The other day someone had an iffy tummy – I can’t drop names because they would never forgive me for outing their unpredictable bowel movements but please note, it wasn’t me…

When I checked to see if Anonymous person was feeling better I said…

“…you’ve got such a funny tum.  What’s going on in there?”

They replied with…

“Turmoil.”

I have to admit, despite having a degree in English literature and linguistics my vocabulary is not as extensive as it probably should be because I am not the shiniest button in the sewing tin, so shamefully I had to look up the definition of “turmoil” which is:

“A state of great commotion, confusion, or disturbance; tumult; agitation; disquiet: mental turmoil caused by difficult decisions.”

Now before you all jump ship and close your browsers, this is not an English lesson.  I could never subject you to that especially when I’ve spent all of my writing life breaking every grammar and punctuation rule in the book.  I don’t care if my writing reads wrong because I don’t use my commas and my semicolons appropriately.  I know it annoys the hell out of every single literary expert but you know what?  I like starting a sentence with “but” and “and” because I’m not at school anymore and no one can stop me.  And if my writing reads wrong it’s because I’m writing the way I would speak in a conversation not the way a GCSE English textbook tells me I should.

At university I remember studying the poems of e.e. cummings.  While I was never any good at interpreting his poetry I was fascinated by the fact that he refused to use capital letters in his work.  I didn’t really care what he wrote about or how ground-breaking his words were, I just remember wishing that I had the balls to do something as revolutionary and exciting as he did and have the means to get away with it.

I don’t know why but I kept thinking about the word turmoil and I tried to think of things in my life that relate to it.

For example, if turmoil is having to make difficult decisions then last weekend when I had to choose between a Bakewell tart or half a raspberry cheesecake it was really difficult because, what if I ate one but still wanted the other?  Would the waistband of my jeans still be slightly slack or would I have to take a trip to H&M for a larger size?

On Monday I looked out of the window when I was getting ready for work, the sky was a bit grey and even though my weather app said it was going to be a dry day, I wasn’t 100% convinced.  The difficult decision was, do I wear boots in case it rains so my feet don’t get wet?  Or do I risk it for a biscuit and wear the new Converse Matt bought me for my birthday?  I also wanted to wear my denim jacket but I worried about it not being warm enough; I get cranky when I’m cold and that’s not fun for anyone.

When I’m deciding what to cook for tea I sometimes look at my freezer and I see the three bags of stir-fry veg calling my name…

“…eat meeeeee.  Eat meeeee Kateriiiinnnniiiii!”

Do I do what they’re telling me and bung a bunch of frozen veg in the pan?  Or do I remind myself that Wilomena does not digest healthy ingredients and I should look in the mirror at the remnants of the fibre induced acne and remind myself of the repercussions of what fibre does to my face.

Back in 2015 before I got married, I remember sitting in the examination room with the surgeon.  She asked me if I had children and did I plan to because the operation could affect that possibility.  I’d been in pain and misery for far too long a time for me to consider what she was saying so I chose Wilomena over children.  Whilst this might be a tumultuous decision for most, I didn’t register it at the time.

A few weeks ago I was in a bad mood.  I went into Bolton for a mooch and popped into Hotel Chocolat.  Usually I’d buy a bar of dairy milk but I was feeling a bit rich so I went into the most expensive chocolate shop in the town and spent, probably 10 – 15 minutes looking at chocolate that I probably wouldn’t like and probably wasn’t worth the amount on the price tag.  But there was an offer on and it was £10 for 3x strips of 6 truffles and the hardest part was deciding which to buy because what if I bought one of them and it wasn’t very nice because then I’d have wished I’d bought a different one?

The dictionary says turmoil is…

…a state of great commotion…

…but what’s the definition of commotion?  Sometimes I make a playlist on my Ipod and I have to have a song on there a certain amount of times otherwise I get agitated if I don’t hear it. 

When I’m writing a novel I picture it running like a film and I pick out songs that would appear on the soundtrack so I listen to them as loud as they will go so that nothing but the action between my characters creeps into my head.

When Matt plays stupid shooting games on his Xbox I have to leave the room because the awful noise of guns makes me panic and I don’t understand what the appeal is.

I can’t stand at a concert because the thought of getting embroiled into a mass of drunken moshers is not my idea of fun anymore.

I’m dreading the work’s night out on the 24^th July because I’m terrified that I will turn back into STA Kat who was boring and lifeless and never went on any nights out because I couldn’t relate my sense of fun to the people I was with.  So do I step back and just stick to who I am on the ward or do I take the plunge and make an attempt at stopping history from repeating itself? 

