Brilliantness!

So ... I now have a new (real hair) wig. I feel MUCH MUCH MUCH more confidant. (I know I sound like an advert ... I can't help it.) It has been tested to the limit. I have slept in it. I have wandered into a December sea in it (I'm impulsive). I have worn it in pigtails. I have worn it down. I have brushed it and brushed it just for the sake of brushing it. It is wonderfully soft. It feels different to a synthetic wig. & the idea of wearing hair someone else grew ... appeals to my sense of the macabre. I want to show it off. The evening before last, I did. I performed poetry at a theatre (open-mic). And, although no-one there knew (presumably) that I was wearing a new wig, so there was no opinion-gauge-ing, I felt A LOT more confident than I would have done otherwise. I wandered up and down outside the train-station on the way there, admiring my reflection in the windows. MOST enjoyable. I strode up onto the stage and (despite the fact that I was actually SHAKING with stage-fright) gave what I consider to have been a successful performance. And that was partly because of my increased confidence. It is also very cool to be able to wander out into the communal hallway for my post without doing anything to my hair. I look forward to cooking for people (because, before, I couldn't go near steam, in case my wig was damaged by the heat - that goes for drinking hot coffee, too). I look forward to worry-free sleepovers - knowing that my wig won't get skewed. I look forward to all sorts of things! Yes, it cost me more than my wigs normally cost. However. I am enjoying every penny of it. So it's worth it.

All of the above is not to say that wearing a real hair wig will be the right choice for everyone. Thus far, though, it seems to be the best choice for me.

I am ONE WEEK PULL FREE! Which deserves capitalisation, methinks. This is a TREMENDOUS improvement for me. And I have done it without really thinking about it. Perhaps I have been super-happy because of my new wig. Perhaps it's because my hair isn't really available to to be pulled out. Perhaps it's because I feel more confident that I am not forever doomed to succumb to the Trich. I don't know. What I do know is that I'm very happy!

Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps...

I am writing this as a (uncustomary) sleeping-tablet slowly kicks in. So ... if I suddenly collapse onto my keyboard in silence and sleep ... or incoherence ... that's why. Tomorrow I have an appointment at the hairdressers. First time in at least 5 years that I've been ... hairdresser ... even in a wig-related fashion. So ... I'm scared. Basically. Why? Because I'm not entirely sure how much it will cost. I assume it will cost far more than I first calculate. And, because this is a major investment for me (whose - perfectly nice - wigs generally cost all of £35) , in case SOMETHING GOES WRONG. The idea that SOMETHING MIGHT GO WRONG haunts just about everything I do. At a vast variance to my less-subconscious protestations of invulnerability. Yes - if the world crumbled to dust at my feet (an extreme possibility - but a possible one) - I might possibly be able, with a disdainful toss of the head, to transcend such a disaster. But really really really I want for this to go well. And I will be being scrutinised by a person for, say, half-an-hour. A frightfully intense inter-communication between myself and a complete stranger. There will be practically no option for me to simply walk out if the whole thing becomes too utterly utter. I will need to keep my mind clear and calm to make whatever decisions need to be made. The responsibility weighs over me like a heavy black cloud. It is at noon. I am not generally even AWAKE by noon! *screams inwardly with a Virginia-Woolf-esque terror in the face of time*. I will be attending the appointment alone. ALONE. No comrade will march in there with me and face whatever has to b e faced, make whatever decisions have to be made, with me. No-one will syncopate their footsteps with mine. No-one will wheel in and out of cafes and murmur things about coffee and suchlike and stare their intensity - and mine - into the sea. For my comrades are GONE. Dispersed between the counties. And I am reading 'The Waves' and the poignancy is heightened. Come to Bournemouth! I exclaim! Come to see the coast! Come to see me! And now when and if these terribly delicately tied-to-one people do kestrel-like strike their talons into my glove (I did say I have taken a sleeping tablet...) then I will be more undamaged, less synthetic, more hopeful. And I hope, wearing a wig all the time, that I will be able to think about it less. Jump out of bed in the morning and RUN AWAY into the city and towards the sea. AWAY from the catatonia of hesitating before I go out. I want to be able to run into sand-emblazoned storms and flick the salt from the ends of my hair as in foams in the air and the people scurry hunched away from the striking of the sand. I want to be able to nuzzle into cushions without synthetic fabrics, slightly frizzed, scratching me like softened barbed wire. Come not closer than us, they seem to say, when people brush my hair but from my face and look at me with a heightened sense of my delicacy, of my breakability. The hesitation is unbearable. I want people not to be frightened of breaking me. I want to be able to be rebellious again and throw myself down to sleep on bombed-church-ed roundabouts, walk through the waves as they smash over my head. Not always to think - what about my wig, what if my wig comes off? This prim hesitancy is an inauthentic shade of malaise - and it is abhorrent to me. I hope I hope I hope they glue it all the way round. So my fingers cannot creep round the edges (hands have played major parts in my dreams of late). They showed me a wig to be half-glued on, though. With a clip at the back. To clip into ... what, exactly? My hair (what there is of it) is very VERY short. So ... we shall have to see about that. Also - would I not still be able to pull my hair out? Would my wig not still move at night? These things can be ... discussed, no doubt. OH OH OH I do hope it will all be alright *hushes the slightly painful attempts of her heart to beat in double time*.

Therapy is Driving Me Mad - So I'll Leave Therapy

Over the last couple of weeks and days I have increasingly descended into a miasma of introversion. It was a week or so ago when I decided that the reason for this was therapy. The little sub-audible whisperings of therapy-memory. I am blah blah blah etc. Which is why blah blah blah etc. Which is why I need to blah blah blah etc. I suppose I have been becoming increasingly two opposites - terribly terribly cross and terribly terribly apologetic. These two whirl around and around picking to speed until ... this morning I start talking quite calmly about the fact that I hate it then my voice becomes louder and finally I realise I am crying and The Snark (my ex-boyfriend/co-inhabitant) has quietly arm-enfolded me and I am explaining how thoroughly ... um ... DISSOLVING the whole thing is. To be imprisoned in a room with someone who thinks you have gotten it all wrong - and, not understanding it really, to agree and think IF I AGREE WITH YOU WILL YOU PLEASE JUST MAKE THIS STUPID ILLNESS GO AWAY?!? PPPLLLEEEAAASSSEEE?!? You know, that's her JOB. When people are somehow physically unwell - they just get cured. When people are somehow mentally unwell (even in some minor obsessional way, like me) then they get ... DECONSTRUCTED. And what is left? An intact body and no mind? No personality? A workable being/non-person/somehow-acceptable-person with nothing else? So you see if she wants to take away my personality - then I hope she has a new one waiting in the sidelines. She doesn't seem to. She doesn't seem to want me to have this personality or any other. And so I am retreating and retreating in a sort of passive-aggressive conscious catatonia. If everything I say and do is going to be unfavorably critiqued by her, I'd better not say or do anything. It's a life, you know, not a novel. If it's not stylistically in keeping with the others on my shelf - well - I'm not going to damn well rewrite myself for the sake of symmetry. If that will mean that I will have my life critiqued by idiots who don't/can't/won't mind their own business - then fine. I'm sure I can withstand that. If I don't have my foundations chipped away at regularly every fortnight by someone paid by the NHS/government to do so. And yes - the whole thing does make me paranoid. It points out to me the extreme differences which can exist (usually covertly) between my experience/theory-of-everything and those of ... those of the people who have had their views ... officialised? And then I have to pretend that I garee. And they know I'm pretending. And they try to make me better so that I don't have to pretend any more. And I look at them with incomprehension and a growing sense that they think that I'm mad. Simply - mad. And can't see that I'm mad. And I look at them with a growing contempt for the lack of their logic. Their inability/refusal to realise/agree-with-me that their views are no less of a sham than mine. They are just an easier sham. A sham that works for them. A sham that does for them what they want it to do for them. Whereas mine - amuses me. That's all I want really - for life to amuse me to entertain me and not to damn well expect too much of me. Not that I'm not capable of it - just that I hate it. And I (frankly)consider myself far to important to give up everything I enjoy - anti-social/removed/detached/pathological - as that may be - simply so that they will think I'm telling the truth when I exclaim in mock-surprise 'OF COURSE you are right - I should care dreadfully a lot about whether people like me [I've tried that - it didn't work] and about whether or not my world-view tallies with that of other people and about whether or not I fit into your capitalist society - yes pour the shame of me over me and how much better I will be! How much tamer [insert social-cohesion-producing fake-laugh here]!' Whereas actually I want to tear your face off. And call you an impudent bloody moron. And hole-punch your tongue [yes, I can see that...]. AND so on AND so forth until you finally LEAVE ME ALONE. Or make stop what I want you to make stop rather than making EVERYTHING stop. It would be far simple to just knock me out if you're going to take away my consciousness (in hiding from you) as well as my habit... And then I would have an excuse to retaliate. In refusing to attend any more therapy sessions, I am dismissing you. Dismiss whatever insults your own soul, Whitman said. Yes, well... GOODBYE. FUCK VERY OFF. I'm tired of trying to look at the world and finding that I can't really because my vision is too blurred with panic and wrongness and suchlike and trying to breathe and finding that I cannot I cannot and wondering if I am doing that on purpose to plummet myself into oblivion away from IT ALL. Yes - a lot of what I do I do on purpose. A rebellion. It's my life and I'll fuck it up if I want to, fuck it up if I want to, fuck it up if I want to, you would fuck it up too if you were so besieged by people trying to save you from yourself as though your self were something to be saved from. I'M. NOT. THAT. ILL. Get over it. What I am is very seriously tired of being defined, in a snowballing sort of a way, as some sort of tortured waif because I do this one little thing... It could be a lot worse. I'm tired of explaining of apologising of talking about it. I want to live as though it had never happened. As though it isn't happening. As though it will never happen again. I don't want to talk about it. Yes - I am talking about it now. But the point is - I am much more than a few unfortunate self-tearings. And maybe - has nobody ever thought of this - maybe I sometimes do that because I am overwhelmed by being happy...? A lot of the time, believe it or not, I really am terribly, almost faintingly, happy. And then I want to throw myself into the sea, smash myself against walls, somehow rend myself into atoms and dissipate into the ENTIRE UNIVERSE! Because it simply isn't fair, being one person - being at all limited. I don't live - I simmer. A lot of the time I want to scream - for one reason or another. But this focus on the wrongness of hysteria is so restrictive - I can't breathe in in, this corset of words inflicted on me by people who whom I don't agree. I DON'T AGREE!!! Is that alright with them? Evidently not. This is my arrogance. This is my lack of acceptance of other people. BUT WHAT BOUT YOU ACCEPTANCE OF ME?!? Do I not count? Saintly as the idea seems, of me accepting everyone in order for them to then accept me, it seems very biased, very torturous. In fact, pathologically torturous. I suppose what they want me to do is not to fling myself onto the ground and scream 'accept me - stamp on me and tell me I'm mad and kill my personality and accept me because by that point I will like you so much!' - I think they want something more subtle, more insidious. They want me to GIVE IN. NEVER!!! NEVER!!!!!! NEVER!!!!!!!!! They CANNOT make me. In that lies my autonomy, and I WILL NOT rescind it. This may all seem a little overwrought. The point is, though, I'm fighting for my life. I'd rather pull my hair out, tear myself limb from bleeding tearing dying limb, than give up on my identity. The first time I will allow myself to rot, to decompose, to come apart - is when I am dead. If my life is a game (and the metaphor appeals to me...) then I'll play it how I want. And anyone who doesn't like that doesn't have to play. I don't NEED anyone apart from ME. I'm perfectly happy on my own. I feel most that I am myself on my own. With other people I bend myself out of shape. And then stand horrified looking at the vandalism. I am going to BE MYSELF. And damn the consequences. Is that OK with you? If not, BYE.

