The answers to all my ills (well for tonight) are

AND





The headaches are continual....with slight relief (mostly from mongey effect of sedation) so am continually taking lorazepam. Shock! Horror! Another NHS junkie to deal with. Well, get over it, I am!

Feeling like a used tampon that somebody dropped in an alleyway yonks back. And if you think that is a horrid image..you should trying coming across one. You get all sorts dumped in the alley near where I live...a veritable array of life's used and no longer needed items. Maybe, one day, I will be lying there, crumpled up and covered in shite.

Some might say it is because the nights are drawing in and winter looms ever closer. That is usually the case for me. Historically, I have gone into acute care end of December/early January having battled a few months and failed to gain any real balance. However, this year it has felt like January ever since January. Ever since Dad ran off to find that 'something' that makes life worth living for him.

I find that wrenching (gut and heart) that he had the motivation to go somewhere (quite a ways a way)..and all he found was himself, lost again!!!!

I used to do the heading for the hills thing. Mostly in some sort of manic state. Coming to in the middle of a park, or a street or someone's front garden and wondering how I got there. I think the mixture of sedation and realisation that wherever I go then I have to go with me has put a halt to all that roaming around.

I wouldn't say I am anymore found (inside myself) than Dad and maybe that means a big part of my spirit has already surrendered. But I don't feel so much defeated as I have done on some medications I was encouraged and agreed to take in the past. That really was a case of arriving in no man's land with accompanying baggage lost in transit.

I think one of the hardest things for someone with mental illness to come to terms with is the fact that, in quite alot of cases, this is for life (and not just for Christmas). And it is fucking relentless!!!

When my Dad is sitting there, pouring his heart out through his eyes and mouth, the stark pain of seeing reflections of my own pain in his pain are too much to bare. As in, I have to deal with Dad in small time sections (some kind of compartmentalisation goes on) or else I would be jumping off the nearest solid structure above 10 feet high (approximation obviously).

Call me a coward. I know I am. I can't sit there for hours listening to him, watching him turning himself over and cutting himself up. Is hard enough doing it to myself but a loved one doing it to themselves. It sucks!

Anyway, that is the doom gloom and despair part of this posting. Well, there is more as in bawling all over the support worker and getting continual phone calls and texts from someone TELLING me I didn't care about them.....but that is pretty much a weekly occurance for me.

The lorazepam followed by the walk to Dad's and then our joint walk to the chippy for our supper was like some halting of the marching insanity. We mellowed a bit together as we ate our battered delights and the talk was relatively easy and afterwards we both lay on our respective sofas, in his front room, and let it all be. If I hadn't had to get home for Suki cat, I think I would have crashed the night. Dad said I could. I said "Maybe next time".

Okay so it was a brief halting and I know the onslaught will resume soon enough but it will do for me, for now!