Recently, you see, I've been writing my memoirs for publication on the divine Women's Parliamentary Radio, entitled A Year Off the Ward, which is an account of my admirable mental health in the last twelve months or so, and how through positive thinking, creative sublimation and vigorous self-medication I have managed to avoid a) suicide, b) self harm (sort of), c) stalking (again, sort of), d) violence, aggression towards the young, petty theft and arson (all except arson have been a little patchy I admit). Most importantly, I have avoided being sectioned since June 2007 and, like a repeat offender recently released from prison, the fact that I haven't been sent straight back within the month certainly calls for a celebration of the diazepam-and-white-wine-spritzer kind.
However, writing my memoirs seems to have plunged me into a relapse. Now I know what you're thinking lady readers, this should have sent me running to my blog, or encouraged me to compose a series of Mental Health Tweets, which would probably have me lambasted like the poor dear who wrote very sensibly about her miscarriage (did you see it? if not she said:
I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because
there's a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.
Wonderful says Posie! I couldn't have put it better myself.) God knows what the modern middle class neurotic would do were it not for the ready opportunities to monetise one's disturbances. However, I thought that, with the book coming out, I'd keep my material 'fresh' as it were, and try to sublimate furiously through a series of monoprints of female saints castrating dragons figured as menstrual hallucinations (coming soon).
That having failed, I turned to my trusty Freud, the beloathed Father, to do a little self-therapy. I have, you see, run a little slow on the trust fund this season and, with no Christmas shopping done to speak of, need to prioritise my outgoings in order to buy those Jo Malone candles for Emmeline, and Aunt Lily's yearly kilo of Laduree fig macaroons. A therapist, therefore is out of the question, and as feminist critic Sally R. Munt rightly termed such bourgeois femmes as myself 'consumers of therapy', who pay £40 a week so that someone can tell us our thoughts are valid, I am happy to sacrifice this luxury for the greater good.
So, having briskly skimmed through Mourning and Melancholia, Totem etc & Freud's entire case notes on Hysteria (supplemented by readings in Elaine Showalter, the darling, so that I don't get too carried away). I am now to proceed with psycho-analysing myself. Keep updated for next installment! Emmeline is going to hypnotise me now.
As a feminist bride, I'd thought long and hard about what to wear, critical as it is to uphold one's political principles while doing justice to one's admirable waist (cf. the Suffragettes with their great hats). Having decided that my virginity, soul, modesty and so forth were decidedly un-'white', in the bridal symbolic spectrum, I decided to opt for a revolutionary black. Obviously it had to be vast and puffy, and cinch the waist to the vanishing point. I mean I was bloody well getting married. You can't tell from this picture but I also wore an enormous boat shaped black hat based on a Elizabethan design after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This represented feminism's defeat of patriarchy (and my love of QE1). 
That really finished it off. I couldn't marry Ann. Ann was clearly a maniac. I mean, what's the point of marrying a feminist if you're going to wear a dress like that? Getting rid of Ann was harder than deciding not to marry her. At first she didn't understand, then she didn't believe me, then she wanted to kill me. As she came at me wielding the phallus shaped pinata I'd planned to destroy during our vows, I had little choice but to let Emmeline pounce. She's always very defensive of her mistress. There was blood everywhere, like in Carrie.
