Friday 28 June 2013

One Giant Baby Step

I've been pushing myself in weird directions recently, and yesterday I made the decision to take my small step forward a little bit further.

I've agreed to live in a flat in Bungay with two good mates, Luke and Jack, and I'm really excited about it. But questions about my current employment keep bobbing around my nervous head: what if Mum and Dad pull out of the golf club? What if I don't make enough money one month, or if Mum doesn't pay me on time, and I can't make rent? What if they're so angry that I'm moving out that they don't want to employ me anymore? Millions of things buzzing around, unanswerable, vague and usually the lack of answer is more worrying than anything else.

So last night, whilst enduring a ridiculously hectic and unorganised shift at the Golf Club, I decided that I wanted out. I don't know if the conversation I had had with my sister the night before was the reason, or just a spark in the giant fire, but either way, I knew that I needed to secure my future for myself and stop being pushed over and taken for granted. I asked Katie, boss at the Rumsey, to employ me full-time. And bless her soul, she wrote up a rota for me there and then.

So my 'baby step' of moving out is now actually moving out of the house and having another job which is more important and trumps almost everything Mum can offer. The only real loss is that I won't be able to do Cambridge any more, but maybe that's a good thing - cut off all the ties, even the ones that I might have held on to.

So this is literally the new chapter, the next step, the future version of Laura messing up all this stuff. For the better? I hope so, but cannot know for sure. Either way, I'm going to go into this head first, chin up, look it in the eye and smile at it. My first world problems need to end. Right now, I can't wait for the next few days to happen.

I wonder how quickly I can pack up 14 months of my life and get out?

Monday 24 June 2013

Morphine

Two nights in a row of drinking, not sleeping, drinking through my unsolved issues, drinking past my paranoia, and drinking out of my inhibitions. Both nights were spent with the same three people in common - Chris, Ollie and Imogen. And today, I spent all day with Chris, a 38 year old I'd just met called James, and an old friend called Ben (not Howarth). And now I am very tired, but I feel better about one thing: I know that when all else feels crap, its not drink that solves things, it's good company. Particularly when that good company is so fond of hugs.

In the small hours of [this morning / last night] a bottle of morphine came out, and everyone started sipping. Ollie hit the floor after two sips. Chris got to about 7, everyone else kept it safe and had a good time with it. The Donovan house was rather full for once, so four of us had to sleep on two sofas: Ollie and Imo on one, Chris and I on the other. To add some backstory, Chris and I have been friends for over a year now, having met when I worked at the Locks. We still hang out quite a lot, usually as a large group, but recently we've had some fun adventures together, particularly the 4am sunrise / beach swimming session, during which we had a nap (and a spoon, as dry towel space was limited) and all was cosy. So on the sofa we snuggled up with our sleeping bags and cushions and slept like monsters.

The small Donovan kids came into the living room at 9am to see who was sleeping in their house, informed us that they were getting the day off school because there mother had overslept and was too hungover to drive them in, and then they left. I realised for the first time that I'd had a couple of really deep, intense dreams, like I was shocked to wake up and discover that they weren't real, but their contents had not stuck very well in my mind, so fear not, this is not a dream entry. And Chris, who has been drinking heavily every night for over a week due to fear of going home and telling his father about being unemployed, got the first good night's sleep since starting his drinking binge. He puts it down to the morphine, but I felt something different (and barely had any morphine) - I think you sleep better when someone is next to you. Like, they are mentally protecting you from invasive bad dreams, negative emotions and that over-tiredness from sleeping all day. Its healthy to sleep next to another person, and to wake up to the sound of their heart beat. And all day I've felt a little lighter, and a little easier, because I had a few good hours of sleep.

I also got some excellent news today - there is a flat in Bungay which the landlords want to give us the tenancy to! Party times with Jack and Luke. Ayipee!

