Final Fourth of July

I seem to have lost the thread that leads from one post to the next post but I feel pretty sure that if I just keep writing them, I'll find it again.

This last weekend was Independence Day for us former colonials. I hope that it will be my last one whilst living here - I don't plan to move back to the states after grad school; I didn't want to move back in the first place and I get on better with my parents when I live on a different continent. Anyhow, because I'm off to London and two of my friends are off to Oxbridge and my very lovely ex-girlfriend but one is off to Missouri, all for grad school, we all four got together to watch the city fireworks from my back porch and discuss moving issues, house hunting and the fear of failure.

We've been friends as a group for three and some years now. The two going off to Oxbridge just got married last week; she's a classicist and he's literature with a classics minor. My ex-girlfriend but one - really now just a very, very good friend - is also a classicist and is going to study some very offbeat and interesting things about the classical tradition and classical urbanisation patterns. The Oxbridge classicist is going to work primarily on Greek paleography - she promised to take me to see the Oxyrhynchus papyri and I am unendingly excited. We are all a bunch of happy dorky people headed off to the promised land of graduate study. We've spent a lot of time together as a group, especially when N (ex-girlfriend who will henceforth be abbreviated because this descriptive reference thing is too clunky to be accommodated further) and I were still dating.

The Oxbridgers have been well known for hosting parties named after grammatical constructions in Greek and Latin. (Did I mention that we are all dorks? Is it necessary even to mention that?) There is a certain kind of construction for descriptive paraphrasis called an Absolute, so there was the Ablative Absolute party, the Dative Absolute party, the Genetive Absolute...recently we found out that there is a rarely used Accusative Absolute but we haven't managed to have that one yet. It could still happen.

Oxbridge boy and N have been best friends for years, since before either I or Oxbridge girl knew either of them. But it was at the time of the first Ablative Absolute that the Oxbridge people began dating each other and that N and I first got to know each other. She and I started dating near the time of the Genetive Absolute. Then at the Oxbridge people's wedding last weekend, N was Oxbridge boy's best man, which led to a fun discussion between me and one of the professor's small daughter who never has been quite sure whether N was a boy or a girl, which N gets a big kick out of. She finally decided that N was the best girl-man, on account of being a girl but the wedding program saying man and because she was standing with all the other boys up front instead of the other girls. That child is going to be very comfortable with gender queerness when she's an adult - it's great and it'll be an advantage if she goes into classics.

I do have a point to all this anecdote and it is this: between last weekend at the wedding with all those people who know what the intervocalic sigma is and this weekend on my porch, I noticed that I have a lovely group of friends. They have all done what they could to help me over the past few weeks, especially N, and I don't feel abandoned and rejected as I often have at the end of a relationship. (N actually sat there and listened to all the gory details - she has always been an above average ex but that really goes above and beyond). It hasn't been just these three either; it's been my Georgia friends and my across the hall neighbors and the rector at my church and some of the professors and even some of the people and the rector at my mother's church who've helped me.

Two years ago, when I had just got out of hospital and had the worst and most acrimonious break-up ever of my life, all of these same people were my friends. But two years ago, I felt completely abandoned. The difference this time is that I'm well.

I never did like the idea of borderline personality disorder and I still don't, nor do I think that I actually have it. But I looked it up a month or so ago and read what seems to me to be the calmest description of it I have ever seen, though it could just be that I was calmer, and something caught my eye. The 'borderline' in the name refers to being in a state of borderline psychosis. That much makes sense to me. It would explain the deep disjunct between my experience then and my experience now. Two years ago, everything and everyone felt hostile; I couldn't let anyone help me, especially with moving, because then they'd find things out about me and use them against me and come to hate me secretly if they didn't already hate me secretly. Every thing that anyone said was full of too much meaning, as though all words and phrases were talismans too inscrutable to understand but suggestive of grave consequences from the heavens to the depths for any reply in word or by deed. I couldn't understand what anyone meant when they talked to me and I was tongue-tied by the need to load my words with the right meaning, convinced that I needed to strike on exactly the right phrase, like a spell or incantation, that would tell them what they were asking so that they would stop interrogating me like that. I would be happy to take the suggestion that all of this was the result of a state of borderline psychosis; in fact, that does explain it much better than bipolar disorder alone. There would be no moral content in saying that I had bipolar II with concomitant psychotic tendencies - it would be a bit scary sounding, but it wouldn't have any moral content. Borderline personality disorder does, however, have moral content; it's in the idea of a disordered personality, a disordered self, which implies culpability and carelessness.

