been a mixed day I really struggled to get to sleep last night so when my alarm went off this morning I cringed a little inside.  I the time ran a little bit late so by the time I got to the meeting place the coordinator (Dave) was there and a new volunteer (N).  We set off to the area where we were working which was a bit of a palava as there was no parking in the area!!  A semi busy day followed it wasn’t hard work but in the morning I felt really dizzy every time I moved which made me feel kind of queasy.  After lunch I was really tired but we didn’t have much to do, so it worked for me!

This evening I saw Holly (counsellor) and we reminisced about the last year as it’s probably been one of the toughest years of my life. With the start of the crappy year roughly occurring this time last year – I think I want to go into more detail on this so I shall end this here and come back to this topic on a day when I’m more awake!

xox

It keeps me busy in the evenings as I am a member of a few internet forums and it keeps me socialising by chatting to friends on msn and skype.

Revision is going slowly and I have far to much still to learn which is highly scary as the exam is fast approaching.

My mood has been quite positive this week so fingers crossed it stays this way as last week it seemed like it was heading downhill again so fingers crossed I can stay on an evil keel for a bit longer.

Tonight I have spent my time watching the X Factor which has been predictably strange but quite fun!

I have a couple of close friends who live in the same area as me who I see on the odd occasion and I have a few friends who I went to university with but they primarily stayed in the area surrounding the university whereas I now live several hours away because of this I don’t see them on regular basis.  My family have lived abroad all my life and my siblings live at home currently so I don’t have a particularly close relationship with them though I suppose I do have a couple of friends in far flung destinations.

I don’t have an active social life I mean I’m lucky if I see a friend once a fortnight and often it’s longer than that.  Recently this has been getting to me more and more and I’m not really certain why.  I think in part it’s because one of my school friends is getting married and when I looked at the photo’s of her hen party a large percentage of my old school year were there and I miss them- I went to a small girls school and as a year we were reasonably close.  Sadly being ill meant that I left the school early and thus lost contact with most of the girls and that is the crux of the problem.

As I said at the start of this entryI’m quite a sociable person but being ill has taken that away from me.  In part because up until a year ago my ‘illness’ was considered to be primarily self inflicted so alongside the Depression I suffered from anorexia/bulimia or more precisely ed – nos and self harm.  If I’m honest because of this I was generally perceived as being an ‘attention seeker’ in part because my weight never dropped that low and my self harm was kept as a well hidden secret from my peers.

I guess I’m now ashamed to get in touch with old friends after all when you haven’t seen someone in a couple of years you have a catch up where you intend to make a good impression by talking about all the amazing things you have been doing and in turn they impress you with what they’ve been up to.   At the moment I don’t have anything to ‘brag’ about and I’d be far to embarrassed to tell them the truth which is as follows – having spent a month in the psych ward earlier this year I don’t currently work and thus claim benefits and I feel like I’m screwing up my life slowly but surely.

I hope things will change soon and I’ll get my self worth back but I doubt I’ll get my friends back and I guess I don’t know how much more of this I can really take.

A year ago things changed and the anxiety and related paranoia kicked up a gear so much so that I decided enough was enough and I made an appointment with my GP.  That appointment changed everything as shortly afterwards I suffered a big psychotic manic episode induced by the anti depressants I was prescribed and from this I ended up with the bipolar diagnosis.

In the last few sessions with both Sam and Holly we have been looking at anxiety in part because mine is that little bit more manageable at the moment.  These discussions have caused me to reflect on things and I look back at times this past year where the anxiety has been uncontrollable so I’ve been scared of having my curtains open because people might look in and laugh at me, at one point this was so bad that I used to go into my kitchen in darkness put on a pan of boiling water and wait for it to boil and in turn fog up the windows at which point I allowed myself to enter the kitchen and cook or do the washing up.  At other times the mere thought of crowds has resulted in abject horror so that I’ve hibernated inside and on the odd occasions where I’ve had to face crowds, at times I’ve been struggling to stop a panic attack from happening. I thus have to concede that whilst the anxiety is no where near as bad as that at the moment I probably am an anxious person isn’t reflection weird!

On non food related news the revision is going slowly but I think I am getting there slowly.  I still have a lot of work to do and it is still taking forever but I’m feeling a teeny tiny bit more positive about it all.

I’m seeing Sam tomorrow and this week she wanted me to think about how she can help me and I have thought about it during the week but I haven’t come up with any ideas primarily because I don’t know as yet what would be helpful.  I’m sure something will come up in the session so fingers crossed the session wont be to awkward!

For the first time in 4 years I’ve had to crack open the books as I’m starting to revise for my upcoming OU exam.  I have a heck of a lot of work to do for it because in typical me style I didn’t do any of the required reading during the course so I’m currently trying to assimilate a year long course, understand it and revise it all in just over 2 weeks.

I am really struggling with the reading due to my complete lack of motivation.  This combined with my inability to keep my mind on track due to my concentration appearing to have been shot to pieces and the utter exhaustion I’m currently feeling means that all in all the revision isn’t going brilliantly.

When this module is over providing I pass I will be halfway through my Masters.  My next course starts early November and the course content seems to be interesting so I’m hoping that I will be more inspired by it as this last course has been particularly dull!!

In other news I did the voluntary work earlier this week and it didn’t rain much to my delight!  However, the area we were working on was utterly vile as it had rubbish dumped throughout so there were condom wrappers, nappies and so on throughout it, despite this we did make considerable headway on the area and whilst I doubt I’ll see the finished product I am sure it will be unrecognisable from how it did at the start.