Nothing to Declare - Just Some Pics...

Ugh

So... I've noticed that when I have pulled lots and lots of my hair out I feel really really aesthetically hideous. Which is really quite odd, as the rest of the time I generally feel somewhat Narcissistic... Perhaps it has to do which the level of control I feel I have over my appearance. When I pull my hair out I feel... Fatter. Which is absurd, because, medically-speaking, I'm not "overweight" (to put things into perspective, I'm 5 foot 7-and-a-half and 11 stone 4, which, according to the National Health Service's Body Mass Indicator calculator, is on the heavy side of healthy, but healthy nonetheless ). I would like to be slimmer, yes, but it's not exactly a major issue for me - most of the time. But when I pull my hair out lots and lots - even my face feels wrong. Typing this I feel as though my face is all wrong. Probably because I am tense because I am writing about Trich. But it feels ... too big. Like a carving of a face. Perhaps I feel too noticeable. And I feel, as I have mentioned, fat. Not just usually fat - a little bit delightfully plumpish like someone who eats one too many chocolates - no. Not self-indulgently fat. Fat like someone who eats fish and chips every day washed down with vast quantities of beer (which I don't - though both of those things in moderation do not entirely not appeal to me). I remember feeling SO MUCH better about myself when I had more hair. I remember flouncing in to university and listening to lots of people compliment me on my hair. It was fairly enjoyable. And now - I'm back to square one, almost. Practically no hair at all. I don't look all that bad, in my estimation - but hair does a lot for a face, and I certainly look, well, ODD, without hair. Prettily odd, but odd nonetheless. Not that I look all that un-odd WITH hair. That's not exactly my goal. Ugh ugh and more ugh. That's how I feel at the moment. And it doesn't help when the people around me tell me to stop being ridiculous and that I'm only trying to get them to tell me how pretty I look - because that's not it at all. I'm not fishing for compliments - I'm just expressing the way I feel. Hopefully only temporarily the way I feel. Because (all 'but I'm an intellectual bookish bluestockingish thing who doesn't really care about the way she looks' protestations aside) I really DO care about the way I look. I want to like the way I look. I'm USED to liking the way I look. I liked it better that way. So I want to recover that feeling and stop bugging those around me with my (rather painful) insecurities.

Having Reterned From Therapy...

So - I went to my therapy session. So - yes it was as always a little too intense. But - I think I begin to understand what my therapist means and, to some extent, agree. My main goal OF COURSE is to stop pulling my hair out. However - if I have to rewire my brain not to panic quite so much before I can achieve that goal, so be it. It's true - I do mostly pull my hair out when I am panicking about something or other. Which I do rather a lot - to the extent of feeling my heart beating away at my ribcage and being, because of that, in a fair amount of physical pain. Why? What can possibly be happening, quite so often, to trigger that level of alarm? I'm a girl not a forest faun ... and all that jazz. Well... For reasons I won't entirely go into here (no-one needs to know the exact details - except perhaps me - and I'm not sure even I do...), my brain (and I am quite prepared to believe this) has been wired to have a somewhat hyperactive alarm-system. So I am a little to often seemingly faced with two options - FIGHT or FLIGHT. Or, I suppose, fainting ... but that probably comes under the heading of FLIGHT. Not that I actually faint. I have been known, in extreme cases, to fling myself onto a bed or a sofa or a floor (whatever's handy) and sob - but not actually to faint. So I need to rewire my brain - to attain a new and more workable level of alarm-system. OK. I suppose I'll just have to be brave. Damn it - in so many other ways I really am. But I think I've attained such a level of endurance of alarm that actually I'm often not altogether aware of it. I'm used to ignoring it. To inwardly saying to myself 'It's perfectly alright, you know - you're being absurd - you really will just have to get on with what you're doing - KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON'. Keeping up a narrative-of-the-sensible is an awful lot less scary that listening to/reading The Narrative of Somewhat Excessive (in the Circumstances) Alarm. I am living like someone is some play by Sartre. And the Existential angst of it all is getting to me. Rationally, I really to believe that the world is, at least potentially, DREADFULLY dangerous. ANYTHING could happen. I am terribly (literally) imaginative. All this is rather OCD-ish. Invasive thoughts and all that. But part of me whats to stare these invasive thoughts in the eye (do they only have one eye? Are they, collectively, a cyclops?) and say to them 'I have you so I'm damn well going to endure you because I can take it'. But simply because I can endure something doesn't mean that it's a good idea (and then I come up against the slight - note the irony - problem that I don't actually believe in objective 'good', having had my ethical/ontological world shattered a couple of years ago by Nietzsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil'). OK - let's rephrase that then: simply because I can do something doesn't mean that it will lead to a more-enjoyable rather than a less-enjoyable state for me. Even if it doesn't ACTUALLY matter if the emotion that flitters across emotional whiteboard-linked-up-to-the-projector-of-my-sensory-input-equipment is JOY or TERROR - well, I like joy more. And if it's all meaningless, what does it matter if I meaninglessly choose joy over terror? 'A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.' (Oscar Wilde) *cue 'it's my life'*

Therapy, Therapy, Therapy...

