It’s Saturday night… I’m not even going to try and dress this up anymore…next to me I have my tipple of choice, decaff tea, a two-litre bottle of squash because my drug of choice in the name of Lithium makes me thirsty and a piece of pumpkin cake smothered in cream cheese frosting – I actually had to eat a piece just for the photo, at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Matt’s just gone to the cinema with his nephew so I’m home alone with the cat and a heated blanket because my house is freezing even with the heating on.

Before he left he asked me what this blog is going to be about and I replied…

“I don’t know yet…”

…which is true, I don’t; but off the back of falling into the bath the other week I’ve been thinking about a few things. 

I know I mentioned that a friend passed away in September and since then I admit I haven’t been the kind of self I like the world to see.

My friend was superwoman.  She was my idol, my Bipolar idol –  you can all keep Stephen Fry, I don’t need him because I had my friend – she was my Bipolar Mum.

Bipolar is a funny thing; it’s selfish and cruel and mean and it takes no prisoners.  It spares no one and doesn’t give two hoots about the carnage it leaves behind. 

On all the writers courses I have ever been on the tutors tell you to never use cliché’s, but Bipolar Disorder is just one massive cliché. 

You can have an episode and you miss out on months of your life and you say…

“Where has the time gone?”

You might make it through the hospital admission and in your Christmas card to your family you might say…

“I love you to the moon and back.”

And my personal favourite is one that I have yet to use…

“And they all lived happily ever after…”

Growing up I had a vision of what my life would be like and it went a little like this…

1. School
2. 6^th form
3. University
4. Travel the world
5. Meet a boy who plays the guitar in a band
6. Get married
7. Have one child
8. Become a famous writer
9. Live in a tiny village and ride a bike with a basket on the front
10.  Die happy!

Nowhere in that list did crippling mental illness and misery appear.  It was not on my radar; it was not allowed and it certainly was not welcome because I had dreams, I had desires, I had a whole load of things I wanted to do with myself like graduating with my friends.  I wanted to throw my cap in the air and have a group photo with all of the people who had soldiered on through the three years of hard slog coupled with the parties and the crazy nights out that were never intended to happen but they just did.  It was supposed to be three years, it should never have taken me six.

I wanted to live in Edinburgh, a place that felt like home from the very first second my foot touched the platform ready to do my first Fringe Festival job in 2002.  I love that place, its energy, the creative chaos; it was something I’d never seen before.  I made life long friends, I saw things I would never see in Bolton.  I was a different person and I lived my best days there so was it too much to ask to just hang on to that and keep it? 

I wanted to travel the world.  In 2006 I went to Australia for six weeks and it was the trip of a lifetime.  I saw my Fringe Festival friends again and I lived in those six weeks the life I had always wanted.  Even though I  was diagnosed, I was physically scarred and I was teetering on the edge of an episode because I never really knew if my medication was right or not and I was still wondered if I really needed it when I felt well. 

When I came home from that trip I made plans to go back on a working holiday visa; but Bernard had different ideas.  I was going on a trip, that was for sure, but it wasn’t to Australia…a locked ward on a psychiatric ward was as far as I was ever going to get.

Bipolar Disorder robbed me of the things I wanted most in the world.  It took from me…

• Contentment
• Satisfaction
• Simplicity

Losing my friend didn’t put things into perspective; it tipped everything upside down and made me question every single relationship with every single person I have ever known.  Because at the hands of Bernard I have lost so many friends, people that I admired, people that I adored and would have fallen backwards in the bath for!

In the last few weeks I have asked myself…

“How embarrassing was I?“

When a friend who I thought loved me got engaged I could not have been more happy for her.  It was all she had ever wanted; to meet her prince charming and stop kissing frogs.  But when I was excluded from every celebration that took place in the run up to the wedding I was hurt – actually I was more than hurt because I understood her reasons why.

How do you introduce your friends and the family of the man you’re about to marry to a person who is the epitome of depressingly single?  She doesn’t have a job and she’s spent however many years going in and out of a psychiatric ward like the revolving door to a cheap hotel?  How do you explain to every successful person in the room that this is the kind of person you are associated with and you didn’t really want to invite them to your nuptial celebrations because it’s shameful to have someone so unfortunate in your life, someone who doesn’t match up to the rest of your acquaintances?  

