Ten
This started with a voice. The threat of voices have long threatened my adult life. Going through my cluster of panic attacks and anxiety as an 18-year-old, I regularly saw a psychiatrist at a public hospital. One particularly horrible day, he told me I was heading for a nervous breakdown. Mental hospitals are full of authors who lost the ability to distinguish fiction from reality, he told me. Among other things, he asked if I’d heard voices. I told him I hadn’t but, terrified, asked him what I should do if I did. He told me not to listen to them. Around the same time, I had a friend who…
The Other Me
‘The Long Hard Fall’ iv. As my relationship with Allie deteriorated, the shadows of depression cast over the fringes of my mind. I took epic walks, and lamented my life, that I was nobody, nothing, that I wasn’t like ‘normal people’ (to whom Allie always compared me), who had jobs and security and all that, and questioned whether I ever could be. I got a referral to a work-placement agency that specialised in dealing with people with mental problems, and was assigned a case worker, Martina, who’d previously worked extensively in counselling. After several appointments, Martina said she felt I was ‘a little bit bipolar’. It wouldn’t have surprised me…
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