Tomorrow, I have therapy... And the homework my therapist set me does not exactly meet with my undivided self-congratulation. My therapist has this theory, see, that my hair-pulling is linked to a desire she thinks I have to keep people rather at arm's length... To cling onto my pedestal like that barely-worshiped god Agatha Christie wrote about in one of her short stories... And so... She asked me to keep a diary recording my Interactions With Other People... Only I wasn't quite sure WHAT ABOUT these interactions she wanted me to record. So, retrospectively (because, having procrastinated for most of the past two weeks, I wrote most of this diary tonight), I have written a sort of Virginia-Woolf-esque stream-of-emotions. I'm not sure that was quite what she wanted. I have also thought about implications of the setting of the homework, i.e. that I need to change the modus operandi of my inter-personal interactions (initial reaction: why should I ?!?) and that I am somehow getting something wrong at present (apart from being somewhat shy, I'm not sure that I am...) and that my social life has a causal effect on my experiences with Trichotillomania (which, apart from - I'd say rather inevitably - making the Trichotillomania worse when any major social catastrophe occurs, I'm not sure that it does...). I feel... apprehensive. I'm going to have to admit to my procrastination. I'm going to have to race (probably in a tearing hurry - because I'm always in a tearing hurry if I have an appointment to go to - procrastination again) through the mean streets of Boscombe to the room in which my therapy occurs all the while trying not to be lynched and cannibalised by the roaming locals (what looks they give me, as I flutter by in my flounces and burgundy-coloured hats and vast faux-fur-collared coats! It is like an illustration of The Bohemian V The Proletariat). Scared scared scared. Of the rather intense therapist in front of whom I will sit, clutching the arms of the chair with white hands. Attempting to defend my world-view. Against the onslaught which I know is meant to help me - but which terrifies me. I AM HAPPY AS I AM. Apart from the Trichotillomania. She says, almost laughingly, that she can't wave a magic wand. But I want her to. There's a part of my mind that says that to wave a magic wand and get rid of my illness is her JOB - that that's what she's THERE for. And I can't help but feel that, if I had the money to pay for it, I COULD get someone to wave a magic wand - to at least give me an effective cocktail of drugs. Anything. But stamping my feet and having tantrums won't help. I HATE THERAPY. But I want to be better. I do so want to be better. So I will go - and I will endure it - and I will rant about it afterwards, all the while hoping that this questioning of my very deeply-held views - views which, were anyone to discount in any other context, would lead to the discounter being called, at least silently in my head, an idiot, indeed that's all the thought I would probably give them - will have the effect of stopping my hair-pulling. As an utter egotist, therapy is VASTLY challenging for me. I hate the idea of HAVING TO artificially try to agree with anyone. To override my authentic feelings and thoughts. But my authentic feelings and thoughts haven't saved me from Trichotillomania. SO - I demand of myself that I will do EVERYTHING in my power to help myself get better (and yes I have this somewhat dual view of myself - as what I do and what I want to do - how I am and how I want to be; I am a perfectionist).

Trich World

Today I looked at Trich World (a site for Trichotillomaniacs) and am at this juncture very enthusiastic about it. So... My plan henceforth is to write a blog there are perhaps copy my blog there to my blog here... I think that makes sense because then both my non-Trichotillomaniac friends who want to know how I am and the people already following this site can still read my blogs, but I can also reach a larger audience. Very happy!

Comfortably Numb - or - 'Don't Knock Neurosis'

I have very little to report - as a Trichotillomaniac I have been, today, a complete failure. I pulled one hair, one single hair, out of my head - and it was sticking out - and I couldn't be bothered to get any scissors (MISDIRECTED PERFECTIONISM ALERT! MISDIRECTED PERFECTIONISM ALERT! BLEEP BLEEP!). That last outburst is the result of having, during this long long Summer Holiday from my Place of Education (otherwise known as the experience of being a graduate) allowed my sense of humour (which had, while I was at university, turned into something I would like to think of more as wit than as mindless hysterics, generally) to revert to my old, pre-university running around with arrows and pretending to shoot them at trees (this actually happened earlier...) and bursting into volleys of laughter for no reason in particular. While the friend I was with made an animated aeroplane on the computer - NNNNNEEEEEOOOOOWWWWWW - making it fly becuase I said that if it didn't fly it wasn't a plane. *blushes* I am 22! Anyhow. Along with all that I have not really been worrying about anything. Or, if I have, I have been not really caring enough about it to keep worrying about it for long. I suppose this is how most people live, most of them time, delightfully infused with the sense that they are terribly important, and that they world is terribly important, but that there isn't very much they can do for about/for/regarding either, so they might as well not worry about them. The alternatives are the following: 1: joylessly martyr oneself on the alter of the world, thus adding not a jot to the aforementioned (no no no no no!) or 2: martyr the world, if necessary, before one martyrs oneself, because, of the two, oneself is more one's own responsibility than the word is. Indifference-in-the-face-of-one's-own-limited-capacities is possibly the most pragmatic of these three options. But is that selling out? I rather think it is. Not selling out any more than most people sell out - but selling out all the same. But my foremost priority has to be myself. And if not striving for anything means, strangely enough, that I don't tears myself to pieces like piece of machinery on full steam with something jammed between its whirling cogs ... good. Rest and recuperation. Effort expended is not always proportionate to reward reaped. Indeed, Excess of Effort Expended (EEE) seems to be directly proportionate to wReakage Reaped (RR), i.e. the undoing of what was done when one was not overexpending oneself like a rubber-band pulled round the world. The point being, my relationship with my Trichotillomania is neurotic.The following is from Wikipedia:

As an illness, neurosis represents a variety of mental disorders in which emotional distress or unconscious conflict is expressed through various physical, physiological, and mental disturbances, which may include physical symptoms (e.g., hysteria). The definitive symptom is anxieties. Neurotic tendencies are common and may manifest themselves as depression, acute or chronic anxiety, obsessive-compulsive tendencies [as in my case], phobias, and even personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder or obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. It has perhaps been most simply defined as a "poor ability to adapt to one's environment, [absolutely - why should I - I may be ABLE to adapt to my environment, but I rather think my environment should adapt to me! And, if it's not able to, does that mean that my environment is neurotic...?] an inability to change one's life patterns [in my case that of self-creation, happiness, panic, self-destruction, miserableness, and self-renovations, cyclically), and the inability to develop a richer, more complex, more satisfying personality (I try to create myself definitively - and am thoroughly alarmed when I notice any change concerning myself - it seems like the changing of the paint of The Picture of Dorian Gray - some sort of deviation from what I have, very rationally, decided to be - an imposition of small-scale evolution into The House of Art).

Actually, I was rather self-destructive during the last ten minutes. *puts on hat* Possibly because my pop-up-blocker suddenly decided that it didn't want to block pop-ups and I found myself suddenly confronted by a wall of sound and light blared by some tabloid I was casually scrolling through - as I sometimes do, because the tabloids are so much more dramatic, so long as I don't have to pay for their trash. *sips blazingly hot coffee*

Why the above train of thought (about neurosis)? 'Martian Time-Slip' by Philip K. Dick (1964). I read it a couple of days ago. I have been reading Philip K. Dick novel after Philip K. Dick novel lately. Thus far I have read circa nine. Three of them in the last week. I find them - terribly terribly comforting. In them, people are bewildered by things much as I am bewildered by things. And they seem to get along with much the same mixture of panic and delight and amused-ness and sheer wonder-filled detachment as I do. Quite apart from aliens (or is it quite apart...?) they seem to be about alienation. Or at least - about the varying degrees between being utterly alienated and utterly osmosis-ed. I can relate, to varying degrees, to both of those - which is perhaps why I am less familiar with the middle-section of experience. Anyway. The following chains of words (mind-forged-manacles?) struck me as having a bearing on the subject of this blog:

'It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.' That reminds me of the moment, quite some time ago, when I said to someone that I wished the world were controllable via remote control. And they said something to the effect that it would be rather less entertaining and surprising if it were. And I thought that it would be simply rather less potentially frightening if there was that sort of graceful gliding around to no purpose one finds in visions of unalterable Edens. If I pull all my hair out, at least it can't be imperfect. It can't be imperfect if it doesn't even exist. (Unless, of course, with Aquinas, one considers existence a necessary predicate for perfection...) But then the same could be said about my entire self - hence perhaps my occasional impulses to go not-at-all-gently into that black night - to fling myself very dramatically from something like Manfred (Byron's Manfred, not P.K.D.'s Manfred). But then what would be the point? I wouldn't be around to enjoy my lack of imperfection, my dust to dust and ashes to ashes would scatter like an exploded window-to-the-soul (MY soul) and prance into panthers, flutter into starlings, burst into the stars from whence they came... And suchlike. And I wouldn't be around to see it, except as inchoate atomic portions of other selves, animal, mineral or vegetable. So utter self-destruction is out, unless something very dreadful were to occur. It just wouldn't be cricket. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON and all that. I'm not a French Existentialist. I'm a post-Wilde-post-Ancient-Greek-Hellenism-post-modern-post-Nietzsche-sensualist-with-unfortunate-Post-Christian-Saint-Ascetic-tendencies. If that sort of conveys the cultural soup I find myself drowning in. No - not cultural soup. There's no such thing as culture any more. I'm not being an elitist snob. What I mean is - there is no such thing as cohesive culture (Dostoevsky perhaps saw the beginning of this), there is only Post-Culture. We are reviewers of all that has gone before. Nothing really new is being done - it can't be, because we have only aggregates of Past Times stitched together like dead Frankenstein's monsters - reanimated by the vitality of the people dressing up in them. The point is - I am then left with the rather mammoth task of constructing myself, on rather a moment-to-moment basis - or just playing along and feeling like rather a fraud. I remember the time when, having long outgrown my little pine child's bed, I was bought a new, rather more adequately-sized, bed. I wanted the double, rather square one, with the dark surround and then I would put a dark board over my window so that there was no light (I decided) apart from the artificial one (which was somewhat central) and then the squarish room would be perfect (apart from the door not being central (I wondered if I could cover it up...). I was told that I could have the bed I had chosen. And then a bed was delivered. A totally different bed. 'There has been a mistake!' I exclaimed, my heart pounding, appalled by the enormity of the dissonance between what I had expected to happen and what had actually happened. It was nightmarish. I tried to liaise with my mother. Tried to make her see the horrificness of what had just happened. Tried to persuade her to absolutely not take the packaging off in case that got in the way of sending the bed back and getting back the right one, the one which had been ordered. She informed me that this WAS the bed that had been ordered. But that was impossible, I told her - I had been told that I could have the bed I had chosen. Well, you have this one now, she told me. And ... so ... I absolutely refused to let her take the packaging off the thing. I absolutely refused to sleep on it. Eventually, a relative I was more likely to obey came round (was probably asked to come round) and persuaded me, still utterly traumatised, to take the packaging off and accept the thing as my bed - which I did, out of sheer politeness. My squarely-symmetrical room never did come about. But - even now - I can't help but wonder why the Hell I couldn't have just been allowed to do what I wanted? Why was what I wanted so unreasonable just because those around me didn't emphasise?

