Memories are made of this

Memory is a funny thing.  Being a slave to your memories is anything but. 

It is three years since the things I can't get out of my head started.  I couldn't have imagined that they would still be causing me this much distress.  Long story short? A Person who had a grudge against me started to write anonymously to my work place which culminated in them investigating me for supposedly lying about having depression.  I wasn't lying, I became suicidal, I resigned. 

When I put it like that, it doesn't sound like much. It was.  It is. That I could be hated that much is something I really struggle with but not as much as I struggle with the fact that the people I worked with at The Place, who knew my mental health history lifted not one finger to support me or defend me. The Person and The Place threw me to the wolves and stood by whilst they tore out my sense of self.

Until the last week or so, I've not told anyone how The Person and The Place infiltrate my thoughts. It's constant. One or the other, or both, are there when I go to bed, there in my dreams and there during every waking hour.  I relive each moment, I imagine it happening again, scenarios from the past and the potential future play over and over in my head.  I can see it, I can see them. 

I resigned in January 2012.  It was January 2014 before I could even go to the train station near The Place.  As for The Person,  they are still on the periphery.  Being part of my local community is great but it also means it is almost impossible for me to avoid them, although I do try.  

Last week I did an assessment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  It seems to fit.  What happened to me wasn't typical of the type of events that trigger PTSD and this in itself makes me feel like a fraud - I haven't be assaulted or witnessed an act of violence, been in a war or earthquake zone, I haven't had a life-threatening illness.  I read this earlier though that I think I can justifiably say is the case:

Harmful intentions

Man-made disasters, particularly those involving deliberate acts of violence, terrorism, or exploitation, seem to cause longer-lasting and more painful emotional consequences than natural disasters. The crucial factor may be that such experiences destroys people’s trust in others, particularly if they involve someone you have depended on.

http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-(ptsd)/causes/#.UvOUMvl_uSo

It was a disaster.  Me and my mental health were exploited by someone with harmful intentions and that experience did destroy my trust in my colleagues and employer who I depended on.  I had depended on them for nearly 9 years. 

I've been signed off work for two weeks due to depression and anxiety. I am so scared that when I go back to work next week, it will be to be told they've received an anonymous letter with allegations that I am faking a mental health condition.   I really wouldn't put it past The Person to do it again, just to fuck with me. I've only been in this job 7 months.  If an employer of 9 years wouldn't back me, can I really expect the current one to? I know the rational answers to all this, but I don't think the fear will ever go away.

Sitting here writing, I can't stop the images of The Person reading this and feeling satisfied at the role they still play in my life. I wish I could cut out the part of my brain that does this and feed it to the wolves. 

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.

An open letter to The Person

Hi!

How are you? 

Congratulations. You told me once that if I ever betrayed you, you would destroy me.  To be honest, I thought it was one of your many bombastic, melodramatic statements that could be taken with a healthy pinch of salt. Turns out I was wrong, you actually meant it. Of course, we differ quite substantially on what constitutes ‘betrayal’;  for me, I followed my principles and along with others took a course of action that was right, necessary and long overdue, for you I failed to be the lapdog you had assumed I’d be.

No doubt you wholeheartedly believe that attempting to ruin my health and career was entirely justified and needless to say I completely disagree. Your actions over the past year made me severely depressed and suicidal and forced me to leave a job I’d been successful at for nearly a decade, so well done, you almost did succeed in destroying me.   I say almost because I am still here, a bit battered and bruised – I am happy to admit you have done a spectacularly good job of trying to ruin me – but here nonetheless. 

I’d like to thank you actually. Without the events of the last year, I would probably never have sought the psychological help I have needed for many years (I’m not particularly grateful for the suicidal thoughts but hey, you have to take the rough with the smooth), I wouldn’t have discovered that I have talents and passions I can build a career from and I definitely wouldn’t have made so many friends, willing to fight my corner.

I’d like to think, for both our sakes, that your - can I call it an obsession? Yes why not – obsession will have abated by now. But just in case you’re still monitoring my online output, I’m letting you know  I’ve unlocked my Twitter account, so please feel free to peruse to your heart’s content. 

