I need to buy and fit two doors. Why I need to do this is not important and indeed I’ve decided why the two doors are missing in the first place is not important either- purely as cover for the fact I have absolutely no idea. I suspect they were victims of a period of home-improvement cruelly disrupted by the arrival of mentalism.
The smallest house in the world is one of the more obvious casualties of my descent into mentalism. It was never palatial, always in a constant state of “being done” but now it’s verging on barely habitable. I could list the problems but it’d be very depressing so I’m not going to. These days I just turn the music up so I don’t have to listen to the malevolent drip, drip, drip that comes from the dodgy plumbing in the bathroom and if nothing else the resident slugs provide material for humours tweets.
Replacing the doors presents multiple challenges- some are obvious and certainly not unique to mentalism.
B&Q won’t deliver them; they won’t fit in the stupid car.
I’m quite proficient in DIY but don’t think I’ve fitted new doors before so may have to upskill myself.
The smallest house in the world has the most awkwardly sized doorways, any doors would have to be cut in order to fit; this would have to be done in the garden and as everyone knows it’s monsoon season in the UK.
I was assured by the <?> therapist at some point in June that I have
“Solutions not Problems”
She’s right, though also sailing dangerously close to wanky platitude territory and everyone knows how much I love wanky platitudes-except perhaps the <?> therapist….? I’m sure she’ll be told at some point, no doubt when she crosses the line from “wise words” to “wanky platitude”.
I do have solutions to all the above problems-
I can drive; I could hire a van.
I’m literate; I could learn how to fit doors.
The house is complete shit-tip, who am I trying to kid that it would look any worse with a few piles of sawdust here and there?
I could do all of these things- in theory.
Truthfully, at the moment I couldn’t do any of them. I’m not lazy or helpless, far from it, but I am broken, malfunctioning.
Hiring a van would inevitably involve making a phonecall. Brief outgoing calls I can do- with a lot of planning and if there’s no risk that the call won’t go as predicted. I’m so easily triggered that switching is still random and chaotic, I recently had to phone the lovely people at DWP as there had been a mix-up with my DLA, it was all their fault, they had made a major error- an error that had stopped my payments for months. I called them to ask them to fix it and generally have a well-justified rant, the call started well but the call handler was unusually and unexpectedly apologetic and sympathetic so I found myself on the phone mid-conversation with no memory of what had been said and indeed not really sure why I was calling in the first place. I can’t imagine many van hire companies would be keen to enter into a contract with a woman who forgets who she is and why she’s calling.
I am a gung-ho DIYer I generally believe no home-improvement task is beyond me. In the past I have hung wallpaper, laid carpets, painted, tiled, rewired, installed, plumbed, repaired and replaced usually with satisfactory results. I’m not perfect but also not easily phased or defeated. Or at least I was. These days I’d be lucky to get as far as getting my toolbox out before forgetting what I was going to do, forgetting how to do it, not wanting to do it, engaging in a random bout of sobbing for reasons unknown or doing something completely different instead.
I have considered getting “a man in” to sort the doors and instantly dismissed it. Few situations are as obviously triggering as having an unknown male in the house, for an indeterminate period of time. Real people still make me mental; any face-to-face interaction that lasts longer than 15 minutes brings on the “personality wheel of fortune” effect, whilst most switches are subtle and only obvious to the trained eye, some aren’t so it’s a risk not worth taking. Encounters with real people still leave me confused and amnesic, their words, movements in fact their mere presence is just one trigger after another.
So I won’t be replacing those doors any time soon.
I’m frustrated that there are so many obvious signs that I’m losing the life/mental balance, particularly as I’m not, I’m winning. My victories may be small, almost imperceptible and as I tend not to talk about them in detail outside therapy nobody knows about them but they are there.
I may have no living room door but I do have a “safe place” in my head, a safe place I built somewhat hurriedly on Tuesday morning after a night of terror that had the potential to send me hurtling into another crisis. I needed to build the safe place in order to deal with the issue that had caused the night of terror in the first place. On Tuesday morning; with assistance via text from the <?> therapist I achieved something immense, something amazing and the crisis was averted.
Therapy for DID is different, I don’t talk about it much, friends often ask how it’s gone and my honest reply is often “I don’t know as I didn’t go”, very few friends know how to follow this up and I understand that. Achievements made in or as a result of therapy are often difficult to describe, I’m never going to be able to say “it was great, we talked about my anxiety, I went to Tesco and felt fine” it just doesn’t work like that. It does work though, it may work very slowly, it may work in a way that nobody other than myselves and the <?> therapist know about, but it works. It works for many reasons, not least because I put the effort in, again I don’t talk about it much but internal work is almost constant, it’s often very difficult but I don’t shy away from it.
So there may be three days worth of washing-up in the kitchen and the amount of cat hair on the living room carpet is such that very soon I shall be able to simply roll it up and discard it (I have multiple cats), I may end up going to Tesco later and buying the usual random, eclectic selection of goods in my usual fear-driven haze and still have nothing in for dinner. I may never replace those doors; the bathroom floor may well rot away completely and slugs may eat my eyes out of their sockets whilst I sleep. I don’t doubt that the external effects of mentalism will continue to frustrate and upset me but I have work to do.
It’s swings and roundabouts.
I love swings and roundabouts- especially swings.