“Don’t worry, I get it.”

But…

…How bad of a person was I?

Did Bernard make me bad as well as embarrassing.  I know I would sometimes look at my reflection and I’d wonder who the hell was staring back at me but, was I bad?  I know I was unrecognisable at times, different to the person I once was but was I really bad?

Was I a danger?

I know that I had a tendency to hurt myself but were the people I loved and adored worried that I might have the potential to hurt them?  When they had children did they think I was a danger to their child?  Or was I just too difficult to explain? 

Was I an embarrassing conundrum?

Now I don’t mean to hurt or upset anyone who reads this; that is not my intention.  This is just something I have to write because it’s been spinning around in my head since Bernard made an appearance nineteen years ago and I know I am not the innocent party in all of this.  I would even go as far to say that I have done exactly the same.  I put my hands up in the air and I will openly admit – because I am all about taking responsibility for my actions – I have cut people out of my life simply for self-preservation in order to move on from a chapter of my life that I don’t want to be reminded of.

I’ve said awful things about people… and I meant them.  I have lied, I have been a coward and I have run in the opposite direction of proposed happiness because I believed that I wasn’t entitled to it because of the person I had become.

A few years ago I said if someone was to put a pill in the palm of my had and say…

“This will take away your pain, this will take away Bernard and he will never come back.”

…I would take that pill and I would swallow it down with or without water and I would kiss goodbye to the illness that Michael Douglas calls…

“…a terrible disease…”

…and I would not look back my friends!  I would not look back.

In that room someone said…

“Even though it’s made you who you are?”

I thought…

“WHAT?!?!?!?!”

I was so insulted!  So I said…

“Bipolar is not there to be your friend; Bipolar is there to kill you.”

I know I upset people with those words because they implied that I would happily give up everyone and everything that had come my way since the illness or disease came in to play.

You know what?  The implication is an accurate one, I would. I would give up everything because it would mean having a simpler life and I would give up everyone I know because I believe in fate and I think if you’re meant to meet people you will meet them somehow; it doesn’t have to be because you have an illness.

My comment wasn’t well received and I was reprimanded for it but I still stand by what I said because I meant it but; there is no magic pill.  I can’t give everything up and I can’t get back time I feel I’ve lost nor can I get back the people that I still think about, still miss and still love.

I look at my life today and I can tick off four things on my childhood list and let’s put it this way, that’s more than what was predicted for me at the time of my diagnosis.  Sometimes lists aren’t always the things we should live our lives by.  Sometimes life just doesn’t go our way and no matter what we do sometimes life is mean.

But I am not ungrateful, I am not ashamed and I am not sorry.   I am thankful for the people who stood by my side and didn’t give up on me when they so easily could have.  I am grateful for all the opportunities that have come my way in recent years and I would not have been able do to those things if I had given in to Bernard’s demands and I’m not ashamed of where I’ve been or the people I met within those places. 

Over the fifteen years that I knew my friend she taught me how to spot the signs of my illness because on more than one occasion she knew I was ill before I did.  She told me that I could still be a success, it just might look a little different to how I imagined it to be.  She told me that Bipolar Disorder is a learning curve; it’s test after test after test and a constant reminder of what we have lost… but on the flip side it’s a reminder of what we still have and what we have in spite of it.

I’m happy now, believe me I am.  I know reading this it might not sound like it and in the last few months through my anger and my grief I lost sight of how to live the way my friend did for so many years.  I concentrated so much on every bad thing that Bipolar does to a person that I forgot that it doesn’t have to beat you.  

So now, even on my most self-indulgent and self-absorbed of days I promise to remind myself…

…that all that I have lost has given me everything I have.

Dedicated to my friend Sheila.

You will always be my Guru, my inspiration and my teacher. All I can say is I’m sorry… but I promise I won’t let it beat me.

