I've seen a lot of mental health professionals over the years. Mostly in my teens and twenties. They've kind of left to putter about to my own devices now. There's only so much they can do. I'm glad I'm alive in the era that I am. Not so long ago I would have been flung in an asylum and left to walk around in circles all day, shrieking. Or put on a ducking stool and burned at the stake if I was lucky enough to survive that. Mental health care still has so far to go. Nobody really knows how the brain works or how to treat it, the complex interplay of nature and nurture. Don't get me started on the side effects of medications.
Only once I tried to tell a psychologist I was seeing about some of the things that went on in my head. I kind of knew it wasn't a healthy strategy and I brought it up in a session one day. She knew all my weaknesses and failings, but this somehow was profoundly personal and shaming. I was very casual with the way I spoke about my mental health. I was regularly grilled about it by every new doctor I saw. Doctors got moved from one position or department to another with astonishing frequency, causing you to have to give your entire mental health history to some other doctor and see if you could build up a rapport and beneficial trusting clinical relationship with them or if they's just make you talk for an hour about what is already written in your notes and they'd write the same prescription again and see you next time.
Psychologists are better than psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are medical doctors who have gone through training in mental health and can prescribe medications. Going to see a psychiatrist is much like going to see any other doctor. They vary in bedside manner, but they are there to make a diagnosis and take appropriate action, whether it be refer you to another type of doctor or give you some kind of medication. They are generally quite pragmatic and lacking in the warmth department. I've never really liked any psychiatrist I've ever had. They are a means to an end. They gatekeep medication and other services.
Psychologists I've mostly been very fond of. They have advanced psychology degrees rather than medicine, and are interested in human beings and giving them the tools to make their lives better. They are a bit more human and compassionate. They have a job to do and aren't there to be your friend, but they are nice and gentle people in my experience. They vary in competence though.
I was seeing Lois after another psychologist, Helen, got moved to another department or heath trust. I really liked Helen and felt her departure keenly. Lois was really nice and I trusted her right away. After a few weeks I steeled myself and told her there was a girl who lived in my head who kept me company, in fact she was only only a better version because I'm so lonely and my life is miserable. She has two brothers and lives with her dad. Her mother is not in the picture. I didn't describe the lush and vivid detail I had created for this second life I found myself living, or imagining I lived. I didn't tell Lois her name. I just told her I spent so much time lost living her life instead of my own I was confusing my life with hers. I was becoming very concerned that someone would ask me my name and hers would pop out and I wouldn't be able to make an excuse as to how I just got my name wrong.
Lois took this in her stride. In fact she seemed underwhelmed, even disinterested. It took a lot of courage for me to bring it up. Two weeks later at my next appointment she didn't mention it, so neither did I. I wasn't going to talk about something so embarrassing by choice, it was like stripping naked.
Next appointment she did mention her. She referred to 'The Girl.' She mentioned she didn't have a mum or any sisters. I warmed to the topic immediately and I replied that I would have been wildly jealous of any other women in her/my father's life. Looking back with hindsight I can see I just wanted my poisonous mother out of my life and a close, loving relationship with my father. I don't really know where the two brothers came from. Maybe I wanted a boyfriend, or just friends. Well, yeah I wanted both.
I didn't have sex or get a boyfriend until I was twenty six. I guess it's forgivable I invented one? I can't be the first. Doesn't everybody do it? I mean seriously? Everybody does it. Everybody has had a fantasy boyfriend or girlfriend at some point in their life. Maybe a dream husband or wife. Maybe they keep them for lonely moments. I'm calling it now, everybody has a make believe lover.
I was in a dentist's waiting room or something once and was leafing through a woman's magazine. There was an article in it written by a bored and lonely housewife. She daydreamed about being married to Kevin Costner whilst she did her ironing. She was quite serious about it. She was unhappy in her life and it gave her an ounce of joy in her empty existence. She felt she couldn't be the only one. I'm writing this to prove I'm right. People just wont admit this stuff as it makes you look pitiful. I thought the woman was sad because she was a housewife, something I couldn't bear. I'm not surprised she turned to Kevin Costner to get through. I don't get what anyone saw in him back in the eighties. He looks like a 1950's FBI agent. I don't like his films and don't find him attractive.
I remember in Shirley Valentine she has a conversation with the wall because there's no one else to talk to. Is that really so different to using your imagination to fill in the blanks?
In a huge twist of fate I never saw Lois again after that. Pingley is quite rural and health trust staff often have to go the the nearest city to the hospitals there. Lois turned a corner and drove right into the back of a lorry full of gravel. Pretty fucking grisly. She survived but sustained serious injuries and was in hospital for a long time. I wasn't in desperate need of psychological services so wasn't referred to another therapist in the mean time. I haven't spoken to anybody else any of this.
It's not just that girl who lived inside my head and got my through the desperate times. There were loads of characters and lives filling my head. Some of it totally ridiculous that it makes me embarrassed to think about. You do what you have to do. I relied on James and these better, happy, fulfilled versions of myself that I created to help me survive the bleak years living with my abusive mother, often unable to leave the house, a suffocating blackness everywhere, in my eyes in my hair in my lungs in my veins. It was my coping strategy.
A few years later I saw Lois at my GP's surgery. I had heard she was back working part time. She walked with great care across the room. A few paces before the door I could see her eyes focus on the door handle and her hand carefully reach for it, like the act of coordinating this whole process used up a lot of her energy. I felt so bad for her. She had been canoeing shortly before her accident and now walking across a waiting room and opening the door seemed to be a depleting task to her.
Three things really changed my life. Moving out. Change of medication. The internet.
The combination of these three things have given me the life I have today. I would not be who I am without them.
I was still living with my mum well into my twenties. On Hogmanay 2001 she went out with her recently widowed sister. They went to the local bowling club. Mum met a man and ten weeks later she came into my bedroom and told me he was moving in the next day. I was pretty appalled, but it was her house and her life. I didn't think I'd ever be able to get away from her and survive on my own, but this was the push I needed.
Next day I went to the council housing office and applied for a flat of my own. Well, I got a form to fill in anyway. Freedom was a step closer than I ever thought it could be. I couldn't go a great distance away from home, my safe place. This was my greatest fear. It seemed just too convenient that there would be a one bedroom flat located within my safe zone.
Mum didn’t want me to go. She screamed obscenities in my face to let me know this.
I had to wait for the monthly meetings where the council housing staff looked over applications and allotted them points based on need and put them on the housing list. I felt sure I'd be way down the bottom somewhere. I already had a roof over my head. It's not like I was pregnant or anything.
Well, my fears were unfounded on so many levels. It turns out single women are preferred by landlords as they are considered way more reliable and they look after properties much better than single men. I mean, in your face the patriarchy I guess.
The day after the council dealt with my application I received an offer on a flat. The flat I still live in now, almost twenty years later.