annafdd

Well, five now.
I can't sleep because I got to think about my mother, and how she nurtured and maintained my depression.

My mother's toxicity was that she wanted to empower me. She believed - still believes - that we are the masters of our fate.

I have a memory of deep happiness from my childhood. It stuck, for some reason, when little else did. I was leaning on the little wall supporting the chainlink fence around my primary school's playground. There was a tall shrub beside me. It must had been very early spring, the sky was completely blue, and there were tiny tiny white flowers on the shrub.

I looked up into the blue sky and the little flower and felt completely happy. Then I went back in and wrote a composition in which I said that I felt happy because I felt like that moment, that flower and that sky, existed just for me.

That was the problem. My mother had taught me that everything that happens to you, good or bad, is your doing. I didn't think that I had it in my to appreciate a flower that existed for its own sake. I thought the flower was put there specifically for me.

I have grown up never looking for excuses, and that's good. But I have also grown up convinced, deep down, that everything bad that happens to me is my own fault.

When it happens now I can see it and smile sort of ruefully and make a note: if I lose the car keys, it's because "you are always losing things, you really should be more careful". If I get sick, it's because I don't go to the doctor to find a way to prevent it (true). If I have migraine, it's because I gave up trying to get them "cured". If I am the shape and weight I am, it's because I don't make enough of an effort in losing weight.

If I am alone, it's because I am "too choosy", or, alternative explanation that still focuses on what I do, I am too good for most men ("men don't like somebody to be smarter than them). If I am depressed, it's because I am not strong enough. And so on and so forth.

In cognitive behavioural therapy, this is a very well known mechanism. I forget what it's called, I think something like universal responsibility. It happens when you lose the sense of boundary between things that are actually within your ability to influence and things that are unavoidable or not directly influenced by you.

Learning that slathering my hands with alcohol gel and spraying my desk with Dettol may reduce the number of colds I catch is learning how to influence your environment. Hoping that if you go to the doctor he'll find the magic reason why you are getting always sick and issue a cure is madness.

Learning how to manage migraine is reasonable. Hoping for a cure for migraine is not. Currently there just isn't one.

My therapist tried to tell this to me for twenty years. For some reason, I was never able to hear her. That is, I heard her, knew she was right, and still could not make the realization mine.

Maybe it was because I lived too close to my mom. I don't know.

Another favourite depression-inducing trick that my mom taught me is catastrophising. What happens if I don't pass this exam? The reasonable answer is: you'll take it again, and again if necessary, and if worse comes to worse, you'll drop out and do something else.

My mother's stance was: you know how competitive Medicine is, and if you don't get good grades you'll never get into a specialization school, and if you don't get your degree quickly you'll age out of the market. You know that most employers will never hire anybody past 29 years nowadays.

My mother thinks that extreme anxiety is motivating. Especially when not self-inflicted but inflicted by others.

This is why I never graduated.

Another trick that I haven't found in the books but that my mother excels at is the focus on the trivial. For example, when I went into my second major depressive episode following my breakup, and was feeling suicidal and increasingly desperate because it was the second such episode in two years, my mother was endlessly fretting about my buying the house. Note that there was no hurry: I had given no notice to my landlady, and if the sale of the house fell through, though titty, I'd start looking somewhere else. For my mother the fact that the sale didn't progress was a major source of anxiety. And I do mean major. While I was sobbing in fjm's bedroom last Christmas, I called my aunt on Skype and chatted and she told me that my mother was very worried about the house - but hadn't mentioned my breaking up with my boyfriend. This is my mother's closest friend and confidant.

She says that this is displacement. Yeah, no kidding. It is also a handy way of withdrawing any support, and even the acknowledgement that something is the matter. She did this during my university career as well.

Another depression trick is the all-or-nothing thinking. Things are never somewhat inconvenient or sad. They are catastrophic and tragic. My ex partner for example was not somewhat immature and sadly incompatible with me. He was an evil bastard who sucked my blood and lived off me. The fact that after moving house there were still several dozen boxes cluttering up the place was not inconvenient: it was a major tragedy worthy of sobbing and hysterics.

I can see all of these things clearly now, but I don't remember them from when I was growing up. They must have been there. Of course, I was an overachieving little girl and mom had few opportunities to worry, fret and chide me for not trying harder.

In other news: I really do think I have Shift Work Sleep Disorder. The symptoms are fatigue, headache, and excessive daytime sleepiness. And, oh, depression. There is not much I can do save try to change my job. One of the tasks for tomorrow is to track down Fiona and ask her if I can meet her out of the time slot we have on Wednesdays. Perhaps I can find somewhere else that pays more during daytime. If only the only place that does so didn't have my first supervisor...

I am in my room, with the shutters open and catching what I can of London's wan sunlight, which is way better than Padua's gloomy drizzly grey gloom.

