I feel much better now, I really do

Well, not MUCH better but not at death’s door.
I am having a bath and reading…

Panic back or heart attack?

Well, not heart attack maybe but I don’t feel well. I have lain down horizontal twice this evening and both times had heart palpitating feelings.
Don’t feel great. Trying to remember if the panic attacks felt like this.

Mental Health Hotline

Bloody answering machine.
Left message with absolute confidence I will not receive a call back..
This is the 0203 313 5661

Blogging versus diary

Can’t believe it’s been so long since i blogged. i used to keep a paper diary.

Will use this to keep track of stuff. Woke up this morning with lots of scattered thoughts.

Am depressed. 9.15 feeling overwhelmingly gloomy and unenthusiastic of life.

For some while now aware that my dreams (never plans) for my life are not going to take place. i was always unrealistically optimistic about the future but now all I see is a long miserable decline.

Still convinced my pessimistic outlook coincided with  the PA which coincided with massive mercury amalgam filling.

Cured fear of drinking?

I think I have finally cured my phobia of drinking. When the panic attacks started 3 years ago it started with me drinking some cider with a friend after a meeting. After that I had some bad experiences of anxiety to do with drinking and it got so that I couldn’t stand even being near pubs or with drinkers. This had some good side effects (lost weight, saved money) but was a major barrier to ‘normal’ socialising leaving me dreading any social even that included drinking.

I have had drinks but always gingerly and just nothing to excess, always watching out for the dreaded ‘out of control’ anxiety.

Now tonight I bought some Hoegaarden (6 small bottles) and quite happily glugged down a couple.

I want Paul McKenna to cure my fear of flying

I like Paul McKenna. He has good taste (I saw him eyeing up my then girlfriend at the Notting Hill Carnival a few years ago.)

Paul McKenna I can change your life  Sky 3 late (2am). Tonight he attempted to cure a woman of her agoraphobia (apparently she’s been alone for only 10 mins total in the last five years). Paul went up to Hull of all places. He must be dedicated. Or they paid him a lot of money. What worked, the NLP or the hypnosis? He does speak very fast and uses a lot of gestures and taps.

NB She had CBT which didn’t work…

Later after he left, the panic came back. How much the original cure was it down to the force of his personality. Interestingly she says ‘Im panicking so I can’t remember all the thing she told me to think about’. She comes down to London for a second session (obviously Paul’s dedication didn’t stretch to another visit to Hull 😉 . She ends up cured but still living in Hull so swings and roundabouts really.

Also, he treats a gambler. He explains the Serotonin high due to gambling. He treats this by changing the association for gambling to a negative one. It seems quite simplistic. Reminds one of a weakened version of the treatment in A Clockwork Orange. Rewiring the brain.

Seeing the agoraphobic helps me because I can see that it’s just a condition that needs treating. It’s not something unique to me.

The best for me is the flying phobic who says ‘I just see that as an accident waiting to happen’. That’s just how I feel. I managed a short flight at Christmas but together is the fear of having an attack the other end, being so far from home He is resistant to Paul’ s initial NLP stuff but the hypnosis does it . After an hour he is good to go and flies. Paul McKenna is my new hero. The kind of change he manages in people in such a short space of time is pretty miraculous. I will blog more about his methods later (on this entry) when I have time.

Another shitty day

I feel like I’m going to ‘snap’ at any moment. Maybe the 2 Starbucks coffee sachets I had this morning.

Neuroticism levels set to 8/10? 

Didn’t sleep a great deal; on the Skype/txt to Scandinavia last night til early hours. Now I have to go see someone. They called from a local organisation I help out with last night. Of course I have been offering to help all this week when it was convenient to ME but they dithered until it was inconvenient to me. I like to do things NOW when I’m in the mood/up for it. It isn’t a promisory note to be cashed anytime they feel like it. Unfortunately I need them quid pro quo so I have to go over and endure the fucking around.

 

Trying to remember what the Psychologist advice was.

Lars Von Trier: Fear of flying, depression

Lars Von Trier interview: Season in hell

 

Published Date: 12 July 2009

IF Lars von Trier hoped to find salvation in Antichrist, his critics had other ideas. The Dogme director tells James Mottram why chaos still reigns despite overcoming severe depression to try to resurrect his career

LARS von Trier is not a well man. As the sign painted in blood-red lettering on his office door says, “Chaos Reigns”. Jittery, nervous and unsettled, the 53-year-old Dane even jumps when his mobile phone rings midway through our interview.

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And there’s no question that Von Trier has a lot of fear and anxiety. Among his multiple phobias, his fear of flying means every time he makes a pilgrimage to Cannes film festival, he drives for five days from Denmark in a battered old camper van. 

This time, he arrived with the festival’s most talked-about film, Antichrist. Despite Cannes being his spiritual home – he won the Palme d’Or there in 2000 for his musical Dancer In The Dark, starring Björk – the film’s first press screening caused uproar, a mix of jeers and nervous laughter. Billed as Von Trier’s attempt at gothic horror, the film sees Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg retreat to a cabin in the woods to heal their psychological wounds after their young son fell to his death from an open window. What follows is a gruelling odyssey, as Gainsbourg’s unnamed mother becomes increasingly hysterical, turning on her husband – and herself – in a brutal last half-hour. 

