katie writes stuff

Cynical brain: so that's how Yahoo are financing Tumblr - by screwing over photographers.

Rational brain: so before, I paid $25/year for unlimited space with no advertising. Now (because my pro account lapsed without sufficient warning) I get to pay double for less space, and as an added bonus, the pleasure of providing Yahoo with an advertising platform. Forgive me if I don't understand which bit I'm meant to be impressed by?

I guess the time has come for me to finally redevelop thisiskatie.co.uk as a portfolio website rather than a photoblog. (In the copious spare time I have between exam revision, doing a full-time work placement, helping to run a conference and getting enough sleep, of course.)

So there's that post, Depression Part Two, that explains so perfectly what depression is for anyone who's not felt it. It was haunting reading it, thinking back to the worst of it - four years ago now, somehow.

"And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything."

This, this is exactly what I felt, almost constantly for 2 or 3 years. I can't believe how perfectly this encompasses how depression was for me, the lack of hope and emotion and feeling.

And in my case, the antidepressants made it worse, because they just highlighted the emptiness. When I had no downs, it was just constant NOTHING. No sadness, no happiness, no excitement, no hope, no joy. Apathy might even be too descriptive, because apathy suggests feeling nothing, and... I didn't choose to feel nothing. I just woke up each day, and there was no life in me at all. I stopped taking the pills so that I could cry again.

And this:

"I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn't feel obligated to keep existing."

I never actually wanted to die, but I couldn't see the point in breathing anymore. I found it hilariously ironic that the only reason I was holding on to physiological 'life' was the knowledge that my friends and family didn't realise how dead I was inside, and when I thought about that, about how my friends wanted 'me' around, even though I had become little more than a shell who just happened to get the facial expressions right most of the time... it wasn't me at all, and when I realised, I wanted to laugh, but I couldn't even crack a smile.

I didn't have a piece of corn to show me hope.

I told my doctor that I didn't want to take any more antidepressants, and I started to cry again. Then, crying made me want to actually deal with the awfulness in my head, so I asked for therapy, and when they said "how about counselling?" I said no, because I was past the point where talking was any good: when you have that kind of depression, and someone asks you what's wrong, the only honest answer is that there is nothing, that you don't know. How do you talk about that? So I asked for CBT, and I got lucky.

It's getting on for 2 years since I had my last therapy session, and I'm not going to tell you that life is brilliant now, because depression like the depression I had doesn't just up and go away overnight. What therapy did for me was teach me how to challenge the negative thoughts, and how to have the confidence so that when the negativity in my head was telling me that the world hated me, I could ask the world if it was true, which is scary as all hell sometimes, but it turns out the world doesn't hate me nearly half as much as the blackness would have me think it does.

Cognitive behavioural therapy isn't a miracle piece of corn hiding under the fridge. It's a lifetime of work, hard work. You go to the sessions and you learn how to do it but when the sessions are over, if you don't keep it up, then the negativity comes back. And it's hard to get the motivation to ask for that help when all you feel is blackness, but as cliché as the phrase has become, it gets better.

A few months ago, with the help of those friends who wanted that empty shell to keep on breathing, to fill back up with life and hope and enjoyment, I learnt how to laugh again.

Favourite moment of university so far is my anatomy lecturer's scathing criticism of vampires seen on a TV documentary:

"These self-described vampires, they use anti-clotting agents when they phlebotomise their mates, so that they don't end up like flat-cap wearing Lancashire blokes chowing down on a black pudding... the mix of intelligence and sheer stupidity is astounding."

Student life continues to be excellent. The workload is intense but manageable, I'm maintaining a social life both in and out of uni, and I'm utterly knackered but still very excited.

Tomorrow I find out where my first placement will be, which means that although I'm on a self-directed study day, I will probably be awake at an ungodly hour so that I can type up last week's lecture notes continuously hit refresh on the Blackboard site.

Huzzah!

So, I found out today that Salford received 783 applications to the mental health branch this year, and they only conducted 150 interviews. Of the candidates interviewed, 60 students got a place. I'm one of 8% of applicants to be studying this course this year.

I feel pretty fucking awesome right now.

PS, being a nursing student is ace!

My granddad died quite suddenly at some point in the last few days. He was found by his neighbour yesterday, who went to check on him because he was feeling "a bit funny" last week, and we got a phonecall this morning giving us the news.

We used to be close, but since he emigrated, he's been a distant part of our lives in more ways than one - and because of a petty family feud in 2007, I can't even remember when it was I last saw him, or talked even. (I told him where to stick his bullshit claims that homeopathy and ionised water would cure my terminally ill stepfather, and my mum refused to tell me off for it. He spent 2½ weeks ignoring us before finally going back to Spain and has hardly spoken to mum or I since.)

It came as something of a surprise - as far as we knew he was fit and healthy - but the general feeling is that a cantankerous 80 year old man who survived two heart attacks (including one from the top of a ladder) and 60 odd years of smoking had a pretty good run at life, and we're just glad this didn't follow a long drawn-out illness. It was time to give up, so he did.

RIP Norbert Michael Lynham, 1932-2013.

Because of my mum's cancer last year, I've been referred to the local family history clinic, and I'm now in the process of filling in an exceedingly long form about the various things that have ailed and killed family members up to great grandparents, aunts and uncles.

I've just had a chat with my aunt on my dad's side, who told me that my great aunt died of kidney failure. This isn't such a big deal in itself, except it turns out that her doctor's attitude was apparently "people can survive with one wonky kidney so we're not going to put you forward for transplant".

This attitude probably wouldn't have ultimately caused her death if her doctors had found out before the post-mortem examination that she only was only born with one kidney...

It is August 11th 1999.

You're in Cornwall to see the solar eclipse, and as the time of totality approaches, people around you begin to notice that the sun itself won't be visible from the beach that you're on because of a tall rocky outcrop.

Unfortunately, you broke your ankle during a trampolining lesson two weeks beforehand, and whilst every other person on the beach wades out to sea for a better vantage point, you are left sitting on your beach chair, alone, with a black binbag tied around your left leg to protect the cast from sea water. It's frustrating, but it does make for an amusing story to tell for the rest of your life - that day you sat alone on a beach watching the world walk out to sea.

In fact, 13½ years later, you are sitting in a teashop in Manchester, relating this story to the best friend of one of your closest friends but whom you've never met before. Halfway through your story, she puts down her teacup and listens intently, and then exclaims: "Oh my god, you're Bag Girl!"

thatbloodywoman was on that beach that day, and remembers me clear as if it were yesterday. As you would, of course, if you saw somebody sat alone on a beach wearing a binbag around one leg, but seriously, what are the chances?

Find the nearest book to you, turn to page 45, and read the first sentence: this describes your sex life in 2013.

"When one approaches do not panic."

Marginally better than 2012. I really ought to find a more appropriate book for next year, though.

Related: you can cope.

Conversation with a three year old girl my mum looks after just now:

M: what's this? (holding up the apron of a nurse uniform from the fancy dress box)
Katie: it's a nurse's apron. Would you like to put it on and be a nurse?
M: (thinks) no. I'm too good to be a nurse. I'm going to be a doctor.