'...a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.' This, to some extent, is why I am somewhat nervous about the therapy I have been undergoing. Pulling my hair out is, my therapist says, a tool, a tool with which I let myself off the hook, so that society (which, she says, I seem to see as something generally hostile, people-I-am-not-ever-so-slightly-nervous-of being the exception to the rule) won't expect anything of me, so that I am seen to be flawed and broken and am left alone. Well - what's so not-sensible about that?!? If everyone were to/were to be allowed to interact with me all at once - OH the chaos. I would much rather flit from flower to flower and avoid the weeds. Surely that's what everyone does, to the best of their ability? Anyone who willingly endures being around anyone they can't stand is more or less self-harming in a manner I consider to be actually more harmful than what I have done. And what's the alternative, exactly? Hide? (Agoraphobia. I've seen what that does to people. It turns them into strange, pale beautiful creatures who expect more and more and more of themselves, because they are terribly out of touch with what everyone else actually achieves - until they dare not go out for fear of being unmasked as being utterly inadequate. When they are very far from being utterly inadequate. That is my experience of the thing, anyway.)Stride around looking formidable? Accept everybody as equal in the eyes of The Lord, despite having only my own necessarily judgmental eyes to look through? I reserve the right to pick and choose my allies and - to some extent - my enemies. About most people I am benignly indifferent. That probably manifests itself far more favorably than the more passionate attachments of Most Other People (an entity referable-to as MOP - or THE MOP - which is, I suppose, preferable to THE MOB). My therapist (in, to some extent, disagreement with me) doesn't want to substitute the Trichotillomania-tool for some other tool. She wants me to stop using any such tool at all. And to LIKE EVERYONE! Or that's how it seems to me. And the idea fills me with horror. It feels like falling into some nightmare pool of flailing THINGS and being subsumed into them. Just writing about it makes my heart race, as though I should run away from it. 'From childhood's hour I have not been as others were I have not seen as other saw I could not bring my passions from a common spring...' (Poe). I want to be apart from the rest of the world, to some extent. Otherwise what's the point of being a single individual at all? It is like expecting me to be humanity, all at once, a Krishna of whirling limbs omnipresent and timeless-and-yet-somehow-time-permeated - all at once. Very Panthiestic - but I'm not ready for it yet, not until I die.

What does the future hold, between now and my dissolution? Well - as I told myself year after year in little videos filmed for myself telling myself, with compassion, that if, by a certain fixed date, I didn't stop pulling my hair out, I would kill myself (on compassionate grounds - how strangely happier I always felt after I had made those videos, as though I had given myself a date beyond which I was guaranteed not to suffer), I would rather like it to be Trichotillomania-less. Don't worry (if you were): I'm not in the least suicidal now. I very rarely have been ever. A handful of times - like, probably, most people. But those videos expressed absolutely the horror I feel at the idea that I will pull my hair out for all of my life. It would be, for me, a defeat. An absurd defeat. It would not be worthy of the best that I am (post-modern value-judgment-less-ness aside, for a moment). If there's anything I damn well will get my own way about - it's this. And if that means not sinking my teeth into happiness quite so ruthlessly and in quite so exhausting a manner - resting and recuperating, in other words... - then so be it. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be...

I Want Doesn't Get

Remember what one's relatives used to bleat at one? 'I want doesn't get.' 'I don't want doesn't get!' I would, slightly hysterically, explode at them - laughter bulleting into their well-meaning attempts to turn me into a nice little lady. Well - I WANT HAIR! Nice hair. Not I've-just-been-kidnapped-and-made-to-join-some-strange-and-super-Spartan-army hair. I want it all - I want it all - I want it all - and I want to now. Unfortunately - it isn't going to happen like that. Even if I were to be utterly utterly utterly good for weeks and weeks and weeks growing my hair back (to my satisfaction) would take a while. Fortunately - I have been very very very good. I have, today, only pulled my hair out a couple of times. That is EXTREMELY good so far as I am concerned. And thus I have recorded it. So that I can look back - when the year is up - on this blog - and say: Yes, I've been good sometimes. I don't want to record ONLY the worst of times. I don't want the blog to be one long wail. I am feeling quite positive about it all today. That is possibly because I have been in rather a good mood in general today. It is possibly because I have bought myself a new pair of (pink!) shoes - yes, I am that shallow. It is possibly because I am buoyed up on the bubble of half a bottle of good wine and a fair amount of whiskey. And nourished - nourished heartily - with steak and caramalised carrots and suchlike - by a chap who disinterestedly is happy to feed me simply because he loves me - hopelessly in a very literal sense - and because people fainting of hunger all over the place because they would rather buy shoes than food would be disconcerting for the world at large. My point is this - I am lucky and spoiled and talented and not-bad-looking. What in God's name have I got to mooch around about? So I shouldn't. It's not fair on me or anyone else. I'm going to damn well be brilliant, or damn well be damned, and my hair is a part of that. KEEP CALM & CARRY ON and all that jazz.

Calm Down

I had been quite good until this afternoon. By my rather appalling standards I have been quite good full stop. I have created a little space on the right side of my head - just above my right-hand-temple. The pain was - really quite enjoyable, actually. But this is what happens when I stay up when I'm deliciously tired. Today I had a lot of energy. I sang in the street. I crossed my eyes amongst serious people in cafes. I laughed at my own silliness. I laughingly smashed my going-into-town-and-buying-books partner in the torso and was thoroughly amazed when, though smiling, they seemed a little alarmed. An enjoyable day. So now I am all over-excited. I never could get used to bedtimes. And so I have become just a little overwrought. I am still happy - but I can feel my heart pounding (over-used term) in my chest (where else?) and I am trying to breathe in a reasonably decorous manner. Life life life I love you. And all that. But as soon as I start enjoying living you I start to panic just a little - becuase I unfreeze from my detatchedness-of-emotion just a little - and then life gets a little scary. As it does. A small price to pay I suppose. - if you only pull your hair out when you are actually alive, when is the alternative except death (?) so just go steady. Good food. Good books. Lemon cheesecake. Lemonade. All is good. Calm down you silly thing you! You're happy! Live with it.

Current Life Experinces = Somewhat Difficult. Current Trich-Related Experiences = Looking Up. Note the Paradox.

So... Despite being embroiled in utter war with my mother (the same of story - told louder, longer and more loathe-ing-ly, I am actually doing pretty well. For me. Yes - I am pulling my hair out. But not nearly so much. Possibly this is becuase I am away from home. (Is this fair? I pulled my hair out quite a lot while I was away from home while I was at university... But I was under the usual stresses of university life then, I suppose...) So hurrah for me! My fingernails are (as you can see in the picture) really quite long now. So long, in fact, that attempting to learn classical guitar (from a book, without a tutor, highly unlikely to work I know...)is becoming somewhat challengeing. My nails make horrible sounds in conjunction with the three metal strings. It is - HORRIBLE! But I think they look pretty. So never mind The Pursuit of Musical Brilliance. My hair looks (marginally) better, too. From the point of view of a non-Trichotillomaniac, it probably still looks pretty bad. But from my point of view it looks like the beginning, at least, of the much-vaunted Road to Recovery (wherever that may be - and, in my case, it may well be geographically-related).

New Post

OK - New Post. The last one was rubbish / completely the sort of thing I do when I'm trying to pretend that I'm not thoroughly RUBBISH for giving in to Trichotillomania. It isn't my fault I have it. But it is my fault if I just give in. I'm going to have to fight a little harder. No-one should have to feel the way that I feel. But the only way I'm going to stop feeling that way is to FIGHT it. Which requires effort. (Too much effort, more effort than I have...) This is absurd. This will probably come to nothing. But I have to make these statements to myself. That I will not stand for it any longer. And all that. Because if I don't what is left except slipping slowly down the slope of failure? I feel hideous. I am tired of feeling hideous. But there is always the paradox of wanting to tell myself off, to punish myself, so that I will not do it again. And knowing that I need to take care of myself to some extent or the self-destruction of Trichotillomania will turn into general self-destructiveness and then where will I be? Quite possibly nowhere. And, having written some more of the (endlessly being-written) novel today, I know that I need to exist - at least until the novel is finished. Perhaps that is why I leave it unfinished. It is, quite literally, my raison d'etre. I need to exist - in a reasonably intact manner - if I am to do anything useful. And, if I am neither to be beautiful or useful, what good am I to be? Another thing - I'm sure I'm getting fatter. To be both bald and fat is hardly a good look. (Note the note of self-hatred - to be avoided if at all possible.) The point is - I want to be the best I can be. And I'm not being the best I can be. And I am furious with myself. I should temper this furiousness with an understanding that I have an ILLNESS - that it is not my fault that I have an illness - and that all I can possibly do is try my very best. My therapist disagrees with this. The argument is that expecting my VERY best from myself all the time is expecting too much. I may not EXPECT my very best of myself all the time. But if I don't TRY my very best (and there is a distinction to be drawn) then I can't very well admire myself. To try and to fail is one thing. Not to try is - monstrous.

