Polaroids from Other Lives: Volume 2

Now in stock! If you want a copy, please come along to the Alternative Press Festival events this weekend or pop along to the web shop for a copy. Be warned, it's not really a very happy story to be telling.

My Tweaker Mum

My Tweaker Mum, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

I've nothing to blog about today, other than that I've put up a new badger comic and I'm waiting in for the post, so my mum's blogging on my behalf. Say hi again to my mother.

Don't Ever Look Back.

Don't Ever Look Back., originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

So, today I spent another day working on essential repairs. I registered with the new GP, who is a delightfully posh matriarch who took my catalogue of catastrophe in her stride. We're waiting for the psychiatrist's report to come through before I start on ADHD medication, which makes sense, plus had a little talk about the op on my arm. She said the lack of information given to me was really typical of an orthopaedic surgeon but she'd help me get a second opinion if I'm still not happy with how I was treated when their report comes through.

We talked a little bit about the depression things I've had going on and we talked briefly about the murder I witnessed. I'm usually very wary of talking about it because it brings up all kinds of flashbacks for me, but she handled it wonderfully, reminding me my goal shouldn't be to stop remembering what I saw and what I did, but to stop remembering it as an entirely horrible experience and instead to focus on what she described as the nobility of my actions by going to help and by testifying in court. I just wish I can hold onto that perspective on it, rather than see my actions then as a failure. We'll see, eh?

Anyway. I went along to Lewisham after that for physiotherapy. I've been trying really hard to keep my posture in mind and to do the exercises I've been set. I'm standing taller, feeling taller too and the kink in my neck from hunching over the computer and the drawing tablet has started to work its way free, but it's made me realise how weak my neck is at supporting itself properly after years of slouching. I've got some peculiar pilates exercises to do to help develop the inner muscles of my neck to stop it feeling a bit wobbly.

Pilates. I'm so Chiswick it hurts.

Apparently, it's too soon for the gym and yoga or similar classes would be a horrible mistake until I've got all the little muscles working that need to be working, but I can carry on swimming if I do freestyle and build up bit by bit. This pleases me. From physio, I went to the Oasis in town, where Paul showed me some swimming drills to help me understand how freestyle works. It's still a bit weird to me to think so technically about how I move in the water and disappointing how weak I am compared to how I want to feel, but it's all progress, so I'm not going to complain too much.

Anyway, all this just to justify the picture I drew yesterday of a man on an escalator, looking back.

Don't ever look back.

...unless you're seeing clearly, then look and learn.

Facebook made me straight

B3ta Poached Eggs

B3ta Poached Eggs, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

I'm so late to the party again. I had some eggs in the fridge and had a little sigh, thinking I'd like poached eggs, but that if I wanted them I'd either have to go out and pay for them or I'd have to put up with runny, string soup.

Then, I remembered that I am not alone in the universe and that the internet knows everything (apart from where to find the 4-digit code for the radio in my Mégane) and turned, of course, to B3ta.

www.b3ta.com/features/howtopoachanegg/

And indeed, I'm now full of yummy poached eggs and the eateries of Chiswick lose out on a customer. Alas! I am an agent of the recession at last!

Had a good day yesterday, met up with J's family for lunch and showed them what we've done with the flat, which met with their approval, then Jonathan wanted me to take pictures of him in his newest sexy outfit - you'll have to ask him for them, but I might post the comedy out-takes just to piss him off - and then we went book shopping in Oxfam (more recession-guilt!) and found some brilliant stuff, came home for a disco nap and then headed out for Niall's birthday party.

I'm slightly getting over my hatred of comedy karaoke voices, but I still spent most of the time hiding in the garden from enthusiastic versions of Total Eclipse of the Heart done Pantera stylee (perhaps unintentionally) and even gave in when forced to sing Running Up That Hill. I never knew that those were the words! I lost on competition mode and Jonathan kept reminding me of this. I think that alone means I should post photos of him in a jockstrap and leather chaps falling over while he pretends to stamp on the camera.

