"Retracing Chasey" +Recorded Audio
TRAVEL BACK IN TIME TRYING TO FIND MY MAGICAL MOJO! To Lighten The Load For Future Fun Writes...x (Say That With a Mouthful of Crumpet Smothered in Marmite) --- and that one too! 3 Oct. 2024
(THIS audio recording of this entire newsletter, MESSAGES FROM ME, +plus+ added conversational commentary is available too! JUST PRESS PLAY.) It’s almost 1 HOUR with me, thank you for listening (if you do!) from, Chasey..x
I play the part of a well trained mental health prisoner. I drink disgusting amounts of caffeinated drinks as ‘‘all nutcases do’’ it has carried me through my schizophrenic sentence since my mid-twenties, gets me through my relationship like a good girl. Today is a new day, a good day for getting over myself and getting on with my own shit, because it’s beginning to feel like a pantomime newsletter.
I accept that it is probably always going to be a bit of shit show (and I like that about my writing, it’s messy, raw and over the top with too much info). I’m living and writing all my cares, worries and woes (and that’s ok too) but I’m doubling up on my downsides, dwelling too much in my despair, and allowing dickhead bullshit to get the full focus as well as being the background distraction.
I want to bring something of a different deep dish to the table for a little bit. Another side of me. I need to practice the art of backing off, and embrace the ‘making it up’ joy to be found in creative writing. I need to get creative, challenge my mind, stop fucking complaining, and step out of my comfort zone.
I need to find my fun side again too. So, having said that, none of this new transformation will be happening here and now. No, that will start tonight hopefully, if I can manage to get this out in the next hour or so. I like to write projects in one take, spanning an entire day but never editing or cut and pasting, building blocks, putting multipal parts together.
Maybe that’s another new formula I should dig into for us, me to create something of interest, which is going to be good for you, and for me - something for me to say I can be proud of. So, today I have drawn upon the past Substack and picked and pieced together one or two previous newsletters - going way back to last year when it all began. 2023: I was still in the same situation as I am now but my creative bulimia was at its highest peak, and still rising.
My mind and work was all over the place, talking about personal experiences without much care as to keeping everything linear. I mixed tone, voice, style, topic and made a choppy scrapbook of baggage into a meaningful and mindless mix of melancholic historical humorous homemade media milkshake of a mess whilst doing my best ‘creativeness’ that I could muster, and it’s not all bad. In some ways it’s much better than my most recent endeavours.
Thursday 3 October 2024 - (daylight hours)
My intention is to retrace my footsteps on where and how this Substack journey all began. The type of person I was when I was having lots of experimental fun with the information I chose to share. When I had my fingers in oh-so-many pies. POETRY was where my writing journey started. I really do want to try my hand at more of that again. I did go to the extreme of establishing a newsletter specifically for my poems, and poetry in general but then I went off the entire process. I think I just lost interest or confidence in my ability to write free-verse poems. I got side-tracked with obsessing over a fucking good poet, and that was me done. He was da’ bomb. I couldn’t match. I carried a torch for him for quite some time but now I am back on track to sort out my own poetic life going forward. Oooh, aren’t I being extra productive for once? and, on a frickin’ Thursday to boot! I don’t know how this works but October, Thursdays and 8:00 pm are all the same time. The same feeling like I just want to cosy up and wind down.
To save you trawling all the way through everything, I have gone over it again for you and have read it with you. Maybe listen in? I’m sure along the way I may find myself having to add extra commentary and conversation into it too so it might be a long one. (That’s what HE said!) hahaha. I just need to go back and lift my spirits a bit because my hand feel haunted with misery, so having a break from writing will do the trick for the now. I hope you find me good company while I’m playing in your ears. Maybe, get something else done while having me playing in the background! (That’s what SHE said!”) I was actually considering you doing the hoovering, or laundry with me harping on and on and that way you may, just might be able to retain and tolerate me a little longer.. hopefully, to the end. Best wishes… x.x.x Please Enjoy! x.x.x
(audio recording also available above)
If you like your newsletters without politics or preconceptions or seeking a break from the norm you may have just found your new hangout
THE ORIGINS OF CHASEY DELANEY & JUSTCLINGINGON💗 (also see: NEW:JUSTCLINGINGON💗 ) and why not follow or subscribe to my other favourite place to hide sometimes: CHASINGTHEMUSE —— thank you so much for coming with me down memory lane! …xoxox
This IMAGE is ME looking so peaceful and content in my own demonic non-photogenic sweet little way!
