It was just coming up to summer last year when I started this blog. My life had erupted into turmoil over finances and a rather sour illicit encounter. Since then I have been through trauma I could not possibly have forseen and life is still not entirely steady. The roller coaster has stopped tipping me upside down with such regularity, but there are still lurches and upheavals.

I wonder sometimes whether I will ever feel truly calm again – at least, for longer than an hour or two.

However, I am beginning to realise that I am far tougher than I ever thought I could be. Granted, the mental turmoil goes on and on, and I feel months, if not years, away from a good night’s sleep.

But I have not fallen apart, have not swallowed a solitary anti-depressant, nor sought comfort in a wine bottle, nor fallen prey to panic attacks (although this has been a close shave on a few occasions, notably a couple of weeks ago when I had that dreadful day of dissociation).

Should I therefore be patting myself on the back? Not a chance; I think that would be courting disaster, tempting the event that I truly couldn’t deal with, to happen. So I will refrain.

If this last year has been a learning experience, I have learnt a lot and hope that I can use that wisdom for more than just my own ends.

But I have paid a huge price, have thrown what feels like my entire life to the four winds to be tossed and buffeted about with no idea of a proper resting place.

I landed here in October, in this small city, but have no clear idea of how long I will stay, or where I will go next. A lot of that will depend on you.

I landed in a job (accept in haste, repent at leisure!); the big mistake, apart from the trade union work. She is now harassing me on a regular basis; She watches almost my every move and that is an appalling feeling to deal with. I have been told that She is “out to get me” and I am watching my back constantly, but that sort of pressure makes mistakes inevitable. This will get worse before it gets better; I have one or two small opportunities to help myself, which I must take and use well.

I landed with you; even a year ago I had no idea of your existence, then Friday 13th July tossed me into the maelstrom that saw me cast the boat off from Knowle just two months later.

This has not been an easy path to follow – not you, but all the circumstances, all the hurdles, all the pitfalls. You are the easy part of it, but you must be my rock as I will be yours. My wisdom (such as it is) is yours to use and I must continue learning.

What has gone before will never be written off, never be invalid, but it can also never be changed or revisited.

Sometimes my fixation with linear time can be useful as it helps me put the past into perspective and it has also saved me a lot of regret along the way. My odd, pagan, drunk, drug-abusing ex used to say that “there is only Now” – and there are times when I can understand that philosophy. We learn things from people in the oddest circumstances, don’t we?

I think now that there are only three things that I truly fear. One of them is losing you.

When I go outside again, the daisies will be there, being blown about in this very unseasonable wind. Despite their thin stalks, their heads never seem to blow off. A thin thread can still be strong.

This is nothing against the people I work with; they are all terribly nice, but I want (need! – in the case of the trade union duties) my own space.

Funnily enough, the noise doesn’t bother me at all; there is constant tapping on keyboards, but often not a huge amount of chatter as She doesn’t like people to talk and often pointedly slams Her office door when there is conversation going on outside.

It’s not going particularly well – I’m not referring to the work itself; since my duties changed that has been an awful lot more interesting and if I don’t get to keep them after August, I will be gutted. However, I am still working for Her and until that ceases, whatever relief I get is only temporary.

She has returned to the insidious harassment. Yesterday it was that my mobile phone (which I have to use to carry out my union duties) was “disturbing people and there have been complaints”. At a rough guess, this is complete rubbish and made up to enable her to have another go at me. She was quick to point out that I am still “Her” member of staff and therefore still under her (comprehensive) control.

She tried to say she wanted me to limit my availability to one hour a day, which I turned down immediately as the whole point of trying to be an advocate for others is to be available to them when they need help.

Paranoid? I don’t think so. It is blatantly obvious from Her body language that She really dislikes me. maybe She sees me as a threat; God knows why as I don’t have the faintest interest in Her job. I’m sure She thinks I am “disruptive” because I like to communicate with people and have opinions on most things. Well, that is me

I have to deal with Her by going into “neutral” mode; I can give away very little of what I am thinking or feeling and I suppose it could be described as a poker face accompanied by similar body language. Maybe She would like to know what I am thinking as She wants to control every other aspect of the poor sods who work for Her.

Tough. While I am in Her company She will know what I want her to know and nothing else.

What really does bother me though, is Her agenda in all this. Am I “just” another person to command and control or is there something more complex going on here?