Yesterday I fell backwards into the bath.  It’s my own fault; I was sitting on the edge of it cutting my toenails and balancing my feet on the edge of the toilet seat – never let it be said that I am not a classy girl, I do things in style – I must have been day dreaming or something – about what I’m not sure – but in my Primark pyjamas I’m must have moved ever so slightly and within a teeny tiny second I found myself battling gravity, flailing my arms about, my fingers clutching desperately to my Tweezerman nail clippers – like that’s the most important thing right now! – really hoping that…

1. I don’t bang my head against the tiled wall…

And…

2. Look like a complete muppet.

Well I didn’t accomplish either of those things but I did get stuck.  My bathroom is not the biggest and neither is my bath, so found myself wedged at the bottom of it with my legs dangling over the edge and my toes dipping into the toilet bowl just scraping the water – again, I have nothing but class.

As I sat there I tried to call out for Matt to pull me out of my predicament but I’d shut the living room door so he couldn’t hear me.  In the end it was a complicated process of manoeuvring myself, twisting, reversing, shifting, turning – maybe there’s hope for me yet, if I’m ever able to drive in this lifetime that was a three point turn, a parallel park and a reverse around a corner all in one!

What’s my point?

Well, life isn’t very kind right now, in all sorts of ways and this is not about looking for sympathy; its really not, but the truth is, a lost a friend a couple of months ago and I didn’t deal with it all that well.   

I have lost myself.

In the middle of my grief and my guilt I lost what I thought my life was like. I lost the image of what I wanted it to look like and the one thing that I can usually count on, my written word; I lost that too. I contemplated shutting the blog down and just leaving it and I kid you not, I was so close to following that through but, my friend Renae told me…

“You will find your voice again.”

…whether I have or not is a different matter, but right now there are words on the page and that’s a start. 

Back to the bath…as I’m being crushed between the sides of it I thought to myself…

“This is hilarious, but dammit! There’s no one here to see it!”

And then I thought…

“I can’t wait to tell Renae about this.”

And that right there is my point.  I found my situation funny; it was laughable, it was amusing.  I fell in to an empty bath while I was cutting my toenails! and even though my world is consumed by darkness; I am still grateful for the moments that make the edges of your lips curl upwards in a vague reminder of how to smile.

Today this is the point of this blog.  I have not been in the greatest of head spaces for a few weeks and I apologise for my behaviour.  I am plagued by Wilomena problems and the debilitating interruption in life that Connie colon likes to chuck into the equation – you know the drill, three days of phantom diahorrea pains and then a volcano of mush that looks like the equivalent of human brain matter coming out of an orifice that isn’t supposed to be in use anymore!

The other day I was sitting on the toilet – don’t pull your face, we all do it – while I was waiting for the brains to come out and in tears I kept thinking…

“How can anyone love this car crash?  How can anyone want to be in my life when every day there is just one disappointment after another? How can Matt love me?!”

Part of me was near to giving in…

Let Wilomena do whatever she wants… I don’t care anymore!

Let Connie colon fanny around in there shedding her bits off…I don’t care anymore!

Let Bernard the Bipolar just rip my sanity from the walls of my skull and we’ll call it quits… I don’t care anymore!

Well, I’ve had a few days of feeling sorry for myself, and I do still feel sorry for myself – I’m not going to lie – but I know I have two choices…

1. Shrivel up and give up?

Or

2. Put my brave pants on and crack on.

I’m choosing to put my brave pants on.  It’s not easy and it’s just guess work and my only saving grace is my sense of humour.  Life is not always funny.  In fact it’s very rarely funny at all and it’s solely down to ourselves to create our own happy place and that’s something I’ve been doing my entire life.

When I was a child I wanted to be a comedian so I made up jokes that no one else found funny…

Knock knock

Who’s there?

Table

Table who?

Table leave the table…

…I can only apologise…

When I was in primary school I wanted to be an impressionist and my passion, my obsession at the time was Coronation Street; I wanted write it, I wanted to act in it; I just wanted to live it… So I memorised the voices, the accents and the movements of all of my favourite characters and I performed them.  I performed them for my family, in the playground for my friends and I captivated the attention of an entire room at Brownies every Tuesday night relaying my rendition of Audrey Roberts and Deirdre Barlow.

On coach trips with my Brownie pack, I was always the one to start off singing There Were Ten a Bed, only I started it off with ninety-nine and it was a mission to see how far we would get before Brown Owl stood in the aisle of the coach and yelled out…

“Right! Enough!  There’s one left in the bed, tell it to roll over.”