Therapy and Stuff

'Why don't you tell your therapist what you're REALLY like?!?' my mother shrieks, like an excessively gritty character in a kitchen sink drama. This implies, I suppose, that my therapist, if I told her what I am 'REALLY' like, would throw up her hands in horror and declare me beyond redemption. I consider the question with as much level-head-ed-ness as I can manage. (This is how I have always tried to stream my mother's outbursts into manageable channels.) What am I 'REALLY' like? I think to myself. It is possible for me to know what I am 'REALLY' like? This leads me to think about how only a transcendent God could be omniscient - the picture of God looking at circular time from the top of a mountain... A picture from a long-ago lecture at a long-ago college... Then a scuffle breaks out. And I leave.

Therapy becomes ever more demanding.I cling to the arms of the chair as though I could fling myself into the vertiginous abyss of the dark carpet. I give the therapist the information I think she wants and she examines it and clears it away. I feel like an actor in a transparent costume which I attempt to pull round myself, only for, like a nymph with a satyr, it to be pulled off. I stand on the stage and attempt to behave as though this tug-of-war is not occurring. My laughter sounds like bullets.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to become less war-like. I consider this a highly dangerous plan. I need to exist. The world needs me. I need to prevent the world from destroying me - for its own good as well as for mine. Destruction comes in many forms. I could be dissolved in the crowd. I could be subsumed. I could be altered, made less than I am, impoverished. (I am reminded here of my present "relationships" - of one dying friendship in particular. How foolish women are to cling to sinking ships! It s valiant of us, but it does us no good... We are drowned.) So what am I to do? Enact a farewell to arms and watch the other, non-farewell-to-arms people smile and stalk me through the invisible grass of post-modernity - smile with sharp, sharp teeth... For, as has been pointed out, I am a wounded animal.

The people around me - how I wish sometimes that there weren't ANY people around me! - are being ... unhelpful. He-Who-Will-Remain-Nameless is (or was) bombarding me with criticism. While I keep up a constant and futile refrain of 'Shut up! Shut up!' - to drown him out if nothing else. It has been - unbearable. So - I have fled. To my mother's. Where I have been received in a sort of condemnatory silence. What have I done? Answers on a postcard... Solitude = Happiness. Happiness = Solitude. I refuse to be made unhappy by other people. It is absurd. So - I will reacquaint myself with books. (Reacquaint myself with books? I read, don't I? Yes - but I used to read a great deal more than I do now.) Books are wonderful. Obvious, I know, but worth highlighting. They are always available. when one wants them to be. They will always go away when one wants them to. They do not enter into endless and futile arguments. They do not shout at one. (Note the barely suppressed note of really quite distasteful righteous indignation. Yes - I am piqued. But I refuse to be. I won' be. I will forsake mine enemies. I will, in the words of Walt Whitman, dismiss whatever offends my own soul.) Replacements are required. The Trichotillomania-related point is, as I attempted to point out to He-Who-Will-Remain-Nameless, that it is terribly terribly difficult for me to get well soon while I am being unremittingly buffeted by the spleen of the melodramatic. People don't recover brilliantly when surrounded by ill-wishers who openly wish them dead. However much I may try to transcend all this enmity, it would be a great deal easier for me if there were less enmity for me to transcend. The only possible way to bring this about seems to be escape. But that seems a little extreme. So I have been spending a lot of time in my darling room, my sanctum, and outside. But there is always the moment I have to go out - into the hallway, into the rest of the flat - or come in from outside - into ... what reminds me of those of illustrations of The Mouth of Hell. Cannons to the left of her. Cannons to the right of her. Volleyed and thundered. I cannot help but imagine myself with cannon-holes polka-dotting me. And for why? I'm not sure I care for why. I couldn't possibly have done anything sufficient. So I simply don't care.

Written 06/10/09

On Saturday I bought a new wig. There was nothing in particular wrong with the old one. But the old one was getting progressively more frizzed. From a distance, all was well, probably. But I knew it was frizzed, even if no-one else did. And that knowledge bothered me. It was all my own fault, of course. Me and my bohemian ways. Falling asleep in my wig. Indeed, falling asleep in my clothes. Falling asleep in my shoes. Me and my insomniacal (slightly less glamorous slightly most truthful) ways. So. My rather lovely ex-boyfriend offered to lend me the money for a new one. So I felt prettier. (Of course, I should have refused. But I didn't want to. So I didn't. If he wants to make me happy it would be hardly logical for me to refuse to be made happy, now, would it?) So off I went to the wig shop. And loitered at a bus stop pretending I was doing something to do with buses - looking across the road trying to work out if there was anything I liked the look of. Because it would be embarrassing to walk in, try on lots of things I didn't like, and walk out again. I don't even like doing that with clothes. Then I lost my nerve and fled into a Tesco Express. And bought some sparkle-ing mineral water. And sat outside the library and drank said mineral water - trying to calm down - and listening to an intrigue-ing conversation someone was having on their mobile telephone. Then I made a dash for the shop. The sheer volition of my rather fast manner of walking carrying me in. I wandered round, trying to remain calm. (Yes - I have done this before. But it is such an important thing to choose, really, isn't it? What if I were to make the wrong choice? It has been known... Mostly, it has to be said, when I was younger and less experienced at choose-ing the things.) First I tried on a human hair wig. A strange experience. It was terribly, terribly soft. I felt almost a reverence touching it. Like stroke-ing the hair of a complete stranger. Very very odd. It looked beautiful on me. It was, however, £110. More than half of my money - more than half of ALL my money. I could have bought it. I probably should have bought it. I've paid more for wigs before. But somehow I couldn't bear the thought of now being able to do ANYTHING for two whole weeks. Until, that is, the government paid me another £100 for being ... for being a Trichotillomaniac and for not having yet failed the medical test they want to give me. The thought of which terrifies me. Anyway. I didn't buy the beautiful and expensive wig. And, as I silently made the decision not to, I felt like crying. Which would have been very embarrassing indeed. I hate embarrassment. It is pointless and ... do I balk at saying vulgar? - probably not. The next one I tried, less expensive, was very very dark and rather too much in an aesthetic sense. It made me look like some niche-market bondage pin-up. Which is all very well if one is a niche-market bondage pin-up... "...but then again incidentally if you're so inclined..." ('QUEEN) The third I liked. The third the woman behind the counter liked. The third I bought. The third I am happy with. It has that new-wig-scent I have grown to love. New new new! And the glossy-ness. No doubt the glossy-ness will last only as long as I do nothing strenuous in it. A few Pilates classes, a few walks along a windswept beach, a few bohemian-fallings-asleep in everything I am wearing - and - disaster! Until then I am very very pleased. This one, I declared this evening, as I swept into my mother's sitting-room, wearing borrowed/stolen jeans and borrowed/stolen pink socks, makes me look like someone who used to be an actress. A little cynical. A little old. But - I was beautiful ONCE, dharlink! *looks forward to growing old disgrace-fully in a gin-soaked fashion* So how am I doing with the not-pulling-my-hair-out thing? Not very well. I have moved round to the back of my neck, where it is currently most painful. Perhaps it is most painful because it has been most left-alone. The point is, this distracts me, in my more overwrought moments, from digging my nails into my skin, hitting myself round the face (round the face? does that make sense?) and flinging myself onto soft furnishings sobbing violently. And exclaiming 'I hate my life!' And laughing at my own ridiculousness. And further exclaiming (for this almost always happens at night when I can't sleep and am utterly exhausted) 'I can't sleep! If only I could sleep! I'm trying so hard to sleep! OH why can't I sleep!' Etc. Occasionally accompanied by a little scream of anger. I have decided, since the above behavior is most unacceptable, that I will fine myself, next month, if I have not to some very substantial extent stopped doing the above. I will fine myself the cost of a human hair wig. So that the punishment may fit the crime. I would much rather do other things with £110. But if I really can't control myself by sheer will-power (& CBT) and all that - I will just have to punish myself. It sounds absurd. Of course Trichotillomaniacs should not be punished for the illness they have. I'm really quite ashamed of having written that. But that's how I feel in relation to myself. The rather childish hope that, if I'm a good girl, everything will be alright. *actually realizes that a tear is running down her face - an unusual show of emotion about a subject I am so used to - at least outside of the aforementioned fits of hysterics (which are just as much to do with not being able to sleep, I think, as about Trichotillomania - though of course when I am feeling tired I therefore feel rubbish therefore I also feel worse about the Trichotillomania). The horrible thing is, to elicit pity (and in the depths of a fit of self-pitying hysteria that is exactly what I want to do - though I think it thoroughly ridiculous in retrospect) one HAS to be aesthetically pleasing. That is how I have always thought about it, anyway. To elicit pity is a kind of seduction. To cry prettily is an art. (One I do not always practice... ) This my ex-boyfriend (who is present at many of these self-pity-fests) knows. And thus I am mocked. It is horrible to be terribly sincere about something and yet to express it in a form that provokes distrust and disdain and mockery. And leaves me feeling like a silly little girl who can't get what she wants - i.e. pity/comfort/some-sort-of-

