Well, if I didn’t know where to start/end the previous page, or what to put in it, I think I know even less for this one. Why? Because the first crisis was very personal, with no real outside human trigger, whereas the second was a lot more complex and long-drawn, less rapid in its fall, and also less fast in its resolution. But mostly it involved other people, one in particular, and it’s a little delicate to narrate it all without mentioning them. I will try to a large extent to focus on the personal experience and problems, but I won’t be able to do only that, even if there may be more hints than details and I’ll try to stay on track (fat chance, you know me). Also, a lot of hints and details are given in other pages, mostly on the ‘psych’ books one.
Anyway, so, I could vaguely start in summer/autumn 2013, long work trips to Qatar and Canada. Well, Qatar was fine, work so-so, but an interesting experience, good colleagues, and I somehow enjoyed it for that. Back after that felt a little empty, I think the void was getting to me. But there was still football, and meeting of new people. Actually, the problem is I could nearly write a book about N. But I won’t. So, I’ll briefly pass over the trip to Canada when I was not the same fun person I’d been over the last few years as emotions and exchanges took all my time, sharing things, expressing oneself truly to someone else over the waves for the first time in years, and it seemed like a strange two-way street for once, which was new. But I’ll jump straight to crisis time in July 2014, to keep to the ‘abstract’, despite all the things I would have to say about the intervening months.
The thing is, I found myself in another state of mental confusion. There was no immediate/instant trigger that time (the break-up was odd and just tearful on my side, but then it became weird, with the strangest FA Cup final that wasn’t a good experience), but I seemed to be doing OK if slightly confused. Yet, at some stage, I couldn’t reconcile the reality I was observing and what I was feeling, or maybe reality and what I was being told. I didn’t know the word ‘gaslighting’ at the time, neither had I heard of ‘cognitive dissonance’, but there was certainly a lot of that at play. Again, the work situation was a factor(I had changed mid 2014 after deciding I didn’t want to spend more months in Saudi Arabia this time), as the new job really didn’t suit me despite some great and friendly colleagues who I got on very well with and still enjoy seeing when I get a chance these days (sadly, the Submarine Networks division has moved to another site recently). Also, summer meant no focus on football, no games to go to either. It was also a very hot start to August (I did mention the previous crisis happening amidst a cold wave, this was the opposite; I was going to expand on my relation to hot and cold weather, but I have decided that I would try to write another blog post on it, maybe I will have something to post in 2024 after all…). Heatwaves were not that frequent then, but it pretty much was one. I was teetering on the brink as my mind was getting more and more confused. I remember once at work on a Monday morning, feeling close to psychosis/hallucinatory state about some piece of paper on someone’s desk. I went home and that was the start of it. I think. There may have been a weekend to survive somewhere before. In my tiny flat (only one room, I’ve moved since, in fact, the move was initiated before the crisis, and very much with great thanks to N pushing me to do something I’d wanted to do for a year or two – a lucky theme on the crises is that both times a big change was initiated before the crisis, not being given up on, and provided me with something to focus on – this time though, the signing of the papers for the flat and the moving in actually happened while I was still partly living in hospital), I was just suffocating, I ended up calling one or two of my sisters, one suggested I called ‘SOS Médecins’, so some kind of emergency but not the emergency services, so one doctor came to my flat, noticed it was truly boiling there, can’t remember what they gave me, but it wasn’t going to go very far (Lexomil maybe?). Anyway, after that thing at work, following one of my sister’s recommendations, I simply went and took the bus to Hôpital Béclère in Clamart. I tried to explain in the most confused way my situation, having somehow managed to get someone after going to the psychiatric emergencies or something (not sure how that worked…of course it’s impossible to explain, but my line this time and with every new doctor I met in the following few days or weeks) was just to say I had a crisis over ten years earlier and that wasn’t properly solved and now I needed to get back into the psychiatric treatment system – actually, the massive difference this time is I was determined to trust the doctors and let them deal with me in their own time, not mine, competence is there to be trusted, it’s something it took me a while to learn in my life, and in this case, it pretty much was a matter of life or(mental) ‘death’, I knew something was wrong in me, but didn’t know what – amusingly, seeing this now, you could argue that the true solutions didn’t come from these doctors, but they sure helped a lot – I digress on proof-reading now, but want to mention