Tag Archives: Husband

December 5, 2013

When a belief is not a belief

By jenbitespeople

There will be a lot of things in this post that I’ve touched on in the past, but I’ve never explained the full extent of what’s been going on in my head over the past year.

I’ve mentioned before that it was the 10th anniversary of my mum’s death in October and will be the 10th anniversary of my dad’s in July next year. I’ve written at length about my experiences with depression and a wee bit about ADD and PTSD. I know I have a tag for Schizotypal Personality Disorder so I must have spoken about it somewhere, but I’ve never really gone into it in depth because it’s less well-known and harder to explain. But it’s a factor in what’s going on at the moment (or at least it seems to be), so… here goes. I don’t claim to be an expert on this. I’m just someone who lives with it, and I’ll try to explain what it is, what it feels like and how it’s affecting me as clearly as I can.

Schizotypal Personality Disorder is a schizophrenia spectrum disorder. It involves obsessive rumination, anhedonia, eccentric behaviour, inappropriate emotional responses, magical thinking, social withdrawal and anxiety, strange means of expression and occasional hallucinations. I remember the psychiatrist who diagnosed me, back when I was 18, explaining that as someone with StPD I would never see the simple solution to a problem if there was a complicated one available. Apparently the big difference between StPD and schizophrenia is that with StPD, you can still tell when what you’re experiencing is not reality.

Over the years I have learned how to live with and control my symptoms. Getting the obsessive rumination under control was a huge personal triumph, achieved through CBT and visualisation and relentless discipline. My means of expression changed gradually, influenced by years of blogging. By writing for an audience and reading other people’s writing, I got the hang of how other people sound. I gradually let go of my unusual patterns and word choices (though a few little things remain – read enough of my writing or listen to me talk and you might spot my obsession with patterns of three). I learned how to tell delusions and hallucinations from reality – most of the time, at least.

The difficulty – and this is the really tricky thing to explain – is that sometimes I find myself in situations where I don’t believe my beliefs. Ten years ago, when my parents died, they were the only people I truly cared about. (Failing to form close relationships outwith your immediate family is a fairly typical StPD thing.) Those events planted the seed of a rather unhelpful idea – specifically, that the people I love that much will die. That my love can bring about the death of whoever receives it. The basis for this belief seems to be that if my life were a fictional narrative, that’s what I would expect to happen next.

Now, on the one hand, I am well aware that this cannot be the case. The world just doesn’t work that way. I do not live in a novel. What happened to my parents was statistically improbable, but that makes me the victim of a misfortune, not deus ex machina or a particular stage of my journey as protagonist. My love is not some kind of deadly force.

On the other, I know it is true. I’m talking about the kind of absolute certainty with which I know my name, or that the face I see in the mirror belongs to me. It is this knowledge that makes me feel so bloody guilty about loving my husband, because if I know that my love will cause his death. So I feel guilty and selfish for putting him in danger, and I live every day with the fear that my belief will prove accurate. Every time I come home I experience intense anxiety from the moment I arrive at  our building to the moment when I am actually in the flat and have seen for myself that he’s still here, still alive, not imaginary. This is not rational or reasonable. I should be able to leave the house without becoming convinced that something bad will happen to my husband. I should be able to unlock my front door without my heart pounding in my ears. I talk myself through the rational argument every time. Usually, delusions respond to repeated dissuasion and a certain amount of CBT. This one, however, is very strong and extremely resistant to everything I throw at it. It has not diminished over time. If anything, it has grown stronger.

That’s  a big part of the reason why I’ve been so antisocial this year. I’ve skipped so many get-togethers because I just can’t manage the usual social anxiety on top of this. I’ve always been a little bit freaked out by large groups, but usually I’ve enjoyed hanging out with people on a one to one basis. Not so much this year. This year I’ve been a lot more withdrawn because my head is too noisy, and also because as this belief gathers strength, it seems safest for everyone if I don’t let myself feel too close to people.

That’s a tough one to explain to people. “Sorry, I can’t meet because I’m really busy just now” is a much easier excuse to understand than “sorry, I’m worried that being friends with me will cause you harm so I’m just not doing the interaction thing right now”. I try to explain verbally when I have the energy, but honestly, talking this through takes a lot out of me and it’s easier just to write about it and hope that the message gets through.

The reason it takes so much out of me is that I fear people’s judgement. I know there will be people who look at this and think “well, you know that belief is nonsense, why don’t you just stop giving in to it?”, missing the fact that I don’t give in to it. I fight it every single day, I win minor victories every time I succeed in doing what I want and need to do without letting this stop me – but I haven’t won the decisive battle that gets it out of my life forever yet, and that’s not for want of trying. I also know that there will be people who write me off as completely crazy because I have a schizophrenia spectrum disorder and they don’t know enough about what that means to realise that they’re not unsafe around me. And I know there will be a few who think this is just attention seeking. It’s not. Even I am not masochistic enough to want the kind of attention that anything involving the “schizo” prefix gets you.

I’m writing this partly as explanation for why my 2013 has been quieter and less sociable than previous years, and partly because I’ve shied away from talking about anything explicitly StPD-related here in the past. I write about my mental health because I feel that if someone like me can’t be “out” about it, what chance is there for people working in less accepting worlds than the arts? Avoiding the issue of StPD was beginning to feel like a betrayal of that purpose, and an act of cowardice.