If I make my life out to be an illusion, will that work well for me?

Maybe turmoil doesn’t have to be to the letter of what the dictionary says.  Maybe turmoil can be defined in all sorts of different ways.  Turmoil can be the toss-up between a cheesecake and a Bakewell tart.  It could be making a life changing decision where someone always loses.  Maybe turmoil is swapping one loud noise for another so that peace can be restored?

When you look at the definition of Turmoil we’re given an abundance of other words that all have their own meaning attached to them…

…commotion

 confusion

disturbance

tumult

agitation

disquiet…

If those words are the definition of “turmoil” then in my own personal dictionary, all the word turmoil amounts to is…life.

Because in life we’re faced with tough decisions that dictate how we live in the future.  We’re surrounded by people who try our patience and we allow them to mould us into shapes we never wanted to be. 

We find ourselves in situations that are beyond our control.  I would never choose to be “mentally ill”, that choice was taken out of my hands. 

I take medication that has botched up my thyroid and corrupted my kidneys because I value my sanity too much to risk losing it.

Some days are a blessing, some days the only thing I have to worry about is which pair of Converse to put on my feet. 

Just like I always say, we are all different and one person’s turmoil will always be different to that of another’s. For some it might be chipping a newly applied gel nail at the start of a night out. Or it could be debating on whether it’s safe enough to donate a kidney to a loved one.

Sometimes the best part of the day is sweating over the small stuff because it’s a break from dealing with something bigger…

And as I’m writing this my washing machine is on the go.  I’ve just looked at the weather app on my phone, it’s 19 degrees and mostly cloudy but when I look out of the window the sun is shining…

…should I hang out my washing?  Or should I keep it in doors?

…now that’s turmoil.

Dedicated to the person who had the iffy tummy….

Birthdays… I flippin hate them.  I stopped having birthdays when I turned twenty-nine because didn’t want to turn thirty.  As soon as I hit twenty-nine I automatically spent the next 365 days panicking about turning thirty because in 2011 I looked at my life and I was disappointed. 

I was single – but so was Josh Groban so there was still hope.  I lived at home with my mum -which truthfully I didn’t mind because I was fed, watered and cared for and that is not a crime.  I also had a job that was more like hole in the head than it was rewarding (again, I’m really sorry to the guys I used to work with, I mean no offence), so life wasn’t exactly bleak but it was less than promising.

In 2011 I scraped by when it came to self-love, it was more like self-loathe, self-pity and just get on with life because nothing was going to change anytime soon.  I didn’t realise at that point that I was the one responsible for making those changes and there was no magic fairy who was going to swoop in and make me confident, successful and beautiful; it might have worked out for Cinderella but in the real world we’re not as fortunate, so for 365 days before I hit the thirty mark I looked in the mirror and thought…

“…oh god, we’re one step closer to the end of the line.”

Just thinking about the change in digits filled me with dread. 

By now if you’re a regular to my blog you’ll gather that life has been somewhat unkind and while most of it I probably couldn’t change there were aspects where I wish I’d owned some “brave girl pants” and given life the finger and just said…

“Back off bad stuff…don’t rain on my parade!”

In hindsight I wish I could have done that, but hindsight is one of those things that I believe only comes with age.  I look back and I know that I had to turn thirty in order to learn this lesson.

When I was a kid I had a party every year.  I was lucky, I had all my friends over and my mum put a spread on, she made party bags and everyone went home feeling happy and fulfilled.  Every year I looked forward to the cards, the cake and the presents – Don’t lie to yourself, everyone loves getting a present!  But when I turned sixteen I sat my GCSE history exam.  At eighteen it was my Communication Studies exam and at twenty-one I was depressed as hell, on the verge of a Bipolar diagnosis and pretending to ride the waves of normality when there was nothing normal inside my head. 

As time has gone by birthdays have just become less important.  They’ve become something I want to avoid rather than address because every year I’d feel the beady eyes of those more successful than me and they would comment and say…

“Have you not got a boyfriend yet?”

“Are you still working at that place?”

“Do you not think you should be moving out by now?”

Comments are comments but those who make them who are reading this bear in mind, they burn because every time you question my social circumstances based solely on my age it makes me embarrassed to be me. 

I had friends who didn’t invite me to their hen do’s and wedding celebrations because, how can you introduce this person you know who has a mental illness, a poxy job and no one to love her, to your friends and family when this is not a pity party and this person is pitiful. 

