I knew I loved you before I met you.

*I wrote this on Day 1 of my stay in the mental hospital.
I re-visited some of my diary entry’s from that time early this morning, purely to see for myself if I had in fact come as far, as the Irish one insists I have.
I found as I turned the pages, that I could not stop thinking of this very first entry.
I remember not being able to finish. I remember closing the book and throwing down the pen. I could feel the terror and shame I felt so acutely back in that moment, when I was reading it, it was overwhelming.
I needed to finish it.
8 months later is what I have added today. It is not the end, but it is a sort of closure for now. This is extremely personal but I hope you enjoy. Thank you all of you for your constant support and for never judging. Jesus, where would I be without all you fruitcakes? Thank you. 

DAY 1.          16/07/2011

There is this girl, and in her world nothing ever goes wrong.

She is the belle of the ball.

She is the life and soul of the party.

She is perfect.

She is listening to ‘I knew I loved you before I met you’ by Savage Garden, spinning around on a glimmering dance floor in a beautiful white and crystal wedding dress.

Her hair splayed out behind her as she twirls, she is caught in a moment. A stunning photograph to hang on her mantle, she feels gorgeous, she is bubbling, blissful, her eyes naturally and positively brimming with the promise of what her exciting future will no doubt hold. Her feet are bare but her heart is full.

Her man, the man of her dreams is holding her in his arms and they are laughing and lost in one another as they float around the magnificent ballroom.

She is a fairytale.

Friends and family become a blur of smiling faces and support, so much so, she wonders if it is actually a thousand angels dancing around them.

She is complete, she is loved, she is real.

Except she isn’t.

The same girl is now sitting on a hospital bed.

She is alone.

The only arms wrapped around her fragile body, are her own.

Her eyes are squeezed shut and her heart is broken.  She rocks to her own rhythm as the demons attack her soul.

She is a failure.

She is cracked.

Today isn’t the first day of the rest of her life. It is the last.

There is this girl, and in her world nothing ever goes to plan.

She is the reflection in a cracked mirror.

She no longer wants to be at the party.

She is exhausted.

She is real.

*There is this girl, and much to her disbelief and relief, she is still here.

A loud cry from the bedroom forces the watercolour memories back in to the past, dragging her tired but proud soul back in to focus.

As she opens her eyes she finds herself back at home, eight challenging months passing in the blink of an eye, toy trains, toy planes and squished gummy bears splayed out about her feet.

A smile plays on her lips.

Her beautiful son was sleeping next door after a morning filled with real laughter and tentative hope, now he is ready for his exciting afternoon.

There is this girl, and she is still struggling but she is struggling out loud, no longer hidden.

She is not a failure.

She is armed, with sticky tape and glue.

She is piecing back together her reflection.

Day by day.

There is this girl, and her heart is healing.

She remembers who she wanted so desperately to be, she remembers who she unfortunately became, and only now is she finding out who she actually is.

The journey is long from over, but every step, every smile, is a new chance, a new beginning, another day, to spend with the little boy who saved her life.

Thank you Woo.

I knew I loved you before I met you.

Your Moose or Mine?

Apparently if you give a Swedish moose an apple it gets drunk.

I have never given a Swedish moose an apple firsthand, but I believe this to be true because a Swedish person told me it was true, so it must be.

According to this Swedish person, who isn’t called Inga, this happens because the apple ferments in the moose’s stomach, and if you happen to be in Sweden near an apple tree and a moose, at the right time and you look out of your window (presuming you also have a window,) you can watch in sheer awe (I would be in awe anyway) as hammered moose’s (moosei?) drunkenly bounce off trees, knock over lampposts and generally behave like you would expect Swedish drunk mooses to behave.

(I believe it is only British moose’s that ask for kebabs, make drunken phone calls to their ex moose’s (moosei?) and hang their high heels off their antlers on the cold walk home, but this may not be a fact so you may want to check it with the British Moose tourist board before telling anyone else. Or not. You know. Your choice. Whatever.)

This all happens because the moose ate an apple.