I was so much more ill than I knew. It's only since I've been feeling better that I've been able to see how far from well I was and for so long. It has only been nine months since I began to feel well, and only five that I have felt really well and I still feel better every month compared to the last. I have no memory of ever feeling well before, at least not in a longer-term, continuous, dependable way. It is a new feeling. I remember having the same trouble with talismanic sentences when I was seven.

It has definitely taken too long to find an adequate treatment and/or diagnosis but in a lot of ways it doesn't matter anymore, now that I have one. It's too late to do anything about the past now, and though I do wish it had been different, it is different now. Much like finally getting the bachelor's degree: it bothered me no end that I hadn't finished yet and so many years had gone by but now I have it and it doesn't matter to me that I got it this year instead of last because I have it forever from now on.

It's the same with my friends. I wish I had been able to understand that they were trying to help me and that I had been better able to accept that help two years ago. But it's there now and I still need it now and I can accept it and understand it now. Thank God.

So instead of spending this Fourth of July alone watching the fireworks from my back porch, we had a proper party with moderate drunken carousing and barbecue and I made my little pecan deadlies and there was bourbon and beer. It was a proper Southern celebration and the last any of us will see for years. There was even an illegal fireworks show that some people let off in the parking lot of the church across the street, which was better than the licit, city-sponsored fireworks. This time next year, it'll be time to stand in line at the Texas Embassy, which is a restaurant in London that's the hotspot for all the American expats who aren't invited to the party at Winfield House - it's a little cheesy but I have had some bizarre discussions about American foreign policy there over the years with junior VP's of various corporations so I still look forward to going. I'll be taking the Oxbridge friends with me.

Continuing to Exist

I haven't been so sure about continuing this blog but I've found that I really miss it. So here I am.
Everything is a bit at sixes and sevens here; beyond personal life drama, I am also in the process of moving. I'm off to London for grad school in the fall to study philosophy and public policy - I can't remember whether I've said that before, so please forgive me if I'm repeating myself.

Either way, I'm very excited to be headed back to a country where 23 C counts as a heatwave. Where I sit, in urban Appalachia, we are having the exact same weather with the same lack of air-conditioning and all anyone can talk about is what a cold spring and summer we've had so far. From what I've been reading in the Guardian, the same weather is causing everyone to wilt across the Atlantic.

It's a little unfair of me to make mock. I remember the first summer after I moved here: I couldn't leave the house during the day from June til late September because the heat was overwhelming. I'm still not fully re-acclimatised. It certainly wasn't any warmer than this summer during the last summer I was in London (2003) but I seem to remember spending a lot of time on the 46 bus to get to Hampstead Heath and go swimming and eating unholy amounts of ice cream and thinking that I would sweat to death before the heat broke. However, after six years of being teased over my pusillanimous response to summer heat of the American south, it's hard to resist tittering in a friendly fashion.

I'm going to go spend about six weeks with my parents before I move overseas, which means that I'm in the odd process of dissolving my household now, still more than two months before I'll be heading overseas. The hardest part was finding a new home for my cat. I was there when he was born and brought him home exactly 5 years ago tomorrow, on the fourth of July. Now I'll be dropping him off at his new home in eleven days. Happily, he's going to a friend of mine whom I know to be good to cats. Still, it makes me upset to think about.

The fun part of this is giving away all my stuff. One of my friends (there are a bunch of us going to grad school this fall, including two who are also off to England) was joking about how it had all started to feel like an early Christian community, with everyone selling or giving away all they have. We've been swapping climate appropriate clothes and there's a lot of furniture changing hands. I've been putting together surprise boxes for various friends - filling them up with things that I think the recipient would enjoy having or make good use of. It's so nice not to have to make arrangements to move the furniture. I will easily be able to get myself and my books and clothes and paintings up to my parents' in my car.