something here rather than later, though it is not chronologically relevant yet: the nurses in hospital in particular were wonderful people with the patience of saints, and they had to cater for patients who were not as accomodating and gentle as me, believe me, my own main problem throughout being mostly being confused), but I was just given some mirtazapine to take and told to come back in a couple of days if I wasn’t OK. One tab seemed to somehow allow me to sleep/feel weird/sedated/paralysed, I could feel it had an effect, but you know, there was absolutely no chance of it ‘fixing’ anything. It’s not like I had any experience beyond what happened in the distant past, circumstances were different, I had so little experience of psychiatry/psychology (never revisited these themes after the first crisis once I thought I was out of the woods), the reasons why or the effect of this or that mental health drug. So yeah, I just wondered and wondered, had absolutely no mental tool to deal with my own state, so quite naturally, I hung on, having taken the one pill per day, and went back to the hospital two days later. Thankfully, one of my sisters still lived not far at the time, and agreed/found the time to be there with me (met me there not drive me, I was still able to take the bus). A lengthy chat/discussion/questions/responses with another doctor led to be being asked if I wanted to be hospitalised (I think the written words from the psychiatrist in early 2002 might have come back to me), and I finally said ‘yes’. (I think I wanted them to take the decision for me, but it was left to me). Of course I informed N, in fact, I chatted to her before/during(possibly, not sure)/after that interview, which made it even more confusing, as there was both sweetness and hostility in very quick succession). I think she was worried about F being with me that day (I only could understand more or less why many many years later when all became a little clearer about both what was truly ailing N, and what my own issues were), and the gaslighting somehow continued (I’m not at all sure she was in control of that though by then and might have been taken by a moment of panic that I was actually not going to react in a way she could control and that she feared could damage her) but that’s for later. Bottom line is that day (don’t ask me for the exact day, but it was the week leading to the first home Arsenal match of the season vs Man City that year if I remember correctly), I ended up in an ambulance, driven to the Erasmus hospital (actually it’s not really a hospital, not in the way you normally envisage them) which was to be my permanent then occasional ‘house’ for about three months (apparently just over two in fact).
The first few days there were an absolute mess. I don’t remember my room at all (but think I was on my own), but I was obviously in a shitty state, and I guess (I’m seeing it clearly now with the distance, but was already more aware than 12 years earlier) they had to experiment a bit with the treatment they gave me, some probably not working,, and yes, I suppose that ‘unité d’accueil’ was very much like the CATDB in Saint-Germain: the anteroom, where rules are different, where your behaviour is observed before they put you in one section or another. Daily exchanges with N seemed to help but…yeah. Anyway, strict rules (some where hospital-wide, like mobile phones in bags given to nurses after 8pm, night time at 10pm (i think or was it earlier?), some only for this unit. In particular, you were allowed outside in the garden for only a few minutes at a time. I think I started with 15min, but maybe got a little more before moving units. But essentially you spend most of the time in the same room (there was table football, a few books perhaps, colouring books? games) and you end up going round and round in circles. I got chatting to someone who seemed a little more ‘normal’ (bar the sudden mind attacks leading to shrieds) and so we had good conversations (which made N extraordinarily jealous despite no romantic interest being involved and our own having theoretically stopped a while ago), but I was both here and not here. Moments where I felt insanity was just around the corner and how the fuck do we move on from this situation? Also I came back briefly to that question ‘what if I am a bad person?’ (I don’t remember if I detailed, but on exiting hospital in 2012 I felt I should try to become mean, yeah I definitely mentioned that in the previous page, that thing that had no chance of working or being me, thankfully) rather than ‘I should become more bad’, but somehow V (actually don’t remember her name, shamefully, but I think it did start with V) told me it was very obvious that I wasn’t, and yeah I suppose it is if you meet me rather than listen to one badly intentioned person. Oh don’t get me wrong, I have some bad moments or bad sides, but fundamentally, you’d probably struggle to put me in the ‘mean’/’deceitful’/’nasty’ bin by any stretch of the imagination. Anyway, more digressions but yeah that was not a happy time. I only remember one interview with the psychiatrist then, and it was absolutely fucked. The guy just looked very young like he was straight out of school, and I don’t remember any word or anything, just that he seemed to make no sense and I was wondering if he was a