Susan Calman and Me

Cheer Up Love book cover by Susan CalmanThere’s nothing going on between me and Susan Calman – honestly! It’s just we seem to have a number of things in common.

Susan Calman is a lesbian, she lives with depression, and she resigned her job back in 2006 to become a stand-up comedian. If you don’t know much about me yet, let me be even clearer about the fact that I’m a lesbian. I also recently resigned my job in order to locate a new quality of life because I need to find better ways to manage my own experiences of depression and anxiety. There’s more! Would you believe we both adore cats? And most importantly of all – it seems we’d both be ecstatic to find ourselves within the world of Cagney and Lacey.

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Lost and Found: the importance of archiving for personal and cultural memory

Archive boxMy depression has returned and it does an amazing job of punishing the memory and subjecting me to self-doubt. As I sit at home, wondering who I am, I’m trying to remind myself of all that I’ve done in the hope this will help me recover a more solid sense of self.

It’s as though someone has rummaged through my mental folders and thrown their contents all over the floor, leaving confusion and disorder. I’m almost certain I have been robbed of something which goes way beyond my self-confidence. Its very likely that I have, but can I know for sure? Because if I ever did make an index or inventory, that’s one of the things which has now disappeared.

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