reassure-ance-that-everything-is-going-to-be-alright - even if it isn't. *SHAME* Which is itself a self-indulgence - OK everything is a self-indulgence - I give up trying not to be self-indulgent. I have bought a purple flocked notebook for the CBT homework. My last homework *smirks - are smirks becoming...?* was to write a list of pros and cons for pulling my hair out and not pulling my hair out. It sounds pretty simple. Pulling hair out = pain, aesthetic disaster, and public-ally inflicted shame. Not Pulling Hair Out = hair, less pain, and less public-ally-displayed strangeness. I'm not going to tell you what I wrote. This is not Carrie Gooding Reveals All for Trash Magazine (that sounds vaguely pornographic). What I will tell you is that I am terribly curious to see what my therapist makes of it all. The picture I took to go with this makes me look so ridiculously fragile, somehow. That's not how I see myself. I see myself as being terribly terribly resilient - egotistical, moi? That girl in the picture looks younger than me. Paler than me. More bruised. Less adamantine. I can't decide whether to wrap her up in a blanket and like her a mug of hot chocolate or smash her across the face and smear her pretty lipstick. Odd that I should think myself pretty in a photo meant to represent an affliction. Masochism? A heightened intensity of actually looking at the way I look (rather than, as I generally do, trying to see myself in a dimmed sort of a way, as though through flattering lighting at an American interview). So. Young. But notice that the top of my head is hidden. In fact, most of my head is hidden. I've mostly only shown you my face. And it's my face that's undamaged. So some bravery that was.

'Why Don't You DO Somethin'?'

'a perfect day a perfect night - tell me all those perfect lies and lie back in the garden 'til it's dark'

(The Lightening Seeds)

ruffled feather, ruffled soul, ruffled hair and ruffled whole

'you're the queen of the superficial - how long before you tell the truth?' (Muse)

Yesterday I made what can only be described as a pilgrimage of excessive suffering (no - I didn't Google Map it - I relied on my mother for directions...) to a hospital down some leafy Southern road - after a great many other roads which could have lead anywhere - after giving up on a slow set of traffic lights, after missing a bus, after somewhat unkindly calling my mother a cripple for walking so damn slowly, after only a few hours of sleep becuase I had been so terribly terribly nervous - I had the first of what will hopefully be quite a few sessions of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). Quite intensive CBT. Medium-Intensity CBT. (I wonder how intensive High-Intensity CBT would be...?!?) I sat in a chair and basically admittedly to a quite stunning litany of faults. And felt I must say rather brave for doing so - ungarnished with any self-defences apart from the occassional high-pitched laugh. I held on to the arms of that chair very tightly at times... Without going in to any great detail (you don't need to know the exact details, world, of my malaise, do you?) I was very impressed by the amount I got through in that hour. I have hated drifting aimlessly around continual failure. Recounting how horrible it all is. Without energy and without the sense that anything is going to happen about it - that I can do anything about it. This wasn't like that at all. Thus far, the lady with whom I am working seems exactly the sort of therapist I need. A happy medium between the sort of person who will accept my elaborate and devious excuses for the perpetuation of my own self-destruction (which is amusing and flattering for me - but not very helpful) and the sort of person who will completely stamp on my very soul (so to speak). I was faced with a whiteboard of my own complex schemes and subterfuges. A tricky sight. I cannot, at any rate, not claim not to know what I am doing... But the point is can I possibly be brave enough to stop? The very idea makes me hyperventilate. A cold ice seems to spread across my lungs. It's - horrible. But invigorating. Having been described (which both amused me and seemed tragically apt) as 'a wounded animal' (very Wilde falling onto his family's doorsteg 'like a wounded stag') - what am I to do? Lie down and be devoured? To acknowledge sheer terror is to make it rather uncomfortable to go on living with it...

Yes - yesterday afternoon and this night I have pulled my hair out... Of course I have. What did you expect? An immediate miracle? It has been made quite clear to me that I am not to expect that. But I have thought about it more. I put away the tweezers after I got my pain-high. Sometimes I cannot align myself to the Wilde-ism 'nothing suceeds like excess'. What about excess of will? But then I come up against Ruskin... Ruskin, Ruskin, Ruskin... I'm not sure I understand you. Anyway. Hair. I need to enjoy the wig-wearing process as much as possible while it last - and then? It has been pointed out to me (again) that it is not entirely my duty to be an image of static perfection (though it would be nice, sometimes...). To some extent, then, FUCK PERFECTION. Imperfection is so... decadant. (Tho by that I do not mean self-destruction... Of the difficulties of these extremities of thoughts!)

I am am to be self-created - this is relevant:

'...no great man [or woman] ever stops working till he has reached the point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution [one of the earliest and most dreadul lessons I ever learnt], and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that he [or she] will always give the inferior portions of his [or her] work only such inferior attention as they require, and according to his [or her] greatness he [or she] becomes accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he [or she] can do, that is moments of lassitude or anger with himself [or herself] he will not care though the beholder be dissatisfied also.' (Ruskin, 1853/2004:26)

Catharsis

I wrote what follows yesterday evening. In retrospect it seems... melodramatic. But I am somehow endeared by it. Poor me, I cannot help but think. Poor, misguided, valiant me. I recorded it on a dictaphone in the hope that I would be able to post that version. It sounds - so much more sensible when I hear it from my voice. From my self-consciously-publically-reading-Radio4-voice.

...

It occured to me this evening, as I read some McKenna to the scent and flickering of an heroically saved (the wick, thrown into a bag along with the rest of it for the purpose of an impromptu expedition to the coast, had been diminished - dimmed) ylang ylang candle, that my posts here have become, in a creepingly inreasing manner, thoroughly self-interested [I nearly write 'self-absorbed' - to drown in the sea of oneself - 'no waving but drowning'], unhelpful and irrelevant, the soul-sreaming of someone distracted from even the unpleasantnesses of Trichotillomania (considerable as they are) by general soul-sickness. (Or indeed let's be honest - why have I written them? Do you remember the last entries in the records od the Tolkeinian Trolls before the Orcs crashed through the door? Only quite possibly there are no Orcs... Quite possibly the terrified records of near-defeat would continue without my mind succumbing to anything more than hyperchondria. [As I read this, I imagine some poet dying of consumption with duck-egg-blue-sleeves and a wan pain-stricken face - oh Carrie Carrie calm down!] How many times can one be accused - accused? - of madness before, strangely drawn to agree with the opinions of others [hyper-formalism] concerning oneself as though [angst-ridden regression] one expected to be contructed through deconstruction [you are a person not aa building - you can neither be constructed nor deconstructed as a whole for you already exist!], one begins to wonder [Indeed one does!], to wander from the equilibrium of accordance with oneself... [Shades of Wilde...]) To avoid the aforedemonstrated bouts of hyperchondria I will set myself and my unruly mind a subject on which to focus...

THE USES AND ABUSES OF SELF-HARM ANCIENT AND MODERN

The title is tongue-in-cheek (strange phrase) [no - the sound of it in my mind's ear offended me...] - but it expresses the level of formality I must inflict on my thinking if that thinking is not to disintegrate into the wailing and self-pitying emotions of the sort of person I would avoid... [Re a conversation I had last night about how seriously dreadful these posts must make me sound - all sound and fury signifying nothing - and how were I not the person writing them I would probably consider the writer to be seriously avoidable - maybe I do still consider myself best avoided - but how exactly am I to do that?] The sort of person who clings to everything (and everyone) they can (predatorily) catach hold of as though they are afraid of drowning in themselves. [That bit I rather admire, from the standpoint of the unexpected phrase, the elegant lament...] Like Alice in Wonderland in her own tears. [A step too far - and an unnecessary one - now it simply sounds overblown.]

