Enough's enough

Right, stick a fork in me, I'm beautifully medium rare; a moment more under the grill and I'll turn to overcooked, chewy and inedible.

It's been a funny week. And when I say funny, I mean miserable and weird. But now it's Friday afternoon, my feet have finally warmed up, the sun is streaming through the window, I'm full of homemade vegetable soup, there's a wash humming away in the background, and if I don't want to, I don't have to leave the house again until Monday morning. Could. Be. Worse.

Someone described this blog the other day as 'about mental health issues' and I went into a slightly flat spin. I mean, obviously this blog is sometimes about my struggles to find peace in modern London, but I also think it's about a lot of other stuff - for one, if it was only about my head, the only tag on the right would be 'Health' - so I was a bit shocked to think that even one reader felt like that was all it does. But then this week, I got into one of those self-fulfilling funks where I felt like if I didn't write about what was going on in my head, I'd be being massively dishonest, but I didn't want to write about it because I didn't want LLFF to be just about my mental health.

But it is ALL I've been thinking about. So hear this: if my mental health fills you with a) dread, b) boredom, c) hatred, d) A. N. Other negative thing, then off you trot and don't spare the horses.

Where was I? OK. Yes. What was weird this week in therapy was that I came out of the session thinking that it was very inconclusive. We'd talked about lots of interesting stuff but nothing had really been fixed or redressed and I wasn't sure how to move on. I said to her that I felt like I'd spent my life sprinting along a motorway, missing out on all the pretty villages en route, my goal always changing so that wherever I reached never turned out to be where I needed to be. And now I feel like I've finally stopped sprinting, and am lying, exhausted, on the hard shoulder, still panting in shock, and completely unsure whether or not I need to get back on the motorway, or find a quieter road to walk along, or whether I should just hop over this fence into this lovely field and gambol about in there, going nowhere for a while.

However, I've been percolating since Wednesday's session and it turns out that it was actually more revelatory than I'd initially thought. I went in there very grumpy indeed. I had stopped meditating altogether, because every single time I do it, instead of focusing on what I'm meant to be focusing on, I end up beating myself up somehow, whether it's suddenly remembering that I've failed to water my geraniums yet again, or panicking that my parents might be dead and no-one's told me, or stressing about being fat, or wondering what to wear to work tomorrow. And although some of those concerns are mighty insignificant, having a barrage of negativity thrown at yourself by your own brain for several minutes is not my idea of fun. So I stopped meditating.

I told my therapist about this, who said that she has this exercise she gives people who get bogged down in stuff like this - she calls it 'intentional offloading' and the idea is that you put a name to the common cause of the negativity, and for a minute you say it out loud. I explained that the difficulty was that my negative stuff was all so different - geraniums, parents' death etc. - and that the only common focus was that I, as I am right now, am not good enough. I was pretty sure that my issues were about success versus failure. But, in an uncharacteristically insistent way (given that therapists often don't push their ideas on you), she said she thought it was something else. She said that the thing I should hate, out loud for a minute a day, is 'feeling excluded'.

"I dunno..." I said, unhelpfully. "I feel like it's more about not being good enough." But she pushed her point. Why don't I feel good enough? she prompted. Because of my childhood, I responded dutifully, knowing at heart that she is right. And here's the thing (if you're still with me):

On the surface of it, I had an amazingly happy childhood. I was, and am, the beloved only child of two wonderful, healthy parents. My mum and dad are full of joie de vivre. They spend everything they earn, they eat and drink and laugh and sing along to music, and play golf and go on holiday and work to live rather than live to work. When I was born, they owned their own business where they worked together, and most of the time they got on brilliantly. They were pretty successful yuppies under Thatcher and had been able to buy massively wasteful luxuries like a boat and an aquarium and private school fees for lucky me. I had my own life-jacket, a My Little Pony grooming parlour, a box full of Lego, another box full of Playmobile, and books and my own stereo and their near-constant attention, blonde hair and blue eyes: my future and I were pretty bright. What could possibly go wrong? Why am I now spending hundreds of pounds on therapy, with green eyes, platinum highlights and no time to do Lego?

I sincerely hope the answer doesn't hurt my parents. It's not meant to. But I think that being an only child is destined to leave a person a bit mental. Now, it's my firm believe that pretty much everyone is a bit mental - I don't know anyone who wouldn't benefit from a few weeks in therapy - but I'm pretty sure that my own particular brand of mentalness is caused by growing up as the sole child of happy, loved-up parents. Any child wants to fit in to the dominant social order when it's born. I wanted to be my parents' equal - an absurd goal given that they had a 33 year head start on me, but there it is. I wanted to be part of their gang - but due to the fact that I was a TODDLER I couldn't be there with them. I didn't understand this. So I felt left out. A typical childhood memory involves me sitting on the landing outside my bedroom, listening to them having dinner with friends below, occasionally writing tragic notes that I would post through the bannisters to land noiselessly on the stairs one flight down and then get madly upset that they didn't notice the missives' arrival and come talk to me.

