#working while unwell

[friction-coefficient]

And now integrate to find the area under the curve

One thing I knew for sure about mental illness was that it went hand in hand with a socioeconomic plunge. I reminded myself of this as I watched myself bounce from my first job to the shitshop, losing 75% of my salary package in the process, and then, fired from the shitshop, to a year eked out on a twelfth of what I'd been on there. (If you want to check your arithmetic, you should be ending up with four percent of what I started with.)

Oddly, data fiend that I am, it didn't occur to me to graph this until the other night, when I tabled my earnings in a spreadsheet, converted them to a single currency, and clicked to generate a line graph. I started laughing - because I could barely believe what I'd sort-of-not-quite known, because what I was seeing was so ludicrous, and because I truly didn't care. It looked like a ski jump, with a short, sharp acceleration as I took my first job and lifted up, a brief equipoise when I was ill but on sick leave, and then the plunge, with a short, rabbit-like rebound at the base when we finally got the drugs half right, as though the ski-jumper had landed on a small trampoline.

Because I am not just a data fiend but a well-trained data fiend, I looked up  GDP deflators and adjusted the currency values, increasing the numbers in the earlier years to counterbalance the effect of inflation. The line of the jump grew more vertiginous.

And now invert the line, and integrate to find the area under the curve. Your lost earnings, I prompted myself. (What? I didn't know calculus. What kind of excuse is that? Check Khan Academy. But there was too much mirth in my head.)

[friction-coefficient]

Softly saying hello

I am under attack at the shitshop for the way I say hello. Swiss culture requires us, when we enter the villa each morning, to call hello to our soldiers-in-arms, and it has come to the notice of the partners that I am not saying this loudly enough.

"You're just not assertive enough," one of them says. "Call out in ringing tones! Don't be afraid to take up space - you don't have enough self-confidence!"

The idea that I might need assertiveness coaching is ridiculous, hyena-laughable. But it's hard to argue back: what they are seeing is half the result of the hyperacusis - I shy back from the zh of bonjour, and from the high, tunnelling ou that follows - and half the result of embarrassment: I do not usually make it in until nine or so, late by Swiss standards, but just (I judge) on the near side of acceptable.

I know I ought to set two alarm clocks: that, if nothing else, would ensure I get up in time. As it is, rising is hazardous. I need to negotiate the path from my bedroom to the shower, and, while this is hazardous if I do it without holding onto everything (because the sleep I do manage is not restful, and I wake to a room that swims and lurches around me), it is equally perilous if I hold onto something or pause. The worst outcome is that I will drop to my knees in exhaustion, and then to my hands and knees: it is a stable position, and I can sway like this almost indefinitely, unable to get up.

From then on, I entwine myself in an ever-more elaborate net of workarounds. Each morning, I open the front door, see the Persian carpet on the stairs rising up at me, and, as I have been doing all along, squinch my eyes shut so it cannot turn three-dimensional and thrust itself out at me. And then, eyes mostly closed, I call bonjOUr - rapidly, defensively, and by no means loudly. It is the best I can do.

[friction-coefficient]

It is not me

As your friends fall slowly, naturally away, you will meet people who have only known you in pain, writhing, starting at shadows.

"You're not really someone who shows initiative," the head of the shitshop says. He is summing up the year during a pay review, facing me with his two partners.

I split into two. On the one hand, of course, this is absurd. Give me a mountain - a hill, hell, a wall, and I will scale it; even at McStrategy, people forever had to reign me in. But then - although he met me when I worked there, several times, the me he knows is the ghost, the slob who cringes back from loud noises, flinching when she catches sight of a picture. So I know the person without initiative isn't really me, and I shake my head, almost laughing. Irrelevant. Irrelevant. But, as he continues to talk, to outline my diligent passivity, another feeling twines around the first. Shame. I have despised this place, I have hated this job, and yet I have not even done it well. The shame that has risen all year surges and traps my cheeks; my eyes begin to spill. He drones on. I work through all the tissues I have with me - strong tissues, a German brand - and turn them over, using the centres, the corners, the folds, until they disintegrate. I feel as though I am being sliced by a bread-wheel. He talks on. My ears are singing, ringing. At last, I excuse myself, run cold water over my face, and return . "I can't go on," I say. It should be obvious." "Mireille, come in," Tomas says gently: "I have a few things to say myself."