Saw lots of friends I really wish I saw outside of parties and then went on to Duckie. One act with a quick and witty gag and a fantastic jumper, one which didn't quite have enough chutzpah but seemed solid enough, then some standing around outside listening to music and shouted homophobic abuse from people driving past.

"I remember when they used to throw eggs."

"I used to be allergic to eggs. I got quite scared but secretly wanted to get hit so I'd die and it'd be dramatic."

"I can see the headline now - Man Killed By Homophobic Egg. I can't understand why someone would drive all the way over here with a box of eggs when they could be sat at home watching television or enjoying their improved chances with all the spare ladies we leave in our wake."

"Perhaps it's a sex thing."

"Internalised homophobia?"

"No, a fetish. I bet he'd turn up at the Hoist half an hour later trying to wank up a soufflé."

I love how rubbish we are at actually dealing with homophobia and instead of even acknowledging that someone was just shouting at us and wishing we were dead and instead turned to recipes and sex clubs.

Speaking of which, Jonathan went on to show off his new outfit at one of those fashion clubs where every garment has to cost over £100 a piece or they won't let you in. Somehow he managed to get Griff in, too, wearing my hand-me-downs, so I lingered for a bit, got slightly affronted by someone's nonchalance about working for an oil prospecting company, "It's okay, if they asked me to help survey for Oil Sands, I'd walk away," as if otherwise it's okay. Still, I suppose it was good he was able to say Peak Oil point's certainly passed if we mean in terms of ease of acquisition, probably passed if we mean the point of maximum extraction and definitely not if we're talking about bioavailability in general, especially if we explore algae producing methods.

Interesting, I suppose. He said this generation will experience fuel hardship, just as the last experienced gluttony. The next generation will bear the brunt of the need to adapt if we're to stop the world from healing herself from human actions.

With that in mind, I went off and drove home alone, more annoyed about not knowing where to find the code for the radio than terrified by my carbon footprint and the tyre-trails of pain I am leaving for the next generation. If I had an ounce of queeny wit, I'd say I was driving out of spite for the attempts on my life by egg-flinging heterosexualists.

However, too many of my friends have babies at the moment for that to be remotely true. I'm just content to coo at ikkle babies a lot.

Anyway, it seems my poached eggs were poisoned with a slight wistfulness, probably something that bled from the cling film I really can't re-use or from the proxy guilt of going with the cheaper rather than the greener energy provider when we moved here.

I should probably go and try to do something earth-friendly today, but I'll mess it up, I'm sure. If I'm an eco-warrior, I think I just failed my yellow belt grading.

You're probably all mashed on air-mile awesome cocaine and by-product-tastic GBL at the moment, so I've got the moral high ground yet, even if it's on the steps to the gallows.

Smart

Smarter, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

Following on from thinking about the sartorial self, here's a picture I took this morning. I don't know if I recognise myself in it.

I'm Cheery, Honest!

I can't believe that going shopping for clothes yesterday brought on a horrific bout of existential angst. I'm such a failure at being gay. I started out with an idea of getting some slightly smarter trousers, a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts. The thinking was that a few people had said they thought I looked good in smart clothes, and I like it when people think I look good, so I looked for smart clothes.

I think that might have been the root of the problem. After elbowing through teenagers in H&M to try on a smartish short-sleeved shirt, I discovered that although it fitted okay (hung a bit loose around my waist, tight around my chest, the material was cheap and you could see my tattoos as clearly as if I were naked. Could be good in some situations, but isn't exactly formal.

A few more shops in and I realised how little vision I had for what I wanted to wear and then that started to dissolve into a sense that what you wear says who you are, so if I'm trying to discover a new outfit, am I expressing a deep dissatisfaction with who I am and how the world sees me? More than that, is a desire to appear as someone you do not currently seem to be an annihilistic drive; an abnegation of your identity and history, abandoned in the doorway of a Chiswick charity shop?

