On Colour

 Again transposed from Instagram because it’s really about mental health, I’ve painted a rather exotic picture about what was really an incredibly desperate & desolate period of my life with transient Anorexia - from about 1998/9 until 2008/9 due to the impossibility of being well with pretty constant undx bipolar episodes & now what I know was reactive BPD basically permanently - I had this knowledge, this knowing that I was being incredibly resilient but also was very disassociative a lot of the time & only partly in reality, which I wasn’t wholly aware of.

 My Bipolar episodes, both poles of which leave brain damage, had been relentless & extreme by this time. I would have 9 month untreated depressions where I could barely leave the house & short manic bursts which I suppressed with vast amounts of that popular Central Nervous System depressant, Alcohol. There was less & less periods of ‘normal’ functioning in between & I think I developed an eating disorder out of absolute disgust & disillusionment at my fate as my life wasted away despite quite obviously being somewhat intelligent, creative & kind. Also the financial struggle of this period was relentless.

Again being missed dx every time I visited a GP which was every other year as I remember it, not every year as it was completely demoralising being told there was nothing wrong with me by complete idiots. I finally got a sick note towards the end of this time around 2008 which actually said Anorexia, I had finally manifested something they would give me some sickness benefits for but no no no mental health diagnoses whatsoever until 2016. The extra money enabled me to eat properly tbh.

Here’s the piece from Instagram 

I get an enormous amount of pleasure playing with colour about my person - I always have - I will never forget an incident one summer, I think 2004 - so i was 37 - I was struggling with eating disorder stuff, I basically just drank real coffee, drank lots of water & smoked a lot of roll-ups for a few yrs there - & lived on sunshine, sunbathed naked at home & if I could get to the beach I’d do it there.

Anyway, I was very unwell, nervous system/mentally & id gone to the beach on my own knowing it’d be quiet, put on a bikini & 2 brightly coloured pieces of fabric that I wore all the time that summer - people said I used to dressed as if I was at a festival all the time, that’s fairly accurate - anyway I was floating down the beach completely deranged but so colourful like a burst busted dayglo painting & this elderly couple as I approached asked to take my photo because he said, I looked like the cover of a magazine 💪😘😂 

Sadly, that’s what you get for anorexia unfortunately- more positive attention instead of psychological support - anyway it was rather lovely, out in the actual heat of summer Uk despite the crazyheat of the madness in my head.