Don’t go on your own, the Maudsley nurses told me when I suggested going to a Ware poets evening to meet Tamar Yoseloff and Co. I wonder why. Perhaps a woman on her own looks like prey to a predator. A man is allowed to be a lone wolf and nobody bothers him; a woman on her own is either socially retarded or just plain dumb or both.
Thank God for family. Dad flew over from New Zealand to help me get back on my feet. I had choices: I could stay in the UK or return to New Zealand. I made the decision to return to New Zealand, and I have to say I’m glad that I did. For three years or so I wondered if I really did have some sort of mental illness. At first I just accepted the doctor’s diagnosis, which was burnout due to being in the grip of a manic episode. But something wasn’t adding up. Why was I struggling to write a shopping list? Why couldn’t I organize a ski trip?
The world is a dangerous place. Yet, why should I cower? Why should I hide away? Maybe it’s a writer thing. Some of the best writers have been recluses. I’ve met my fair share of brain-boxes. They all seemed more confident than me, but maybe they were just faking it.
In my last days in London I was far from with it. I believe I may have had some kind of seizure, during which my spirit left my body. Where it went, nobody knows. Roaming in the Scottish highlands, perhaps, or malingering in the London Underground. A restless spirit; a hungry ghost with its sights set on reaching the other side. A dangerous high-wire act.
Three years and ten doctors later, they found the brain tumour in my left frontal lobe. They’d been all too eager to diagnose me as having manic depression, the mental illness du jour, but after sitting at home for three years, more bewildered and confused than manic or depressed, I knew that there must be something more wrong with me. They checked me into the local mental health unit, gave me an MRI and found a lump the size of a lemon. Millimeter by millimeter it invades my brain. It’s not the death sentence I once thought it was; you can live for decades if you take them out. My neurosurgeon, Mr Mee, tells me that he operated on a couple of people with grade two astrocytomas in the 1980s and they’re still going strong. Further, there could be bright spots on the horizon. Science advances all the time, and stem cell research is being pioneered. Perhaps in the future, somebody could grow a new piece of brain and implant it – which leaves me wondering how I would turn out if they did slot in a new brain segment. Would I emerge with a new personality? The tumour is in that area. Perhaps they could insert an extrovert segment so that I could cope with having a public persona. I could emerge a whole new woman. It’d make a good story.
Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t all bad. There were cool parallels between the art world and the world of IT. Working for Fast Search and Transfer in Norway, I learnt that their CEO bought Ingmar Berman’s estate. Nerds could be into art and film. Into music. Many developers get to listen to music all day on iTunes and nobody bothers them as long as they get the work done. It’s not such a bad job, but to succeed in that world you probably have to be better at playing politics than I am, be far more cut-throat, more ruthless, more downright ambitious.
Sounds like a right shark pit, commented my father, when I reported back from the front line.
I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself, said the Senior Executive I worked under.
But I didn’t understand what he meant. I wasn’t being hard on myself. They were being too hard on me. I didn’t burst into tears. I simply snapped. I don’t care now. Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones. I don’t have to work in a sweat shop. I got the house. I’m in a safe place. I have support workers and parents who still care, despite the turbulent adolescent years. My honest feeling was that I was surrounded by corruption or that all was phoney as Bob Dylan says. Nobody was to be trusted. Everything was coated in sugar; enticing but bad for you. As for me – God, you’d think I were the devil.