Perhaps it's not that extreme, but you know what I'm like for extrapolation. I found myself wandering around looking at the people for whom what they wore obviously mattered enough to make them feel part of something more than themselves. Fashion gangs flocked around particular isles. Hipster, Skater, Indie Kid. All I saw was suits in colours Kookai ran in 1997, the kind of padded lumberjack shirts I wore when I was 15 (and the people buying them were wearing nappies) and endless tired, comedy t-shirts. Oh, and drainpipe jeans. Drainpipe jeans? Are we just to celebrate starvation and weakness these days?

I suppose so. I went with a pair of Carhartt jeans in the end and abandoned my dreams of posh drag for now and might have to brave Westfield next week and hope that I can go with a sense of adventure for novelty rather than a crushing sense of despair that things like this just don't matter to me the way they seem to for other people and a desire that I could be one of those people who gets excited by any of this. I don't want to be anyone other than who I am. The howls of those zombies lifting their discoveries aloft (slogan t-shirts they used to sell at the market by the Wimbledon dog tracks in 1984) should serve as a baying warning to remember that the beauty of life is in its diversity and that we should not seek to be different by joining tribal packs of the undead.

Want to see my new jeans?

Commissions and Confidence

I picked up another portrait commission yesterday, and it looks set to pay really well. The struggle I always have with commissions is to remember that people are paying to get something I've made, rather than something that I think will please them most. Going into Magma yesterday and looking at the books of the 200 Best Illustrators and the like just added to how intimidated I feel when I think about my drawing.

It's a funny cycle, going into shops like that. There's so much incredible talent in those books, on those postcards and in the cute plushy toys that I get a gnawing sense of dread that by doing this course I'm meant to be operating at an equivalent level to these artists and I start to wonder if I'm doing the right thing, or if the course leader made some insane mistake in letting me join the course with such ease.

Then, I see a single drawing that captures something emotional and evocative in a book - sometimes it's a brilliantly complicated and realistic drawing, but more often it's something where you can see the motion of a human hand in its creation. Then, I stop and wonder if I'm being blinded by science when I see the splashy and technically advanced stuff I couldn't replicate without years of photoshop practice and I find myself cooing over a little drawing of a mouse or a fashion illustration of an incredibly thin woman whose body is expressed as two almost straight lines and her eyes carry a story of pain and entanglement.

I guess it's like anything, it's not what you've got, it's how you use it. I'm just hoping that it's not an unrealistic desire to want to attain a standard where my drawing supports and enhances, rather than hinders communication and storytelling. I'm nervous, but it's born of a desire to do what I do better, rather than a desire to be or do something different.

After Pride

Always comes a fall. I think the last week's been a lot to take in and I need to let it all filter through. Jonathan's getting really frustrated with his leg still being weak after the cast's been removed and I'm hating myself for having to remind him to be patient and take it slow. I know how resentful I am about stuff like that, especially as I'm going through it at the moment with my hands. The psych stuff is a huge insight into how I think and work and probably tells us what my dharma is, but I'm not sure I'm ready to take that leap right now.

There is a lot happening.

Where to begin? First off, I've got a new comic for sale, details are over on the Cute But Sad Comics site but I'm sure you all subscribe to that, right? It's the second in the Polaroids from Other Lives series and I've done a lot to make the drawing style more realistic and accurate but that's not what's making me nervous about publishing it. In the first volume, I told a story about a parallel me who is grieving for a lost lover who is taken by an un-named disease. It's based on how I felt after someone close to me died when I was quite young. Some of you will also have read the one-page story about the murder I witnessed in Leeds. That story was straight down the line true and one I'm planning on telling in more detail at some point down the line, probably as a part of this series.

