A New Normal

My kind of normal

You know what’s really pissing me off now that I am recovering from my breakdown? People happily telling me that I am almost back to normal. Now, I realise that this makes me sound like the arsiest kind of hag it’s possible to be without turning into Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones. And I also realise that it’s wildly ungrateful to get the hump over such generous praise.  So what the fuck is my problem?

Perhaps it is because I’m never going to be ‘normal’ again. Well, by that I mean I’ll never be the old me again, if it’s the old me that represents ‘normal’. So when anyone congratulates me on being almost back to normal it’s like congratulating me on being the old me. Problem is, the old me got me into this fucking mess in the first place. This chemical imbalance may have been visited on me like a pervert in the night, but the old me did a spectacular job of inviting it in, offering it a cuppa and warming its sweaty little slippers.

I like to think that I’ve learned a thing or two from sprint-finishing over the edge of reason and that includes knowing that I wouldn’t be the old me again if you paid me cold, hard cash to do it. It was too much like hard frigging work. I pushed myself to be brilliant at everything (although fuck knows if I actually was) and created personal goals that would have towered over the Burj Khalifa. As one of my counsellors asked me, when I told him that I’d been managing myself wonderfully for the last 40 years, “Yeah? And how’s that working for you?”. Fair point. Well made.

And don’t go thinking that my getting this hump over this particular kindness is about pessimism either. It’s not. It’s about optimism. Optimism that I’ve left behind the gnashing little demons that lived in my brain for the first 40 years of my life.

Apart from which, there is something about the whole getting-back-to-normal thought that feels like a negation of what I have gone through.  As if the breakdown is over and I can now put it behind me. Er, hardly. The fact is that my breakdown is evident every day, even on those days when I have to be restrained from skipping through fields the sunbeams. It’s changed me and not just for now but forever. Does anyone really drop their marbles so spectacularly before returning to life as if nothing ever happened?

The thing is I just have a new kind of ‘normal’ now. Not the old ‘normal’ but one that is slightly less bananas and a smidgen less destructive.  So, for fuck’s sake, don’t curse me with being back to my old self. Just ask me how the new normal is going. God knows, it might even raise you a smile.