This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 09/06/13
10 Out Of 10 - Locked In (2011)
I tried very hard for the first few years of this site to write as little as possible about that huge subject, me.
There were a number of reasons for my reticence; a regard for my own privacy, obviously, coupled with the - as I now recognise - forlorn expectation of continued anonymity of some sort. Plus, of course, the fact that no-one else would be remotely likely to find it interesting, especially in an environment where half the planet seems to be demanding attention like a spoiled four year old.
My opinions, my observations; those I was willing to sell you wholesale for a penny a ton and throw in the carrier bag as well, but anything which revealed too much about myself? Not on your life. Or mine.
However, my experiences from about the spring of 2010 onwards - triggered by being brought face-to-face with institutional and managerial incompetence and malice on an epic scale (see here, but only after you've read the piece I'm about to commend to you, please) - were so powerful and so debilitating that it led me not to care about what the world might think and to just get my own feelings and internal meanderings 'out there', if only as an attempted act of exorcism.
Not that it succeeded in that aim, particularly; there was some sense of relief at having 'come out' as an official depressive (and, as Terry Pratchett says, in order to fight the beast it is necessary first to name it), but it took a long time after that for the poisons in my psyche to recede to the stage where I can now face most days and most events with some degree of equanimity.
Before you do that necessary thing and click on the 10 out of 10 button above, I feel it essential to warn you that what you find there is not an easy read. I can, however, assure you equally firmly that it wasn't an easy bloody write, either.
(I dedicate this 'reprint' to my friends 'A' and 'S', who themselves have been savaged by The Black Dog in their lives; and to my colleague 'M', who is currently tackling an even more extreme form of the illness).