I stopped celebrating my birthdays with friends because I didn’t think anyone would want to celebrate it with me; I concentrated so much on the negative side of my age that I never saw anything worth celebrating.

The only thing with birthdays is, you can’t escape them.  You can’t hide because somewhere, someone in the crevices of the life you wish you didn’t lead, knows the date you were born and…

…BAM!

You’re reminded who you are.  I blame social media.  It’s littered with positive birthday wishes and photographic evidence of pure joy that turn into poison arrows thrown directly at your aching heart.   

So when I hit the big 3-0 I took the day off work to avoid the attention because the idea of being in an office full of people who were confident, popular and birthday savvy made my head sweat and gave me heart palpitations.  

The only thing I wanted to do was sit in a darkened room, watch Smallville on DVD and pretend I was going to marry Michael Rosenbaum because he was also single and I’ve got a thing for bald men.

I’ve never been mature, I think I’ve always had a young head on my shoulders and living at home I didn’t have the responsibilities that other thirty year olds had.  Because of this I looked at all the photographs of joy on Facebook and I felt like I was being left behind.  My friends had partners and children, they were buying houses and getting career promotions and while I feigned my support of their wholesome milestones, I wanted to crawl into the packet of millionaire shortbread I was eating and die a fattening death.

But I had a friend who wouldn’t let it slide and in the end I was glad she didn’t.  Janice is a big birthday celebrator and she took me out to lunch, we ate a ridiculous amount of food and I felt loved.  I didn’t for one second feel inadequate about having a rubbish job or not having a boyfriend; I was just someone eating a tuna melt panini and a Mediterranean salad.

Every milestone birthday people say…

“…life starts at…

30

40

     50…”

…but all I can say is, which is it?  Or is this just to make the unfortunate feel better because they haven’t achieved what they wanted to achieve in life and if we give them another decade to have a bash at it they might just manage it? 

I don’t know…

…what I do know is, I never really started living until I turned thirty-one – thirty is a blur, I have absolutely no idea what happened within that twelve months.  Thirty-one was the year the cloud of emotional doom faded.  I met Matt (admittedly we met because I was having a Bipolar episode and a friend convinced me Match.com was a good idea) and I started to feel that bit more comfortable in my own skin and I read Electroboy by my friend Andy Berhman.

For years I’ve felt like I’ve missed out on all of my twenties because I was always ill.  I was up and down and all around, I was in and out of hospital, over medicated and trying to cheat the beast by messing around with my mood stabilisers.  I didn’t think it was possible to take control of a mental illness. 

Andy is also a big birthday celebrator, I could never understand why but I realised through talking to him over emails and letters; that when you’re dealt a really rubbish hand of cards, instead of looking at what you haven’t got, you have to look at what you do have because sometimes; we’re just lucky to even be alive at all.

I’d like to say I put this into play and that since the age of thirty-one I’ve become a massive birthday celebrator, but that would be a lie…

I think I got more comfortable with birthdays up to about the age of thirty-six because when you hit this one, you’re closer to forty than you are to your youth and those old friends harbouring social expectations on your lifestyle make a return and pass judgement on the things you still haven’t got and still haven’t done.

Looking back I would love to tell my younger self that…

…it’s perfectly okay to not have a boyfriend, because boys smell!

…it doesn’t matter if you have a rubbish job, the point is you have one!

And…

…make the most of living with your parents because trust me, the second you buy a house you’re gonna be as poor as hell, so enjoy having some pennies in your bank account because they won’t be there for very long!

To this day I don’t do birthdays, I would rather it slip under the radar and just get on with life and wait for it to pass me by and yesterday’s 39^th year was no different.

For this one I didn’t bother to take the day off.  In my new job I actually wanted to be at work, I didn’t see the point in taking a day off for a six hour shift.  I had planned to keep schtum but I let it slip to one person and by the end of my working day I left with a bunch of flowers and a card signed by all the patients and the staff.  I might have wanted to my day to pass by unnoticed but in the end I was happy for the attention and their genuine appreciation of me.

These days I find birthdays hard to deal with because I look in the mirror and I see things are different; my hands have changed, my hair is growing white instead of grey, I dress like I’m still a student and my lack of maturity is an alien being inside my head. 