People have hurt themselves [that sounds more darkly-humoured S&M than Madness-Confessional] for much of recorded history - at least as far back as the Ancient Greeks. [Obviousness! Yawn. Pseudo-Precise-ness! Yawn. Empty Pretentiousness! Yawn.] This sounds horribly vague - but my memory retains overviews and dispenses with details. [Yes... So...? Yawn.] I recall a television programme about (I think) Italy, which showed a Christian religious day on which there was a stream of self-flogging [what enthusiam I put into that word-combination! Oh the marvellousness of the word 'flogging'! Not quite entirely matched by the word 'flocking'... 'flotsam'! 'Fentimans'! Oh Fentimans Curiosity Cola... fizz fizz...] penitants. I was supposed, I think, to view this with an admixture [is that a word? I do hope so] of pity and horror. I did not. [Oh how I rose above the expectations of others! Bow before me, oh you other less transcendant people, and worship me at once!] What simpler way of cleanse-ing oneself of the accumalated guilt of the practice of any sort of interpersonal relation [she wrote, as though having anything to do with anyone were obviously reprehensible - how terribly English] (or even one's dreadful betrayals of oneself, or of some dualistic side of oneself) [how terribly Oscar] than to bleed oneself of them, to bleed oneself of the scarlet of one's sins [she screamed into the moonlit night - terribly overwrought creature that she was]. In the ensue-ing exhaustion, I imagine, there would be peace. [Yes.] Peace is what one's body gives one when it judges one incapable of any further action. It is a failure - and a reprieve.

My problem as a Trichotillomaniac [is Trichotillomania], I have thought, is that I have succumbed to a perfectly natural form of catharsis that is out of sync with the culture in which I find myself. It renders me... odd. (Not, of course, that I am claiming that, apart from being a Trichotillomaniac, I am entirely non-odd.) [What charming modesty!] I wonder if, had my upbringing deluged me with more - conventional - culture (rather than encourage-ing me to despise it, all of it, without exception - so that I was encouraged to transcend all times, all places, all classes, all things outside of the uneasy duality of my fierce-ly possesive mother and myself [I make her some like some sort of beast...]), I would have shrunk from defying it with a form of catharsis so culturally unacceptable/unaccepted. For I knew from the very beginning, when I was very young [A.A.Milne...] indeed, that as soon as people knew, there would be trouble. Which I would have to endure - which I would try to endure - without giving in. For that was my sense of relations between myself and the rest of the world: fear and defiance. To some extent, sometimes, it still is.

The problem with the faint surface acceptance of these things is that rather than being The Strange South-Coastal Girl Who Pulls Her Hair Out (Admittance 5 Shillings), I am The Quietly Strange South-Coastal Girl Who, Though She Pulls Her Hair Out and Hates Hates Hates it and Suffers, is Expected to Lead an Otherwise Ordinary/Sucessful Life. Things simply do not work that way. Trichotillomania, for me, is the first domino in a horrible and vertiginous [spelling?] sequence of unravelling. The almost-constant apprehension of the defective peculiarity (as I see it in relation to myself - not so much in relation to other Trichotillomaniacs - but this is no doubt vanity) posisons - everything. I feel like Withnail & I's Uncle Monty chasing the Cat of Trichotillomania [?!?] out of the room - 'you have ruined EVERYTHING! [A little excessive?] Of course, were I to conquer Trichotillomania, I would be left in the awkward position of not having anything left to blame any failure on... [How terribly pathetic that sounds. Pull yourself together!]

This all sounds terribly hard on myself. [Yes.] Terribly hard in general. But it is to be remembered that I have been faced with the choice between adamantine hardness AGAINST myself AGAINST my own emotions [psycho-babble] - or (as I have experienced it sometimes) almost intolerable suffering. [How pre-post-modern. Nothing is meant to be intolerable anymore. We have - transcended suffering. Or we are meant to have. That is why old tragedies look absurd.] Before I pulled my hair out in a serious way I would actually collapse in a dimmed world of near darkness - literally - so incapable was I of dealing with the extremities of my own emotional states (brought on, often but not always - by the demands of those around me. My choice was die, temporarily, or be cannibalised. [That is the part of this with which I still most agree.]) A more sensible and time-relevant choice now would be - be cannibalised or damn well DEFEND YOURSELF! Fight or flight is now optional. [The rest is irrelevant, really...]

Trapped in Paradoxes

I have not been good – again and again I write that I have not been good. I have not been good is becoming tedious. I have not been good is becoming what I don’t want to be. What a lot of energy I put into becoming what I don’t want to be. And writing about becoming what I don’t want to be. It is paradoxically heroic.

The fact is – my life is not being conducive to recovery. (Excuses excuses…) I find myself surrounded by hysterical people – and their hysteria wraps its tentacles around me. And I am dragged underneath the gently lapping waves of… Giving in. To what? To being what I do not want to be. Which is absurd.

So what do I do? Acquire some way of dealing with the hysterical people? Somehow get rid of the hysterical people? (I almost wrote ‘the disposable people…’) Run away very very very far away?

My writing is horrible today. But everything (except the ylang ylang candle) is horrible today. My shoulders tensed, I feel that everything I go near will somehow take on my malaise, this tense-ness of shoulders, this implosion.

I seem to somehow have become surrounded by the people who like me least. It is… inopportune. I despise it. And I am drawn towards silly grand gestures and silly melodramatic words because it seems as though the grander the gestures and the more melodramatic the words the more likely it is that it will be cast out into some wonderful desert where I can recover from the people. I. Need. Solitude. Or at least to be away from the people who don’t like me.

I have taken to wearing dark glasses at night. This amuses me. It also keeps me hidden. It keeps my face hidden. My expressions hidden. From – The Other People. I have had rather too much of Other People for… at least a while. Though of course I cannot do without conversation. I simply cannot. The imbalance is horrible.

And in the middle of that last paragraph – the throbbing terribly painfully of an over-tax-ed heart. The way that pain radiates is appalling. Everything is appalling. And my keyboard is covered with my hair. How’s my hair? On my keyboard. How’s my keyboard? One of the keys fell off earlier. Where’s the key? I gave it to my mother. Who has probably now ground it into a million pieces beneath the heels of her Hush Puppies.

The pain, however, of Trichotillamania is so… comforting. Much better than the dull ache in my shoulders, the throbbing of my heart. Much more cold and sharp and sterile. Something removed from the soft mass of falling into the well of other people.

But I have been alone today. And I have been happy. Terribly terribly happy. There is something about hating to be around people which makes snatched moments of solitude absolutely blissful. A books and some cushions and some sunlight and and and nothing more is even considerable. Nothing. Until of course someone breaks in and is repelled with a sullen look and the waving of arms – the do please get out before I am less happy than I was waving of arms. Out!

To some extent I am enjoying this melancholy. Melancholy suggests that one is capable of… better things. Higher things. Transcending the transitory. I am. I have to be. But it would be so much easier to make my escape if I had conquered Trichotillamania. & so much easier to conquer Trichotillamania had I made my escape.

More

And I just looked at a photo of me on here in August. And I looked - better. In trichotillomaniacal terms. Some story of valiant recory this is prove-ing to be... *sinks into slough of despond*

An Ecological Question

The Snark, with whom I have resumed an uneasy throwing down of wordguns, in an entirely Platonic (i.e. counter-erotic) manner, has decided that Trichotillomania is An Ecological Question. I.E. my hair is a natural rescource, which means that to deplete it, to destroy it (indeed, to destroy me) is ethically wrong. And yes. I agree. Which makes the whole thing rather worse.

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE

I am listening to the aforementioned on loop to drown out the man with whom it seems I am destined to be imprisoned again and again. Admittedly, I asked to be let in. I rang the doorbell. I tapped on his window with my sunglasses. I knelt before his letterbox and told him not to be childish and to let me in. The aforementioned is all very absurd. The whole thing is absurd. And I am being sucked into the supermassive black hole of the absurdity.

The last couple of days I was good. I was never 1) with my mother 2) with The Snark 3) with only myself - and these are the three conditions in which I am bad.

NOTICE ME! ACKNOWLEDGE ME! COME TO ASDA AFTER THE TEA - I WILL BUY YOU DINNER (+ COOK IT) THE ANGEL BUNNY says the note clutched in the mouth of the man who has just brought me a mug of tea, and kneels before me, looking penitant. I do wish he would just go away. Tea acknowledged as being welcome. But I am rather hungry... & he does cook rather well... I suppose once again that my gluttony will overcome my principles.

But I find myself pulling my wig to pieces just so that I will not be able to go out (but of course I would - I would just have to wear a hat or a something) so that I can simply simply simply not have to interact with these people who shout at me and wrathfully lean over me, eyes wide, coils of dark dark hair like a flurry of live black snakes abput to consume me. He reminded me, earler, of nothing so much as the horrible fire-monsters in Mirrormask. How they seem to deconstruct one, to consume one, until there is less than one, until there is a fraction, a 0.? until there is a 0.0 and one is 0 and no longer exists. Reminiscent of Zero, 'I'm your loverm I'm your zero' - only in his case I want to be neither becuase he is making himself seem utterly repellant, insinuate-ing himself into the list of People I Dread along with my mother - though perhaps now more so than my mother in some way, since I have liked him and been disappointed by him more recently? Yes - all this is horrible. His screaming hideous imititations of my voice at me - which, if they were true, would preclude ever speaking, ever saying anything to anyone. I feel very young and very much like crying - he somehow has the effect of being like some sort of vastly overwhelming big brother from hell. With all the unpleasant under/over-tones of someone one has once worshipped - like some inhuman forest faun. Never really liked perhaps...

