I'm out of the Twitter closet!

Morning campers, how’s it going?

Today is a big day in the on-going trials and tribulations of me and Twitter.  I’ve come out.  My real name and my Twitter name are in the same place for the first time ever.   Given the problems I've had in the past and particularly given how I was feeling when I wrote my last post you might think this is a move of the utmost foolishness on my part.  Maybe it is. 

I’ve started blogging for the Tottenham Journal under my real name and my first piece includes a link to my Twitter account.  It seemed like a bit of a faff to have to start explaining why I couldn't actually give out my Twitter name in the same space as my real name and to be honest, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I shouldn't have to.  I am not ashamed of anything I put on Twitter and whilst this move may mean I need to be a little more circumspect in what I write on there, that’s not necessarily a bad thing – there may be a few less ‘cunts’ but the internet is littered with swearing bears (just look at who I follow on Twitter) and I doubt my lack of contribution to that arena is going to break anyone’s heart. 

There is also the fact that the more open I am the less opportunity there is for nasty mean-spirited people like The Person to try and get one over on me.   I’d like to think they’re over all that now, but I’d never be so foolish as to not give it due consideration.

I am a very open person and hiding out of fear doesn't sit naturally with me. So I’ve decided I'm not going to do that any more.

My name is Tara and I am Bear Faced Lady. 

I can’t let go

I am angry.  I am angry and I can’t get past it. I am angry and it is not doing me any good. I am writing this in the hope that it will be cathartic and I’ll stop having nightmares about the place I used to work at, that I’ll stop being terrified of not being believed, that I’ll stop thinking about it all the bloody time.

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know something of what I’m going on about and might not want to read anything else about it, so here’s a Get out of Jail Free card; collect £200 and pass Go without reading any further.  I wouldn’t blame you; I’m sick to the stomach of the whole thing. If you haven’t read it before, here is a brief synopsis: I had depression and was signed off work. A nasty, grubby individual wrote to my employer saying I was faking it and using my tweets as ‘evidence’.  My employer investigated me, found me guilty of misconduct on the basis of my tweets and precious little else and began disciplinary action. I was suicidal.  I resigned.

I’ve tried so hard to get past it.  I cleared my desk on 10^th January this year.  Time has gone on and yet I can’t stop thinking about it.  It affects everything I do.  I am so fucking angry.

They knew I was on a waiting list for therapy.  They had medical certificates from my GP stating I had depression.  They had letters from my GP confirming the severity of my illness.  They had reports from their own Occupational Health doctors who having met and examined me on at least three occasions agreed with my GP’s diagnosis. And yet, on the basis of what I put on Twitter and a telephone conversation with a different doctor from Occupational Health who I hadn’t even met, they told me I was a liar.  They told me my behaviour was not consistent with that of someone with depression.  

This, from a manager who, by her own admission, had no experience or understanding of depressive illness.  This from a manager, who, when I said I felt uncomfortable talking openly to her about my symptoms told me “Stephen Fry talks about his depression…” This, from a manager who whilst carrying out the investigation into the veracity of my mental illness, was also appointed as my line manager, responsible for over-seeing the phased return to work recommended by the organisation’s Occupational Health doctors.  Conflict of interest, much?

Of course, everyone asks why I didn’t take this to an employment tribunal.  I thought about it, I really did.  I sought advice.  In the end, I was still too ill.  Even though I was told that legally, I had a strong case.  The prospect, however remote, of being found guilty a second time of something I hadn’t done was just too terrifying.  I’d pulled myself back from the brink once; I knew I couldn’t do it again.  It’s too late now, you only get so long to lodge a complaint with an employment tribunal, and honestly despite being more mentally healthy now than I have been in a long while, I don’t think I’d ever be strong enough to fight that battle again, even if it were an option.

I’m starting a new job soon. I am terrified of it all happening again.  I’ll never be able to say where I work, or have any public facing role in the new organisation, for fear of the grubby individual who began all this, sending their nasty poison pen letters to my new employer as well. I’m not angry with the grubby individual anymore; they are not worth the effort.  They are nothing. I am angry with my old employer.  They knew me. They knew my past history of depression.  They knew I was good at my job. They knew me. And they called me a liar. And I can’t forgive them.

Being my friend

So I’m guessing y’all know by now that I suffer from time to time from a big ol’ dollop of that there depression? (I don’t know why the mid-Western twang, I’ll stop it – it’s a little unbecoming one feels).  Anyhoo, I’ve been giving some thought to how that impacts upon you – I know, how unselfish am I?