So there you go. A bit of insight into my head and hopefully into StPD as an everyday thing. I don’t feel like I’ve given you an accurate picture of how powerful and terrifying these beliefs can be, but I don’t know whether I can. I’ve been searching for the words for a very long time, and finally it felt like I should just get this much down and see whether the more minute, intense stuff follows later.

Hopefully some of this makes sense to people who are not me.

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February 9, 2013

If I were a cat I would be in profound meditation

By jenbitespeople

The fact that I’m married surprises no-one more than me. I was never the kind of woman who has had her wedding day planned out since primary school. Who wasted time thinking about getting married when there were imaginary monsters to be battled? I was never interested in playing house or being the princess waiting to bestow her favour on whoever showed up to rescue her. These were things that would interfere with my valuable adventuring time.

 

I should have realised that there are narrative rules governing the fates of girls like me. In strict accordance with the rules set down by Rogers & Hammerstein (amongst others), I fell hard and fast. I’d known my husband for a few years before I fell/realised I was in love with him, but things moved swiftly once we’d figured it out and within a few months of getting together we were planning our wedding.

 

So why get married? A couple of reasons. First and most important was the prospect of celebrating our relationship in the company of the people we care about. There is something really beautiful about looking at my husband and knowing that we feel strongly enough about each other to have said our vows in front of friends and family. I am surprised by how important that was to me, since it was something I had never felt the need of before Mark. I would always have thought that living together, having a cat together, building a life together was enough, but it turned out that I wanted to make that commitment in public.

 

There were also the practical, unromantic reasons. I still think marriage in its current form is a bit of an outdated institution, but society as a whole doesn’t really care about my views and continues to work on the assumption that marriage is the way to validate a relationship and make it official. I’ve always felt uneasy about not having a legal next of kin, or at least not one that I trust. My closest blood relative is someone I steer clear of for a number of compelling reasons, and I would hate to think of her tracking me down if I were in some way incapacitated and being permitted to make decisions about my wellbeing just because we share some genes. If those decisions ever need to be made, I want Mark to be the one making them and there’s only one way to make absolutely certain of that. Likewise, in the event of my death (because when you have a couple of near misses in early adulthood you think about these things) I want him to inherit whatever I have without paying any bullshit inheritance tax, assuming there was enough to incur any.

 

And there was a reason that’s technically practical but in many ways quite whimsical… I never have to wonder how to refer to him. I hate the term “boyfriend”. Lord knows I’m not a schoolgirl in the frenzy of her first affair, to quote a clever man – but “boyfriend” sounds so teenaged. “Partner” makes it sound like a business relationship. (I know some people also object to this one on the grounds that it connotes a same-sex partner. Not really something that bothers me – if people want to waste time speculating about my sexuality they can. You know I’m married to a man. The rest is supposition.) Being able to call him my husband removes the implication that he’s someone with whom I do business or someone whose name I scribble obsessively in the back of my maths jotter. That matters to me, probably because I’m quite nitpicky.

 

Which leads me on to the question of what I now call myself. I’m still surprised by the number of people I meet who can’t quite get their heads round the idea that I haven’t changed my name. Am I making some kind of feminist statement? Refusing to be my husband’s property? Well… not really. I think we are both quite clear about the fact that we’re not each other’s property. I just like my name. It’s mine. I’ve had it all my life. It’s a connection to my dead parents. It’s also on my business cards, my Equity card, my website, my Gmail and all my programme credits.

 

We considered various options. Mark could have taken my name, but with the exception of the dead parents, my reasons for keeping my name apply equally to him keeping his. We could have hyphenated, but both McGregor and Bolsover are long enough already, thanks. I don’t have the attention span for telling people my name is Jennifer McGregor-Bolsover (I can hardly even be doing with signing myself J McGregor). Some of my friends have taken to referring to us as the McGrovers, which I find very sweet but have no desire to adopt as an official moniker. So the simplest thing to do was for me to keep my name and Mark to keep his, since we are, after all, still the same people we were before we got married.

 

However, I still had to decide what to do about my title. I’ve always worn my Miss with pride, happy to display my status as an unmarried woman. Now, having married but kept my name, I find being Mrs an uncomfortable prospect. Mrs McGregor – specifically Mrs J McGregor – was my mum. Mrs Bolsover is Mark’s mum. So where does that leave me? Both of those options feel like a second-hand identity.

 

So on all those annoying forms that consider it their business, I am Ms McGregor. It’s not ideal. For a start, I don’t like the sound of the word. Mzzzz. But perhaps I’ll get used to it in time. I also find it a bit annoying that using Ms still marks you out as a lefty feminist type. Yes, I am a lefty feminist type but no more so than I was this time last year when I was still styling myself Miss. I think this is me kicking against people’s assumptions that they know everything about me based on the fact that I use Ms, kept my name and am happily childfree. Well, there’s an incentive to do a PhD someday… Mark can be Dr Bolsover and I’ll be Dr McGregor and we’ll both have identities that didn’t belong to anyone else in our families first. (Of course this would mean a return to academia for me, which is full of its own terrors. Oh, the agonies of being a first world woman with food, shelter, birth control and the time to worry about which version of my name I use and whether I’m already qualified to the point of being unemployable.) In the meantime I’ll continue to be Ms McGregor, still looking for the right configuration of my name and regularly mocking myself for being concerned about something so trivial when the important thing is that I’ve married a good man with whom I am very, very happy. And when people choose to make assumptions based on that name, perhaps I’ll simply hand them print-outs of this post.

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