They must know, (the moose) from trial and error I imagine, what the outcome of eating an apple will be, and yet, they still eat them.

Maybe they continue to eat them because basically, they want to and they actually know what they like? And who’s business is it but theirs really anyway?

(Unless it is always different moose’s eating the apples? But how many moose can there actually be in Sweden? I didn’t get in to this with the Swedish person but I am assuming here, that a moose, lets call him Tony for the purpose of this example, will go out, sink twenty apples, get steaming drunk, knock over a tree, manage to get home somehow, although he has no recollection of it, and wake up the next morning moosificantly hung-over, swear he is never eating an apple again, but then when all his moose friends invite him out again, he eventually goes back to the apple farm and starts the cycle all over again. I mean, I’m no David Attenborough but come on! How different from humans can they actually be? The moose is called Tony!)

Anyway, last week I bought new boots. Sensible thick soled boots. Boots I wouldn’t usually be caught dead in but I bought them anyway because in all honesty I was getting a bit sick of people telling me to be careful I didn’t fall when they saw me carrying Addison in my normal 7 inch stilettos.

Cause and effect at its most simplest, people.

Someone tells me not to fall, so I think I need flat shoes. Because they must be right! I DON’T HAVE MY OWN MIND!!! I shouldn’t be wearing high shoes, mothers don’t wear high shoes, I’m a bad mother… yada yada yoda…Anyway…

Yesterday, while wearing these new boots, carrying Addison out of the doctors office, texting my other half to tell him Addison was fine, feeding Addison an apple and generally multi-tasking like only a mother can, I fell absolutely antler over tit and ended up sliding about a mile down a gravel hill, using my face as a break pad to slow us both down to a grinding halt.

My phone screen is smashed, my shoulder may or may not be sticking out of my spinal chord at a jaunty angle, my wrist is refusing to cooperate with the rest of my body and my face looks like something the dog actually dragged in, across sandpaper.

Addison has a small bump on his head but testament to my thrill seeking two year old, the moment we slid to a bumpy stop and I had spat out a mouthful of stones and dust, twisted around to see how he had come off, half expecting the passersby’s observing to be holding up score cards, such was the magnitude of my Olympic dive, he gave me a toothy grin, burst out laughing and shouted, and I quote ‘again again! Mama, again! Funny mama!’

Meanwhile I lay on the floor in the middle of the road, like a hung-over moose, groaning and moaning and swearing to never wear flat shoes again.

I like wearing high shoes. I am aware of the potential risks, why can’t I trust myself to make my own decisions?

I’m not sure what the full point of this post was. I did, but it’s gone.

Basically, I guess, some things are inevitable? Like learning lessons the hard way?

Maybe I should trust my own judgment not the opinions of others?

My son is mental?

Sweden sounds like a cool place?

I need more sleep?

My medication is too strong?

You decide. I can’t make up my mind.

But I do want a pet moose.

And an apple tree.

I know that much.

Postnatal Depression. (The Boomerang Effect.)

It has been 2 years to the day.

Years which have flown by like an airborne crisp packet sailing turbulently past the maternity hospital window.

‘Look! Prawn cocktail!’ I pointed from the delivery bed, ankles up around my ears, unable to grasp the severity of what was about to happen, as drugged up as a dancing tramp, calling The Irish One by my ex boyfriends name, thinking this was the funniest thing I had ever done, and genuinely confused by his lack of mirth. ‘No I won’t push! Get me some crisps. Look!’

2 years to the day since my son landed blue, and extremely annoyed and more than likely freezing and certainly confused, on to my empty bump in the cold, clinical delivery suite and grabbed hold of my finger in fear.

Look after me, he asked as I looked down at him in shock, the tears streaming down my face.

Protect me.

2 years to the day.

2 years of watching my son grow from a smooshy headed donut in to an inquisitive little creature that has no qualms about eating a spider.

And oh how I love him, with his head full of dreams and his belly full of hoops.

Sometimes I feel my heart could tear open and weep out the love.

Sometimes I wish love was a cure. 

