Sometimes Girl, Sometimes Writer

[sometimesgirlblogs]

On Depression. And not being diagnosed as clinically depressed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/anne-theriault-/living-with-depression_b_3726949.html

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ca/2013/05/depression-part-two.html

Be warned. This is a long, drawn out attention seeking post that I'm writing for catharsis. Of course I believe it's attention seeking, that's what I'm going to write about. The links above are really rather good though.

I remember when I tried to kill myself. I took a kitchen knife and I ran it across the inside of my left wrist. It hurt and I decided that actually it wasn't such a good idea because I wasn't really into pain. It bled quite a bit, I put a plaster on it, and 13 years later I still have the scar to remind me what a fucking stupid (and painful) idea that was. I want to get it covered by a tattoo one day. A black band like a bangle. To keep reminding me what a fucking stupid (and painful) idea that was.

I don't know what started it really. I was just always a bit sad inside, I don't remember ever not being that way. Then when I 13 and at school this girl I was friends with, well she was diagnosed with manic depression. We liked the Manic Street Preachers and she started to cut herself, on her arms and things. Places that you could see it. So she got more 'help' and the teachers made exceptions for her. They let her hand in homework late because she was 'ill' and she got extra time in exams.

I remember vividly a quote in the Manic Street Preachers biography by Richey Edwards. It was 'I hurt myself to get pain out'. I remember wondering if it would get the sadness out too, so I tried it. It did. At first I just bruised myself, all over my legs and things. No one noticed because I played Water Polo at a high level so I was always covered in bruises. I did Jujitsu too. I never got 'help'. And my homework still had to be in on time.

And then it progressed. It was about the same time as I started to feel like I didn't really want to be a girl anymore. Of course I didn't really know what these feelings were, I just thought I was weird. I knew that some men had sex changes to become women but I that was the extent of it. I loathed my breasts. And going thorough puberty meant they were getting bigger. Far too big for my tiny little frame. So I cut them. No, that's not right. I defaced them. And I defaced the front of my pubis. It was like the girl in The Secretary you know? I had a little box that I kept sterile and I used scalpels to do it with that I ordered off the internet. I don't think I have any scars from that, I looked after them so well, but it felt good.

All this gender hate. I became promiscuous. Now *that* I got 'treatment for at school. Apparently it's not right for 14/15 year old girls to go round fucking everything they can. I didn't tell them why I did it though, so the 'treatment' didn't go on for long. Plus sex addiction wasn't really a 'thing' over ten years ago. It wasn't really taken seriously. The truth is that I fucked people to try and fix myself. To make myself feel like a woman. To stop feeling like a boy. Because if I was having sex, that was the most grown up, sexual thing that I knew how to do.

The truth was, promiscuity was self harm. I just developed from cutting myself and bruising myself to having dangerous unprotected sex in order to try and feel the right things. The right things.  I stopped cutting my breasts at around this time (because boys and girls want to see your boobies when they have sex with you apparently, and it's really hard to explain away) but I developed a tick that stays with me to this day. I pick and scratch. If I see even the slightest hint of a defect or spot on my breasts and chest then I pick at it. If you look closely (not many people get this close anymore) then you can see that my chest, from collarbone to under my breasts is covered in thousands and thousands of tiny little scars. I bet most people don't even notice. If they do, they never say anything.

I've never been diagnosed clinically with depression. I sometimes wish that I could be because then it would provide me with an excuse. "Oh hey, sorry I was an asswipe the other day and I let myself crudely stomp all over your emotions, but I am depressed you see". I have no such excuse. I'm just an asswipe half the time. Most of the time. Anyway.

There's a reason I won't take myself to the GP and ask for help, it's because I don't think they'll take me seriously. And I'm not sure it's all that bad, because I mostly know how to keep a handle on things - I've lived with it all my life after all. And I don't want to bother anyone. It's not like I've got the guts to kill myself anyway.

