blood nerve and bone

 Throughout my years in education, I was surprisingly good at the whole thing. I wasn't the typical "good at school" nerd, for lack of a better way to explain the type of person I'm thinking of. I got myself in trouble, I did stupid teenager shit more than a lot of my peers did, and school didn't come naturally to me, except English and geography. But, I left school with all 7s to 9s in my GCSEs. I went on to do two A-Levels and an equivalent course, and left again with 3 A-stars. I say it to brag only a tiny bit, but I fear I might have lost a lot of my bragging rights. My first adventure with university was actually very different to my current one - and out of character for myself now. I studied BSc Psych at a university in north-east England for a year. I did really well, considering my circumstances of undiagnosed bipolar disorder and alcoholism I didn't particularly feel like addressing. I have the certificate - a Certificate of Higher Education in Psych...

Let’s just cut to it. I’m bipolar and also anti-psychiatry, and it’s not as contradictory as it sounds. I actually fell into anti-psychiatry before I fell into my diagnosis. My dive into anti-psychiatry started after my dad’s needless death at the hands of the psych system. I started to question its efficacy, its usefulness, its ethics. How come it’s okay to lock someone up when they haven’t committed a crime? Is that supposed to make a sad, angry person less sad and angry? It hasn’t sat right with me for many years. It was only a year or so ago that I got the language for this, and fleshed my view out. For an overview, my view is this: You can’t ever prove anything scientific in the psych world. My A-Level Psychology teacher used to phrase this as “you can’t test everyone who has ever lived, is living, or will ever live, so you can never prove anything.” It literally isn’t possible, yet we act like it is. Why do we act like we have a concrete, scientific answer (like low serotonin ca...

  I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know what I hope to achieve by talking about this again. I think I just hope it brings me some sort of peace of mind, or maybe, this time, I’ll have some sort of revelation and my grief will be fixed. Maybe all the pieces will finally slot together. I doubt it. There’s no nice way to say this. You can try – passed away, left this life, whatever. No. None of it conveys what I want it to. My dad killed himself when I was sixteen. Died by suicide, whatever, that works, too. It was February 20th 2020, which was a Thursday during the half-term holidays. I’ve talked about the day it happened before. What’s the point in doing it again? All it does for me is remind me how it felt to feel my life shatter when the police came knocking. It’s strange, because it wasn’t like I wanted my dad in my life. I just didn’t expect this to be the way he left it. That’s a lie. It was expected. My dad was ill for a good part of my life. I don’t like the psychiat...

 Anyone who knows me at all knows that I love Holding Absence. I quite literally wear that on my sleeve. To me, there aren't many lulls in their discography at all. Each era or album is definitely good for different things; the earlier stuff is great when you're in your early 20s and suicidal and in love. The Greatest Mistake Of My Life is a fantastic commentary on life in general, healing and relapse. Today, though, I want to tell you about my greatest Holding Absence love; The Noble Art Of Self Destruction. Let's set the scene. Your first album, and early singles, are gut-punchingly miserable. They're littered with religious themes, love, loss, suicide, everything you could possibly ask for in an emo album. Your sophomore starts off with a huge celebration of life (literally Celebration Song), and devolves into an album about death and mourning (again, literally, Mourning Song). The Noble Art, though, turns that misery on its head. It turns it into something beautiful...

  9:30am - I woke up! Achievement one of the day! Today, I did it with a bit of a sense of dread. Tuesdays are a busy one for me, and sometimes I’m not sure I have the energy for it. I stayed in bed for quite a while, honestly, with that weird feeling in my chest of really not wanting to do all of this. But, laying in bed rotting away scrolling my three Apps doesn’t actually take the feeling away. 10:30am: I told you I laid in bed for a while. No more – I made some toast for breakfast. Gourmet. I also made a run to the corner shop for an energy drink, knowing I’d need one to get through today. I chose a strawberry Monster, and much to my displeasure, found out that my corner shop is closing for four weeks from tomorrow for refurbishment. Where the hell am I gonna get my cheap silly drinks from?! Anyway, to accompany my toast and energy drink, two episodes of Breaking Bad, a show I’ve watched time and time again. Perfect for when I don’t actually want to think about anything at all....

  I got the answer to my life's problems last month. Well, at least that’s what some people would expect, and maybe to an extent a little bit what I expected. I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder in early January after a few months sitting on NHS waiting lists and a lot more years of being – looking back – obviously fucking bipolar . Like I said, I expected it to be the answer to my life’s issues, the thing that I could point to and be like “that’s why I felt that way.” It’s been helpful, but it’s not all that. There are so many misconceptions around what bipolar disorder even is, or looks like, or feels like. Really, I can never say any of my life was that way because I’m bipolar; it’s too varied and personal. Instead of talking about how my psychiatrist fixed my life (I’m actually going to talk about some damage my diagnosis has done, not just the good), I just want to talk about my experiences with mental health pre-diagnosis that could’ve pointed to the new diagnosis, the ...