I had people laughing in the palms of my hands, some even had tears streaming down the sides of their faces.  I made up sketch shows, I was a writer, a director, a Greek dancer and I tried to teach my friends the Zorba only I hadn’t fully paid attention in the dancing lesson at Greek School (that’s not a lie, my brother and I genuinely went to a Greek School every Saturday) so I just kicked my legs up a bit, ran from left to right a few times, did a swish and made my face look like I was really concentrating because I was thinking to myself…

“…one day there will be a real Greek dancer in this room and I will be shown to be the fraud that I am…”

From the age of about fifteen I was a massive fan of the Manchester based band Puressence.  Somehow they were massive in Greece and from 1992 to 2013 and I saw them live nine times – yep, I haven’t even seen Josh Groban that many times! – not only was I in complete awe of the singer but I lived for his lyrics so when the band split I was ever so slightly disappointed.

Now fast forward to September 2020 when I’d just got my current job, I had a day of online training and it was just me and the trainer on Teams.  He asked me if my name was Greek and he went on to say he used to be in a band and they played a lot of gigs in Greece.  I got half way through the day when I thought…

“Band in Greece.  Band in Greece? Could it be???”

After the break I asked him…

“What was the name of the band you were in?”

He said…

“You won’t have heard of us but it was Puressence…”

To which I replied…

“Are you kidding?? I have every album and CD single you released from 1996! I saw you play live nine times!!!!”

When I told my friend that afternoon he said…

“Did you not recognise him on camera?”

I said…

“No, I fancied the singer, I didn’t look at anyone else.”

I love reliving that moment because it brings me joy.  You very rarely get to meet your heroes and sometimes the ways in which you do are far from what you ever imagined. 

When I started my job the very next day that was the ice breaker.  When people asked how my training was I could answer their question with a tale that was so bizarre it opened the door for a million more questions.

In 2019 I booked tickets to see James Mudriczki (Puressence lead singer) performing as a front man for another band; due to Covid the gig was moved to three different venues and four different dates. 

I haven’t seen this guy sing since 2009 and he’s knocking on a bit now – No offence James, I’m nearly forty so it’s inevitable for both of us – I took Matt with me who was extremely reluctant and I used the classic “date night” tactic that people seem to practice these days and off we went.

It was like being an indie music fan back in the 90s.  I was standing in the smallest venue I’ve probably ever seen any band in, which obviously meant there was a chance I would get to meet said lead singer, so I said to Matt…

“Look for a guy with grey-white hair and funky glasses.”

When we looked around, every single man in the room was still trying to master the art of Paul Weller’s grey-white hairstyle with added funky glasses while others were still wearing the kind of coat Liam Gallagher has been wearing for the last 25 years.  But one thing was for certain; there was absolutely no risk of being trampled on in a mosh pit… because every person in the room bar was probably at risk of damaging a hip or knee replacement. 

Standing next to us there was a girl with a guy who was clearly twice her age and you could just tell that they probably met in some dodgy bar where she was trying to pull off maturity and he was trying to convince himself and everyone else in the room that even when you’re 40+ you can still spin lines like…

“Come out with me, I’ll take you nice places for dinner and then we’ll go see a band who have albums three times older than you…”

As I was looking up at James Mudriczki singing with the same ridiculously amazing voice that he always had, I noticed the sadness from my youth has been replaced with something different… It’s still sadness – in some way – but I can try to take the reigns on my unhappiness whereas I didn’t know how to do that when I was younger.

I may feel mental and physical pain and that’s down to circumstances, but my biggest fear; my ultimate, terrifying, awful, horrendous nightmare is that I could give up on myself and become everything that I have always fought against; because if I did that, it’s game over.

Over the last few years I have learnt one thing… if you can find laughter in a world that is more often than not, far from being funny; then you’re half way to being able to survive everything it throws at you.

In every uncomfortable or questionable situation I find myself in I always try to find something funny about it in order to get through it. Now,  I am not a comedian.  I am far from being an impressionist and my feet lost all sense of rhythmic ability many years ago so  I am not a Greek dancer. I am not everyone’s cup of tea, but one thing is for sure; whenever I am in doubt, when no one else is laughing and all I have to rely on is myself…

…at least I think I’m funny...

Dedicated to my friend Renae. You have given me so much encouragement, support and love and you have no idea how much I love and admire you. I don’t know how long this will last but, I think I found my voice.