Regards,

Bear_Faced_Lady 

Why having a locked account doesn’t make you dick

I hate having a locked Twitter account. It is intensely irritating that I can’t reply to people in my timeline who don’t follow me back, if I reply to a mention which includes non-followers they don’t see it and probably think I’m ignoring them, people often assume having a locked account means I’m up my own arse and full of my own self-importance. I am passionate about sharing information and I’m a right bloody chatterbox so being behind a locked door doesn’t sit well with me at all.

I have to protect my tweets because I am being harassed by someone who appears to only understand Twitter as a means with which to make me life hell. This began back in January, I wrote my first blog post about it. All went quiet for some time and I began to put my life back together. At the beginning of the summer I hit a major depressive episode and had time off work with it. I began to recover and went back to work to be told that The Person had written again, this time using any tweets that referred to me leaving the house, drinking and socialising as evidence that I was in fact faking depression and asking my employers to investigate the claim. I still don’t know how The Person knew I was signed off with depression as I never explicitly said it on Twitter. Creepy, eh? I know depression is an often misunderstood condition, so I blogged about it in a bid to explain that being sociable and being depressed aren’t mutually exclusive.

Knowing your every move is being tracked by someone with a grudge against you is unnerving in the extreme. I share a lot, that’s the way I am so what could I do? Delete another account, not tweet anything relating to my personal life or say fuck The Person and continue to tweet openly and publically? Much as I wanted to do the latter I just couldn’t - this is my mental health and career we’re talking about here, not a crusade for open comms - so I locked my account and went through my 570 or so followers, forensically checking them to see if I could identify The Person. I couldn’t so I blocked 226 of them and felt like the biggest bitch going.

Obviously the police are involved although given that their main response has been essentially “dur, leave Twitter stoopid” I don’t hold out much hope of them being particularly useful. My employer is indeed investigating the claim that I have been faking depression – you can imagine how helpful that is in terms of making a full recovery from a major mental health episode – and I still have a locked Twitter account and will probably have to continue to have one for the foreseeable future; until either The Person gets bored, I stop being such an open person or, as currently seems most likely, I have a complete mental breakdown and get carted away to the nearest psychiatric unit.

So if you’re one of those people who feels the need to take the piss out of people with locked accounts, or smugly refuses to follow people back because their account is protected, remember there is a real person behind the avatar, with real reasons for locking themselves behind the door of Twitter and perhaps give them a chance.

Flippancy is a defence mechanism

I've had depression my whole adult life. Most of the time it doesn’t affect me and people are quite surprised to discover it is something I suffer from; I am outgoing, loud and fairly opinionated, I am sociable, communicative and the first one to get up and shake my thing on an empty dancefloor. I take medication that keeps me on an even keel and I am lucky that I have a wonderful group of friends I can talk to when I am feeling particularly down - they take me out, let me talk and do their level best to show me that I can be happy. But sometimes that isn’t enough and recently I have been signed off work by my doctor with a particularly significant depressive episode.

It isn’t easy to explain. During this bout there have been days where I have literally been unable to get out of bed, to get a drink, go to the loo, to eat. There is emptiness, followed by despair, followed by panic and fear. Fear that I’ll never be free of this seemingly endless cycle of my own introverted thoughts. Some of the symptoms of depression are an inability to concentrate, a heightened level of emotional sensitivity, lack of motivation and difficulty making decisions and interrupted sleep; these things make going to work during a significant episode very difficult. But it is unpredictable and there are better days, where I’ve been able to take the focus away from myself and go out and do some food shopping, meet a friend for coffee and dare I say it, have evenings out, having a drink and feeling free of the black dog for a few hours. A lot of that is putting a brave face on it and afterwards the depressive thoughts come back tenfold, but yes, there are times in the midst of a bout when I feel alive again. There are people for whom this indicates that I can’t really be that ill, and certainly shouldn’t be off work – in essence that I am the very worst kind of malingerer. You might agree with them. If you do, that’s your choice, I am not going to justify myself to anyone. It is what it is, I am who I am.