As such, and in the interests of continuing ease of friendship, here are some things you should know and hopefully some things you can do to help me when the going gets tough. (Yes ok, do your best Billy Ocean impression now…that’s right, let it out…)

I need a plan.  Not a life plan (although, yes possibly one of those too).  What I mean is, I’m not good with tentative.  If we arrange to possibly meet up, I need to know if it’s on or not and the where’s and when’s pretty much from the get go.  If I don’t know,   I get very stressed and can’t settle to anything else until I do.  If for whatever reason I don’t hear from you (and that can happen for a number of reasons, rational-me does get that!) I become horribly paranoid and worried.  To the point that I think you’ve a) met with a terrible fate and are dead in a ditch or b) decided I’m a god-awful person you can’t bear to spend time with.   So please, wherever possible, furnish me with a plan!

I may not always answer my phone.  There are times when basic conversation, or even texting, is just too hard.  It really is a case of “it’s not you, it’s me” so don’t think I’m deliberately ignoring you.  Well I am, but not because I can’t be bothered with you, it’s because I can’t think of anything to say or because what I could say is too painful to begin to know how to express.

I may cancel our plans.  Most of the time this will be for an actual reason like I forgot, I double-booked, something urgent came up – you know, the kind of reasons the rest of you give for cancelling plans.  Occasionally it may be because I’ve hit a wall of depression and can’t move from my bed let alone leave the house,  that being the case I’ll probably say I’m not feeling well – which is, funnily enough, the truth!  It’s just that for me, not feeling well doesn’t mean a headache or a cold, it means I’m depressed.  The thing I'd ask you to do here is just give me time, I'll come back when I can.

One thing I won’t do is lie to you.  I may not want to burden you with the full truth of how I am feeling but I won’t lie.  I was accused recently by a friend of 18 years of continually lying and making excuses to get out of seeing her.  One of my ‘lies’ was something along the lines of “I had a bit of a breakdown this week and ended up having to go to a mental hospital so I’m not going to be able to meet up on Friday.”   I don’t know what hurt and angered me more, the fact that she was so unfeeling about what had happened to me, or the fact that she thought I would make up such a monstrous untruth!  Needless to say, that friendship is well and truly over.  

I am blessed by having many good friends.  And sometimes this blessing is a curse.  I want to be there for you, to help you through your bad times, I pride myself on being there for those I love.  But the depressed me has a tendency to think that I won’t be of any value to you if I can’t be the strong one, the advice-giver, the cheerer-upper, that I’m not really worthy of your friendship so I hide away from you until I feel able to be the friend you might need.  I know it’s awful, that there’s a part of me that apparently thinks you are that shallow that you’d only see our friendship on the basis of what you can get out of it; I’m working on it.  When I’m well I do know that it’s really not like that, it’s just that sometimes, and it’s certainly been the case over the past year or two,  I’m not that well at all. 

The Dark Arts

"The problems of the UK benefits system* are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible." 

Severus Snape in Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Price. *Dark Arts

If you’re on benefits, don’t get a job.

I cannot believe I am actually saying that but I am tired.  I am tired of having to negotiate my way through the mire that is our benefits system whilst trying to get a little bit of paid work whilst applying relentlessly for a full time job.

I’ve had my Housing Benefit reduced from £180 to £55 a fortnight because apparently they’ve overpaid me and they’re reclaiming it back from my current and future payments.    This is because I did 5 days work in April and May netting me £621 after deductions and because of this they have calculated I have been overpaid in every payment from April to June.   So that’s 12 weeks of overpayment because of 5 days work. 

I’ve already written about how these 5 days of paid work affected my Job Seeker’s Allowance so I can only conclude that I shouldn’t have bothered working, trying to pay my way, trying to get back into work because the benefits system makes it impossibly complicated and financially penalises you for the effort.  I can understand entirely how you can end up as a long term unemployed statistic and find yourself subject to all the vitriol that label engenders – the system is gamed against you getting any kind of work that doesn’t enable you to kiss goodbye to being a benefit claimant entirely.  They cut your benefits if you work part time or occasionally whilst trying to get that elusive full time job and anyway your Job Seeker’s Allowance is taxed as income and included by the Housing Benefit bods as earnings, so it is included in their calculations of any overpayments. 

The game is rigged and the house always wins. 