2 beautiful years, the memories of which should ensure nothing but breath catching happiness, which are instead filled with silent tears and venom filled thoughts, with heartbreak and hate, with stolen kisses and watery smiles and eventually with love and quiet.

It is the quiet that I long for the most.

2 years, gone in a heartbeat, 2 years vanished like a deleted text, floating around in the ether.

It is the lost days that I crave to erase.

I yearn to rip them from the pages of my life story, to remove all evidence they ever happened, they ever existed.

The moments that I would beg to feel the love, let me feel anything, the times when the illness had eaten at my brain and I felt nothing.

A bottomless, airtight hole filled with… nothing positive.

Long spidery days splayed out in front of me like witch fingers, clutching me around the neck.

Hours filled with self hatred, wasted lost moments of self indulgent guilt and angry pointless self punishment while my son innocently played in front of me, his eyes questioning my emotionless warmth.

Numbness so acute, I could misplace a month without realisation.

An eternity in 12 hours, like a heavy suitcase filled with broken dreams being dragged behind me.

A sword through the heart that I am unable to fulfil my promise of protection, too exhausted from an invisible battle.

But I crossed the finish line, I raised my arms in the air and sailed through it, exhausted and out of breath but elated.

I made it.

I tentatively reached out

I grabbed hold of the light and I hugged it close to me unable to believe it was real.

I got cocky.

I was discharged.

I was proud.

I felt better.

I had conquered the demons.

I was living, really living, and loving.

I could play, finally I could play.

I could feel.

And then I woke up.

Now I am angry, and sad, and disappointed and panicked.

I didn’t win.

Once again I am broken.

Unable to connect.

I woke up happy, and sang Happy Birthday and from nowhere I was blind sided.

In an instant the light was extinguished.

My tears stinging like hot acid.

My fragile contentment, once again trampled on.

Doodle, my beautiful black dog, climbs on my knee and rests his head on my shattered heart.

He knows.

A car on the motorway, upside down, resting on the embankment

They know.

A dead bird, its beak smashed in, lying silently in front of a window.

It knows.

It is the quiet I long for.

I wish love was a cure.

Because the love I know is buried once again, could conquer all.

If I could just keep hold of it.

The fight goes on.

Twinkle Twinkle little Cow Pat…

‘Is it going to hurt?’

‘I honestly thought I was going to die last time.’ She says searching in her Vivienne Westwood handbag for a cigarette and then looking directly in to my eyes.

‘I thought an angel was going to appear from the ceiling and take me to heaven…’

I feel the blood drain from my face as she goes on.

‘I felt this warmth on my back, and thought oh god this it. This is me. I’m off. Off in to the clouds I go…’

Stood on the corner of a quiet street with a gorgeous and hilarious gal pal (she wanted me to call her that) the cool morning air biting at my face, making my lips tingle, the sun just setting up shop, not yet on full throttle but inching it’s way across the road and on to the pavement behind me, as if trying to chase me with a warning of the deep heat I could be in, I take a deep breath.

I am what some may refer to as, shaking like a shitting dog.

I am hopping about like a long tailed skunk in a room full of rocking chairs.

I am feeling no doubt, what every cow must feel right before it gets branded with a red hot poker.

Like releasing a huge cow pat.

‘Then what happened?’ I ask breathless and giddy, my stomach turning over reminding me to clench my buttocks in case I let one rip and embarrass myself.

‘Well. Basically the minute the needle went in’ she takes a long drag on her cigarette as she lights it and grins at me ‘I passed out, and the warmth I felt on my back was the big bloke who caught me waking me up.’

I explode in to nervous and slightly horrified giggles.

‘So not an angel?’ I ask, slightly disappointed. An angel would have been cool.

But fainting? Oh god. What if I faint? I tend to dribble when I faint, and everyone knows that dribbling in a tattoo parlor is social suicide!

‘No.’ she laughs back ‘Aw but he was honestly so lovely. It does hurt, but it’s nothing like childbirth so you should be fine, and at least if you faint you know he will catch you.’