Best case scenario: she is a screwed-up, baggage-laden, drink-dependent mess who just does the same thing on everybody who is unlucky enough to manage her. I know from other people here that she has already systematically (but very carefully) bullied and harrassed most of them. However, like most practised bullies she is clever enough to make proof difficult.

Worst-case scenario: she has lured me in by saying that she fully supported my trade union work, but there is a hidden agenda and she actively wants to get at me because of what I do and what I represent (which I suppose, could be interpreted as freedom; stark contrast to her desire for control!). I know that she has already talked about me behind my back, as the people she has spoken to have told me.

I’m aware that people in my position have been systematically destroyed; that’s no exaggeration and I think I have to be mindful of this.

At the moment, I can do very little right and I am going to start keeping records of it.

To those who don’t know, it’s like being dropped into a glass jar. You’re aware of the world going on around you, but you have no point of contact with it. In effect, it’s like not being there. It’s usually linked with a feeling of impending doom, the fear of fainting, throwing up or screaming the place down in public before being carted off by the men in white coats. It’s that bad; I kid you not.

I know what caused it; it’s the culmination of the last twelve months. I’ve hung on, dug in, done whatever I could to try and stay on a level, but it’s all just become too much. I’m too overwhelmed by stress hormones and the reality that I have given up just about everything to be where I am, but the knowledge that where I am doesn’t feel entirely stable.

One of the major stressors has been having to choose my moments to say what I think and feel. As my words will affect a bunch of other people, I can’t just give vent to everything when I feel like it. It has been like wandering through a minefield; say the wrong word and everything will blow up in my face. I’ve feared that so much.

That has been tough; tougher than I ever thought it would be. I’m fairly reasonable at diplomacy but am by no means the world’s best. I have tried to do what I thought was the most appropriate thing at the time and often, that meant having to keep my mouth shut, having to bide my time.

But yesterday pointed out to me that silence isn’t always the best policy; it was starting to kill me. I’ve been worried for a while that I was going to be seriously ill if I can’t download some of the angst elsewhere and that feeling of being detached from everything was the final straw.

Luckily for me, you recognise that feeling as a symptom of severe, intolerable stress. Now maybe we can both move on, in the same direction, albeit with slightly different agendas.

I might be a bit less oblique when I’m more sure of the road.

It went on for nearly all of my primary school life and reared its head from time to time when I was at grammar school, although nowhere near as often.

At various times, I was (allegedly): too fat, too posh, had funny teeth, was a Jew (impossible), a witch (maybe), too clever, too stupid, smelt, had bad breath, had the wrong names (Christian and surname), was a teacher’s pet, had a mother who was too old, couldn’t run fast enough (archetypal last child to be picked for any team game, “Miss, do I have to pick HER?”), didn’t sing out of tune like everybody else, supported the wrong football team and had no father, so even though he had died during the time I was at primary school, I was therefore illegitimate.

That was just the verbal abuse. On an almost daily basis, I was kicked, punched, slapped, tripped up, spied on in the toilets, had chairs pulled out from underneath me, had my fingers slammed in desk lids and countless other things that I suspect I have wiped from my memory to give myself a rest.

It went on and on; at primary school it was started in the reception class by one main perpetrator but over time, a number of others joined in for fun, meaning that I often had half-a dozen tormentors.

Bullying at school wasn’t dealt with properly then; in fact, it wasn’t dealt with at all. There was no system, no advocate, no defence; the victim was utterly alone.

At the age of five, I was punched in the head so many times I had nosebleeds, but as my attacker already had the guile to do the deed out of the teacher’s eyesight, there was no proof and I quickly learnt that telling tales made things much, much worse.

I only fought back once, at the age of eleven when the red mist finally came down, resulting in me punching the living daylights out of a boy who had spent four years grinding me down. Carpeted by the headmistress, she pronounced that I had “put up with a lot over the years” and decided not to impose any further sanctions on me.

I endured far less at grammar school but by then was so cowed that I wouldn’t readily speak up for myself and would hide from group activities in case I got picked on again. Luckily to find a small group of oddballs in my year and we formed the rather eccentric group that didn’t like following the crowd. There was safety in that and in addition, I became the typical shy child who was a good performer, standing out in anything musical. I achieved a certain notoriety as an “artiste” and gained some popularity in that way.