madman, a patient here rather than a doctor. I still don’t know, but obviously I was in no state to be lucid about that. Once more, these were very dense days, because by the Friday, I was considering whether I should be out and go to the Man City game (weirdly encouraged by N, which was either insane or a deliberate ploy to break me down for good, or see me for someone I am not in a state I was not….I think she might have thought I was just faking it all, but believe me I wasn’t, only lunacy let me think that I could switch things off, but I’m not a person who has leaps of faith, I need things that take time, healing takes time, there are few instant miracles in my life). Yeah, not sure but I think it may have been the psychiatrist (a different one thankfully) who decided they couldn’t let me out. Anyway, that first phase ended only a few days later (don’t ask me for precise timelines, I have no idea), when I got offered to move to the ‘Minkowski’ unit that was focused on depressive people. So I said yes (again it was an offer/a suggestion/not forced on me), and things got progressively uphill from there. Not completely linearly as there was one bad moment, but I have no actual recollection of it, conscious or not. But I know it happened, because of a nurse being there, and the once more super-clever N giving me a used RER ticket for that date with a lot of unused ones the next day. I never mentioned it to her, but I did notice, and somehow appreciated the subtlety of the hint that she put there in case I doubted her. Anyway, so one day she came to visit (see I end up talking a lot about her, but that’s fine now, I don’t think I’ll say anything very controversial). It was around lunchtime, in fact, she had herself announced while I still had to go through yoghurt and dessert. It may seem like nothing, but despite not showing it then, it did have an influence on her own reactions… I mean, the way I was, I knew I needed to focus on tasks one by one, rather than rush in confusion from one to the next depending on whatever happened at any moment and that I was instantly reactive to (a very unhealthy way to behave but that has been mine so many times though I’ve improved an enormous lot now). And so I decided to finish my lunch before going to meet her. Hey, it was only about five minutes and I was the one who was a complete mess and in a hospital, but sure later, in N-world, it turned out this had been a big crime as I hadn’t put her first and made her wait while she came all the way. A little contrast with my brother 12 years earlier, eh? Anyway, I didn’t know about that then(who was fundamentally rather than temporarily self-centred, eh?), she brought me some beautiful white flowers (that remained my screen on mobile phone for many years, was meant to be forever, until I realised that keeping your word just for the sake of it, to people who don’t care, wasn’t THAT important), and it was a sweet moment, we had a nice chat, and it felt like a moment of tender peace in this world. On leaving, she gave me the unused RER tickets I mentioned above. Which was nice. But once out of here, maybe the next day or soon after is when the different mess happened. Hers rather than mine this time, though I don’t know the exact extent of what was real or possible lies and still don’t. Either way, this seemed to trigger a huge crisis in her. The reason? Not just that five minutes wait. She had come to the hospital the day before. We had an argument. So obviously she must have been extremely confused when the next day I was there all sweetness and love with zero recollection (well it wasn’t mentioned or hinted at by her either then, which was kind in a way, but not normal for sure). Now, I don’t know how that argument went (she only told me later that I told her that before I met her I was just a happy wanker and that she’d turned me into a mess or something – I’ll let you debate whether I was a wanker or not, I don’t think I was that lazy a person, but I often struggled to get going without motivating aims and so was very idle at times,; what is sure is that while I had moments of happiness and joy, I don’t think I was a fundamentally happy person, I was just permanently lost and frustrated), but I (we?) had words no doubt, as one of the nurses told me it definitely happened when I questioned her later. It certainly wasn’t that bad though as no-one in the hospital had mentioned it to me, and in fact that nurse told me patching up with her at least gave me something to aim for (but then I suppose she thought we were ‘together’, so that was not a true perspective in the sense she meant – though Christmas that year turned out a little confusing before the gaslighting machine worked back in full flow – so many examples I could relate…). So yeah, I had two visits and the first one was a total blank for me. Oh sure, you may think that this means I could be in a state where I have no conscience and am not me. But there’s two things to that. First I think you need to understand the situation and state I was coming from (no doubt called ‘psychosis’). And the second, quite important one I believe: I was no danger to anyone, and so, sure life can surprise you, but even out of my mind I don’t seem to really be that bad even when I feel (with or without good reason for that matter) upset or paranoid.
