Welcome back to more Lines
From An Unfinished Love Song chat!!
If you don’t have a clue what I’m on about, here’s the previous
three posts:
The ‘Coming-Soon’ post: http://www.imnotdisordered.co.uk/2017/09/coming-soon-line-from-unfinished-love.html
The ‘Pre-Launch’ post: http://www.imnotdisordered.co.uk/2017/10/pre-launch-ad-lines-from-unfinished.html
The ‘First-Part-of-the-Book-Review’ post: http://www.imnotdisordered.co.uk/2017/10/pre-launch-ad-lines-from-unfinished.html
I knew that
the second part of Lines From An
Unfinished Love Song would be difficult and perhaps upsetting to read. It
wasn’t just seeing that the second part of the book was named ‘Grief, Depression & PTSD;’ but also
that the first part finished with such a heart-wrenching moment in which Gail
(Curry; the author) lost her wife: Lena.
This feeling
only worsened when I read the first poem; ‘Lost’ and identified 100% with
Gail’s words.
‘A day seems longer than a day
When the only voice that’s heard comes from inside me.’
As Gail
writes about having no one to eat her meals with or to share her thoughts with;
I identified through focusing on my thoughts and feelings when I was
experiencing auditory hallucinations. It was strange hearing voices so
regularly but still feeling all alone, but I think it was to do with the fact
that no one could hear what I could. No one knew what was being said to me; but
me. And if no one knew it existed then how could anyone believe that it did.
Reading Gail’s own experiences of loneliness that had inspired her writing, I
feel kind of lucky that my own experience wasn’t of a relationship.
There were
many more poems in the second part of the book that I could relate to; the next
one being ‘Pain conundrum.’ I think
it’s something that everyone can identify with – that difficulty in separating
the emotional pain and the physical pain, and wondering which hurts more. This battle is ironic
because I used to inflict physical pain to try and ‘take over’ from the
emotional, I thought that making another part of my body hurt would distract
from the fact that my head was so full of detrimental thoughts and feelings. But
then I’d suffer the consequences of the self-harm e.g. hospitalisation,
psychiatric assessments, being sectioned; and the emotional pain would become
more powerful. To make the ‘conundrum’ even tougher; I’ll never forget this one
time when I’d had a cyst on my ovary and it had ruptured so I was in A&E
having a cannula put in for morphine and I commented that I didn’t even feel
the needle and the Doctor told me that is how they know when a person is in
genuine pain because something less significant will not hurt compared to what
is actually wrong with them.
‘Am I struggling to breathe or just fighting to cope?
I wish it mattered either way
But it is irrelevant
it just hurts.
Is that so hard to understand?’
I faced some
confusion when I reached ‘My mask’
because the first words in the comment afterwards, were ‘I don’t like this poem, it is a pretty painful reminder…’ and upon
reading that, I contacted Gail, asking why she had included the poem in the
book. Her reply?
‘Because I think it’s an important poem about the stigma of mental
health and how I felt I had to hide or protect myself from the people I thought
might help me.’
I was pleased
to find more pieces that rhymed such as ‘Lost
without you.’ In this poem, Gail talks about the impact of losing Lena (her
wife) and how it seemed to affect every aspect of her life, and herself as a
person. Some of the lines rang true to me as descriptions of some of the
‘symptoms’ of Borderline Personality Disorder (the mental illness that I once
suffered/battled with). The first described the ‘symptom’ of disassociating
from people, and life in general: ‘I left
the other world behind before it swallowed me…’ Secondly; loneliness: ‘I’d hear a voice in a crowd, turn my head,
but no, it was just my wishful thinking, a distant quiet echo.’ And
finally, one of (in my opinion) the most debilitating ‘symptoms’; difficulty in
having a sense of self, feeling like you don’t know who you are. ‘I doubt myself so easily, there’s nothing
deep inside, no substance, no resilience, no sense of self resides.’
One of the
two longest pieces in this second part of the book is ‘War and peace’ where
Gail makes some incredible analogies between traditional warfare and mental
health. I like that it is straight-forward and easy to understand what it means
and not to take the literal meaning of parts. Another piece just like this is ‘Life cycles’ where Gail successfully,
and perfectly, using analogy to illustrate the different ways of living to
cycles on a washing machine. For example, she associates those who might be
more vulnerable, to ‘delicates’ who need to ‘stay cool, live with care.’ Then there’s those who live in the fast
lane, are compared to living ‘life in the
fast wash, for a dare.’ Those who may just lead average lives are on the ‘main wash, stay down the middle, never
deviate left or right, whatever gets them through the night.’ Economy was
is associated to those literally living that kind of lifestyle: ‘always a struggle to make ends meet, in hot
water, tangled, a muddle, all washed up, out on the street.’ Gail then
discusses the difference between those who ‘have
it all sorted’ and ‘troubled souls.’
She asked if we should envy those who are ‘confident,
laid back, dried flat’ or ‘tell
ourselves they sometimes get limescale.’ Finally:
But some troubled souls
Lose their bearings
Asking what does life mean?
When family and friends check the label
They find, too late
It says Special Needs – dry clean
At the public
launch of ‘Lines From An Unfinished Love Song’ Gail elaborated on the piece
‘Finding my voice.’ She spoke about the importance of June 4th to
her recovery of her voice and sense of self. She talking about the realisation
that a knife to her throat could keep her silent, as could PTSD and stigmatised
responses from professionals; but her writing? That was her voice. No one could
take her writing away from her.
The second
largest piece in the second part of the book is ‘Risk assessment’; in which,
Gail uses her unique humour to tackle the subject of her ‘Amygdala’ and all of its’
instructions and numerous, strange, requests; e.g:
The latest email from my Amygdala declares
The current threat level as ‘Severe’ and reads:
Warning!
Dear Victim
You must be hyper vigilant at all times
The final
poem was ‘The Good Doctor, the tree and
me’ and even just from seeing the title, I was happy. I that if I were to
have a book published or have a project of this magnitude, I’d want to
mention/praise/thank several professionals who I’d label as having a huge part
in my mental health recovery.
To say that
Gail’s public launch event went well, would be an understatement! Whitley Bay
Library (the venue) was completely full and everyone was so supportive and
showed a lot of emotion around Gail’s readings of a selection of piece from the
second part of Lines From An Unfinished Love Song.