I am about to respond that the catchy ‘its nothing like childbirth’ line has actually done nothing to calm the bowel movements I am currently experiencing when a heavily painted arm, with a neck and head attached appears around the door.

‘Lexy?’ he asked, surprisingly softly spoken, considering how mental and grizzly he looks with his long beard, his beanie hat and the heavy metal rock music providing the soundtrack to his entrance in to my life story.

There is no turning back now.

As I walk through the door I can hear the voices in my head.

‘Do not go ahead with this, or you will regret it! You are an embarrassment! What if it looks stupid? You do realise you are 32?’

‘I forbid you from doing this! You’ll never be cool enough to pull off a tattoo you stupid moose like knob jockey!’

‘You are 32 years old. It is your life, your body and you own your own mind.’

The tattoo man asks me to sit down on the stool opposite him and extend my right wrist.

I am shakily finding somewhere to prop Arthur (my new handbag – so beautiful he deserved a name) when another man appears to the left of me (presumably this is the body catcher) and asks me if I know who Black Sabbath are.

‘Is that the bloke who bit the head off a rabbit?’ I respond nervously, my eyes darting between their faces to the big feck off needle resting on the bench beside the ‘yob’ opposite me. (Yob, was my mothers voice muscling it’s way in to my psychic.)

‘Bat.’ He laughs. ‘ But yes.’

Right.

Bat.

Not rabbit.

Damn it. There goes my street cred. (Oh Jesus, am I actually turning in to my mother? Mental note to self, stop thinking in my mother’s voice.)

‘Are you ready?’ Yob one asks, turning on the stabbing needle gun of death and aiming it towards my clear white beautiful and innocent arm.

I would like to tell you at this point, I calmly and coolly told him I was born ready, and everything went fine, but alas, I didn’t and it didn’t.

‘Hang on!’ I end up shouting directly in to the weapon yielding grizzly’s face before re-adjusting the volume setting on my anxiety and trying to appear calm and collected.

‘Can I ask you some questions?’

‘Shoot!’ he said smiling kindly (which would have been lovely if it wasn’t for the jerking metallic buzzing needle gun of disaster he was holding in his hand approximately 20 cm away from my face.)

‘Will it hurt?’ I asked honestly, the question seemingly pissing off the body catcher as he sighed and stropped off with a roll of his eyes. (Big grizzly men can strop – you learn something every day, as my mother always.. god damn it!)

Oh god. I have no body catcher.

I look down at the tile floor and wonder if Arthur would break my fall.

‘What do you think?’ Grizzly responds interrupting my thoughts and turning off the animated injector of pain and ink.

I breathe a shaky sigh of relief.

2 extra minutes to prepare.

‘I think it will.’ I respond with thought, moving Arthur on to the floor about a foot away from the stool.

If I feel myself going, I will aim my faint towards him.

‘You are right it will,’ he solemnly replies before nodding in the general direction of my left arm and making full eye contact.

‘But I notice you are covered in scars, which tells me one of two things, either you are absolutely crap at fishing (?!?) or you are a self harmer.’

I laugh in shock.

‘If you are the latter, which I am guessing you probably are because you have that sexy but damaged and slightly unhinged look about you, then I will tell you now it wont hurt nearly as much as that.’ He points at a deep bubbly scar above my left thumb. Burn?’

I smile at him gratefully.

‘Yeah.’

He has totally put me at ease, bless his – evil clown tattooed, graveyard scened, burning Jesus dying on the cross-etched inky black- cotton socks.

‘Degree?’

‘Third.’

‘Respect.’ He nods. (There are no words. In my opinion unless you are Eminem, you can not get away with saying ‘Respect.’ but whatever…) 

Before I get chance to jump up and run outside to tell my gal pal (again she wanted me to call her that) that the tattoo man thought I was sexy and unhinged which in my mind passes roughly for cool, he ran his plastic gloved thumb over the trace on my wrist and turned the blade of doom back on.

‘Woo?’

‘Yes.’ I respond enthusiastically.

‘Woo?’ he asks again incredulously, a little louder.

