Diana Stones Blog

Just by chance I happened to open an old diary from 1985 and it felt open on a significant page.  The end of a somewhat odd relationship with a girl who had Bi-Polar. At the time I was not aware of the devastating effect that Bi-Polar has on peoples lives and I had not identified my the nature of my own mental problems either.
I worked back through the diary and discovered that the relationship had lasted 6 months almost to the day. I suspect that there were many reasons why it did not work out but I have no doubt that one of them was simply my being far too needy.  Also to be honest I was not terribly interesting company in those days and may well have seemed very boring indeed.  If I had been able to meet me then I would I think have found someone with very limited horizons doing a dead end job that was easily amused and incredibly naive and also in complete denial of their own nature.

What is strange to me is that I should find out 25 years later that she had taken her own life a few years after I knew her as I had always imagined her as the kind of person that would have succeeded at most things she wanted to do…

Life leads us down some very strange paths.

Diana on the Charles Bridge in Prague

 From a holiday when things were changing quite a bit.

Just me

Things are not quite going the way I expected on the whole.  Its coming up to 2 year’s  since I left the Civil Service and nothing has gone as I planed. I have learned a lot and mostly I feel less stressed and apart from a few minor lows I have not had any re-occurrence of serious depression but the plans I hoped to put in to action to support myself have flopped quite badly.

I have achieved quite a few things that I am proud of including:

• National Radio play for one of my Glass Cage songs
• Local radio play for Elephant Shelf
• Performing in a fringe festival
• Performing regularly as an accompanist in a west end venue
• Singing lead vocals live with a band regularly
• Telling  jokes as part of the duo act
• Recording and mastering a CD for Elephant Shelf  and getting 1100 pressed
• Playing at some very well known and respected venues
• Joining PRS

I could go on, its been quite a learning curve so on a personal level it’s been good and worth doing but financially its not going well.
I had hoped to do some IT freelancing but on the last project I got unwell and had to stop though ironically I seem to be functioning better than ever now. But I fall apart under any sort of pressure. There has to be something that I can do to make up the short fall financially with out cracking up again.