Debt is depressing.

Being poor sucks. Really sucks.  And I don’t mean poor as in you can’t afford to go out as often as you’d like, you’re not having a holiday this year, you’re not earning enough to justify a haircut.  I mean poor as in you’re getting red letters from all your creditors, you weigh up every bus fare against buying bread and milk, you really don’t know how you’re going to pay your household bill this month, next month, every month. And knowing that part of the reason you’re so poor is because you have an illness that takes away your ability to manage any kind of personal care or circumstances really sticks the knife in.

Like work and depression, alcohol and depression, relationships and depression, finance and depression can feel like a chicken and egg never-ending circle.  Did I get in debt because I am depressed or is my depression causing me to get further into debt as I don’t have the emotional strength to get a handle on it?

I’ve never been that good with money (Savings? Huh?)  but I’ve always managed to keep on top of any debt I had until now.   I’m unemployed after being forced in December to resign from my job due to an investigation into claims I was faking depression. It’s a long, sorry tale which I’ve blogged about before so I won’t go into the detail here. Suffices to say, I’m out of work and no one seems in any way keen to interview me.

I’ve just had my Job Seekers Allowance cut because I missed an appointment.  I missed an appointment because I got four days’ work for which I will get paid about £600 at some point in the future. I did try and inform the Jobcentre by email of the circumstances (I couldn’t phone as it was a Bank Holiday weekend and I was working 15 hour days) but nevertheless my allowance has been taken away.  This means that my monthly income is £320 Housing Benefit which is for my rent (it obviously doesn’t cover it) and £8.71 per week Council Tax Benefit.  I’m not going to disclose how much I owe to the red letter senders – frankly it’s none of your business! – But clearly, they ain’t getting paid any time soon.

Because I’ve been so ill with depression, my natural tendency to keep a grip - albeit a tenuous one - on my finances has gone to pot.  It’s not been so much burying my head in the sand as being so out of focus with things that they have just not even registered. My memory is terribly affected by depression. I just don’t remember to do stuff.   And now I’m surrounded by letters and getting the dreaded 0845 phone calls and I don’t quite know where to start.  Having my JSA cut has knocked me right back; I’ll be honest, I could have sorted it out a couple of weeks ago but I was already slipping, I’m having more and more frequent depressive symptoms.  I am terrified of going back to where I was at the end of last year but the curse of depression is that I just don’t feel able to do anything about it. And so we’re back to the chicken and egg.

I can imagine that to some people this just reads like a list of excuses for being crap with money; it’s really not. Depression plays Russian roulette with your mind. It takes a wrecking ball to your sense of priority and gives your memory a right old kicking.  When leaving your room to go to the toilet is Mount Everest, than having to interact with people you feel over-burdened with guilt about owing money to becomes an impossible mountain to scale.

This morning I have been looking on the website www.nationaldebtline.co.uk and I think it might just be the thing that will help me get a handle on things, so that is a step in the right direction.  I am going to look into getting an advocate to help me contact the companies I owe money to.  I can’t do this alone. And for once I am going to ask for help, which as any depressive knows, is often the hardest thing of all. 

Soup

I like cooking.  I like the creativity of it, the sense of achievement, the feeling of producing something bigger and better than the sum of its parts.  I’ve found that one of the main symptoms of my depression is not being able to eat much at all and six months ago, cooking  meant boiling the kettle for instant noodles or trudging to the shop in my pyjamas for a bag of salted popcorn, that is to say, not cooking at all.  I slept rather than eat properly; my stomach felt hungry but my head couldn’t get itself into gear enough to make the connection between that and getting out of bed and going to the kitchen.   It’s a vicious circle, too little food means not enough energy, not enough energy means too much sleep, too much sleep means enhanced feelings of wasting your life, being worthless.  Eating just felt…effortful.  