I used to walk across this bridge at night when I lived in Aberystwyth. It was the way home from where I worked. I used to look down into the river that fed into the marina and wonder what it would be like to just jump. I thought about this in depth every time I walked over it, I don't really know why. I'd wonder about things like if my legs would break as I landed because it wasn't very deep most of the time. And then what it would feel like to be washed out into the marina and into the sea. How it would feel to be trapped underwater, to sink and not be able to breathe. Of course I already knew the answer to lots of these questions, I was a lifeguard and we did lots of simulation training.

I still wonder about things like that today. When I moved away from the sea and rivers and I learnt to drive it became car crashes. My biggest one was always 'what would it feel like if I just drove at that telegraph pole'. You see, I just wondered what it would be like. How it would feel. Just to feel something. And then I actually drove my car into a telegraph pole (accidentally I hasten to add!) and I discovered it hurt. Alot. I don't need to wonder what that one is like anymore.

It worries me that I don't really feel anything, so I try to make feelings up to match what those around me say that I feel. Love is the classic one. People say that you know when you're in love, that it feels a certain way, that YOU JUST KNOW. Well, I don't know because I don't feel it. I know that love is a thing that accompanies certain other things. Like I know that if I care about someone deeply, then I probably love them. At least a little bit. And I know that if someone makes me smile just by being there, then I probably love them. I know these things because people tell me that's how I should feel.

It's very hard living your life off of theoretical knowledge and it uses alot of energy for me. I often say after a few hours in the company of people I don't know very well that 'I'm all socialed out' because it's genuinely hard work. Everything someone says I have to try and produce the appropriate reaction to them. I know in my head what the appropriate reaction is, but I have to go looking for it and then produce it on demand. It's not a spontaneous thing.

More recently in my life I've discovered that some people and some activities however do produce genuine reactions. And I don't know where they come from. Seeing an old friend who I had not seen for ten years, I had this weird feeling. It was there, it was absolutely overwhelming joy. I don't know where it came from and it smacked me round the face like going ten rounds with Mike Tyson. But it was there.

But the most consistent way for me to feel anything is kink. When I am running on empty and I've used up all my reserves, I just want to be beaten. I want to feel something. I want to feel the hurt and let someone else be in control. I want to cry. I almost always cry after this kind of session now. I used to stop myself doing this, but now I've discovered it feels good to feel anything.

The downside is that when I'm really low, my way of reaching out is to try and find a way to lose myself by inducing feelings. This to me, is now intrinsically tied to kink. It got so bad over the last few weeks that I've made myself a nuisance to a few different people who I enjoy playing with. I mean it got bad enough that I was on the verge of paying for an appointment with a pro top until I realised that actually I didn't really have the spare cash about my person. The final bill would have been somewhere around the half a grand mark and I just don't have that sort of money spare as a student.

I've not come up with a way to self medicate this crushing need to feel. It used to be that I would cut myself, but I don't want to do that anymore. Sometimes self caning down the length of my legs can help but I struggle to get enough force behind it. I've bought myself a batch of needles in the hope that this might be the thing that works, but I'm not holding out too much hope. Anyway, I think I've gone off the point as to where I started an hour ago. I can't even remember what my point was really.

TL:DR

- I wish I was clinically diagnosed as depressed so that I could use it as an excuse for my bad behaviour.

- I just want to feel.

[sometimesgirlblogs]

Obsessions

http://vagendamag.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/anorexia-was-my-problem-but-its-also.html

This is vaguely terrifying, because this is how I feel in some ways.

I am an intelligent woman. I have a body that people compliment me on at a frequency that I believe is higher than my peers. I understand basic sports science, I yearn to live a healthy life and I actually have qualifications in nutrition.

And yet I have body dysmorphia. But intelligent women don’t have body dysmorphia do they? Especially not angry feminists who don’t believe that bodies should have to conform to any particular standard.

I don't believe I have an eating disorder (although I guess that many people don’t) but I do watch what I eat in painstaking detail for much of the time. The feelings of guilt afterwards are the worst, although I am not far enough ‘down the line’ that I’d stop myself having something if I really wanted it. And actually being vegetarian for almost the last year has been a bit of an enlightenment to be honest. I can now eat a much better diet at a lower calorie count because I’m not stuffing myself full of low nutrient protein at every meal. I eat more vegetables and more colour and my diet is technically better than it has ever been.