I am thinking that I could probably use a holiday somewhere sunny, for purely medical reasons. Sharm el Sheik looks attractive, plus there is diving. No wi-fi in the hotels, and going on holiday all alone is bound to be somewhat sad, but hey, I'd be able to write to my heart's content, and the hours of sunlight a day are on average 10 to London's 2 in this season.

I called my mom, avoided any mention of depression or psychiatrists, and got the Worried Lecture About the Health Implications of my Weight Problem. Groan. ("I know that you say that you accept yourself as you are and are happy like this, but too much weight is not good for the spine or the legs." My weight currently is 63kg, or 10 stones).

The labradorite long necklace as modelled by my mother And I think it suits her very well.

From the Gruniad:

"We still come out for dinner. The bombs have not put us off." Asked if security fears were in the back of her mind, she added: "No, but they're probably in the back of my mum's mind."

Which is why I've bought me ticket for next week.

It's not that I regret the dreadful, dreadful incompetence of these last bunch of bombers, right? But, you go to the trouble of preparing a car bomb and then you leave it parked in a tow zone? I mean, how stupid can you get? Everybody knows that London traffic wardens are unforgiving. (I mean: ticket at 2.30am. Tow at 3.30am. Good Heaven.) And besides - look what the world has come to. The latest lot used Semtex or C4. These guys? Chapati flour, petrol and gas canisters. Please.

In other news. only 1 mile today, but hell, it was pouring down, and in my wonderful light waterproof jacket I was boiling.

One by one, all these moments come and pass. Wiscon was one: now the various Pride marches. Next year will probably be better. This year, they all force me to remember The Time When Anna Was Happy. It's all very well telling myself that I am better, than I am not so much in pain, but then I remember that there are other standards.

Talked to my mom today. I told her about the counsellor wanting me to be "more self protective", and my mother started agreeing enthusiastically. "Yes, yes, that's it exactly," she said. "You know, you make me always think about masochism".

That was so not the moment to tell her "Mom, I think we don't mean that word in quite the same way."

"Take this thing you said of failing the copy-editing test at work: that is obviously self-sabotage. It's absurd that you are not up to do a simple copy-edit job. How can they tell you that your grammar is perfect and your writing skills exceptional and then that you miss all the typos? You obviously wanted to fail."

I listened in disbelief. Really, I did not know where to start. Not in the sense that I didn't know which of the many things wrong with her I could explain, but in the sense that I literally was speechless.

Finally I managed to say, "No, look, I think she meant something quite completely different. She meant that I am not able to communicate efficently to people what I want from them and therefore I end up disappointed."

My counsellor has told me to reflect on how I could be more self-protective. I suppose in this case I could just have said, "No mom, what you are doing is blaming me for everything that does not go well in my life AGAIN. What you are doing is once again undermining my ability, intelligence, competence. What you are doing is telling me once again that if things go wrong it's my fault and only my fault."

And I should have said: "In fact, when she talks about being self-protective she is talking about avoiding this kind of bullshit from you. STOP IT. I didn't WANT to fail the copy-editing test. It so happens that I am not suited to copy-editing because among my skills is not an ability to spot typos. Live with it. Just like I did not chose to fail that long-ago test for the literary translation school, I actually failed it. Just as I DID NOT CHOSE TO BE HURT, BETRAYED, ABANDONED OR DITCHED by all the men I ever loved. It is not my fucking fault. So stop blaming me."

I am not capable of doing it. Long, long ago I promised myself that I would never do to other people what my mother did to me - open her mouth and let all her anger and bitterness come out unchecked, only to later tell me, I didn't mean it. I promised myself that I would never, ever tell people hurtful things without thinking about it.

This evolved into not being able to tell people hurtful things, period. I still manage to hurt people, but only because efforts at communications go awry, because the truth hurts ("I realized I was never really in love with you"), because people misunderstand me. Things do slip out, occasionally, but usually I'm very good at keeping them in check.

Which is why I won't tell all of this to my mom. Plus, a lifetime of experience thaught me that it doesn't work. What would have happened would be that my mother would be horrendously offended, would have cried, screamed or put down the phone and weeks of excruciating non-communication would follow. During which I would feel miserable, guilty, and think about my mom all the time.

So instead I quoted Aynathie's brilliant analysis of my counsellor throwaway line about "if the world was fair, you would not have to be alone, because you're lovely". I told her, see, she said that so that I would not think that my being alone is somehow my fault.

My mother seemed genuinely puzzled. I don't think she understood what I was talking about.

So, I am supposed to think about self-protection. My mind is rather blank. I am thinking about my last Wiscon, and I suspect my counsellor would have liked me not to go. But that is not self-protection, that would have been cutting myself off from people I loved and moments I cherished. In hindsight, I should have prepared myself better. Try to negotiate what kind of contact we could have.

But, well, hindsight.

I went to see Pirates III. All in all, I wished they had stopped at number I.

On the other hand, I went out running today, deliberately doing a reduced run, and switching to distance instead of time. I am very pleasantly tired, and torn between the wish to go running tomorrow as well and the realization that, really, tomorrow should be a rest day, because my legs are getting a little sore.