I spy...a Friday night in.

Once upon a time Friday nights were the highlight of the week.  A time to play, a time to laugh, a time to flirt, a time to get off one’s nut on drink, drugs  or just the heady mix of youth and expendable income.

Ah me, would that such days did last.  They don’t.  Which is I why I find myself sat in bed, a bowl of Bombay mix by my side, bugger all on the tellybox, with a bunch of equally lost souls cool people on Twitter for company at 8.30 this evening.  University Challenge isn’t even on to break up the monotony.  Sad times, my friends, sad times.

But wait!  I have a marvellous idea.  I can harness all of this middle aged, middle-England, middle to low income ennui, by the simple expedient of the classic children’s game I Spy!  But with a twist…wait for it…you’ll never guess (you might)…it will be called Fri Spy and it will be played on Twitter.

The rules of Fri Spy are simple.

1. The game will take place on Friday evenings. (Don’t pretend you won’t be in.  You will.  Or even if you’re not, you know your night will be punctuated by slightly paranoid checking of Twitter to see if you have any mentions.  Don’t deny it, it is a truth)
2. The Fri-Master (me) will tweet “Fri spy with my little eye something beginning with <insert appropriate letter>” and you have to guess whatever it is I am spying with my little eye.
3. I will give you clues (up to a maximum of three) throughout your frenetic guessing and if no one gets it right I WIN.  AND GET TO PLAY AGAIN.
4. If someone guesses correctly it will be their turn to be The Fri-Master.
5. We start again.
6. &c
7. &c
8. &c
9. As per long car journeys, Fri Spy will end when we get bored, start kicking the back of the seat in front and gurning at other passengers,
10. The evening flies by in a rush of guessing and punning and double entendres so much so that we laugh, I say LAUGH, at those silly sausages going out boozing and drugging and good timing.  The fools. 

We Friday-Night-Staying-Inners are many; indeed one could even say legion. 

We are Fri-Spyers.

Let the games commence!

(On Friday 29^th June.  I’m going to bed in a minute).

To my mum

My mum died five years ago today.  I've written her this letter. 

So much has happened since you crept gracefully out of life.   I know you’ll be ecstatic that I finally mustered up the courage to walk away from that relationship that was so damaging to me, that you knew has become a mirror image of your marriage.  After you died I tried many things to fix it but in the end I knew that to stay with him would be like a betrayal of you.  So I left and it was the best decision of my life.  You’ll be proud of me, I think, for doing the thing you were never quite able to do.

I’ve started singing.  I know!  I wish you’d lived long enough, and been well enough, to come and see my choir.  It’s been a lifeline for me and I now understand how singing was such an emotional outlet for you, a release of all the feelings you took care to hide from everyone.  When illness took away your singing voice I saw how painful it was for you; now I understand something of how soul-destroying that must have been.   I would love, so much, to be able to sing with you.   Oh, that we could have the chance to do it. 

I cook like you.  Throw it all in, one pot dinners.  My spaghetti bolognese and moussaka taste like yours but I’ve never managed to match your roast potatoes – although let’s be honest, no one could ever match your roast potatoes.   I can never eat cheese on toast (with seasoning salt, of course) without thinking about you, with a smile.  The same goes for chicken noodle soup, our comfort illness food.

I’ve had a horrible year, mum.  I’ve wanted more than anything to curl up on your lap at your end of the sofa and have you make it all better; there were times when I thought about coming to find you in the sweet hereafter or wherever you may be.   I know you’ll understand that, I think you felt that way more often than you ever said. You knew there was a dark shade to me and without you to talk to about it I’ve felt lost.  I’m coming through the other side of it now. Being a strong woman is as much my strength and yet my weakness as it was for you and I’m learning when to ask for help, and accept it.  I’ve learnt so much from what you did and couldn’t do. 

I wish you could have known B.  You’d like him ever such a lot.  He’s even got me interested in gardening, so maybe I have got your green fingers after all.  He makes up silly songs and I can just picture the two of you together in your garden, pottering about among the hardy perennials swapping ever-more ludicrous rhymes!  Yesterday he said “even if you don’t believe in god, you can still believe in magic.”  I think you’d love that as much as I do. 

When you died I was terrified I’d never be able to remember you as you were before illness, but I do, and I feel happy at these memories more than I feel sad.  I have this picture up in my bedroom, you and your funny, shy little shadow.  We had such good times you and I.