Also also, my sisters are home at the moment, preparing for their weekend in Glastonbury, and I yet still not told them about my visits to the uni counsellor. Tomorrow I also get a call from the NHS counsellor about further my sessions, as she thinks cognitive behaviour therapy will be beneficial, which involves face-to-face sessions with another counsellor. So I may have 3 counsellors. Odd.


Thursday 20 June 2013

This Empty House

I'm stuck in this house today. I feel trapped. I have a vehicle, so I can leave at any point, but the problem is that I don't have anywhere to go.

I am the only person in the house that ever goes food shopping, and because mother hasn't paid me and my bank balance is getting low, I can't afford to do a food shop (and am kind of on strike, to see how long it takes until someone else does it), so there is no food in the house. This makes my Dad happy because he believes he's losing weight from not eating dinner, and it makes my Mum seem to not care, instead have a dinner of toast and 'bar food' (be that peanuts or a pie, I don't know). However, my lack of money means I cannot leave to buy food from such a place. My Dad just handed over £50 sympathy notes because Mum can't pay me because of 'cash flow'. But still, this house is useless. It contains no food, no family, no support system or care, no shoulder to cry on or company to watch a film with. We only ever talk about the business, we watch Pointless and Eggheads every dinner time, they both drink as soon as they're in the door and my 'study' has turned into the place I can hide away all day. This isn't supposed to be my recluse, it's supposed to help inspire and get me focused.

This house sucks all my life out of me.

I'm going to have a bowl of cereal for dinner, and continue watching the Secret Diaries of a Call Girl. I'll probably finish it tonight - that's four series in two days. New record?

And worst of all? The Howarths have said I can go and live there, I can escape this place and get my life together. But first, I have to talk to Mum and Dad. My whole life I've avoided these types of conversations. But I have to do it; I have to get out; I must get my life back. This is no way to live.

Wednesday 19 June 2013

One Day Son

There's so much going on in my head right now. And I've had too little sleep to deal with most of it, so last night I had one extensively excruciating dream which tried to deal with a billion things in ten seconds and hurt my head a bit. I need to get out of this house. My brother is home, so I want to see him, but I can't be here. I need out.

I'm in one of those moods when I just want to listen to loud rock music all day long.

My dissertation is scaring me. Its this ominous thing just beyond the horizon and I can't see it to focus on my enemy, I can only cower in fear.

I'm running away today to get some writing done.

And all I want to do, my escape right now, is to watch all of The Secret Diaries of a Call Girl.


I feel the same way I felt last year at this time - the pressure of the business is thwarting my own hopes and plans.


Sunday 9 June 2013

Perceptions

I've been watching a show called 'Perception' this week. Season 1 is only ten episodes long, and season 2 starts at the end of June. It's a show about a doctor who is both a neurobiologist, and a paranoid schizophrenic. And he helps an FBI agent solve bizarre mysteries and things. Its a little bit like Fringe, a little bit like X-Files, but so much lighter and happier than both those shows. Its sunny, and its not about government conspiracies and horrendous things like that; its more about how we cope as people from day to day, and the weird things our brains can do.

Doctor Daniel Pierce is played by Eric McCormack aka Will Truman from Will and Grace. And his FBI friend, Kate Moretti, is played by Rachel Leigh Cook aka the girl from She's All That, and Pierce's most frequent imaginary visitor is a girl called Natalie, played by Kelly Rowan aka Kirsten Cohen in The OC. But, here's the odd thing - Pierce is older than Moretti, as she's an old student of his (at university) and to show his age more, McCormack has a good bit of rough facial hair going on. It makes him look like a strange mix between David Duchovny (as Hank Moody) and Mark Ruffalo. But McCormack must be going through the same thing that Duchovny went through - fear of always being labelled by the one big show, so now that there is another successful show, one must appear differently, to avoid the connections and associations always made with the previous role. For both actors, apparently this is solved by growing facial hair, as if their former selves were incapable.

I've got a couple of films to watch, also about 'imaginary' people, and then I will watch Dexter.