They tried to put my mom in the brace to let her stay upright today. She was looking forward to it a lot but apparently it didn't go well and they gave up on trying to keep her straight, so she's back horizontal now and apparently very dejected. She hasn't been eating enough. She called me on the phone this morning and she didn't sound well. She's weak and in a lot of pain and all sorts of things are not working properly with her body.

I feel very powerless and not a little scared. It's a serious operation, and she's not young, and if things don't start improving... well, I'm scared.

It did seem that things were going fine with my mom this time around. True, she had been aggressive and bossy and rather nasty to my friend Riccardo, but I thought that situation had been defused.

Today she came to my room and entreated me to cancel tomorrow's writers' group meeting at my home. I explained that I couldn't: that the date had been set ages ago and that I was certainly not going to cancel because she felt my dining room was not up to standards. I had, during the last few days, scaled down my plans in an effort to placate her: ok, the table didn't NEED to be in the new house (although it could be); ok, we would be having pizza sitting down on the sofas instead of a cooked meal around a table. But I drew the line at cancelling the meeting.

As a result, she has been sulking ever since. I tried talking to her, reasoning to her, cancelling my night shift tonight and going around fixing things and arranging stuff, cheerfully giving her good news: but nothing worked. I came home telling her happily that I had bought lots of bookcases, so the hated books boxes could be undone: she first reacted with hostile, offended silence to the news that I had bought the bookcases in oak instead of white as she thought they should be(there is no question of personal preference with my mom: the white bookcases where the obvious, sane and rational choice, not just HERS), and then reacted with a violent rant about the painter not having put down the mouldings yet and therefore us not being able to mount and fill the bookcases. She acted as if the lack of mouldings was my fault, and my cheerful willingness to get the books out of the way compounded the offense somehow.

She slammed the food she had cooked (she is violently opposed to eating out and I can't cook when I work, much less when I work and I am in the midst of moving houses) and went to the bedroom to sulk, leaving me and poor Riccardo to eat in awkward silence.

I don't know what to do with her any longer. I really don't. In the end, I opened a beer and then another and got drunk. Seems like the only solution.

Today's lizard was almost fully adult, and with a full tail. I took it and transferred it outside, but it seemed stunned. It was still alive - I could see her breathing - but she was completely still. Well, I wish it luck, poor creature.

I have had some interesting moments trying to get some money out of one of my ATM cards to cover an overdraft on my account. I took two trips to the bank and some desperate rooting in my Stuff to find out that my PIN had not been working because I had somehow become convinced that PINs were six numbers instead of five and inserted an extra nought there in the middle.

I slept most of the day and tonight promises to be a long night. I slept a lot - I went to bed at four am this morning but I still slept on and off until 6 pm.

My mom has suggested (threatened?) to come visit me instead of me going to visit them.

This would present some advantages, ie I won't have to drive to Udine, which at the moment would be very very difficult for me, since I had some problems staying awake long enough to walk to the bank, some two hundred yards from my home.

On the other hand, the house is in deplorable condition. No, really. The upper bathroom is an unspeakable horror. Ok, I can fix that in half an hour. The downstairs living room has spiders living happily in every corner, dust on every horizontal surface, and random piles of papers on most of them. Dead lizards under every piece of furniture too, no doubt. I can fix that but it would take longer than an hour, because among other things I'd have to sort the piles of paper.

(But, I have decided to move the table back to its original position. Emiliano had moved it parallel to the library to create a nook for himself to work in, and loved it, but I have never been able to work there, the space just doesn't seem right to me, and it makes the room generally harder to navigate. It's been two years, and the time has come to deal with the living room without emotional cobwebs interfering.)

The kitchen is pretty deplorable too, but it can be brought back to something resembling decency just by taking out the recycling stuff that's been accumulating and mopping the floor.

I contemplated all of this and was aghast, but then I decided to try it out and set to work on my bedroom, which I considered pretty much the most hopeless of the various tasks, since there were still piles of clothes in various states of cleanliness and packiness from my trip to the States laying around. Most of them had spilled out of the bags at some time or another and had been bunched up on various surfaces, ending up in baffling knots of fabric. Then there were the conglomerates of magazines, the sludge of books, and sundry archaeological stratification on the dresser, no wait, it was getting on to be geological stratification at this point.

I attacked the bedroom and in a mere hour I had wrestled it to the ground, having sorted t-shirts from All The Rest, then having sorted All The Rest into Underwear and Stuff That Is Clean But It's Gotta Be Ironed Oh Why Can't I Have A Dryer, having emptied the suitcase of the remaining sludge of objects, stacked the magazines, shelved the books, dusted every dustable surface, stripped the bed of covers and put on new ones (pause to chase out the cat doing a joyous impersonation of an hyperactive mole under the fitted sheet), and generally having, well, cleaned up. Wow. Amazing. This actually is doable. I should do it more often.

I can probably get away with letting the study moulder on a little while longer. My mum expects it to be a den of iniquity anyway.