Where once I believed I was being left behind by my peers, I now feel like I’m waving goodbye to my youth and I will never get that back…

…but…

…life is journey.  It takes us on different paths and none of them are ever the same because people are not the same.  I am slowly learning – very very slowly – that we still have to live life even if we feel like we can’t and maybe birthdays shouldn’t be about getting older, maybe Andy is right, they shouldn’t be about what we have and haven’t got…

…perhaps…

…I should put a different spin on my birthdays and celebrate the real meaning behind them because birthdays are about being born.  They’re about becoming a person; so maybe my next birthday should be about being lucky enough to have a life and to surviving it so far?

This is what I will try to remember, because now I’ve got…

…364 days until I’m 40…

Dedicated to everyone who reminds me that birthdays are a good thing.

It’s June, it’s summer, it’s 22 degrees outside and it’s hot!  For most people it’s the time to whip off your top and slap on that suntan cream and bask in the glory of that big fat ball of fire in the sky.  

Summer makes people smile, it brings them together and it’s a chance to get our legs out of our jeans and give our arms the ability to break free of the sleeves of our woolly jumpers because nothing beats the feeling of the sun on your skin.  It’s glorious…

…unless you’re a self-harmer…

I’ve never written about this subject.  I’ve never documented it in a journal or gone into the intricacies in one of my presentations.  It’s a section of my life that I’m not proud of but it’s a part of me that I can’t hide.

I’m not looking for sympathy or even understanding, especially when it’s something that I don’t fully understand myself and I can’t pinpoint a reason or event or a pivotal moment where I…

“…made the decision to hurt myself…”

…but I can say that when your life is consumed by self-hatred and confusion and you have no concept of mental illness or what it even looks like; when all you want is to be able to feel something, then pain is sometimes the only thing that makes sense because how can you feel joy when all you feel inside is pain?

I know very little about self-harm.  I barely know anything about my own variation of it, except that in the moment, in those few minutes, I felt relief.  I was relieved because I could see something that hurt and I was also relieved because the pain I felt echoed the pain in my soul.

In my early to mid-twenties I would dip in and out of the self-harm habit, just like I would dip in and out of hospital.  When Bernard the Bipolar brain was medicated and caged within the realms of sanity I didn’t feel the need to hurt myself.

When I look back on my self- harm history I can only describe it as moments of madness that made sense at the time.  It was desperation, it was like drowning in a lake of cement and it was the one thing that pulled me out.  It was a few minutes of blind self-inflicted rage, self-pity and a way of pleading with life to just stop! Stop what it was doing and just make sense again.

In the moment I didn’t think of the future.  I didn’t think to myself…

“What do I do when its sunny outside and everyone is taking their tops off?”

“What do I do when I want to roll my sleeves up to wash my hands and there’s someone stood next to me who doesn’t know I struggle?”

“What do I do when I meet a boy and he sees these hideous scars?”

In the moment I didn’t think…

“What do I do when I get a job and there’s no aircon in the office and I’m frying like an egg.”

I didn’t think…

“What do I do in eighteen years’ time when I get another job and I’m working with patients who have done the same thing but they have no idea that I am anything other than Admin Kat?”

In that moment, at the age of twenty I didn’t think of the future; I didn’t think of the future because I didn’t think I had one. 

Contrary to popular belief self-harm was not a form of attention seeking for me; how could it be when I had to go to incredible measures to hide what I have done to myself because no-one really understood it.

It’s been long sleeves at social gatherings so people don’t stare.  I put my arm behind my back when I’ve been at the end of a row of people and a photographer makes a spontaneous appearance.  I make up elaborate and ridiculous lies like…

“I used to be a Piranha fish tamer.”

“I had an altercation with a seriously angry cat.”

“It’s an unusual birthmark.”

“It’s a new form of tattoo art.”

(No one believed any of them, can you believe?)

It took me years to find the courage to roll up my sleeve at my last job.  In the end the defining moment was the office was just to damn hot and I couldn’t take the heat.  People stared, they whispered, some even stopped speaking to me for a while; one person refused to make me a cup of tea because they didn’t want to touch my self-harm infected mug.

I had a friend once who told me I was in the running for being her bridesmaid but she had to make a decision on what would look better on her wedding pictures.  Unfortunately the dress she’d picked out for the bridesmaids didn’t accommodate a hideously scarred arm.  I had another friend who told me it would be better if I could cover my arm so that she wouldn’t have to explain the state of it when we were supposed to be having a nice evening out with her friends.

Once I tried to explain to someone how difficult it is to keep up the act of normality when life is constantly throwing curveballs in your way to make it less normal.  They said…

“Well you made that choice, now you have to live with it.”

They are of course right.  Whatever spin I put on this, eighteen years ago I made a decision to hurt myself and that decision has affected my life ever since….