But body dysmorphia. I was diagnosed with it about five years ago now. I don’t know if I still have it, you see the NHS wouldn’t give me treatment for it. Not that I’m sure I need treatment, but I really don’t know because I was provided with so little information about the illness. You see body dysmorphia related to wanting to be tiny and slim, psychologists can understand that. They know it’s bad and they know something about how to treat it. Sometimes it’s accompanied by a horrific eating disorder such as anorexia as well and the two illness’ can be treated in tandem.

But I want to be strong. I analyse my diet to make sure I’m eating the right amount of nutrients. When I’m not suffering the results of a car accident (that wiped out my quadricep) I train hard. Too hard really, if there is such a thing. And that’s the problem. I suffer from being incredibly healthy when I’m at my peak. My body ticks over almost perfectly, I look the way that a human is supposed to look - muscular and strong. But I am obsessed with looking that way.

They didn’t know what to do with me. I presented myself to my GP saying “I’m obsessed. I don’t want to be obsessed. Please stop me being obsessed. I look in the mirror and I hate myself. I look weak, I look soft, I want to be hard and strong.” You see the problem is that when I train, that things like calorie and nutrient counting take up a ridiculously disproportionate amount of my time. I log everything onto a website that does the sums for me. I will not even eat a sweet unless I am confident that I can find the nutritional information to enter into the charts. Almost everything I eat is home made and I spend time working out every little detail about all the ingredients that I have put into whatever I have cooked. I mean a meal can take hours because once I’ve cooked and eaten it, then I have to take all the weight measurements and see exactly what I have put into my body.

It’s obsession pure and simple. And intelligent women don’t become obsessed with things like this. I have joked before that my body dysmorphia is like having another lover, but sadly it’s true. It takes up more time than any lover I’ve ever had. It’s not only the calorie counting and the calculations though, it’s also things like the obsessive weighing myself, the body fat measuring and the obsessive examinations in the mirror. Not to forget of course the sheer volume of time that exercise begins to take out of my life. And there’s more calculations to be done with that. As a qualified personal trainer I scour statistics and figures and I build the most time efficient workouts that I could manage. I swear, I could sell this shit to busy business people as a magic formula. But ironically the efficiency of the workouts is lost when you consider the time that I take planning them.

And of course the worst thing is that people just don’t take you seriously. Because it’s good to look healthy, right? I mean of course it’s good to look healthy, I’ve spent a large portion of my life trying to make people believe that. But I am obsessed with the way I look. I look in the mirror and I see fat that needs to go, but not because I want to look skinny, because I want to look strong. I’m not particularly vain though, I don’t spend large amounts of money on primping and preening. Quite the opposite in fact. I have my head rather than have expensive haircuts, I rarely wear make up, I don’t use expensive body products. Actually I look from the outside that I don’t care about the way that I look at all. My dress too, I don’t flaunt my body, again very much the opposite. But the reasons I don’t flaunt my body are possibly more grounds for another post on strangers behaviour in public.

So my psychologist just dismissed me. He told me I was healthy. He told me that I was one of the healthiest patients he’d seen. Which of course was true, since my body is a temple and all that. But he didn’t seem to see the fact that my obsessive behaviour about being healthy was getting in the way of things like having a social life and even at times getting in the way of working. Since I’ve not been able to exercise recently I’ve replaced my obsessing about health with obsessing about my love life and trying to find lovers. This indicates to me that perhaps it’s not a body dysmorphia problem that I have but rather a personality that suffers easily from addiction and obsession (which would tally in with the drug addiction I picked up as a teen). But I just don’t know what to do about it. Or even if I can do anything about it. My intelligent personality says I should just get over it and stop being obsessed (and that I’m a bit of a baby) and that a psychologist will say exactly the same. But I don’t know. Something concerns me about it. And I fear that I just won’t be taken seriously if I go to my GP with a problem like this. 

It’s not like I’m saying I don’t want to be healthy, it’s just that I spend too much time being obsessed about it. And intelligent women don’t do that.