Anyway, that’s a long aside that happened at the start of the re-recovery. I was put in a slightly unusual room (it was converted from a disabled room I think) meaning the controls for the shutters and light were outside the room, so I had to adapt in ways others didn’t necessarily have to. But the main thing was I was progressing. There were still moments when I was struggling to focus and take things one by one, when my conscience wasn’t completely there, but somehow the hospital routine helped, waking up at the same time every day, regular meals. I also got to sort out all the paperwork (I was basically out of the normal national security system before that) for the leave of work etc. Got to meet new people young and old (some I’m still in touch with), there were even some activities, a sort of debating society, table tennis, I discovered that being in that hospital didn’t mean having zero social activity and interactions. We had pretty much free access to the park at Minkowski, which was a delight in the still warm summer days. I took to walking around the gardens, timing myself and walking faster and faster (I’ve definitely always had a taste for running aroung the clock then, oh yes I didn’t mention because it’s something in the sports page already extensively, but after the first crisis, hiking and running was part of the restorative process, and that Paris-Versailles remain my highest athletic point I guess). And crucially I was allowed more and more days off the premises (though not yet back at work), so somehow got to Arsenal matches again (just taking a couple of days off, you were not randomly allowed off, you sort of had to say what you intended to do, what would keep you busy, and obviously that required approval from the psychiatrist), I remember maybe a Spurs match and drinking with Kris. I eventually got to visit N again too, and at last, it was some time in October when I got discharged for good, full-time at home and back at work a few weeks later. The weird coincidences of my little world meant that the very day I was released, I received an e-mail from J for the first time in years, and it was kind of magic. Didn’t lead to anything but she’s also been a great support though this year (2023) she seems to have finally drifted away from communicating. I think we both live with a lot of regrets, but I feel I still have a lot to look forward to, whereas she’s often seemed down lately and I don’t know how to help. Anyway, life restarted, bits by bits, the difference was I now had regular appointments with the psychiatrist at the CMP in Antony, which all through the years and still now, serves as a kind of regular monitoring, something to look forward to, not as a good thing but as a life-pulse. I was also seeing an ‘assistante sociale’ (well I went once, until we decided it was pointless, because I was still an engineer in a stable social situation), and also the psychologist, who I gave up on after a few months (or more, again it seems so far away now), because I felt like psychologist+psychiatrist was a bit of an overkill especially with finding the time to get there while working.
There have been a lots of ups and downs and meanderings in the years after. I think it was 2016 when I first tried to stop the pills (I was just on Zyprexa by then very small doses, Effexor had been ditched some time before), it seemed like a good idea, but I was unprepared, slightly insecure still and unable to make the part of what was under my control and what wasn’t. I was the architect of my own downfall. There’s enough on NPD elsewhere, and I don’t feel I can blame N (certainly not at that stage) for my troubles. Sure ‘normal’ ‘nice’ people don’t exploit other people’s weaknesses and kindness, but some are wired this way, and somehow, perhaps I put too much responsibility on myself at times (but I’m essentially done with it now), but the fact is, I had these weaknesses, they could be exploited, and I was acting all sorts of wrong in some ways, a prisoner of my own words and dreams and ideals. So yeah I couldn’t hold to the no-pill more than a week or two because I was too (co-?dependent). But I fell back to the same reasonable level after a temporary re-increase (and a brief attempt at trying a different one), and this carried on for a few more years, one 5 mg pill every three nights.