I have therefore grown up as a loner in many ways, but paradoxically I actually like people, but I suspect that I like them on “my” terms. If I can entertain them, then I feel at ease, so have exploited the Brummie’s natural desire to be a stand-up comedian. I can’t stand being “just” part of the crowd; I have to lead in some way, or at least be near the top of the pecking order. Realising that I could lead has come to me much later in life, along with confidence.

But that confidence is quite frail and I feel it being eroded. It is therefore quite easy for people to bully me still, I fear – not by outward means as I would quickly rail against that, but undermining and insidiousness damage me quickly; the things that are hard to prove and easy to deny.

I’m aware that this is going on now and this is one of the principal reasons for my unhappiness with the job. The atmosphere of control and unpredictability in itself is wearing, but being made to feel stupid is hurtful beyond words. Sadly, I don’t feel it is worth the hassle to go into direct confrontation over this; there has been so much upheaval over the past year that I am weary of feeling traumatised, so it’s likely I will leave it be, at least for a while.

Standing up for myself is never as appealing as fighting for another person’s rights. I can’t bear to see others fighting adversity alone; they become the frightened child that I was and I am driven to help them – which is why for a long time I have been a trade union official.

Through this, I can achieve all sorts of things; lead others, guide them, be an advocate for them and change things, make a difference. I am not the old-fashioned union rep that thumped on tables in smoky rooms in the 1970s; I am one of the new breed that mediates and negotiates to find a solution. I know I can do this, know that I have sufficient logic and humanity in the right proportions and get an adrenaline rush from doing this sort of work.

Through a rather odd and very sad set of circumstances, I find myself in exactly the same senior position within the union here that I was in my last job. It has been a rather rapid rise to prominence but is the best thing that has happened to me here. As I know I may have a relatively short time here before I move on to something else, I’m particularly driven to doing as much as I possibly can.

I can achieve something, being part of the union.

About the best analogy I could come up with was that the active mind containing all the functional and day to day stuff is represented by a vertical column. Tipping this column backwards, to an oblique angle puts one in the right “place” mentally.

I haven’t used this bit of my brain anywhere near enough in the last few months. I’ve been so wrapped up in the every day world, the general dreadfulness of the job and dealing with change that the esoteric bit of me has become almost buried.

Accessing it last night was something of a revelation. It induced a calmness in me that I haven’t felt for weeks, months even. It had the same effect upon you as well; you have a permanently racing mind too, even though it manifests itself in a very different way.

So, I am going to find ways of using it more, even if the most frequent way to join minds with you in a mutual mind-massaging exercise of the type we indulged in last night.

Maybe the answer was in front of me all the time – or was it behind me? Instead of fretting, trying to push bits of my mind into impossible shapes, reaching forward constantly, maybe what I need to do was take a step back. Literally.

First of all, the job. I am going to be doing something different for three months and from a lengthy chat about it this morning, it sounds quite interesting and will actually involve me helping people to get results. This can only be good; don’t worry, I am not in the process of inspecting the gift horse in the mouth.

The other half of the job is still what I was doing before, which is also OK. Now all I have to do is solve the atmosphere in the office (or manage to manoeuvre a move elsewhere) and this would be fine and dandy. I will keep you updated.

Then there is the union work. Is “fun” the right way to describe this? Maybe not, but I’m sure you know what I mean, as you’ve probably worked out by now that I find solving problems and being proactive fun in a bizarre sort of way. It gives me an adrenaline rush of sorts as it makes me feel useful.

If (if…. if….) I could find a way to consolidate this, then maybe I could stay here for a while, maybe even move into doing more of the sort of things that I am good at, with the benefits of keeping myself in the NHS pay structure and knowing that for the next few years, I am guaranteed pay increases.

But in the meantime, I have applied for this “other” job, the one that would require an element of performance skills. However, I am not going to do anything more about this until I have got an interview. Then, other than doing my best in an interview, I will do nothing more until (or if) I get a job offer. Then there may have to be some quick thinking, but I am determined to cross that bring when if or when I come to it, not before.

That’s quite a few liquorice allsorts so far, but another, altogether surprising one was added to the pile last night.

The “D” word has been mentioned – by the ex-wife. Surprised? I was; you could have knocked over with a bloody feather. However, like most things of this nature, it’s not going to be a simple matter as there is a large house, a medium-sized mortgage and the small matter of maintaining some sort of financial independence, which may not be easy.