I'm sure many firstborn children have these recollections - our parents seem desperately cool, popular and wise, and we want to be a part of every bit of it - but then a sibling comes along, and normalises everything, and you learn your place in the family. Finally you're not the sore thumb - you're one of a pair, and then sometimes a trio, and you fight for supremacy with your peers, not with people decades older than you. And of course, siblings cause major traumas of their own. I'm not in any sense claiming that my problems are worse than anyone else's. If anything, they're a hell of a lot better. Poor me, I'm the healthy child of loving, well-off parents. But anyway, I'm coming to terms with why I'm still crazy after all these years. You can click the window shut if you want.

[Jesus. There's a huge fight going on outside my window. About four bikes have been abandoned in the middle of the A-road and people are driving round them. A hundred yards away, eight or nine guys in hoodies are yelling at each other in such furious blasts that initially I thought it was dogs barking. Now there's a woman crying. It's 15:39. Madness.]

Back to me. I wanted - however foolishly - to feel like me and my parents were equal, like I belonged. But even though they loved me, inevitably I could never feel like their true equal - because I wasn't. I was a child. Not better or worse. Just different. But, as many children do, I didn't feel good different. I felt wrong, and I blamed myself. When they feel left out, kids rarely think, "Oh that person's at fault," or, "We're just different. It's not my problem." Instead, they conclude: "I am bad."

I felt wrong. But crucially, I didn't feel irredeemably wrong. I believed, for some reason, that if I just tweaked this or that element of my personality, with enough careful observation and hard work, I'd eventually get the balance right, and everything would fall into place. And I went to school and was ignored, most likely because I was an attention-seeking brat who deserved to be shunned by anyone with a pulse. I realised pretty quickly that I was deeply annoying, but I didn't know how, or why, so I thought 'If I just tweak this, it'll be OK - if I just get this pencil case, or this haircut, or don't wear these stupid glasses, it'll be OK.' But it never was. I never felt good enough.

And time went on, and I got older, and over and over again, in some tragically Freudian repetition compulsion way, I would identify someone who nearly respected me but was just beyond my reach, a girl two years above, a guy who was in love with the girl two years above, and try desperately to make them like me, do everything I could to make them think I was amazing. Sometimes they did and I got what I wanted and then - of course - I went off them. I had to find a way to destroy it because no one worth respecting could possibly respect me. I always wanted one of those posses of Friends-esque friends, people who hung out in the same place, where everyone was always welcome, where the door was always open, but any time I've come close to those kinds of relationships, I've felt claustrophobic and limited, and I've pushed it away. And pretty much anyone who's ever gone out with me will tell you that I nearly destroyed them with my attempts to sabotage the relationship. Although that might have been because they were all FREAKING ANNOYING.

[Wow. They're right outside my window now. There are about thirty black schoolkids all in uniform, varying ages, and one older guy in a hoodie with a beard waving a D-lock in a very menacing way. A lot of shouting and male testosterone flying around. I reckon if I stood down there for more than a couple of minutes I'd probably get a hairy chest. Everyone white is just walking by trying to pretend they don't see what's going on. A black mum's just dragged her eight year old son through the melee trying to run for a bus.]

But anyway. It seems that what I want, more than anything, is not to feel excluded - but simultaneously, I've had to admit that it's not currently possible for me to be happy when I'm included either. And that's where I'm at.

[OK, a big police van has just turned up. Three white policemen get out, and about half the kids scarper. For some reason the people at the centre of the fight don't run away. Within about twenty seconds, a policeman identifies someone as significant and slams him up against the metal doorway of the tube. Three white grown-ups are talking earnestly to the police, trying to explain who did what. I mutter that they shouldn't stick their beaks into stuff that's not their business, but one of the guys appears to be trying to act as a mediator between the kids and the police, and the kids don't seem to be hating him for it. The policeman bundles the tall significant boy into the van, and another one is taken towards another van that's just pulled up. I can't believe how quickly they worked out who to separate. Either the perpetrators are known to them, or they're just picking people at random. Both options are sad.]

It's been a pretty unpleasant journey, especially over the past few weeks. I stopped dating months ago, I've pushed away a lot of friends, I've canceled a lot of engagements, I've wasted a lot of tickets. I've been snappish, grumpy, selfish, ill, self-pitying, unfriendly, ungrateful, unpredictable, over-emotional and teary. I've also done pretty well covering this up to a lot of people. And now I'm here - at the centre of the onion, or as close as I'll ever be. I'm metaphorically weeping, sitting surrounded by discarded layers of allium and wondering what the hell to do next.

But even though I'm metaphorically crying surrounded by onion, I actually feel amazing. Properly joyous. Because Yazz and the Plastic Population were right. And it's the weekend.

With love for you all, even if you clicked the window shut several paragraphs ago. Yours always, LLFF.