In Memory Of…

…Yvonne. Today is the 19th anniversary of her death. It still seems like yesterday.

 

Yvonne O’Kane
5 January 1951 – 24 March 1989

Much loved and missed, still.

Great News, Bordering On The Miraculous…

Shannon Matthews has been found alive….

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/7296756.stm

I hope she hasn’t been too badly damaged by her ordeal.

I Used To Play Piano…

and now I’m teaching myself to again.

I absolutely love the piano. There’s nothing like the feel and weight of real piano keys under your fingers…

I even have a talent for it. I never had a piano, we could never afford one, but I still managed to make a big impression on my teachers and examiners as a child. I still don’t have one, but I do have a full size keyboard.

I’ve been inspired to take it up again by the wonderful and hugely talented Amy Lee of Evanescence.

I’m fed up being homeless and this really scares me…

I’m terrified of this very possible scenario…

If my Mum dies, I will have to clear out my her/my old home, all the furniture, curtains, carpets, all the bedding, clothes, books, ornaments, all my knick knacks, all my Mum’s cherished possessions and mine, all my cherished “inheritance” things and get rid of them, because I have NOWHERE to put them…..and a week later, I get offered a house. I now have no furniture, no clothes, no anything to put in it.

This is how bureaucracy works and I’m very tempted to go back to my abusive life, in order to prevent this from happening.

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Okay, I’ve had it confirmed by the Homeless Unit today that, if my Mother dies, I will, indeed have to empty her entire house within a month, they’ll allocate it to someone else, and I’ll still be homeless. They did however, acknowledge that it’s a bonkers situation which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I’ve never really been able to write about my phobias and depression

I don’t know why. I think it’s just too raw, too emotional and too visceral for me to put into words. The fear is too intense and the feelings of despair were too huge to find words to express them. It doesn’t bother me that I can’t do it, but I sometimes feel it makes it impossible for me to connect with other sufferers, which I sometimes want to do, but mostly don’t. So, no loss, really.

Lots of different reasons for blogging.

I came across a blogger recently who suffers from panic attacks and followed the link to her blog to see how she was coping with her situation only to discover that her blog is riddled with posts, many written in all caps, about how evil she thinks Barack Obama is (she refers to him as “Kenja Muslim Obama”, by way of an indication of the general level of intelligence we’re talking about here). Her blog is also plastered with hugely visually distracting political links, images and banners. It took me a long time to find a single post referring to anxiety and, in it, she was posing the question: “why won’t anyone talk to me about my panic attacks?”

I left a very polite and genuine comment suggesting to her that her political agenda was so prominent on her blog and her views on anxiety so difficult to find that perhaps it might be an idea to separate her political musings from her posts about anxiety and maybe she wouldn’t scare people off, as she had done me. I told her that I thought having both in one blog was what was stopping people from talking to her about her panic attacks.

Now, rather than take my comment on board or talk to me! she just moderated me and my comment out of existence and also deleted her original post! There is your answer right there, my dear. That’s why no-one will talk to you about your panic attacks.

I never did understand bloggers who disallow comments that they disagree with or which don’t fit in with the intention of their blog. I came across this same attitude some years ago with a couple of adopted people, who started acting very oddly when I left comments on a blog about my experiences, not as an adoptee, which I am not, but sympathetic nonetheless. During a light-hearted exchange of comments, I pointed out something funny about another culture I’m familiar with. The blogger promptly sent me an email saying “hope you don’t mind that I’m deleting your comment from my blog as it isn’t appropriate”.

Mind you, thinking about this afterwards, I realised that these particular adoptees were all about having been adopted. They presented as Victims Of The Horror Of Adoption and Survivors Of The Horror Of Adoption. Yes, their blogs were about adoption, but so, it seemed, were their entire lives and those, I suspect, of their partners and children. One of them, when I suggested, not even to her, as she never had the decency to engage me directly, that everyone who has children does so for a selfish reason, took to her oxygen tent with a dose of the vapours, she was so offended. “Oh woe is me. Not only am I A Victim Of The Horror Of Adoption, but now I have to deal with the fact that my biological parents had me for Selfish Reasons…” As opposed to what? Saving the human race from the threat of extinction due to underpopulation?

Come to think of it, with an attitude like that, I can see why they don’t like comments on their blogs which they don’t agree with. If it’s going to tip you over the edge into madness, just disallow comments altogether….mind you, then they wouldn’t get sympathy and attention either, would they?

Depression

…just came from nowhere today and whammo – I’m sitting on my arse wondering wtf hit me. I feel totally floored when this happens, although thankfully it is rare now. I have just spent the last week without carbamazepine, as I want to stop taking it, and I know I’ve tried to stop it before and had to go back on it each time, so….maybe this is why?

I might add that carbamazepine is usually prescribed for epilepsy (or neuralgia) but I was prescribed it to see if it would help with mood swings…hence the fact that I am trying to stop it. Had it been prescribed for epilepsy, I wouldn’t be doing any such thing.

The Drudge Report

What were they thinking about publishing details of Prince Harry’s active service in Afghanistan, a direct result of which was that people’s LIVES were put at greater risk?

In that Great American Tradition – they were thinking only about Themselves.

Yeah, they knew he was serving there, so did thousands of other people….Big deal. They, at least, had the balls to do the decent thing and STFU about it, but not The Drudge Report.

The difference between all those other people and the person who decided to publish the fact on the Internet is this – maturity, decency and common sense. The person who made that decision clearly possesses none of these qualities and did it for one reason, and one reason alone, so they could go “nee ner nee ner…we know Harry is in Afghanistan and we’re the first to tell everyone”.

Sad, sad, sad…

They’re assholes, just like all the other, many assholes we have to endure in life.