Adios, Don Diego

It's been a painful decision, and one I still haven't entirely come to terms with, but Y and I, along with the lady who sold him to us, have come to the conclusion that our dear little fur-ball, Zorro, just isn't happy with us and needs to be returned so that he can run free in a larger space. He seems to dislike human company (I dread to think what awful treatment he must have endured in his short life to have such fear of humans...) and needs a garden where he can run and explore and do cat things in peace.

So it looks like this weekend we're going to have to try and capture the wild creature (he doesn't let anyone near him, so putting him in the travelling case is going to be...challenging, I fear) and take him back to the refuge. It breaks my heart to have to do this, but it also breaks my heart to know that he's so unhappy.

This evening, Y and I are going to Pérols (just south of Montpellier) to check out another kitten - a much smaller one this time, a little ball of grey fur, a little like a Chartreux, but not with the same face. I hope this is going to be the one that will help me get over the loss of my beloved Tom...

Till then, adios, mi Zorrito querido, I wish you the happiest of free-spirit cat lives. You touched my heart, despite everything.

Slip, sliding away

It seems I'm in a bit of a Simon and GarFUNKel mode at the moment, which is odd, as I haven't been listening to their songs at all.

But yes, I'm in a bit of a funk, and I can feel myself sliding down the slippery - oh, so slippery - slope of being so overwhelmed with stuff to do that I end up doing nothing at all.

I have a shit ton of stuff that needs doing, and needs doing urgently - Urssaf need to be visited to try and get myself exonerated from at least some of the ridiculous €7,000 they claim I own them (wrongly calculated on revenue from a better year than 2013), I need to see the VAT guys to try and spread the €3,000 I owe them over a few months because yeah, €3,000 all at once will kill me. I need to contact the totally incommunicado guy dealing with my mortgage, which hasn't been paid for months as far as I'm aware. And I need to send papers to the mortgage insurance company to try and get them to pay some of what I owe, but of course I don't have all the papers required (this is bureaucracy-obsessed France, remember).

So far, out of all that, I've photocopied a letter from the insurance company and sent an e-mail to the mortgage guy.

Then there's work, and the invoices that go with that, plus paying dear Arnaud for work he did months ago (and that the mandataire was supposed to have paid but didn't).

And tomorrow, I've promised to take the girls shopping at Odysseum as part of Lydie's birthday present. I'm dreading it, and am hoping and praying it won't last too long so I can get back to Yacine.

I am a bad mother, one who finds her children fairly unbearable most of the time and who doesn't exactly relish their presence. A bad mother, for sure.

I'm also annoyed with Dr H for prescribing only medication with which it is very difficult to overdose (he knows me too well, clearly). I have a huge stock of Mianserin and Abilify - the ones I don't take at 6 pm, just about every day - plus an equally impressive stock of Atarax and a couple of Noctamide and Lysanxias. None of them taken alone would do the job, but I'm hopeful that if I took all of them, with a hefty dose of alcohol, they might work. But I don't know. And if I do want to go down that path, I don't - most definitely don't - want to fail again.

Life as a working, responsible, adult with children and a home and a cat to deal with is too much for me, I'm not cut out for it. I want to leave Rech next week and be allowed home indefinitely, but I'm not sure how ready for that I am.

Slip, sliding away, indeed.

Hello, darkness my old friend...

...I've come to talk with you again...

Indeed.

I've come to the conclusion that my self-destruct instinct is the strongest instinct I have, because I've more or less stopped taking my main medication (the anti-psychotic and the anti-depressant), just taking the odd anxiolytic and a totally ineffective sleeping pill, and only taking those because I can't get out of it.

As a result, and despite all my best efforts to hide it and try and appear normal, I do feel that the darkness is creeping back into my life. I know I should just start taking the damn pills again, but there's something about taking medication that offends me, upsets me, disturbs me, and I just cannot bring myself to do it.

I must prefer the darkness, I suppose. Which no doubt says more about me than most of the rubbish I post here.

I feel old, though I'm not actually old enough to have been alive when the song referenced in the title and first line of this post was a hit, or even when it was used in The Graduate. I feel like I've failed so very badly at so very many things, important things like raising children to be people I like and living a "normal" life (whatever that means).

Martine, the wonderful ergotherapist here in the clinic, says there's a darkness to my work - she calls the stories I write "apocalyptic" (at least in parts), the paintings I use as models have a "melancholy" to them (the one I'm doing right now is this one, Edward Hopper's "Morning sun" from 1952:

) and the original work I produce is "dark" (that darkness rearing its ugly head once again).

So yes, I think my main talent is for self-destruction, and darkness is my best friend.

En mai, fait ce qu'il te plaît

This popular French expression roughly translates as "In May, do as you please". Which is all well and good, but supposes that you have a clear-cut idea of what would, in fact, please you. And I? Really don't.

I want to be released from this hospital, because I've been here for more than 3 months and it's really not easy spending so much time in a psychiatric hospital. But the thought of being home on a permanent basis fills me with both terror and horror. I don't feel ready at all to have to deal with all the day-to-day crap that normal people deal with without difficulty. And you must remember that the last time I was let out of this hospital, everything went pear-shaped again within 4 months, and within 5 I was back here. I don't want that to happen again, I don't want to fail again. There has been enough failure in my life already.

Another example: since June 2013, I've been a "protected adult", meaning that a judge appointed a guy - a mandataire - to deal with my personal finances (note: personal, not professional). That sounds great, but it also authorised him to remove all means of payment from my possession, leaving him to give me a (small) amount of cash every month for basic expenses. He's done a lot of good, cleared a lot of (again, personal) debt, made my bank account healthy again. But last week, I received notification from the judge saying she was withdrawing me from "protected adult" status and restoring my right to deal with my own affairs. On Wednesday, the mandataire came for the last time, gave me back all the paperwork and stuff, and left, leaving me to my own devices. But as I said, he essentially dealt with personal finances, so my professional finances are a mess - I have a huge (and very overdue) VAT bill, I owe the URSSAF (the French administration dealing with social security) a huge amount of money, my professional tax forms are full of mistakes... You get the picture. I've longed to be free of protected adult status because it's humiliating and restrictive. But now that I am, indeed, free of it, I feel very, very fragile and scared. The fear of failure looms very large, I must say.

So what would please me? I really don't know. There's so much in my life that doesn't please me right now: I feel that Y is unhappy and nothing I do or say seems to change that, yet I want him to feel good, feel happy with me; The girls are being spectacularly difficult and unpleasant and disobedient (though they're currently in Paris with D and his mother till the 7th), causing me much pain and sadness; Zorro remains terrified of everything and has now, to top it all, started pissing all over the place (on the bedroom carpet, on the duvet, on a blanket used while the duvet dried, on a plastic bag in the sitting room...), making it even harder to accept him as a sort of replacement for Tom... the list is seemingly endless. I feel old and a failure at life in general.

Maybe if all that were to clear up, that would please me, but I just don't think I'm capable of feeling peace and happiness and joy. My brain isn't wired that way (despite the electric shocks supposed to kick-start it).

May is supposed to be a good month - lots of bank holidays (though they change little for me, I've always worked on bank holidays because I work just about every day, always), good weather, my birthday... But the weather isn't great, I'm dreading my birthday because come on, 45 for fuck's sake.

I think I'm a lost cause. And I wish May were over (even though it's only the 2nd today).