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, but I think it was shortly after my discharge from hospital, I did try to ask my psychiatrist if there was a diagnosis. She may have been a little evasive, but just said I seemed to have had a ‘bouffée délirante’ (that’s essentially a sort of psychotic episode I think, but again you need to think of ‘psychotic’ in a very medical sense, not someone going on a weird violent rampage, like I feel is the idea with the general public) with a bit of depression. I think she also mentioned that maybe it didn’t matter, and I think I tend to agree with her. I’ll try to put conclusions at the end of this article again, but I think one of the keys when it comes to mental health is how you cope with it, how you manage, get better, accomodate, live and improve rather than relying on a diagnosis. Sure it might be easier for me to say as I’m not diagnosed with anything, probably because I don’t have much of anything bar a little imbalance and a very very slow emotional development (but not stunted or stopped, which is the difference with people with some personality disorders for instance – hello Cluster B), may be slight mentally ‘unusual’ but not much else. I just feel that there is a lot of ‘excusism’ in finding yourself enlightened by your diagnosis, that may or may not be accurate. Sure it can help, especially allaying the ‘I’m a wrong person’ guilt (it’s a disease, not something you chose, and I tried to tell that to N when ways parted), but everything particularly there is on a spectrum, comorbidity abounds, and it’s also easy to mistake one thing for another. When a lof of the DSM diagnoses are based on ‘meeting X (number) criteria out of Y’, it’s obvious that someone diagnosed with something will be pretty different with someone diagnosed with the same illness if they match the same number of criteria but some very different ones; also if you are, say, one short of ‘X’, then does that mean you don’t have a disorder but nearly? Studying the different treatments is also interesting. If you take Zyprexa for instance, an ‘atypical antipsychotic’ mostly (I think) prescribed for schizophrenia, you see it is in fact prescribed and recommended for a lot of different disorders, mood or personality, depending on the dose etc. So if you think you can work out someone’s problem from their prescription, good luck.
But back on topic, things progressed, there were ups and downs (pretty much unvariably linked to my ups and downs with N, though it’s hard to know who or what they were driven by, I was a mess, and while I hoped I could help her, in some ways, I think all of this was messing up with her nearly as much as it was messing up with me, main difference is I feel I had no-one to talk to or confide to, no true support who would have an inkling what was going on, and I wasn’t about to let her down or react badly or talk shit about her. — therein lies one of the many huge differenced between me and her, I’m afraid). Mostly though, the way was up, despite a strange breakdown in 2017. New Year 2018 (I think but I’m wondering if I’m one year ahead there) was great, my love in new music got rekindled again that year (more about that somewhere else on this site), and things seem to be possibly more balanced.
There were dark times, there were bright times. Then S came onto the scene and became a better ‘secondary target’ for N eventually (very complicated but I look back at the whole situation and how I got it utterly completely wrong and it all takes a different light, sometims you just have to swap the way you see roles to see the truth, but the genius of N….), and very importantly COVID happened. Meaning everything became purely online, the realm of the best manipulators. A lot easier to confuse people you can’t see. I could or should write shit loads about those years and everything up to my Dad’s death and what happened then (again I feel I might have mentioned that elsewhere? Yeah, the stuff about triangulation. There’s control, manipulation and there’s triangulation, and N was absoutely incredibly skilled, hell she still is I suppose). But those are side-topics as I must refocus on my own mental health for that article.