This story, though, sits somewhere between the two in terms of autobiography and looks at someone (who, as is the theme of the series, looks exactly like me) in a hospital waiting room trying to decide whether or not to seek medical help after a violent sexual assault. Even though it's not a true story, elements of it are and it's definitely emotionally autobiographical, so I'm going to be feeling quite exposed after it's published. I think this is a good thing and that it will continue to push me to tackle difficult themes in my work and there's also very much a way in which it's cathartic by letting me write a different story to what happened. We'll see. I'm hoping that it will be received as warmly as the previous comic, and I'm preparing myself for some good conversations to come up as a result of it.

Anyway, that's one thing, go have a look - I'm taking orders now, it should be through from the printers in a week or so and I'll post copies out the day it arrives with me.

What else is going on? Well, I complained to PALS in Lewisham Hospital that I wasn't getting any follow-up after the surgery on my arm and there's been some very intriguing developments as a result of it. The main thrust of my complaint was that I don't feel I was adequately informed about the operation, particularly in terms of recovery time and in what I should be doing to make it easier to recover and I asked why I hadn't been offered any physiotherapy or occupational therapy when I've still got a compressed nerve in my left elbow that means I had no working hands after the operation.

Well, I saw a physiotherapist the next day - the physio team have been brilliant - and she took a look at my posture, my neck and back and said that she thought the trapped nerve in my left arm could be sorted if I could learn to radically improve my posture. The reason the nerve is pressing in my elbow is that it doesn't have enough slack further up where it passes through my neck. This is, of course, brilliant news and seems glaringly obvious. What I'm now wondering is why the orthopaedics people never checked my neck and back, only ever poked at my elbow, which usually left me in agony for hours.

Yesterday, I met with her again to say that two weeks of standing tall and following her instructions had really helped me to ease the pain in my left hand and I asked her whether she thought I really did need the surgery in my right arm. She sighed and told me that the surgery is a notoriously unreliable remedy for the kind of problems I have had and said she'd wondered the same thing. Add to that the orthopaedics consultant only now telling me it'll take 18 months for the nerve to heal, during which time I should expect to continue having days where it suddenly feels as though my hand's on fire and you can perhaps understand why I'm wishing I hadn't had the surgery after all. I'm definitely pressing the complaint with PALS and getting a second opinion from a doctor in West London now I've moved.

I'm trying to remain focused on the good stuff that's coming from the physiotherapy and not just descend into the limitless rage I feel towards the orthopaedics team. Once I have the response from the PALS investigation, I will more than likely be seeking legal advice as 18 months of arm pain which could have been avoided could really fuck up my chances of completing my MA, which means so very much to me. Plus, it means I can't really return to interpreting for a very long time, so that career is ended by the injury, the surgery was probably the final nail in the coffin.

As if that weren't enough medical stuff to talk about, I had an utterly fascinating appointment with the Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder clinic in the Maudsley hospital yesterday. We talked through the survey things my mother and I had filled out about my childhood and current behaviour and he ran through a very detailed questionnaire about my early years, my experiences at school and in adulthood and then we went through the slightly harder stuff of my wider medical history, talking about depressive episodes, drug use, suicide attempts and risk-seeking behaviour. I'm not going into the details of all that, I'm sure you all know enough about me to figure that the diagnosis that followed wasn't a huge surprise.

He said I definitely have ADHD, without a shadow of a doubt. He said that it has three main features: inattentiveness, hyperactivity and impulsivity. He said that I still exhibit quite a lot of inattentive traits, but as an adult, particularly as an intelligent and insightful person, I've learned to mask and suppress the hyperactivity and impulsivity and most of the time I let those out as internalised stuff. He also said that doing so takes a lot of effort, which makes sense of why if I'm tired or hungry or stressed, I lose the ability to mask those and suddenly seem incredibly snappy and reckless. He said I also have a depressive disorder, but whether it's the bipolar illness I was previously diagnosed with might need to be examined again once treatment for ADHD has started as it's easy to confuse mania with ADHD traits. He reminded me that although there's a very high co-morbidity of the two things, ADHD treatment won't change my moods and there's a world of other stuff I still need to talk through with a psychiatrist, particularly around post-traumatic stress after the murder and other horrid things I've experienced.