But…! There are also some huge advantages, not least of which will be that I could become kosher, step out of the shadows and become real. Don’t get me wrong, my heart leapt, but I know it could take some time.

I suspect there is much more to come about this particular subject, so for now I will continue to cogitate.

With that in mind, it is probably a very good thing for the world that I didn’t choose to throw my DNA into the gene pool and have any of my own children, as I doubt that any sort of maternal instinct would have magically materialised. I suspect any child of mine would have had a rather strange upbringing and would have turned into an equally odd adult like myself.

For those few of you that chance upon this blog (I know it’s not many; I read the stats), one of the many cataclysmic changes that have occurred over the last twelve months is that I now spend quite a large proportion of my time with two fairly young children.

Luckily for me, they are not pre-school, as I think I would have thrown the towel in at that point. I don’t “get” small children at all; I can’t understand them and have no little idea of their basic needs. Oddly, I am also quite scared of touching them, possibly because I was never touched much as a child, other than out of sheer necessity. It’s not an instinctive response at all – and wasn’t one even when I was a child myself.

Babies are far, far worse; I find their helplessness terrifying and have absolutely no idea of what to do with them. They inspire no basic caring response, which means that I am a strange woman indeed. On the rare occasions that I have held them, they sense my ineptitude and scream the place down, only stopping when given back to their rightful owner.

However, I digress. The two children I spend my time with are currently ten and seven. My own observations of them is that the older one is trying to be a small adult, but is not sure how to accomplish this; the other is most definitely still a small child. Obviously, there is a lot more than this, but I think this is a subject I need to be simplistic about.

Naturally, this floundering individual has varying degrees of success with them. Maybe I’m not quite as bad as I think I am, but I do find it hard work; I don’t know how to pitch conversations, how to manage them, or even how to deal with things on a day-to-day basis and find my lack of understanding of them means that my patience is pushed hard.

I can’t really be “me” with them as they would never comprehend me, so instead I project a “schoolmarm-ish” me and hope that at least they will continue to respect this person reasonably. It places a fairly convenient barrier between me and them and means that I can stay in some sort of comfort zone, a region where I don’t feel utterly at sea.

However, even at this level I struggle enormously. I don’t think I was ever really a child; I wasn’t encouraged to be, but was rather pushed and jostled into adulthood as quickly as possible in order to fit in with the rigid family structure I was surrounded by. Because of this, I don’t understand the psyche of children at all, in fact find them too simplistic, can’t comprehend the beasts that don’t have the complexities of my own head.

I’m know this is my failing, but I don’t know how to make any more progress than this; page eight in the book seems a long way off and today, while I am handicapped by a raging sore throat and headache, feel I have got as far as I ever will.

Advantages

* could have more autonomy/self-determination/freedom

* could have more job satisfaction/interest/enjoyment

*could be in a non-target driven environment (this is important for me)

Disadvantages

* possible loss of pay

* probable loss of annual leave (this could be quite a large amount, so needs considering)

* not doing trade union work

At the moment, the advantages and disadvantages are fairly equal, so I am in a quandary.  All of these things matter to me, with one edging ahead in importance; the trade union work.

I’m very sure that if I could do doing this work for all or most of the time, I would be perfectly content.  Not only am I in a position of authority where I can be proactive and change things,  it satisfies my altruistic side, my sense of justice, my desire to do something positive for others.

I truly don’t know what to do for the best.  I have made huge inroads this week, but is that temporary? Would it be possible to keep up this level of input into this work?  I know what I am doing is appreciated; I feel I can make a difference – but what of the rest of The Job (the “real” job, that is, the one that I most definitely don’t enjoy).  Can I get enough time away from that?

Would moving away now be another sideways or backward step – or would it be the best move I have ever made?

For the first time ever, I can understand the people I used to give tarot readings to (and still do, occasionally).  They wanted to be told the best way forward, whether it was in regard to a broken relationship, broken home or broken job.  Now I wish someone would do the same for me, turn me round to face the signpost that will show me the direction to go next.

I can’t afford to make any more wrong choices; I can’t afford another piece of bad luck in relation to a job; Heaven knows I have had enough already over my working life.  My sense of natural justice makes me want to rail against life when I feel it is not treating me fairly; I acknowledge the abundance it has given me in some ways but don’t know how to dodge the proverbial slings and arrows.