The idea of not being here for next year's farm tour or this year's apple season and not being at Our Lady of the Holy Smokes for Easter (no more church choir!) is disturbing. However, whatever melancholia this premature nostalgia brings on is easily dispelled when I remember all things in London I like to do - there are so very many. I'll be back in the same town as some of my friends whom I haven't seen in six years and there will be tops of buses from which to stare out of the windows again and the Tate Modern and lunchtime concerts in the City churches and Primrose Hill and I won't have to drive everywhere. Walking will be easier, too, what with London being on an alluvial plane while I currently live in the mountains. You can't just go out and walk for a couple of hours here as you can there, and I miss it.

It's going to be nice to leave the ranks of America's uninsured too: due to state budget cuts, the mental health clinic I go to is now open only three days a week and they're about to dump patients like me, who aren't in a state of acute mental illness. I'm glad I won't have to figure out how to find appropriate care here next year.

I'm going to stop here for now with two requests:

1) There's no way for me to pretend that wretched things have happened in my personal life and that I am quite unhappy over the state of things. The world hasn't ended, however, and no one has died and I haven't lost my mind, so it will all be okay in the end. I just can't talk about it, so, though I know any enquiries would be friendly ones, please don't ask me about it.

2) I need to find a church in London: C of E, high, pref. Anglo-Catholic, and friendly to women and gay people. If you know of one (or of a way to try and find one - the diocese of London website is distinctly unhelpful), please tell me.

It's nice to be back.

Happiness and Illness

What a funny, lovely year this has been so far. I feel as though I have landed in an alternate reality. For one, we have a president who keeps doing good things; for another, I am about to graduate from university. All the time life gets more and more stressful and I seem to be getting more and more well in response. I've gotten through nearly the entire semester without staying up all night or even late, really, and I've just finished my comprehensive exams and my thesis defense without even taking a klonopin.

As though all this, the wellness, the graduating, weren't enough, I seem to have fallen in love. It seems to soon to say that but it is nonetheless true. I see no sense in pretending to myself or anyone else that I feel otherwise. I have no idea what to do about it; certainly, this is going to upset my plans in some measure but I don't seem to mind about that. I'm just happy.

It is the happiness that makes me wonder whether the world I live in now can be the same as the world I lived in last spring. Nothing, no object nor word seems to have the same significance as it did. Even the colors seem different. I hope that I will not fall into the ranks of the healthy and chauvinistic, despising illness and unconvinced of its reality. When I remember - and it takes effort - I can see how overwhelming it was, how very real and very horrible it was. I wasn't ever being lazy or weak. I wish I had let myself be ill instead of twisting everything around and trying to convince myself that I wasn't really or that any rate I ought not to be, or ought not to take it into account. I wish that I had been able to say to myself, anyway, that I was ill and that it was wrong and unreasonable to expect myself to be able to do even the simple things as easily or as well as others. I think that it is probably inevitable that there will be people who would think me lazy or malingering and I doubt that I will ever live in such an ideal world that I would truly be allowed to be ill whilst ill and convalescent while convalescent but I hope that the next time I will be able to tell myself the truth, even if nobody else believes it. It was a cruelty to have done otherwise and I wish I had not felt it necessary to be so mean to myself: after all, isn't that what mental health professionals are for? I shouldn't try to do their job for them, especially if I'm not getting paid for it. Not that I'm cynical or anything...

Nonsense

Well. Here I still am.

It's been a funny old week: I am unendingly behind on my schoolwork and happy because I'm dating a very sweet girl and very anxious that I won't be able to graduate because I am subconsciously convinced that I have screwed something up irremediably without realizing it. I am on the verge, I believe, of having an offer of a place at one of the MA programs I applied to and it snowed quite a bit yesterday but did not kill the flowers, thank God. I have a tension headache and yet keep finding myself singing because I'm happy.

So yes: my emotional life makes no sense at all right now.

It's Holy Week, too. Lots of church, which I like, with lots of music that I like. Time to get the house cleaned out on Good Friday, which is really a Jewish custom for Passover but which I have adopted because I like it. Really, what good is the church calendar if it can't occasionally tell you when to plant things and clean your house?

This is a fairly nonsensical post, which only makes sense given the circumstances, and really I just wanted to say 'hello, I am alive', anyway.

Hello. I am alive.