However, the most fascinating aspect of the discussion was when we chatted about how he thought this all came together and it was sparked by my mentioning that when I have migraines, I get a kind of numb paralysis down my left side, followed by an inability to speak, followed by the loss of sign language and the ability to perform complex manual tasks. He said that this is an incredible insight into the wiring of my brain because it means that the language centre in my brain sits in a different place to where it's found in most people. I process language in my right hemisphere and it's also threaded through into different sensory pathways.

He asked me for a third time in the interview if I was left handed. I explained that as an infant I was ambidextrous but at school it was felt that if I had the option of using either hand to write, I should train myself to write with my right hand. He smiled, as if this suddenly made everything make sense. I've looked into how ambidextrous brains work and have a vague understanding that quite often they're a bit of a mess with things passing from one side to the other in quite odd ways. He elaborated on this in a way that made my history make such perfect sense on a neurological level.

I've got an ambidextrous brain, he thinks, which means that when I was born and wasn't breathing, my brain recovered from the damage caused by hypoxia at birth which is connected with all kinds of mental health problems and can cause cerebral palsy, schizophrenia and other things I am quite glad I don't have. The reason I could recover from this was because of being ambidextrous, which meant I could develop using different pathways to those which were damaged at birth.

We then talked about early deafness and how that often makes touch compensate for hearing and how, in an ambidextrous child, particularly once my hearing returned after grommets, the pathways for my senses were interwoven. I often think about sounds in terms of texture, tastes and smells as colours but had just thought this was me being a poet/artist type. Apparently not; I'm a very mild synaesthete according to him.

All of this means that I process information in a different way to other people, a way that is driven by intuition rather than ordered learning, so it's little wonder that I was always getting poor grades for effort, good grades for attainment at school and hated having to copy things out when I felt that I could just grasp the concept quickly. Even now, I'm very weak on process driven skills which rely on learning compared to how quickly I can absorb new concepts.

It's not all good, though. Having this fluid processing style means I'm not going to do well in anything that's measured in rigid terms or relies on retention of information, particularly if it's to do with sequences rather than patterns and if it relies on single-sense input. It also means I will always have slightly unpredictable responses to stimuli and seemingly incongruous things can trigger depression in ways I can't really justify.

Now, I know the temptation at this point is to just give a sigh and attribute everything to this particular atypical neurology, but I'm really wary of being too fascinated by it and wanting to understand myself purely in this light. I don't want to be defined in these terms, but I also recognise that if I can improve my attentiveness and get support in re-training myself out of habits I've built up through my life, I can probably improve my productivity, my chances of holding down a steady job and perhaps even learn how to relax by doing nothing rather than relaxing by doing things, which is how I do it now.

I don't want to be a banner-waving nutter using a medical description as an excuse for all kinds of odd behaviours. Just as the physiotherapy is a tool for me to improve my posture and from that my general sense of health and to avoid pain in my arms, neck and back, I want to view this new phase of psychiatric intervention as providing me with a toolkit to make me able to be a little more grounded, more emotionally honest and to accept that I'm as entitled to be the way I am as anyone is and that being neurologically very different is something I shouldn't be ashamed of, just like my height.

I'm looking forward to being content to stand tall and to stand out.

Good morning.

Sign Language Son of a Preacher Man

I miss spending so much time in sign language that stuff like this comes naturally. Can someone help with taking the audio from this recording? I really should do more things like this.

So much to say; nothing to say.

So, last weekend was Gay Shame on the theme of Femininity, the last Shame there ever will be. I'm proud to have been a part of it. I looked a total mess in wig and makeup and a beautician's outfit, but it was a good night. If you were there, I hope you had a heap of fun. I'm still recovering a little bit. I'm an old lady now, I'm falling apart.