Another Face in a Thinning Crowd.

I felt I needed to escape for a few hours today. As has often been the case in recent weeks just getting out of bed took a supreme effort. But I did get up and caught the 11.24 am from Welwyn Garden City to London.

Getting on the tube I headed to old haunts in the West End. In years gone by Charing Cross Road was a mecca for book lovers like me. Now many of the shops are shut. Replaced by chain restaurants and as yet incomplete regeneration it is a shadow of the place I knew back in 1994 during my tarry in a psychiatric hospital in London.

Also different but only much more recently is the huge decrease in the number of people out and about. Have the terrorist atrocities of recent times kept the crowds at bay? I have noticed it on all my most recent trips to town.

As ever in town I'm just another face. The crowd may be thinning but I doubt anyone noticed me as I aimlessly wandered, a shadow and ghost of what I once was, and unknowing as to what is to come.

My most recent setbacks mentally have gone on longer than any previous relapse since 2001. Am I any further on than I was last week? Probably not. I had a good day on Sunday. Less so yesterday. And today I feel lost.

People keep commenting on why I'm not at work. All those snide remarks of the past had I hoped been put to bed. But still people comment. It is demoralising and makes me feel even more of a fraud than I feel anyway. The temptation to hide away is great. Yet I must keep going.

What awaits me and how long it will take is a mystery at the moment. It's been too long in the land of darkness. Where is the light?

I can take solace in the fact that the snow has gone and I'm mobile again. I'm hoping to drive to Hatfield to meet my manager on Thursday. She is full of flu so it may yet be postponed. It has been nearly an entire term since I have been off. I have forgotten so much, people, systems but not the expectation. That I beat myself with. The curse of mental illness is to do everything possible to sabotage what might be to stay stuck in the familiar darkness. Please let tomorrow be better.

See you soon.

I Heard a Voice.