A doctor who listens!

There’s a parcel waiting at the door to be posted to some woman who’s bought A Kestrel for a Knave through my Amazon seller account that peaked a week or two back in some bizarre saving-the-world-through-bookmarks-about-colony-collapse-disorder fantasy. I get up late after a late night last night trying to work til I drop by doing a translation of The theatre of Jara Cimrman because until ten I had been writing for this blog rather than Call Them Soldiers (I will have to watch out that I don’t slip into doing that more often) and then I was too awake to sleep. I had a valerian tea, which often doesn’t put me to sleep at all – not the brand I have been able to track down of late anyway – and I think that often makes me irritable and jittery the next morning. I got up late, at around twenty past eight, with the post office opening at half past and the doctor’s switchboard too – you have to make appointments on the day and it is a nightmare of ringing and redialling over and over.

I have a shower. Finally. I was beginning to stink again. I realised my lack of personal hygiene is becoming a problem at times when I got a call from a mate to meet up at the driving range with him and a friend. (He phrased it, as he always does, that I don’t have to turn up if I don’t want to, understanding perfectly that I don’t do well with other people.) My mum told me not to wear those jeans as I headed out, with the tear in them. But it was when I got there I realised that I stank. And telling the guy I don’t work at the moment, this guy who looks so straight-laced. The kind of guy who comes over as older than his years, though handsome. As the hot water hit me I tried to remember the last time I showered. We’re not talking weeks by any stretch, but it had been a while. I do tend to be irritated by the ‘waste’ of time unless I have been out on my bike or done some exercise that I can wind down with it.

In search of diagnosis #1

I don’t know how many years I have been seriously seeking diagnosis now, but it’s three at least and still I’m no closer. This latest stretch I’ve been seeing some young girl, Low Intensity Liz, in the Kafkaesque Citizens Advice Bureau in town. She was put in place to see me while I await a placement on some CBT programme I’ve heard nothing on in the six months they’ve been talking about it. CBT is not the answer for me, and nobody competent who is familiar with my case would believe it to be, but I feel duty bound to experience it at least. Meanwhile, I have been asking for diagnosis. Again, this time round, I have been asking since April.

Getting diagnosis I have placed on a list of ‘Somedays’, goals I aim to achieve that I have written up on the website MySomeday.com, my latest strategy to get help with some mentoring and oversight on my various desultory efforts towards my clutch of dreams, obsessions and aims. You will find me, of course, under the name Gav Belcher.

My priorities shift over and over, and there are times when I forget about my need for diagnosis, my need to explain myself to others, to have an explanation myself, to take the edge, if nothing else, off my own self-hatred, undimmed after all these years after any fuck up, real or imagined (though most often real). This latest time round it was prompted, perhaps rediculously enough, by my perpetrating a catastrophic cooking/baking experiment, a kind of quiche cum pasta bake come savoury daisy cutter pastry bomb. Often, my cooking shores up my self-esteem. But when it goes wrong, as absurd as it may be, it leads me to self-hatred, depression, and to all of the very real faults I store up to hold against myself at such times. Ok, so it wasn’t just down to that. The quiche bomb was a catalyst for my recognition of my own awkwardness, demonstrated time and again over that weekend, and a recognition of the anxiety and restlessness that I feel every weekend I lose my sustaining routine. Salmon smoking experiments (using the dried, brown rosemary at the bottom of my herb pot), first-time attempts at blind baking, and all the rest of it, were the result of not being at my typewriter from the morning as I ought to be every day.