I will give this my best shot, of course, but at the same time I am stepping up my search for another job.  In fact, I have an application half-done, for an unusual job that I have wanted to do for a long time.  The only real disadvantage to it is that it might necessitate a cut in salary – but what is the price for job satisfaction?

I’m not going to name it or describe it yet; the superstitious bit of my nature doesn’t want to jinx what could be the opportunity to do something that would really suit me.  Therefore I must put my best words together to give myself a chance of getting an interview.

As ever, there are one or two things about leaving this that I would miss.  My current carbon footprint must be minute as I barely use a car at all.  For nearly any other job I will probably need to use a car again, when now I am driving perhaps once or twice a week.  But in the grand scheme of what I want to do with my life, travelling a short distance isn’t much of a sacrifice to make (with apologies to the environmentalists).

The thing I will miss is the trade union work.  I feel I have started to make real inroads in the last week and have had some very good feedback from managers and other union reps alike, that I am going to be “good for the organisation” and an “asset”.  That makes me feel quite sad, so in whatever time I am here I will attempt to make as much positive change as possible.  Maybe it will be better to come and go like a tornado than hang around there for years.

I’m going north again tomorrow.  It’s quite isolated up there, which I always find a rather strange feeling.  This big-city girl has never got the hang of being in the middle of nowhere and the quiet darkness is odd i the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.

Sleep is still a problem.  Nodding off curled up in front of the TV is never a problem, but going to bed is different.  The dreams are vague and slightly disturbing.  Several times recently I have gone into a dream sequence whilst still awake.  With my eyes shut, I see a fog in my mind’s eye which swirls and parts to reveal a dream image I can step into.  It’s not a daydream as I don’t seem to have control over the images and often the scenes placed before me are unreal, a glimpse of another world that I don’t particularly want to be part of.

Sometimes the moving patterns in this process remind me of a migraine attack and I jerk myself awake to make sure that I’m not having a visual disturbance.

I seem to be in a spate of these at the moment, three within a couple of months and I have lapsed into the migraineur’s common problem of living in fear of an attack.  They are so disabling; the loss of vision and disorientation of the aura, sometimes accompanied by the other odd symptoms, not being able to form speech, tingling in hands and face, occasionally hallucinations, followed by the dreadful pain and nausea that doesn’t readily resolve with painkillers.

In a phase of them like this, I can’t bear to be on my own for a long period, as there have been occasions when the attack has been so bad I have not been able to look after myself.  Some years ago I was trapped in the aura for hours when alone; instead of the normal 30-60 minutes, the visual disturbances continued for over three hours and a trip to the hospital was starting to look like the only course of action.

Migraine is a dreadful thing, so little understood and so difficult to control; it victimises its sufferers and there is still no treatment to stop or avert an imminent attack.  We find coping mechanisms to try and protect ourselves, but that is all, so for the next few weeks, until I get a reasonable space of time between now and the last attack, I will feel distinctly uneasy.

The “locals” that I work with are getting used to my rather abrasive accent and even find it amusing. But I don’t know anyone here.  The people I work with only socialise with each other when someone leaves and I have met nobody else at work who is the slightest bit interested in knowing me outside what I do in the workplace.

“Your” people at work are all nice enough, but because of what I can tactfully describe as “my/our circumstances”, in most cases I am aware of a faint barrier between me and them.  I don’t conform in the right way, you see, so I will remain at arm’s length, a pace behind  – until or unless things change, but I don’t envisage that for a good while, if ever.

However, they think the way they think; I can’t change that, nor would I want to.  That’s just the way things are.  I suppose if I was feeling at all arrogant, I could say that it’s their loss and not mine.

But there are a lack of people here for me.  If you left, or told me to leave, or something else of that nature happened, then there would be nothing keeping me here at all.  I would be gone, probably within a day or two and other than my name on a hospital payroll and a few bills, there would be no proof that I’d ever been here at all.  I am, in effect, quite invisible here.

I don’t think I’m that bad at getting to know people, but I have not had much luck here at all.  It’s not a neighbourly neighbourhood that I live in.  If I locked myself out of the house, I would not know anyone by name to ask for help.

Without you here, I am completely alone.  All those who are dear to me are in Birmingham, the place that’s forever home, but at the same time, not home – as home is with you.

Maybe there will be progress – or maybe this little city will always be lonely to some extent or another.