Questions and Answers

After a few proper phone calls and emails, a visitor to my house and a chat at work I have found a pattern emerging around the questions that people are asking. So here are some of them and the answers that go with them. This doesn't mean you can't ask me them again to my face.


Q. I found your blog quite hard reading. Do you have to be quite so graphic / open / honest?
A. Yes. Unfortunately, (for me at least) what makes it as far as the blog is still somewhat censored and a lot less graphic than I could have made it if I was intending to go for shock value. If you find it hard reading then maybe you should try living some of it. Also, if you find it too hard to read, there is a simple solution; dont!


Q. Does it need to be public?
A. Yes, for a number of reasons. The top of the list being that writing things down just for myself is no different than letting them run around in circles in my head. If I think them through enough to post them for other people to read it means I at least considered what other people might think about them. It does also mean that occasionally some people raise reasonable challenges to what I have written and help me think about things in different ways.


Q. Does it need to be quite SO public?
A. Yes. It is currently the only method I have for "communicating" with a lot of my "friends". It does also mean that people who read it know what is going on and I at least get some support, even if it is from unexpected sources.


Q. Can't you turn off the comments?
A. Yes, I could, there is an option to turn off all the comments completely. I have currently selected the intermediate setting and locked off the completely anonymous comments so that anyone who wants to leave insults now has to at least put the effort into making up a fake name. I have still chosen not to lock off all comments as I think that the negative ones have their place in demonstrating to the rest of you how some people are behaving.

Q. If you are so messed up how can you still cope with writing coherently every day?  Why are all your blogs so angry and upset?

A. I only hit "publish" after I have read it enough that I think it makes sense. I have an awful lot of time on my hands to write (e.g. this post has been intermittently created over about 6 hours). I try to only write when I am somewhere in the middle ground between upset enough to have something to write about and too upset to be coherent. That quite often drifts further towards the upset side once I start writing, or once I start thinking. 

Q. You didn't sound that bad when I talked to you on the phone. OR. You looked agitated / crap / unwell when I saw you.
A. Not really questions, but both lead to a point. If you have seen me or talked to me then that has been a point when I am locked-in somewhere safe (work or my house probably), and I am distracted by someone who cared enough to talk to me. That has been an absolute high point in my day, and probably my week. I was also probably drugged up to the eyeballs (or beyond) at that point. You will just have to imagine what it was like after you left or hung up.


Q. Aren't you just over-reacting?
A. No. At the start I had a perfectly normal grief reaction to the trauma of having someone I was expecting to spend the rest of my life with removed from my life, within a matter of minutes, with no rational explanation. This led to me having a breakdown and then Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That was then worsened by a further grief reaction when 90+ of my friends also removed themselves from my life rather than provide the support network that I had reasonably expected. That was then compounded even further by having the basis of my own identity for the last 20 years removed as well.


Q. Are you still suicidal?
A. Actually that one hasn't been asked flat out but people kind of teeter around the edges of asking. Today, I am not. But it comes and goes. I have stripped the cabling off my bike so that I can't take it out without spending about 2 hours rebuilding it first, and I have disposed of all the spare drugs that were collecting in my house. This won't stop me from thinking about it or feeling like it is a good idea, but it does make it slightly harder to carry it out.

Q. Can I do anything?

A. Yes. Talk to me. At all would be good. Like normal would be better. It will not freak me out if you ask stupid questions. You will not make it worse. If you want to ask about how I feel or what is going on in my head it will not upset me further. If you do say anything that does upset me (and you will have to be trying hard to beat the blog comments) I will say so or I will change the subject.