Nightmare

i feel as if I have been in a deep sleep, woken and found myself in a nightmare. Is this really my life? Is this it?

I took the blind neighbour to the dentist today with the usual messing about on busses and as we neared the hospital (where the dentist has their surgery - convenient but not confidence inspiring) I looked around at the bus and the people on it, listened to Peter repeat for the hundredth time some really not funny joke, and thought, I can't bear this. I got home to find a letter from the mortgage company to say I still owe them eleven thousand pounds! Bankruptcy really does loom. Why carry on?

The trouble with the waking up is the sense of responsibility one has to others is also awoken so immediate thoughts of a quick slash and dash had to be quoshed. But really what do I do? The loony nurse, aka community psychiatric nurse, paid a 'supportive' home visit yesterday. This is the man who left me in tears some time ago. Yesterday he looked at my healing arms and said, "Doesn't count if you take the scabs off." I mean really -  not, well done, you've tried - nothing! I think he has mischosen his career. I got cross - he wrote screeds but still lacked any of the 'support' that his job title promises.

I know rhe only person responsible for the mess I am in is me. That the only the person who can make a diffirence is me. But it is bloody hard to know what to do and how to do it. The 'caring' CPN is coming back in two weeks with another support worker to help me try to socialse! This is me, Joanna, who talks the hind legs of a donkey - could make friends in Bedlam and really doesn't need to have my hand held to 'socialise'!

I am overusing the writer's enemy, the exclamation mark and the single quotation markings. They are a lazy way of signalling my disgust and despair. What have I become that my life is made up of trips to Basingstoke with Peter, the blind neighbour and visits from 'supportive' health care professionals with occasional moments with my sisiter and the girls that serve only to remind me of what I have thrown away.

As does this blog - all the small baba stuff, the stories of Calcutta and my mispent youth - they belong to the past and we know - the past is another country. This is now and it is terrifying. I won't have a Prince Charming who will come and take me out of this nightmare, Instead I am condemmed to live in this Sartrean hell of other people. I am sorry if you are still loyally hoping this blog will fulfil its early promise and feeling somewhat hard done that it hasn't by but as Cindi Lauper said - it's my party........