Ramblings.

All is well. A new iMac laptop is on it's way. Now all I have to do is fire it up. I'm so nervous! So long since i had to launch a new computer and i'm not very adept. This week I have deleted Sandy and I from Facebook somehow. Not that I use it, nor does he, but we like to know we have the option. All I did was voice my opinion on a government site then panic when it said I could link my entry to Facebook. It sounded alarming. I thought S would be credited with my soap-box stuff about planning application for a local development submitted by the Tesco company and, he wouldn't want that ruining his street cred. I pressed 'cancel' and now we are history.

It's extraordinary how topics, people, events collide in my life, in everyone's. We all have examples. I was reading the book 'by' Kim Noble (ghosted) who is a non-existant woman, given that name at birth, but her body was then later inhabited by 100 or so personalities as horrific abuse caused mulitiple fractures. The dominant personality Patricia, began painting to encourage their daughter ( a daughter she doesn't remember giving birth to and who, until the diagnosis, she imagined to be the child of a friend always being left for her to mind). Other personalities found they also enjoyed the opportunity to splash paint around, express themselves or just have fun, and now they have group exhibitions, all except one of them who wants her own exhibitions! It sounds crazy. Staggering to hear just what the brain is capable of. None of Patricia's personalities were aware of the existence of the others and though their lives seemed oddly disjointed they somehow made sense of them, with occasional spells in mental institutions . They did suffer and there were terrible sadnesses, like the woman who gave birth to the baby girl only to have her taken away by social services. Another personality fought to get her back but the birth mother who had lost a newborn couldn't accept the infant and still mourns her baby. There are also the funny sides. One woman has a driving licence, another loves water and always plunges into any she sees, which led to the driver finding herself sitting in her car fully clothed but soaking wet in front of a fountain after the water lover had had her bathe. Years ago I read 'Sybil' about a woman with multiple personalities . It was made into a film, which was gripping but turned out to be a scam cooked up by a therapist. That experience made me wary of 'All of
Me' but it does seem authentic. Nowadays the condition is called Dissociative identity Disorder. I'm tempted to be cross my brain can't come up with something more interesting so that bits of me at least could actually write something worth reading! More seriously, if we could access all our brains have in the way of functions how exciting that might be!

With all this in my head I found out that two siblings I knew as cheerful teenagers in Brussels have been diagnosed schizophrenic and, now
in their 40's are still living with their parents. Their cheerfully normal younger sister came into the shop yesterday, startling me, because she looked like a stranger, by saying 'Carol, it is you isn't it?'.