Through the decades

I might as well say, before I start, today's entry isn't going to be light reading. I have hit the buffers somewhat, as I often do just after Christmas. Maybe its the inevitable comedown after the highs of the festive season, but it is what it is, and I feel how I feel.

I've been watching Every Number One Of The Eighties on MTV classic, and it made me wistful for that decade, as if transporting myself there would be the solution to all of life's problems - a decade when my memory would have it that I had no responsibilities (or responsibility) and everything was relaxed and fun. Of course, being who I am, and having the reflective nature I do, I couldn't let it lie there, and now find myself disecting the past and reflecting that it wasn't all I crack it up to be.

I look at things through the prism of what I shall charitably call 'my mental issues'. In truth, they are not some recent phenomenon (indeed I don't think I ever thought they were) - but of course, back there in the past they had no name. I was just Dave, not understanding why my mind worked the way it did.

I've spent a great deal of my life trying to hide parts of myself away. Always terrified of being questioned or probed about why I am doing something or what I feel the need to say. As a teenager it is not east to explain why you have to walk the same way to a location, and it was torture trying to undertake one of my little rituals without being seen and mocked. Looking back I cannot begin to really recall how much stress I was under, but there was always that numb sensation at the back of the mind that the floodgates will not hold out forever, at some point the world will burst into my bubble and I would be lost in it, unable to cope amidst the noise and the chaos when all I ever wanted then was peace and order. That's the thing with OCD, everything needs to be in order, just so. I used to physically recoil at, for example, a car backfiring. I was so wound into stress at coping that I was a ticking timebomb. It amazes me to this day that I held out so long before everything disintegrated.

As a young adult in the late eighties and through the nineties, again I suppose life was not as rosy as daydreaming about it suggests. Perhaps this was when I was first truly aware that everything was wrong. I've never been good at sharing pain, especially so to people I feel closest to. How do you tell someone you love that everything is wrong? How can you face up to them when you are blue and explain that it is not them, it really is not them, but that you cannot be anything but blue? Then of course I was still hiding rituals away to get me through. I must have appeared so distant at times as I tried to cope with it all in secret.

I tried different ways around the problems back then. Drink was one way, something I relied on very heavily until I was about 30. Drink suppressed the immediate feelings, and offered temporary reprieve, as well as being a handy cover for my occasionally bizarre behaviour, but of course it is a depressant itself and only served to add to the spiral. It also has the side effect of making you act like an arse to the people you love the most sometimes. If that's you, just know that I am sorry now and I was back then too. It wasn't jsut drink though, I detested myself, or rather, I detested being ill and being permanently stressed and I tried so many ways to numb the feelings. There were so many ways I tried to be different so that I was no longer ashamed of being different, so that 'different' became my norm. What do you do when you cannot share the whirlwind inside? I actually feel tense at this moment thinking about it. How the breakdown of 2009 was the culmnation of (literally) decades of denial, hiding, transferral and stress.

Of course now the truth is out, my family and friends know I have been unwell, and I know the signs to look out for. However, still, in the back of my mind I know how hard it is to share the feelings, the rawness of OCD and Depression and I feel guilty at the thought of burdening anyone else with it. It's lonely, and the weird thing is, loneliness is the thing I am most scared of now. I don't want to be alone. So I have to find a way of sharing and it not causing consternation, or we are headed back to square one and I've been there before. It's not somewhere I'd recommend to anyone.