But…

Had I not made that particular decision, the only one I was left with would have been a whole lot worse because…

…I would not be here to tell the tale.

Twelve years ago I may have braved the office with my naked arm but when I started public speaking in 2014 everything I did to every single audience was done in long sleeves.  I would sweat, my skin would itch and I would stand in front of the crowd and tell my story but I would never bear my arm. 

I was ashamed.  When you’ve spent so many years being made to feel like a leper because of the things you’ve been through and the decisions you’ve made, it’s difficult to get out of that habit.

On the 5^th May 2019 I went to see Rose McGowan do a reading and interview about her book Brave.  There’s something about Rose McGowan that I’ve always admired.  When she was in Charmed I wanted her hair.  When she became a voice for all genders in the Me Too movement I admired her bravery and her courage.  She’s someone who has suffered but she’s never given up and that’s what I admire the most.  She uses her pain to give others the courage to carry on.

Anyone who worked with me at the Edinburgh fringe festival will tell you that I can talk to anyone, actually everyone who knows me will tell you that, but my Edinburgh friends will tell you that when it comes to talking to celebrities I shrivel up and die and I turn into a ridiculous gibbering idiot who can’t form sentences… and for a public speaker it’s not a good look.  But in 2019 I was not going home without my copy of Brave being signed by Rose McGowan.

So I stood in a queue for 45 minutes, which didn’t feel like 45 minutes because I spent the entire time texting my mum asking her…

“What the hell do I say?”

It was a warm day and I’d walked into the Lowry dressed in a woolly jumper and my winter coat, so coupled with the fact that I was nervous I was also getting that jittery sweaty look…but let’s cut to the chase…

I got to the front of the queue and this beautiful person was sat in front of me and she asks me what my name is and we start talking about Greece and where my family is from because she’s just been to Greece and then…she clocks my arm!  She clocks it because in my Sweaty Betty panic I rolled up my sleeve for some temporary bare skin relief but I forgot to roll it back down before I was stood in front of her.

In that moment I had two choices, tell her the piranha fish story or…

…just tell her the truth.

So I said…

“I have Bipolar but I’m a public speaker now.”

She said…

“Do you show your scars when you speak?”

I said…

“Never.”

And I will always remember her reply because it was a lightbulb moment.  It was like a rough sea becoming calm or the clouds parting after a storm.  It was peace resting on a troubled soul.

“You should show them because you survived them, you should be brave.”

With tears in my eyes I nodded and I said…

“I will, I’ll be brave.”

And she said…

“I’m proud of you, I’m so proud of you.”

I wish I had a picture of myself being wrapped in Rose McGowan’s arms when she said those words, but even photographic evidence can’t explain what I felt in that moment.

It was validation from a complete stranger.  It was permission to stop being ashamed of my behaviour and a reason to move on from it. 

I look at my arm sometimes and… guys it’s a mess, so some days I am still ashamed but other days I think to myself…

“Damn right Rose, I survived them!”

So now in my presentations I talk about it and no matter how cold it is in the room I whip my top off or I roll up my sleeve and I strut that stage and do what I’ve always tried to do, I try to make people proud.  I try to make Rose proud.

I’m not saying any of this is easy and sometimes when life is really difficult and things don’t make sense, the urge is still there and I’m not proud of that; but I am proud of the fact that I manage to resist that urge.

These days I try to write it out.  I try to write blogs or I rant in my designated “bedtime rant” notebook.  I write stupid fiction where I make the lives of innocent characters miserable because it makes me feel better, it’s a release.  I have an abundance of notebooks in my little library that are filled with the deaths’ of the most beautiful people of my own creation but they die because they are part of me, parts of myself that I couldn’t save at the time.

At work I was chatting with the drama therapy student and he asked me what write I about, was it romance or sci fi or crime? That kind of thing.  But I couldn’t give him an answer, not properly.  I couldn’t give him a simple answer because there’s more to my words than just a genre.

Since the age of eleven my words have only ever been a way for me to cope with the world.  They give me air by suffocating my pages.  My characters represent the parts of me that are still here and the parts that are gone.

As I’ve got older and hopefully wiser, I’ve found ways to channel those feelings of self-loathing, sometimes I’m not always successful but writing this particular piece right now has helped me understand the way I’ve been feeling. 

I’ve spent the last four hours writing this – believe it or not – and now I know exactly what I write about…

I write about darkness and I write about light, because…

…in order to survive, I write about pain.

Dedicated to Rose McGowan, although you may never see this you gave me the courage to be brave.