Back To The Shit Show

I’m back in work on Thursday and, after nearly a month off, I’m starting to get really anxious about stepping back into the office.

It may not sound like it should be, but to me this is going to be a real challenge.

I honestly don’t feel like I’m mentally built to cope with the daily grind, but I don’t have the talent/creativity/intelligence/skill/drive required to be anything but a slave to it.

Not The 10 Year Challenge

I keep seeing the ‘10 year challenge’ popping up in my various social media feeds, there’s 2 main reasons why I won’t be taking part.

1. I don’t have a picture of me that’s 10 years old.

2. I’ve achieved almost nothing in the last 10 years, in fact my decade has been a litany of failures.

Just A Home Cook, And Not Even That Good At It

Today I’ve cooked a roast turkey, a roast duck, a glazed ham, 3 different types of stuffing, pigs in blankets, honey roast carrots and parsnips, roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, brussels sprouts with pancetta, baked leaks and turkey gravy… I’m knackered, I don’t know how chefs do it day in and day out.

So I Got A Car…

Getting Back To Normal… Ish

It's been nearly 3 weeks since I failed my driving test and had my first full on public panic attack in about a decade. I considered these to be 2 heavy knocks to my self confidence and they pushed me into something of a spiral. After a particularly rough week, the combination of anxiety, depression and insomnia (largely caused by the anxiety and depression) had left me emotionally, mentally and physically exhausted and I made the decision to do something about it. 

I used my remaining annual leave to break up early for the Christmas period, headed to the local chemist to get some over the counter sleeping tablets and ordered  some St. John's Wort herbal tea bags (St. John's Wort is supposed to be good for anxiety and insomnia, the tea tasted pretty rank and I'm not sure if it actually helped, but I thought it was worth a try.) from Amazon. Whilst the tea and tablets didn't really help me to sleep through the whole night, they did make it considerably easier to fall asleep in the first place and that was a step in the right direction. The combination of not being at work and sleeping a little better helped me to break the spiral and get into a better frame of mind. 

To cut a long story short, I was able to force myself to have another couple of driving lessons, rebook my practical and even manage to take advantage of a last minute cancellation to get the test in earlier than I otherwise would. Thankfully this time I passed, I don't even want to think about where I'd be mentally if I'd failed, and, although I don't have a car yet, that is one less thing for me to worry about. 

My anxiety is still pretty high, I'm still struggling to get a good night's sleep and I'm still not coping with being out in public in general, but the depression has more or less receded back to my normal manageable doldrum, I'm starting to feel more like, what I've come to accept as, myself again.

Missed Opportunity

We had the opportunity to say no to dishonesty, no to bigotry, no to massive corporations avoiding taxation, no to pandering to the whims of the richest 1%.

Instead of this we chose to say no to having more say in the Brexit process, no to protecting the NHS for future generations, no to helping the most vulnerable in our society, no to a fairer distribution of taxation.

To say that I'm massively disappointed in the outcome of the general election is an understatement, to say I understand why people choose to vote the way they did would be a lie. What I do understand is that the majority of people who voted Conservative, the rich, the misguided elderly, the middle class with poorly informed views on climbing the social ladder, the outright bigoted, are the people least, or think they are, likely to be affected by their policies and that all they've really done is shown the rest of us just how little understanding they have of the world at large and just how little empathy they possess.

For those of you who voted Conservative 'to get Brexit done' or just because you're sick of hearing about it, you seem to have forgotten the most important fact. They are the party that put us in this mess to begin with, the one that kicked off the whole process with little to no understanding of what that would entail, who, after months of nothing but bickering and infighting, invoked article 50 with no deal, or even a deal in principle, in place, who to this day have no viable option for our withdrawal on the table and seem to care very little about actually doing so. You have voted for a party that is literally incapable of getting Brexit done and will allow us to free fall out of Europe with nothing to stop us but our face and the jagged, broken, rocky ground that is reality. 

We are in for years, if not decades, of economic slowdown and potentially even recession. Don't worry though whilst the Conservatives are in power they won't let this hurt the wealthy, they'll keep tax on high earners low, they'll still use tax payers money to bail out failing big businesses and continue to give the most lucrative government contracts to their already massively wealthy friends. They do have plans to fund this... They'll cut funding to the social support structures that help the most vulnerable amongst us, they'll make it even harder for the disabled to claim benefits, they'll further cut funding to police forces, fire brigades and other emergency services, they'll cut funding to our schools and education systems, they'll cut funding to and further privatise the NHS.

This may all seem like liberal scare mongering, but you only have to look around to see that this is already happening, the truth is out there to see if you're willing to look for it. I'm not even that politically minded and I can see this, how are so many people living in willful ignorance?

Why Are The General Public Such Cunts?

I live in England, we had yet another general election yesterday and somehow, despite royally fucking us over almost every time they get in power, the Conservatives won (that said Labour aren't all that much better).