I can't stay while Felipe is there, I say. He looks surprised, but, when he leaves, I put my feet on the table - on the table! - and stare at the other two.

God knows what they make of this. It won't be what I know, with absolute certainty: we can disregard all of this, because it isn't me. It's the illness. I couldn't take initiative because I was boxed in by exhaustion and quasi-hallucinations. I did not have a choice. We can disregard it. It's not me, it's the illness. I didn't have a choice, any more than I did now, when I disintegrated along with my tissues (I cannot control my emotions!). Or put my feet on the table. It is not me. It is not me.

[friction-coefficient]

Of medication and crutches

"You're looking better," says the partner who still speaks to me. "You really are, you seem so much better." "I know," I say happily. "I've started taking this new thing called valproate; it's worked really quickly." He is quite still for a moment, for so short a space of time I would have missed it if I had not been looking directly at him. And then he says, and he sounds heavy and resigned, "I thought you'd begun to face your problems. To grapple with your illness. But you've just changed your crutch." "It's genetic-" I begin, but he shakes his head and walks downstairs. I know, yet again, that I have disappointed him.

[friction-coefficient]

Ça va?

"How are you?" one of the partners always asks when he sees me. (The other partner has written me off, and has stopped even saying hello unless there are other people in the room.) "Better," I always say, and it is true every time: it is achingly slow, but things are improving, bit by bit. The carpet is quieter, and I can stop sometimes, on the way home for groceries. But it is always the wrong thing to say. "You're *not* better, he snaps, almost every time. At first, I think this is just the language, that when I say I'm better, ça va mieux, he hears me claiming I'm completely better, rather than just better than I was. But it isn't that. He has become judge and jury, and my progress, clawed and scratched as it is, is irrelevant.

[friction-coefficient]

Oriented to place

The building I work in while I fall is the leftmost of a row of three villas, built in the first decade of the last century in a style that had not quite become Deco. Once, in a bone-cold winter, I arrived unusually early and stabbed my key at the lock. It did not give: I tried, and tried again, until I hear a voice calling, "Mireille!" and look left: Darcelle is standing in front of the next house. I have got the wrong building. I laugh, and say, "They look so alike!", but she corners me later that day. "Listen, Mireille," she says, "I was so shocked when I saw you trying to unlock the wrong building this morning." And she does look shocked, as though a ghost has drifted over her grave. "Is there someone watching over you?" I see her consternation, and feel terrible: she is worried; she is a sensitive person, and I have discomfited her, although not as much as I will do if I tell the truth: I am an atom, whirling. My thoughts scramble like jets, and I think of Marie, the psychiatrist with the unhappy task of seeing me through all of this. I see her every week, and she is more or less keeping me alive, twiddling the drugs, asking me always how it is going. I concentrate on Marie and say, first guardedly and then as reassuringly as I can, "Yes. There is. Really, you don't have to worry." I know I am not supposed to be as alone as I am. I have watched Marie try to tack a net together for me, pushing me to find a GP, asking for the name of a friend she can ring in an emergency, and so on. But I also feel the burden of being a burden, of imposing by withdrawing.

[friction-coefficient]

Starting work too early

I knew I was not quite better, but I knew I had to start work, knew I could not send in a sick certificate on the very first day. (No one said: show up ill, and you'll really wreck that first impression.)

So when, on the first day, the Turkish pattern on the staircase carpet dissolved, rose up and flew at me, I knew what it meant: not that I was too ill to work, but that, quite logically, I would have to close my eyes when going upstairs. Which I did; fortunately, there was a banister for balance. But other limitations rapidly became apparent. I was given lever-arch folders of printouts to work through - “This is our company knowledge,” I was told, magisterially “ - familiarise yourself with it.” But I could not do it: sentences shimmered out of my mind before I reached their close; I made notes, notes on my notes, and pictures of my notes, yet I could not retain it. I took the folders back, eventually: I had gone through the materials thoroughly, I said. I was not quizzed on it.