The Other Me
An ongoing serial about neurosis, beginning with anxiety that burgeoned through my teenage years, and grew into issues also with depression and OCD, amongst other things.
The Other Me
‘Shut In’ vii. It was like yesterday when I was in my early twenties, playing indoor cricket, socialising, bartending, and trying to make a writing career for myself. Now I was in my late twenties, with little social activity, still writing, and still living at home. Still locked away in my fortress of solitude. Everybody accepted me as a hermit. Everybody saw me as too fragile for the real world. So I just lived the way I knew how. Stan and I still caught up, although not as much we used to. As had occurred with my other friends, he’d moved to a house well outside my sphere of comfort.…
The Other Me
‘Shut In’ vi. Do things long enough, and they become your routine. Get stuck in a routine, and you don’t think about what else there is. Your routine becomes your life – your world. For most who work, the break in the routine is the weekend, when they might go out, unwind; for me, the weekend was just another two days. So when a cousin’s wedding approached, I advised my mum months in advance that I wouldn’t be going. This was unlike the couple of times I’d been out, chaperoned in a controlled environment to buy Wolf, or see Mike – two excursions that were brief and which, if worse…