by Last week it all became unmanageable for me. On Wednesday night I was already struggling but picked myself up off the floor to call Barclays in the UK to get a debit card for an account I have over there. I got a female voice-recognition robot. I said “bank card” or something. Ms Robot said “all right then, credit card fraud” and that was obviously serious enough to warrant a real person. Mr Real Person, who from the way he spoke might as well have been a robot anyway, told me that one of my accounts had been cancelled due to inactivity and I’d need to go through a long and complicated process to retrieve the money. I’d have to send this pink form off to some address in Leicester, which he couldn’t pronounce. For whatever reason that sent me off the deep end. It took me a long time to calm down and I didn’t sleep well. This whole year has been a terrible one for sleep.
I nearly stayed at home on Thursday but figured I should keep things as normal as possible. I lasted about an hour at work. My carpool mate drove me home in my car. I was lucky enough to get an appointment with the doctor that afternoon, and I’m back on Citalopram again. That’s the SSRI I took for 7½ years (minus a short gap in the middle) after suffering panic attacks in 2001. The doctor also told me to take the next six days off work.
Wednesday night and Thursday morning had been coming for a while. It was an awful episode and I’m still recovering from it.
The highlight of Friday was dumping several thousand pages of actuarial notes in the recycling bin. I kept just one file for some sort of posterity. I also took some stuff to the tip. Yesterday I saw two friends, one in Petone and one here. They were both very supportive of me. Last night my friend from the tennis club came over. We played table tennis (though not actually a game; he would have thrashed me) and then tried to play squash. We’d hardly got going when I took a tumble and saw stars. I felt quite wobbly and disoriented, as if it wasn’t just the fall but everything else. We got dinner from the Basin Noodle House just before it closed, and chatted for a couple of hours. At 10:05 I looked at my watch and I realised I hadn’t checked the time for 90 minutes. Sometimes I go a whole night without managing that. He talked about his family in Singapore. His father, now a retired lawyer in his early eighties, sounds like a complete bastard.
Today I played bad tennis but won an award for my nine successive straight-set singles wins that now feel like ancient history. I’ve now got an engraved trophy, which is nice − I don’t get trophies every day, but I’ll only be able to keep it for a month. After that I popped over to my cousin’s place, and I’ve always enjoyed that.
After a really shitty week, I’ve managed to get exercise, sunshine and contact with people who I actually enjoy being in contact with. I could hardly have hoped for a better weekend and I’m now much calmer. I’ve now got a whole week to tackle my to-do list.