‘Yes.’ I repeat nodding for extra effect. ‘Woo.’

He sighs ‘Go on tell me all about it.’

I close my eyes, as he lowers the tattoo gun towards me and take deep breaths as I do as I am told.

‘Woo saved my life. I used to be cool but then I had Woo. He is my son, he is two next week, he says bugger a lot… I wee when I sneeze’

A pause, and he continues.

Wow this hurts. But I kinda like it…

‘… but Woo also represents the thousands of people who have supported me and cared for me, total strangers, I may add, since I had him. It also represents my dog Doodle…’

The buzzing stops so abruptly, I am forced to open one eye and peep at him.

He is hunched over my hand, pulling the skin on my wrist back tightly, but looking directly up at me, his eyebrows knotted.

‘Doodle?’

‘The poodle.’

The buzzing starts up again as he shakes his head and goes back to concentrating on scaring me for the rest of my god-damn life.

‘So yeah, and basically’ I continue, trying to remember my flow and closing my eyes again with a wince.

Breathe Lexy, breathe.

‘I tried to kill myself, then I went in to a mental hospital, then my therapist asked me when I was going to take control of my own life, and I realised at that exact moment that it was about time I at least tried to free myself from the chains I have, I suppose kept myself under. I want to live my own life, but I never have. I have always asked others ‘Am I ok?’ without actually asking them? You know? Like if they are in a mood then I automatically assume I have done something wrong, and if people feel bad then I have to make them feel better or it could be me that has upset them and then they may not like me anymore. Like they may confirm to me, by not liking me, that I actually don’t like myself. I have always been so afraid, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what of. You know?’

‘No.’

I carry on regardless as he bumps the needle over my crease. (That sounds way ruder on paper than it does in my head.)

‘Well basically, I have always thought I have been living my own life when really I have always been controlled by these voices in my head.’

The buzzing stops again.

It’s ok though. I kind of expected it to.

I open my eyes.

He is looking at me with an expression I am unable to read.

‘Voices in your head?’

‘Yeah.’ I say, looking back at him, focusing on his mono-brow for courage. ‘Like, Sometimes its my mothers voice and sometimes it’s my fathers voice and sometimes its my own harsh voice, and they are always telling me what I can and can’t do. And I am sick of it.’

The buzzing starts up again and once again I close my eyes.

‘Argh!’ I exclaim before continuing between gritted teeth ‘so Woo represents everything I have been, everything I can be, my son, my dog and a new beginning where if I want a freaking tattoo I will get one and I don’t have to answer to anyone.’

He turns off the stabbing needle gun and rubs the blood off my wrist.

‘It represents control, and me, and my son, and my dog, and that mental health is ok and I am never alone.’

He ignores me as he turns away from me and grabs up for some cellophane.

‘Finished. Do you like it?’

I look down at it, and tilt my head.

That’s my wrist.

But.

It looks weird.

‘No.’ I reply honestly, feeling a bit queasy.  Oh shit what have I done?

‘Why?’ he replies.

‘It’s too straight, do some curly bits.’ Oh my god make it better, make it better, holy hell make it better! That looks like a crab pood on me!

The buzzing starts again and I add something.

‘Woo also means, from now on, I am gonna be me, and only me, and the only person who will tell me if I am ok, is me. Or at least, thats the aim.’

The buzzing stops again. He sighs.

‘Do you like it?’

I breath a huge excited breath

‘Yes. I exclaim! I bloody love it! WOO!’ I lift my wrist as I say this.

‘Woo also means Woooooo!’ I add excitedly, lifting my wrist in to his face.

He gets up from his chair and shakes his head.

‘Women’ he mutters as he wraps me up. ‘You’re all as mad as a bag of frogs.’

Whatever! I have a tattoo!!

Woo means ‘Journey.’

Well today it does anyway… tomorrow it may mean destination.

Is it meant to be this itchy though?

Don’t scratch. Don’t scratch. Don’t scratch!

It’s so itchy!!!

Like thrush but on my wrist!!

Oh hell. 

I have woo on my wrist.