But strangely perhaps I was worst yesterday. Unthinkingly so. I was happy and I didn't really think about it. Now, though, that my world has once more temporarily imploded, it seems ever more imperitive that I MUST not make saving myself from - this horridness - any more difficult. I need all the energy I can save from these people's depletions of it. To endure this and to escape this. How terribly teenage-angst, I know. Perhaps it's the Muse.

So yes - if I am surrounded ny people trying to destroy me (paranoia anyone? But it does seem that way), by the torn-up, stupid spiteful letters of a forest-faun-gone-wrong/'ANGEL-BUNNY', by The Snark, by the Mother-Monster (who may for all I know be perfectly lovely to me when I next see her - in which case I will feel guilty.

So now I sign off, being handed a chivalric white ribbon by Him Who I Will Will Will Avoid, and wishing so very much I were in a soundproofed room of my own, Virginia-Woolf-esque-ly.

No photo today. I am suddenly shy of that - as I feel stamped on my The World and very very little and delicate and no no no no photo.

'don't forget to breathe'

I am happy. Simply. So what must I do to counter-balance this horror of hyper-intensity? I must savage my appearance as a sort of compensatory measure. Possinly to remind myself that I am able to endure it if and when unhappiness descends. To the music of Wagner. If and when the rainstorm dashes against the Nietzsche-built-mountain-sides of my... soul? self? s...

I have not been good. But there is something so exhilarating about tearing myself to shreds like a silken scarf - like the silken scarf in Wilde's poem - 'Symphony in Yellow'. 'It's a bitter-sweet symphony, that's life...' 'I'm a million different people from one day to the next...' Yes I am, and some of them are far more sensible than to destroy themselves on a daily basis.

Perhaps I need a natural predator. My life is too easy for me. I am too... content. Some black-clawed thing like the long-limb-ed ravens I was fascinated with years and years ago - self-constructed nightmares. Or the terrible spider I was convinced was crawling up a silken thread last night - half-dream - so much so that I hollered for light and reassurance that there was indeed no terrible spider. Yes, my life would be so much better with nightmare-ravens and nightmare-spiders she said with just a trace of irony...

It is such sweet sorrow, this tearing apart of myself. But it is also a search for the purity of the essential. A disdaining of the unneccesary. But - Carrie! Hair is neccesary, don't you think...? You are human and need only endure ordinary human sufferings. That is sufficient evidence of your durability, surely? Or perhaps you shout stand on a mountain and shout at the gods - I can endure your beautiful lightening for I am inhuman and subhuman and superhuman and require a showdown!

Got Up, Got Out Of Bed, Dragged A Comb Across My Head...'

I am today haunted by a song. Not even a song I have heard for a long while. The Snark has his theories, but The Snark always has his theories. I leave him to them.

Having been entirely surrounded by people for a couple of days, I have been good. That is, yes, there has been moonlight and mayhem and mock-murder - but no intentional self-destruction in the Trichotillomaniac sense. This pleases me, it need hardly be said. I say that in the present-tense becuase obviously at the time I was too busy with moonlight and mayhem and mock-murder to think about that.

Then I returned home. To my mother. *cue PSYCHO music* And stayed up all night becuase I was too - too what? - too furious and generally unhappy to throw the things on my bed off my bed and go to bed - and becuase the sitting-room seemed so much further away from her than my bedroom. The next day, after more dread-full-ness, I was... Hardly good. But the night was worst as the night always is.

Reading with great and for me very relevant interest 'The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise' by R.D. Laing I can only agree all too heartily that IT'S ALL MY FAMILY'S FAULT. I do not tell them this, remembering with horror the moment when, when I was circa five, my mother, apropos some (not-to-be-publically-shouted-from-the-rooftops) issue (shall we say) of hers, said 'It's your fault I [insert issue here]. I always thought that rather absurd. So. I have put my red slipper-shoe down. GRANDMOTHER: You have upset your mother. ME: She deserved it. Not very nice, no, but neccesary if I am not always to suffer for the sins of my ancestors. I may have, for finaincal reasons, to step down in some utterly insincere manner. When my grandmother says 'see ow you'll get on without us' (or words to that effect) she is, to some rather down-heart-en-ing extent, correct (if not right). But for now I AM VICTORIOUS. & I rather like it.This is all relevant to the Trichotillomania question becuase, I don't know about anyone else, but my Trichotillomaniac tendancies tend to fluctuate in direct correlation with the impositions of the world around me. If I am overtaxed I press the self-destruct button and hope for the best. Salvation or oblivion. Which is a little extreme, I know, and never works out quite that way, I know - but what else is there for it but direct confrontation? And direct confrontation is (as I found to some extent when I did it last night, backed against my mother's sitting room wall, vision blurred with absolute terror, screaming 'leave me alone' repeatedly and loudly to a pointing, grinning, accusatory gargoyle with some dried white substance encrusted on her chin ... nightmarish).

This evening, though, having slept to my heart's content at the house of a compassionate friend (with whom I did not fail to have an intermittant and easily sorted exchange of shouts of the 'leave-me-alone-I-really-am-dreadfully-tired' variety, me, and hand-gestures-of-an-excessively-expressive-nature, them), I feel... better. And am being good. Becuase I am so tired of being bad. And the confrontations of the last few days have tired me in a somewhat enjoyable manner. I am past the point of being emotionally involved with people who behave so absurdly. This is not flounce-ing expostulation. This is simply how things stand. It is... like lying on a poavement having been run over. There is nothing more one can do, nothing more that can possibly be asked of one (even though it always is of course - but that is merely sound a fury from some far-off incomprehesible or at least uncomprehended land) - so there is no need for the self-destruct button. No need for the numbness of the post-pull. No need for escape becuase this is the calm after the storm.

Growing Pains

As though I am going to be going to a children's birthday party (as a child, you understand, not as an adult gatecrasher and eater-of-jelly) I am a mixture of nerves and excitement. I ought to have grown out og this. Ever so often my hand strays to my head and tears-plucks-pulls a little more hair from my head. But I feel fairly lighthearted about it tonight. I think perhaps the combination of coffee and wine has helped. But, as the friend who is doing something to a peice of wood with a knife out of the corner of my eye has pointed out - I don't really want to be doind it. The tearing-plucking-pulling not the party, that is.

Doctor Doctor...

I had an appointment yesterday. The night before - convinced that I would miss the appointment and plaintively bleating 'what shall I do? what shall I do?' - a blaze-ing row was had with a certain someone - masculine sride-ing and exclaiming 'you spoiled deluded stupid nut-nut it's not my responsability to make you keep your stupid appointment' - lovely - hyper-girl stumble-ing and crying and muscle-convulsions 'you ridiculous incomprehensible stupid man-idiot how then can I go to sleep when I just don't know if the appointment will be missed when I just don't know if I can trust myself to keep the appointment when I just don't know what will happen becuase it is impossible to know what will happen in the future but I want absolute certainty and why why why won't you help me you who have such a firm grasp on time and space that flee from me all three of you' and suchlike. I woke early - shouted and cried some more - and - having obtained the use of my own seemingly commandeered coffee - fled. My new tinted moisture-ise-er did horrible things to my eyes so that I artificially cried all the way to the appointment - two people actually asking me if I was alright. So I smiled and said nothing. So I breezily said 'fine thankyou' or 'yes thankyou' - not at all fair I think for my nerves and heartbreak to be revealed by accidental and atrificially--produced tears. I wandered around the buildings lost until I came to that in which I was to be grilled. I listened to the interesting loud talkings of someone a little less waiting-room-reserved than I. I folded and unfolded a square of paper in half-amused parody of what I thought I ought to look like in such a setting - aloof, nervous, jumpy. The doctor came and I explained to him what needs fixing - looking for some sort of judgement good or bad from his face that thankfully and professionally never came - apart at one point for a smile - I got a smile. It is easiest to talk honestly to blankness. Like now. And listening to my narration of it I felt sorrier and sorrier for myself - and had more and more respect for my attempts to overcome. Yes - I am a helpless and weak-willed ingenue. I am also a damn ambitious brave and resiliant little thing. That may, oh fallen-out-with-person, be 'feminist bullcrap' - I don't know. Nothing would disappoint me more than anything generic of that sort. But if to be at all happy with anything one strives to do is to exhibit 'feminist bullcrap', what is one to do? Roll over on one's back like a sycophantic bitch and get stamped on by the big alpha-male-gone-wrong paw of the pride of the wounded-pretty-thing? Dear dear the vitriol. Stop it Carrie stop it. Rah. Anyway - I said my say while wondering what it said about me - well insomniac binge-eating loud-shouting depth-dive-ing striver after such unearthly peace as cannot be striven for - and was offered CBT. Sometime soon. Watch. This. Space.

I find myself flicking through the pages of The Gaurdian singles section. I imagine what I might write were I to write in it:

Penniless Poet. 22.

Occasionally pretty, perpetually bad-hair-dazed, occasionally articulate...

Seeks...

Similar?

No no no!

Seeks...

Genius. Hopefully jacketed. Hopefully not so volatile predecessors.

Brilliant cook, conversationalist and generally dashingly-handsome-brillant-chap/chapette.

For gluttony of food & of talkings both witty and brilliant.

No mere mortals need apply.