At the end of November I decided to do an online food shop so at least if I did feel like eating, I wouldn’t have to leave the house to get supplies.  I bought, on a whim, a big bag of potatoes.  It stayed a big bag of potatoes for some time.  A big bag of green-tinged, pock-marked potatoes by the time January rolled around. My appetite had been improving but I wasn’t enjoying the cooking or the eating; it felt like a necessary evil to be honest.   My flatmate said something about making a load of chips just to get rid of the gnarly taters but I felt bad, they’d been sat there for nearly two months and I thought they deserved a better fate than boring old chips. Yes, I felt guilty for the potatoes, what of it?  Also, I still wasn’t up to much on the eating front and that’s when it hit me.  I could make soup.  Leek and potato soup.  All by my own self.  I’d never made a soup before and I found I was feeling quite excited at the prospect.  Could it be I was regaining my joy for food?  I pushed that thought to the ‘perhaps I might get better’ box in my head, I didn’t want to hold on to it too hard in case I didn’t make the soup, in case I just left the potatoes to rot whilst I rotted away in bed, hungry. The idea of getting better is frightening. Like a siren, calling you to a land of pleasure; what happens if you get dashed upon the rocks?

I made the soup.  I found the actual process to be soothing.  There was a logic and routine to it, things which had been largely missing from my life for so long but also it was creative, taking these knobbly old tatties and tuning them into a warming, comforting, not too much effort to eat food blanket.  I felt ridiculously proud of myself.

I started to tentatively re-engage with food. The next week I made stilton and broccoli soup.  A couple of weeks later, smoked bacon and lentil (this one was not such a success, too greasy) and then yesterday I made a Thai-style prawn and noodle soup.  In between soups I’ve cooked a roast dinner, a stew, a couple of pasta dishes more complicated than just opening a jar of pesto.  And I’m starting to not only enjoy the process of cooking food again, but the eating of it too. I have started to see the point of it again.  Thanks to soup.

‘Cos I’m guilty, guilty as a girl can be.

So sang Bananarama in their 1987 hit Love in the First Degree.  Do you know it only got to number 3 in the charts; it was beaten to number 1 by Pump Up the Volume.  A classic no doubt, but my pocket money went on the ‘Rama. How can you not love the ‘Rama?  Anyways, I digress.  I was 10 in 1987, my clothes came from Tammy Girl and C&A, I fervently believed my toys came alive when I left the room and I had an almighty crush on Phillip Schofield who had broken my heart by leaving the Broom Cupboard.   I was also well on the way to developing the guilt complex I carry around with me every day. Poor 10 year old Bearface.

I feel guilty about everything.  Really, everything. I feel guilty about the books on my shelf that are shoved to the back, never seeing the light of day because I have to double them up because I have more books than shelf space, I feel guilty about the sweet cat that’s taken to frequenting my balcony in the mornings, even though she is clearly well fed and looked after, I feel guilty about the old people who now have to walk a bit further down the road to the temporary bus stop that’s outside my house.  I recognise these are ridiculous things to feel guilty about, and yet feel guilty I do.

Never mind how I feel about the people I know and the things I do, or don’t do.  This is where my guilt complex really takes over.  I feel terrible that I have let down a number of friends whilst I’ve been in my depressive slump.  Not that anyone has said “You’ve let me down, Bearface” – well one has but that’s a whole other story – but I feel like I have.  I feel like I’ve been a bad friend, selfish and self-obsessed.  I have a huge amount of guilt about my mum, that I didn’t do enough to support her through the last months and weeks of her life, that I didn’t love her enough to put her first.  I feel guilty that I don’t do enough to help my siblings cope with our rather difficult father.   For fuck’s sake I feel guilty when I see people arguing in the street and don’t intervene, when clearly it’s got bugger all to do with me! See?  Guilty about everything.

Now it hasn’t escaped my notice that in a certain light this could be viewed as entirely narcissistic – it’s all about me. But guess what? Yes!  I feel guilty about that too.  My therapist and I are going to be exploring all this guilt, where it comes from and how I can stop it from controlling my thoughts and behaviour.  It’s pretty easy for me to trace where it comes from but it’s a vicious circle which I need to break free of.

Right this second I am feeling guilty about the face that in the opening paragraph of this post I expressed a preference for Love in the First Degree over Pump Up the Volume.  Yeah, this really has to stop!