Unfortunately, my dissertation seems to be happening at the same time as everything else in the world. The parents have a new business venture - the Bungay and Waveney Valley Golf Club, for one, and also their repeating need to work less because Dad is too old and broken, means that I'm working a lot more for them, and I've only got a couple more weekends at the Rumsey before I leave, and I'm still at uni every tuesday morning for counselling, which is unearthing lots of things but not making me feel any less broken, or any more content with who I am. And the more busy I am, the more I want to break away. Just get away, drive somewhere. Last weekend, watching the sun rise with Chris at 4am, freezing cold on Lowestoft beach, I realised that the reason we'd got there is because it's as far as I can drive, eastward. I wish I could just keep driving. I've been to the corners of the UK (admittedly, having not seen most of the middle stuff), and knowing how far away Devon, Edinburgh, Aberystwyth and Brighton are, it's not enough. I need to go further. I itch to get out.

Pending news about Sam's return in October. Watch this space.

Hope for my future is being confused with knowledge of the immediate future.

Ben's drama with ladies is making it hard to see him without content. I can be his friend, but when he just ignores my advice and then complains about his situation again the next day, I can't do much more for him, so now I just want it to be over. I can't be the one to spill the beans, because it's not my place to do so. But I need him as a friend right now, and he's not being a very good one, and its getting harder, day by day.

And then Helen phones me, and I'm even more confused.

And then I have a dream and I'm even more confused than before. After all of this, after everything's been said and done, am I actually not over him yet? Or is there something else in store for us. Is my psychic mind ringing in the next idea, or am I just stuck in a groove thinking about him again.

I'm bringing this up with the counsellor this week.


If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark.

Wednesday 5 June 2013

My Green Jumper

I'm swimming in the smoke of bridges I have burned
So don't apologise, I'm losing what I don't deserve.




I had a dream last night. Lots of things in it have since escaped my mind, because I didn't want to hold on to it: it was a very strange dream which involved lots of issues that I don't want to deal with in my waking hours. But I do remember one part of my dream. I'm not sure if I remember it because I want to, or because it was one of the last images, and it remained in my mind. I was a student at Solent, but lived in Brighton, with Maria, Martin and Ollie. And nobody's stuff was in the right place, and it was annoying me, and it was a four-bedroomed place, like the place at Burlington Road, but it wasn't, at all. Like, the two doors coming out of the very similar kitchen went opposite ways - but the 'garden' door, which went to a new part of the house, not the living room, meant the house was a weird shape, and the 'livingroom' door went to the garden, which was somehow in the middle of the house. Like my brain couldn't deal with creating a logical new house, so it literally rubix-cubed the old house around a bit.

Things happened of little consequence - an argument was had about butter which Ollie bought and Maria used; maybe a cleaning rota was discussed, something like that - but then I went up to get my boxes of stuff out of Martin's room.

I just never left.

And I remember hearing Ollie complaining. Being like "here we go again", or something, and then playing F1 really loudly. And, weird as it is to think (after a random dream), but I think that our friendship can't go back to what it was; if we ever made a valiant effort to see each other frequently as friends, we'd end up being in a relationship again. Because that's what our friendship had built towards anyway. Like, there's a gravity in the universe, and when we spend time together, that gravity ignites and pulls us together.

Remember that posh guy, looked a bit like Marcus Mumford, who drunkenly made up the whole 'handcuffed to a radiator' thing? I found my green jumper earlier, and remembered that night.

Sometimes I'm tempted to just get away from here for a little while. Just get in my car and head to Brighton. And then I start to think about it, and I think about Manchester, and I think about just pretending like the last year didn't happen for two days and just be with him again, and hope that this terrifying world could leave me alone, and let me feel happiness and warmth again.

But then I remember the advice that I gave him: you can't run away from your problems.

Maybe I can run away, then come back? 'Circling' my problems.


Maybe.