[sometimesgirlblogs]

Charging more for men at events

As a self-labelled feminist, I find the idea of charging more for admittance to sex based events (like swingers clubs or fetish clubs) a backwards step to the feminist cause. But NOT because it is unfair to the men. It's because it is unfair to the women.

The oft cited reason for charging men more is to restrict numbers and make the atmosphere better. Unfortunately this implies that an event with more men has a less pleasant and more predatory atmosphere. I don't like this assumption. This suggests that men are incapable of behaving appropriately at events and for want of a better phrase, keeping their hands to themselves. Having to physically restrict the amount of single men shouldn't be the answer, education and vetting should be. Let the men be responsible for their own decisions on how they behave, and if they don't comply with the rules then kick them out, as you would with anyone else. At the end of the day, don't pose behind 'equal numbers' as a way to make more profit. If equal numbers truly were a problem, then just keep a register and admit one man for every woman. Anything else is just a profit making exercise hiding behind the women's cause.

However that is not the main thing I want to talk about.

By restricting the number of single men but allowing unlimited single women, the club is rejecting the idea of a woman's choice in her sexuality.

By allowing more women than men, you are giving men the power. You are giving men the choice. You are saying that men want to choose from multiple women but women should put up with what they can get. You are saying that all men should be good enough for women - hence why you don't need to let many men in, but you're saying that men should be allowed to choose the pick of the bunch and reject those that aren't good enough.

You're also saying that women should be happy playing with other women. That a couple is only going to want to invite a woman to join them, not a man. That it's ok for women to be a 'third', but not a man. Once again you're giving men the power here, to indulge their fantasies. To support the idea that threesomes (and moresomes) are all about multiple woman and one man. You're supporting that stereotype that is forced on us as we grow up. That women are desirable to men, but men are not desirable in the same way.

You're only accepting bisexuality in women and not in men. It's expected for a woman to be bisexual in this world. Because all women like other women really, right? When I tell people I'm not really bisexual, only for very special women, I am looked at like I'm a freak. "So how does your dom feel about you not playing with other women for him?" well to be honest, he's quite alright with that. We'd rather play with other men anyway.

And that's just it. By taking away the amounts of single men at events you're taking away the likelihood of meeting a hot bisexual man. That's one of the reasons we go, you know. To meet a nice (or maybe not so nice?) man. A man who has the same interests as us - fetish clubs, swinging etc. Where better to find one than at a fetish or swingers club? Oh no, wait. It's NOT a good place to find them, because bisexual men are constantly rejected by this world as not being up to standard. Including by restricting their access to clubs and similar but charging them extortionate prices.

You're also rejecting MY sexuality as well as the bisexual men. I like men. Most women like men. Given the choice I would rather play at a club with ten men than a single woman. And you're taking away my ability to act on this. But a man wanting to play with ten women... well that's perfectly acceptable. I want to go to clubs to fulfil my fantasies, not to help a load of straight couples fulfil theirs.

But the biggest problem is this one.

If I attend such a club as a single women, the burden is on me. It's like when you go on a date and a man buys you flowers. The burden is on you to perform and reciprocate the value, generally in sexual favours. That's how the patriarchal power exchange between man and woman works, like it or not.

When I attend a club as a single woman and I pay a quarter of the price of a single man, I know that the single man is expecting to get more than me out of the experience because he has paid four times as much. This means that he will be looking for the women to perform for him, to get his money's worth. I'm not saying this is a conscious thought, but think about it. When you open a bottle of Stella, do you expect the same drinking experience as a 50p can of value lager? Of course you don't. It's reassuringly expensive for a reason, it's built into our psychology.

So by charging more for single men, you're turning the single women into a sex object, designed to entertain the single men.

And clubs reinforce this by the dress codes. By telling women to 'be daring' or 'dress to impress' while saying that men have to wear a shirt and shoes as a minimum. Why aren't we telling men to be daring or dress sexy? But that is another post.

So I believe that by creating an atmosphere of equality by charging everyone the same, you would take the pressure off the single women and perhaps even attract more, evening up the numbers that way instead. And best of all, you wouldn't be putting pressure on me, as a single woman, to do things that I don't want to do