Autumn

I hate to-do lists with a vengeance. I can’t relax if I have things “to-do”. What’s more, I am so intimidated by to-do lists that I usually ignore them and spend all my free time online instead. The more I have to do, the less I actually do. It’s the strange place where my general anxiety and OCD meet and explode into a bathroom which looks like a bomb has hit it, stuck between the horror of the mess and the horror of all those germs which must be lurking in there, waiting to slip past my rubber gloves and make me sick. This week I finally got around to bleaching the crap out of both my bathroom and kitchen, and I feel much better for it. My hands don’t feel so good, because once I was done they got washed with bleach, anti-bacterial spray, alcohol gel and soap (repeatedly). But they’ll survive. There’s something about this time of year which makes me want everything sorted out, so I’m free to focus on other things. It’s beginning to feel like autumn.

Not that it ever felt like summer – here in the UK we’ve had one of the wettest, coolest summers I can remember. It’s quite funny, because April was boiling hot and had all the bookies and papers insisting that 2011 would be the hottest summer since 1976 (which my mum remembers, and can attest to the fact that it was indeed rather warm). Instead we’ve had perpetually grey skies, flash floods, occasional thunderstorms and temperatures which rarely rose to, let alone above, 20C. Not just in the north, either. I think there is actually far less of a north-south divide than people think there is – it was lovely and warm up here last year, and this year it’s been wet and miserable everywhere. And Newcastle is usually a pretty dry city, since most of the rain is dropped over the Pennines. Now there’s little hope of a final fling with summer, and all we have look forward to in regards to the weather is more of the same. But forgetting the weather for a moment, autumn doesn’t really mean that it’s all downhill from here.

Autumn is a funny season. It has connotations of beginnings and endings. September might be the end of summer and therefore the first hints of coldness and darkness and winter, but it’s also the start of the academic year and the month of my birthday. I’m quite looking forward to my birthday. Presents I can live without, but I was so happy last year when I got quite a few birthday messages on Facebook, after years and years of being ill and stuck at home and not having anyone other than my family wish me happy birthday. I know it’s just Facebook and that it takes people thirty seconds to write a message, but it still meant a lot to me. I’ve already begun my annual practice of telling myself I’m a year older than I really am, so it’s not a shock when I finally get there. I keep mistakenly saying to people who ask that I’m 27, when this won’t be the case until September 22nd. Not that it matters, because to my residents I’m “just a bairn”, and look far younger anyway. I can’t see much difference in my face or my body to when I was 20. I found my first grey hair at 19, and there are a few more lurking in there now, but not to a noticeable extent. One of my friends had gone half-grey by the time she was 28 – literally half grey, on one side of her head, like Cruella De Vil. She said she might not have bothered dyeing it if it had been all grey, because it would have been striking – but half grey was pushing the novelty boat out a little too far. I don’t smoke, drink much alcohol or caffeine, wear make up or have children. I hope I’ll manage to keep looking like I’m in my mid-20s for another decade or so yet, no problem. If only I was less anxious I’d be eternally young.

The beginning of the academic year has always been a very positive event for me. Even when I was younger and being bullied, I looked forward to the start of school so I could get another year out of my way and move closer to escaping to university. Not that I had much of a clue what I wanted to do once I got there. I have always been plagued by boundless curiosity and a very limited attention span – I want to know everything, but I can’t concentrate long enough to get past the basics

Next month my ability to concentrate will be exercised and (hopefully) improved by beginning my counselling degree. In nine months I’ll be starting my first placement, holding some responsibility for the mental health of real clients. In two years I’ll be qualified. In three – or four if I have to do the last year part time too – I will FINALLY have a degree, and a career, and opportunities for further education or even getting the hell out of this country and setting up elsewhere. I will be able to stop feeling like the government and the readers of the UK tabloids see me as a useless burden. I would never think that way about anyone struggling with long term illness or disability, but having chronic health problems in the UK is just one blow to the self esteem after another if you’re not well off enough to support yourself. I can’t wait to run my own business and be fully financially independent. I don’t care how difficult upwards social mobility is supposed to be, I’ll do it.

Four years ago I was just about to concede that my dream of becoming an occupational therapist was unrealistic, because I was too unstable, had spent the majority of the year as an inpatient on a psych ward and was now losing weight at a rate of knots. Giving up university that time made me terrified of ambition or hope, because I couldn’t stand the idea of going through all that disappointment again when it all went wrong – which was inevitable, to my mind. I think – neurobiological explanations aside for a minute – that was one factor which contributed to my swift decline at York a year later. If I had eaten properly but struggled to cope and become too depressed to continue I would have had to face that disappointment and devastation again, whereas remaining anorexic, even if it made me too sick to continue at York, would still give me something to hang on to, some purpose to my life. A physics degree would have been great, but losing weight was a goal I knew I could achieve. I have learnt that I am capable of rather more than that since then.

I still get frustrated by how much time I’ve “lost” – by now I could have been fighting for a place on a PhD in clinical psychology if I’d managed to stay on at Cardiff, or starting my third year at York. I could have done the misspent youth thing and be quite happily settling down a bit, instead of feeling like every moment I spent in my house is a lost opportunity. And last winter was hard – freezing in my run down house and unspeakably lonely. But every year since 2008 has been a little better. In 2009 I recovered my physical health as best I could. In 2010 I picked up the boyfriend, moved away from home, started the voluntary work which proved to be my ticket into paid employment, and survived that winter without relapsing into the anorexia or becoming too depressed to function, although it was a close call at times. So far in 2011 I’ve finished the entry requirement courses for the counselling degree, been accepted onto aforementioned degree, made some friends locally and got a job. The sheer amount of time – two and a half years so far – it’s taken in recovery to get to the point where I’m well enough to cope with a job and a degree is all the motivation I need to continue working on preventing relapse. I have too much to lose, and too much experience of what it feels like to lose it.

Autumn is a strange season. It’s always been difficult for me, with bad memories, negative associations, “anniversaries” and more than a little SAD preceding my almost comic record of bad Christmasses. But whereas most people think of spring as the season of change, I’ve always given autumn that title. I can’t wait to get started.