So I won’t go into the details, but the real revelation for me happened in 2021. In fact, I was already starting to behave a little more healthily, more independently, doing my own stuff without too much fear or worry about N’s reactions. But that couldn’t work in her world. I managed a first period of six months without a pill between February and July. As that’s when the turning point happened and also the somewhat dangerous shit happened. The turning poing was reading Margaret Fjelstad’s book as mentioned in the corresponding section of this book. I had just started investigating NPD (you could say I’d more or less wasted seven years of my life, as things should have stopped and changed when out of hospital, listening to one of my sisters telling me she thought (well no she didn’t say she thought, she was convinced, but that didn’t make it true…or convincing to me) N had NPD. Or rather, she used the French familiar equivalent, that had negative connotations, so I dismissed that off hand wanting to only believe in the good in N and blinding myself to all the shit. But that book ‘Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist’ was an absolute revelation. Because it was not about the BPD or NPD person as such, it was about the caretaker. And I saw all the mistakes I’d made and was making. And I learnt about the things I could confusingly feel or I knew but couldn’t really articulate or didn’t know how to put into practice. I learnt about boundaries (my own to set, not just other people’s who I already respected possibly even too much at times by putting them where they were not, except with N who played a lot with the limits of these to both our confusion in the end as mine were so flexible at the start). I learnt about setting barriers. I learnt that you could care about someone without caring for them all the time. I learnt that there were limits to the sacrifices you could make to try to help others. And I also learnt, crucially, because it is something I had got wrong a lot between 2013 and 2021, that you can understand someone or the way their mind works without excusing and defending all their behaviours. Loyalty is not a one-way street, that’s fealty. It was too late to save anything there due to other parties involved in part and due to the incredible level of shite I had to face (she tried all the tricks in the book when she could feel I was cottoning up to the deeper truth, but the tragedy is, as is her wont, she thought I could be a threat, when I had absolutely no intention to be, I’m not the one to abuse the abusers, I still wanted to help her, just help her better now that I had more tools). But I don’t blame her. It’s probably self-preservation, some irrational fear based on projections of your own problems, etc. There are enough books and articles on that. But this time I managed to stay strong enough, and slowly extricate myself from the few cleverly placed chains I hadn’t noticed had actually been put in place years before (and so I sent back some paintings that were ‘on loan’ to me -now it made sense why- but did it my own time, what with the logistics involved, sorted it by the end of 2021, and was very glad), and the attempts to panic me or make me react badly were mostly well managed (I saw some of that, an absolute disgrace and a few lies, but I kept it all to myself until I realised it wasn’t even worth monitoring any of it at all). There were things I considered writing but didn’t (and so I lost touch with her Mum by not writing, which I regret, because I think her Mum truly is a great person, but I hope that precisely she is always remembering that, because her Mum, like most Mums, loves her unconditionally too, and I think that’s a concept that’s a little alien to N).
If you wonder, while I’m much better off without N in my life now, I still admire her genius, and the idealist dreamer in me still hopes she finds a way to use her qualities without using people to manage her illness. Is that possible? I don’t know. The crucial thing is, she is ill, which means ‘good’ or ‘bad’ possibly does not apply in normal ways, if she is unable to choose. But willing or not, and whatever the reasons behind, there is no doubt that she’s bringing a lot of good to a few people especially if they are not in too close contact with her. And there is even less doubt that she’s made a huge difference in my life, directly and indirectly, and somehow contributed to me being, I hope, a better and stronger person than I was. But that is part of the paradox she is (and maybe I am too).
Anyway, one more back on topic (what is the topic?), all that led to the end of 2021 and 2022 being mostly a journey of progress and re-discovery of myself. I managed another six months without pills between July and December 2022, until different circumstances made me reach for a pill again at the end of NYE 2022. It was a little different but proof that I still had some work to do. I will write an article on 2023 specfically which might touch on a few aspects of this, but essentially, this year (2023) has been up and down but another few steps forward – hell I wrote everything that’s on this website for a start…, fixing a few more things inside, consolidating the progress, being more assured, more assertive (sure you will never completely remove self-doubt in me, and I still made shitloads of mistakes or took unnecesary risks, or ones that were unlike me), and somehow, today, it’s been just over eight months without a pill, and even on bad days, I’m not even really entertaining the idea of taking one even if that could lead to a better night’s sleep, a quick fix. But I’ve mostly learnt to manage situations a little better, priorities, moments for myself as well as moments out. Sure, some things are still missings and some fears maybe not faced, and maybe the best things will never happen, but I’m probably the best person I’ve ever been and happier for it, even if serenity isn’t always there.
So yeah, if you want the ‘mental’ conclusion, I’ve come around to the idea that I most definitely don’t have a personality disorder, and that I probably don’t have that much of a mood disorder either, or that if I do, it’s somehow pretty much under control through the experiences I’ve been through. Not sure that makes me ‘mentally normal’ (there’s a word I’m looking for that people like to use, but I’ve forgotten it right now – remembered it a few days later: ‘neurotypical’), but here you are, this is me, these are (some of) the things I have been through. If anyone’s reading maybe you feel it’s not the person you know, but it really is.