England is a country where you can literally get in trouble with the police for hurting someone's feelings, where freedom of speech is basically just a myth, where the masses get offended over the most minor of things most of the time, and are very vocal about it. Although some people do disagree, most appear to be ok with it and it all seems to be for the sake of political correctness and ensuring no-one feels discriminated against (although a lot of people still are).

The question I have is given their track record, and the fact that we are somewhat of a snowflake society, how in hell are the openly racist, sexist, elitist, bigoted buffoons we currently have in government still in power and still getting voted for?

Craving That Good Weekend Oblivion

It’s Saturday morning, I’m tired, I have literally no need, or desire, to be awake and all I really want is the silent oblivion of a deep and dreamless sleep.

At 6:30 am my brain is like “Wakey, wakey, rise and shine… here’s all the shit going on in your life that’s making you anxious… enjoy” and now my heart is absolutely thumping out of my chest and there’s no chance of me getting back to sleep.

Why Do I Only Remember The Bad Dreams?

To be honest I stopped remembering the majority of my dreams a long time ago, some nights I’m not even entirely sure if I dreamt at all, but tonight I definitely did.

A tallish, chubby, bearded man (not me, it doesn’t look like me and there’s no sense that he represents me in the dream) puts his kids to bed, he kisses both of them on the forehead, shuts their bedroom door and heads downstairs into the kitchen and makes two mugs of cocoa with marshmallows.

His partner/girlfriend/wife calls to him quietly from the darkened living room “the films starting hurry up”. He takes a partially melted mallow from a mug and eats it before heading into the darkened room.

The film ends and they’re both sat on a sofa under a blanket. She says “OK, I’m going to bed, you coming?” And he replies “Go get yourself cozy, I’ll be up in a minute, I just want to tidy this up first.” He gestures to a coffee table in front of the sofa.

She heads up to bed, the focus switches to her (she doesn’t look like anyone I know and there’s no sense of recognition), she lays down on the bed and instantly flashes into a flashing dreamscape of horror film scenarios. She wakes up in the corner of the room, clothes torn, covered in blood and something organic looking stabbed in to her thigh.

She screams, pulls the thing out of her thigh and covers the wound with her hand. There’s panic on her face as she looks around the room, it’s covered in blood, gore and what looks like chunks of torn up meat.

She leaves the room and slams the door behind her, the landing is empty and looks entirely undisturbed. She tells herself that she was still partially asleep, the bedroom was just part of her nightmare and it calms her down. She can hear loud TV static from downstairs and thinks it’s her partner, he’s put on another film and fallen asleep on the sofa, it was the noise from his film that caused the horrible dreams.

She goes downstairs into the kitchen, it’s dark, she can hear quiet sobbing and sniffling mixed in amongst the now extremely loud static.

She turns on the light, the room has been wrecked, the table is overturned, cupboards are hanging off walls, the contents strewn across the floor and again there’s blood, gore and unrecognisable chunks of meat all over.

She’s panicking again, she’s trying to tell herself she’s still dreaming, she’ll wake up soon and everything will be OK. The sobbing is louder now, it sounds more desperate and it sounds like a child. It’s coming from behind the table, she rushes over, shoves the table aside and she’s her son. His legs have been broken, almost crushed, he’s cradling the remains of his sister, her belly has been torn open and it’s contents are spilling all over the floor.

The son screams at the site of her and tries to back further away. He’s crying harder now, “Please, we’ll be good, please, it hurts, please, no more mommy”. She steps back, looks desperately around the room and the unrecognisable chunks of meat come into sharp focus, they used to be her husband. She looks down at her hands and remembers, in violent flashes, what she’s done.

I'm Still Just A Broken Child Under All This Hair

I know that I often come across as a little whiny and self indulgent, on here at least, but that’s because I tend to use my blog as my emotional dumping ground. If something that I consider bad happens to me I post about it, if I’m upset about something I post about it, if I’m feeling generally shitty I post about it.

I don’t talk about these sorts of things in real life because I either don’t have anyone to talk to them about or I don’t want to burden people with my problems or I feel like my issues are trivial and I’m making a big deal over nothing. Even so there’s actually still a lot of stuff that I don’t post about on here because I’m probably just being stupid and I shouldn’t be letting it bother me.

I know that not a lot of people read my posts, but those that do are often seeing a side of me that very few other people get to see. Almost everyone that knows me has seen the overgrown child, who’s well into adulthood, that still loves video games, action figures and comic books (though I hardly ever buy either of them and it’s even rarer that I read/play with them these days). You get to see the broken child who’s still scared of things he should have grown out of years ago, who’s still struggling with understanding his emotions and never quite learned how to interact with other people.

I don’t think that the people I do somehow manage to interact with in my day to day life would understand the broken child…

I’m tired…