Depression is not about strength versus weakness, coping versus falling apart. It’s as real a condition as any other – other people just can’t see the symptoms like they can a rash, a stammer or a fracture. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone but the main reason for that is still because of the stigma surrounding mental health. Diagnosed depression can be managed with medication, talking therapies and the like but the attitude of other people to it is for me, a definite obstacle to being free of it. For every friend who gets what it’s about, there are countless others who don’t, for every friend with depression, there are countless others in denial and refusing to seek help because when all is said and done, we still have a culture of shame and fear around depression.

“What have you got to be depressed about? You’ve got a great job/lovely home/wonderful partner!” doesn’t even come into it, it’s got absolutely fuck all to do with financial security or whether you’re seeing someone as so many people seem to think. Sure these things can make anyone feel a bit depressive - who hasn’t been unhappy in a job, home or relationship at some point? But there is a vast difference between the unhappiness we all must feel at times in our lives and the condition Depression, diagnosed according to standardised, recognised medical guidelines.

I don’t go around advertising that I am a depressive, I wouldn’t be shouting my mouth off about any other illness I had either, but on the other hand I will not be shamed into not talking about, because it is not a fake illness. It is unpredictable, frightening and exhausting, but it won’t beat me and nor will the attitudes of other people.

Twitter blah blah blah.

I realise I am a complete cliche for starting a blog within a year of joining Twitter but who gives a fuck, you don't have to read it. I've had a shitty couple of months and Twitter has been at the heart of it all. Both my nemesis and my saviour, if you will.

I used to have a different ID and was merrily going along gathering followers, swearing profusely and generally getting to grips with having to use astrisks to get my point across where mere words would not suffice. Then someone wrote to my employer to alert them to my Twitter use during working hours. Well you might say, fair enough, I shouldn't be tweeting in a personal capacity during working hours. You'd be right. I hold my hands up to it - nevermind that I don't know a single person who doesn't tweet, facebook, email, text when they should be entering a formula into a spreadsheet, writing a strategy document, developing a marketing campaign or whatever it is they do to earn a living. Anyway I got a slap on the wrists, a kick up the arse and I've learnt my lesson.

What frightened me was this. The Person who contacted my work sent copies of the letter and pages of my tweets to every member of the senior management board. They did this anonymously and left no contact address. They had clearly spent many, many hours, if not days monitoring my output on Twitter specifically pulling out the tweets they thought would do me the most damage. They had even gone so far as to highlight some with a Sharpie. You won't be surprised to hear that I know who is behind it and why they did it. Suffice to say, I don't believe I deserved it. My only crimes were to not be who The Person wanted me to be and to stand up for my principles. Hell hath no fury like a....no I can't say it.

I deleted my old Twitter account as soon as the shit hit the fan and then a couple of weeks later, rejoined as @bear_faced_lady. Word had got about that I'd returned under a new guise and it was quite something to be welcomed back and *hugged* and *kissed* and generally made to feel like a long lost friend returning from the trenches. At first I locked my account, frightened that The Person would start 'twitter-stalking' me again, but then I thought fuck it. If they're that sad that they have nothing better to do than sit in front of a screen feverishly monitoring the endless drivel I spout then frankly, they're welcome to.

I really like being on Twitter and I get something from it that I don't get elsewhere. I get to be coarse and crude or I can shout or cry and generally be the emotional blunderbus I don't get to be in real life (sorry, IRL). It was horrible to think that some one would take advantage of that bond of trust implicit in any kind of social network - virtual or physical. Maybe I have been too trusting and a bit naive in opening myself up as I have on the social web. Maybe, knowing the sort of person The Person is, I should have seen this coming and been a bit more canny. Probably, yes. But the thing is, I have friends on Twitter as well as followers, some started off as followers and became friends, some I've met and some I never will, but friends nonetheless. Friends the likes of which The Person never was and never could be, to me or anyone else.

So I think that really, at the end of the day even though it's a fight I never sought, in the battle between The Person and The Bear Faced Lady, I WIN.