My Someday: Get Diagnosed

MySomeday, which seemed to be the perfect application for me, but which hasn’t yet taken off too well, I don’t think, have recently installed a Share feature. I would recommend it to anyone who is as distractable as me with the propensity I have for straying from projects before they are finished – something is no less marked now than it ever has been, and no less distressing. Either way, if there’s something you aim to do, take a look at it. And if you are inclined, follow mine and give me a kick up the ass when I’m faltering, which I inevitably will.

MySomeday | Someday Owner

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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.