East, West, Home is Best? *

I said I would leave this site alone and knew at the time I would go back on it. Maybe I have already done so, writing up on the locked-up G4 Mac upstairs something I could not upload but from another computer. Anyway, of course my not writing, or not writing so much for my blogs in no way cured me of my problems, freeing me up to finally write my novel since the flitfulness continues apace and I can still not settle down to any one thing but go round and round in circles.

I came back from a work trip to the Cotswolds yesterday and once again, depression hit. I had managed to stick to the diet for the first few days, but then we went out on day trips and I had no food to bite down into and so Mars followed Mars followed Mars. That and coconut macaroons, and fruit pastilles, and also flapjacks and some toast. Typically, I hadn’t noticed any ill effects while I was away. It’s true that when I was away in Venice and Florence (written up as a trip round the South coast) I was caught speaking to myself, as I wrote up a few days ago on Thursday night on the day before we set off [link] but most of the time I was away that time I was waiting for the problems to kick in, and the same was true this time.

I got back from Venice and Florence in the summer and depression hit. We flew back into some nasty weather. There were thunder clouds for weeks afterwards. I had to pump myself full of St John’s Wort to be able to function. I forget how I felt on coming back from Shell Island, but I have a feeling it was similar. This time I got back at around three and the house was empty. I rang M_____ and she was out with a friend. I said we needed food and she said we could go shopping together once she’d finished. I agreed. But then restlessness kicked in. That and hunger. I was angry that here was an unstructured period of time. Something I could do nothing with. I picked up one thing after another and put it down again, tried to watch TV but found it depressing. Listened to music. The same. Tried to clean some of my things away, with predictable results.

I have once again realised that my problems with ADD and Asperger’s, if not also cyclothymia, have not and will not go away, and realised too that despite the years of looking into it, I’m as far away from finding a specialist as ever. This has undermined the work that supports my whole life, the idea that I am progressing towards a novel that will change my life and make me fulfilled. I can carry on planning the thing, but in a certain sense, this only makes it more complex and further than ever from realisation.

I haven’t managed to write the letter I wanted to write to my psychiatrist, a letter I spent a few precious afternoons writing which outlined my problems and my need for medication, and my appointment with him (written somewhere on a piece of card I have misplaced) is approaching, meaning that the letter was just one more abandoned, futile, project. [I hope to upload a few more such letters in the coming weeks. There are plenty of them.] I was nervous too because I had an appointment with a dietician today.

I worry a little about such things because I am not good at finding places. I worry I won’t make it on time, or at all. This despite the lengths dad went to to describe the directions to me, and the fact that I now keep an A to Z map in my car (underneath the zoom lens that I have in my glove box that was to encourage me to take pictures, using up the time I am unable to use in other ways and helping me to listen to the Audible audiobooks I still subscribe to).

I did find the place. It was easy enough. But no dietician. The receptionist rang around for me but the dietician who was there had already gone home.

I went for a piss and out back to the car dejected, reverie after reverie focusing on how hopeless it all was. I reflected on how, even if there had been a dietician, it would have been the third I had seen, and the second was no good at all, knowing nothing at all about concentration and food. I thought about the dire state of the NHS and about how I have no money for a private consultation.

Driving back I thought once again on the region I am living in. Before I left I had been watching Billy Lier for the first time (I’m certain I’ll watch it again) and he was talking about moving away to London. One of his girlfriends, Liz, had been telling him it was easy. All you have to do is catch a train. I had thought about that. I need to get away again, I had thought countless times, feeling trapped by this house, trapped in a relationship neither of us have the guts to end. ‘Every time I come back to this place I am depressed,’ I had been thinking. The people are ugly, I thought to myself driving away from the place. Perhaps I had thought it going there too, it’s possible. I have been constantly dwelling on what woman I might find attractive were me and M_____ to break up, and I can think of no possible type of woman here who could do it for me.

Yesterday M____ suggested to me that I could look through recipes while I was waiting for her to have her drink with a friend. She had remembered my mood last time we had gone shopping when we hadn’t planned what to cook and ended up just buying any old thing and trying to make meals from it. But I had only one g/f c/f cookbook, and one I don’t find so inspiring (there are no pictures and too many desserts). I had given my one decent book to a teacher at college so she could cook with students. And so I could find nothing to plan for that would accord with my diet. And so at Mardy Hell I trooped off to Waterstones, leaving M____ at T K Max. Still I could find no decent books. Much the same problem. I found a gluten-free book I had given to E___ in Prague, but that had a lot of cheese and dairy in it, and another with a lot of desserts and plenty of hard-to-find ingredients such as Soya Cream. And so I looked over the Apsperger’s section and got myself a book by Tony Attwood before getting myself some Omega III fatty acids and some Vitamin B Complex. It seems the Flaxseed oil I was taking doesn’t contain DHA, but can be transformed into it in the body. This had made me wonder whether my body in particular, and the Aspergic system in general is capable of doing so, or whether in some way the body’s ability to metabolise this is lacking in Aspergics.

Whatever, I decided to try and use whatever I can to make myself feel better. I need it at the moment.

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