In the press kit, in what he called the “director’s confession”, Von Trier dubs Antichrist “the most important film of my entire career”. The reason is quite simple: his depression had left him unable to work. Six months into his illness, he wrote a script as a cathartic exercise – “as a test to see if I would ever make another film”. Still, he was listless, completing the screenplay with little enthusiasm, adding scenes and images – often culled from dreams – with no concern for logic. Dubbing it “a glimpse into the dark world of my imagination, into the nature of my fears”, what spilled out onto the page was anything but pretty. 

Ironically, the end result is one of Von Trier’s most style-conscious films since the days of his early works Europa and The Element Of Crime. Take the bravura opening black-and-white sequence as Dafoe and Gainsbourg copulate in slow motion. It’s a far cry from the back-to-basics aesthetic of his Dogme95 manifesto, when Von Trier (who made 1997’s The Idiots under its so-called Vow of Chastity) urged filmmakers to shoot films on handheld cameras in natural lighting with no special effects. 

Nevertheless, Von Trier, who wanted to merge a documentary-like style with more “monumental” shots, was unhappy with the end results. “I don’t think I really succeeded,” he moans.

The closest we get to a laugh in Antichrist is when a fox – eating its own entrails no less – turns to the camera and repeats Von Trier’s office door slogan, “Chaos Reigns”. “As you know, I work very much from humour,” he says. “And we know that this (a talking fox] is a horror killer, but on the other hand, the fox demanded a line – so what can you do?” 

By the time Von Trier arrived in Cannes – infuriating one Daily Mail journalist in the press conference by refusing to justify the film and instead proclaiming himself “the best director in the world” – chaos did reign. When the film premiered, he left the screening without waiting to receive the applause. “I’m not a stable person,” he shrugs. “I felt quite a lot of hostility in the room, and then a stupid little thing (happened] like a light didn’t go on, and we had to sit there for seven minutes and wait for an endless time. I’m normally a very friendly man but at a certain point I couldn’t take it anymore. Then someone said, ‘People are clapping. If you go, it’s an insult to them.’ And that was enough. I was off!” 

With the film proposing that Gainsbourg’s character is the embodiment of the Antichrist, it once again raises the age-old accusations that Von Trier is a misogynist. Just recall Dogville and Manderlay – the first two parts of his as-yet-incomplete USA trilogy – and the punishments handed out to the character of Grace, played respectively by Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard. Certainly, a brief glance at Von Trier’s private life hints at where his problems stem from. Back in 1995 his mother made a deathbed confession that her late husband was not Von Trier’s biological father. Within a year he divorced his first wife and converted to Catholicism (hitherto believing he was Jewish). 

So what made him see woman as the Antichrist? “I am probably not very religious,” he explains. “It’s very obvious to me that religion is something that’s invented by man. So suddenly I saw that the Antichrist would be the woman because she wouldn’t accept the religion that was so typically manmade.” He’s increasingly come to believe he’s an atheist, he says. “I can’t be honest and say to my children (he has four], ‘There is a God.’ It’s not possible.” He lets out a long sigh. “I think you can say that I’m a pessimist. It’s the only thing that has come out of all these years of therapy.”

It’s there for all to see in Antichrist, a Freudian fairytale that’s arguably saved Von Trier. Did he accomplish what he set out to achieve? “It’s a good question,” he says, “but I don’t know. Because of this mental illness, I was not expecting so much. I was just trying very hard to be there physically and finish the film.” With no idea what his next film will be, I’m left with the impression that he still has a long way to go before he’s better. Certainly, the vitriolic reaction to Antichrist in Cannes has shaken him. No wonder he stops short of saying that filmmaking is always therapeutic. “That would be too easy,” he says. “Then I would be really, really healthy after all these films.” 

• Antichrist is released 24 July www.antichristthemovie.com

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/sos-review/Lars-Von-Trier-interview-Season.5451263.jp

Shall I buy a Mac?

Exhausted last night.  Kept up chatting to Swedish girl who wasnt free til very late. Should have gone to bed early but of course didnt like a moth to flame

Went to Park to write email sin Starbucks. A Vento with an extra shot expresso then later a decaf.

Felt odd on bus to Westfield. Hyper-focusing. Was it too much coffee? My usual paranoia about food/drink intake.

Toothache left lower canine. i probably need a root canal or something   equally horrendous. I should be spending mullah on a good dentist not contemplating a grands worth of Power MacBook. Procrastination on the dental fron – I don’t trust dentists. Mac provides a positive self-stroke or just retail therapy

Good news o housing front. A phone call means I may have a bright future in a flat near mine.

The 6 month mark

Staggered to the end of a pretty dire week. Stress and anxiety levels pretty high.

I just want to ‘stop the world I want to get off’ ! Have realised I should nevr have taken on the Manager job for a business I knew little about. My former girlfriend – who begged for a job – has been pretty hopeless which just adds to the pressure on me.

I always seen to end up in these awkward disaster-prone situations. People try and take advantage of the fact that I am enthusiastic and never-say-die. In fact this wek I felt very ‘die’ and just wanted to walk away as i have been advised by several friends and family.

I used to start the day feeling dreadful and then gradually improve throughout the day til I was positively enthusaiastuc by the end of the day. Now I am just miserable and anxiety-ridden throughout. It’s because there are potentially serious consequences to what I am doing.

I sunbathed today to try and relax. Didn’t work since I am unhappy with what my illness has done to my body.