"Waiting for the out"

There is a fantastic programme on BBC iPlayer just now called Waiting for the Out, about a young man who teaches philosophy in prison. And he hallucinates, he sees his dad, who isn't there, on the bus, in a pub, all over the place. 

He also has a brother in real life who he gets on with. I feel sick when I say that word, I usually avoid it. He has a sibling, he has a male sibling who he gets on with. And this sibling was in prison, like the dad, but now the sibling has turned a corner. Whereas the philosopher, he's straight down the line. He went to university, doesn't get into trouble. But he has OCD, as well as hallucinating his father. I don't know much about OCD, but I wonder if his fixations, which are about the stove in particular, are specifically to do with something that happened to him, or whether it's just something random that he picked up on. The more I dream, and I am dreaming more, finally, the more I think the brain may not be as random as we sometimes think.

I wonder what the philosophy teacher's "out" will be. 

I wonder if I will get an "out", or how much of an "out", and when. I wonder how much of my life, of the things I can't do anymore or don't have, I will regain.

I will never have the relationship I had with mum before Pigface took her for the second time. It's not because of her illness, because she was already ill. I cannot imagine going to the rothouse they put her in on my own, or taking her to an event or a concert, which used to be a regular occurrence when she lived here. All of that, my relationship with her it's as though someone spat all over your food and laced it with poison for good measure and there isn't  an option to take it away and get more. What there was was all there was, a one-off.  

 I can't send mum cards or gifts or pictures because he takes them. It's part of campaign "Erasure".

No matter how much therapy, neither can I imagine ever going to the council or any other organisations with a skewed power structure for help they are legally required to provide - because I have repeated experience of that not happening and there being no accountability.

Simillarly I cannot imagine ever trusting pen pushers, people that just tick boxes: lawyers, the NHS, bureaucrats, educators. They don't do what they're supposed to do and then they just cover it up. It happens in government agencies where power is skewed and with e.g. GPs who are private but paid by the government. None of them are interested in what they may have done wrong but they aren't interested in improvement through accountability, it's the very last thing they want. They close their eyes. 

I recognise that repeated, shocking experiences have formed a map of generalised danger.  But I believe that map is accurate and so I can't see how therapy will change that.

There were so many lessons to be learned from dad's death: from the arrogant consultant who wrote him off, to the GP who was too scared to manage his condition properly and even joked about his poor, suppurating legs, to the geriatric consultant he was finally handed to. I don't think any of them thought twice about dad's story. I don't think any of then even really knew it, let alone wondered if he might have lived longer had any of them acted differently. I don't think any one of them did. They just saw a sick man in his early eighties. So dad's "out" was the terminal kind.

"We aren't going to talk about the past" said the SS woman, wiping away all of the Pigface abuses at one fell swoop. If she deemed it all "in the past", well, nothing to investigate, was there.

A friend who has just retired and doesn't own a house was telling me today about how he plant to get his very elderly mother to sell him her house at a good price while she still has all her faculties. 

- Your sisters won't like that I said. They'll want to sell to a stranger for a higher price and the three of your share the profit. 

- I don't care what they think, he said. I don't really care for them.  They have houses even two, some of them. I don't have a house. 

- But they'll think that's your problem. 

He shrugged. His view was that he'd had bad luck in the financial crisis plus he'd lost his wife.

He planned to fight them, to take from them, really, what was rightfully all of theirs, and while there mother was still alive. I found it distasteful. He had suffered but I didn't think he should be angling for the house.  He saw it as dog eat dog.  If he didn't make his move, maybe he thought he'd be left homeless.

I didn't fight. My health had suffered badly because of the Pigface attacks and I didn't feel I had a choice but to relinquish my right as Power of Attorney.  He'd already taken everything anyway.

The way I see it now I might have another twenty years to get through and that is how I see it. Just doing it, just getting through it until I don't have to any more.

I was watching a terrible series to fall asleep.  One character says he's lost his joy.  I don't know when I last felt joy, but getting up is hard. Everything drags. 

Getting out, getting past. Or do you just not? Is there no going back? Do you just blank it out, suppress it down, grin and bear it, limp about, zombie around? 

Or is there some other out? One that isn't terminal?