This is the WIP eBook version that I think I have abandoned to concentrate on entirely on Substack [2023 - all errors were present at the date of publication]
(See my message, conversational audio recording of everything you are about to read available at top of page)
I'm Chasey Delaney, rolling into my 40's (not a euphemism for my weight or anything - if that's a thing I'd rather say 'bouncing' into them) I am unhappily enjoying being unmarried but aesthetically stuck and totally miserable at all times. Except for the slight respite from the pain of being alive, I survive alright by making sure that I am oblivious to the world outside my window. I know it's there but pretend like it isn't and wish it wasn't.
I also wish that I wasn't here or there or anywhere , especially not outside my window. Don't worry, I don't want to die not yet... not again... later maybe. One day when I'm a lot older and have a huge blue diamond to throw into the sea after making a crew of influential gold-diggers, sit through and listen to whatever turns out to be my one and only true love story!
MAYBE, one of you delicious people reading this might wish to join me later for a drink? or a dance? or even a quick shag round the back of the pub!! Ha! As anything these days, can be deemed ROMANCE to me. I half wish that I was serious. Truth be known - I'm not really a dare to do anything of the sort.
I'm afraid of annoying my own shadow, I'm scared to disrupt anything that I actually have going for me in case it turns out much worse. I like change but not chance. Which is usually the case especially when dealing with my hair. I have to wake up in the morning, examine my surroundings and simply accept that this is as good as it gets.
It is good sometimes. Most of the time. Until I realised that I'm totally infatuated with this guy who has got me totally addicted to it. Romance; and....it's not my husband. My husband isn't even my fucking husband (he's not anyone else's either! I'm not that kind of a slut!). I don't know what else to call him. My lover, my carer, the bane of my financial freedom. It's a long and boring predicament.
Fourteen years of living together with this boyfriend and now I am too old to be allowed to refer to him as that. I might try to say partner but he supersedes all that I am worth (he is way above me - we are not equal) with just one fart of his; the voice and opinions of dog's shit are much more important than me or mine.
At least that's how he sees it. I am enjoying the time I have with this man. I am enjoying the process of being quite 'content' and 'settled down' and 'stagnant' and... that's about it. I love him - but I would love him more from a distance.
What to expect from this eBook or me:
I wish I had a theme idea. Fuck! I wish I had just an idea of what these pages will contain. I have nothing of a memory to offer you stories or anecdotes and little of a brain left, after copious amounts of drugs - enough for seven girls' lives , nevermind just one - mine. I am a bit of an unabashed sniff head. I like to call myself a writer and sometimes masquerade as a Bedroom DJ. Most of all I don't know who or what the fuck I am.
I have nothing that belongs to me. My time is not mine. My life is lived for others, at a push or to be pushed into, my world is solely concentrated to just the inner world.
My door on the internal Sadhouse is opening just enough to fill a small electronic book. The one you are reading. Just before you fuck it off as a bad idea.
Remember how lucky you are to be able to form ideas and act on them. Some of us just love to love and respect your decision. Still, wouldn't it be interesting to carry on and have a further look?
Shall I talk about myself first or last - to be fair, I'd rather not. I know how annoying that can be and I'm not talking about me now. As I said "I'd rather not" that's what I'm referring to the statement, the phrase, the response to every question or direction apparently.
I'd rather not is a running theme through from a recent book recommendation. Bartleby The Scrivener. Everyone says he is weird and quirky without any explanation or back story to shed some light as to why he is like that. So he is always thought of as strange. Got me thinking about myself a bit.
If I tell my backstory will that make my own life and behaviours easier to understand!? I mean, if only I could remember what happened to me, to make me this way, then maybe I could be explained to everyone who has decided that I too am an oddball.
I am a strange one, a bit weird, loopy , mad , bad , sad, crap, shit, stupid - you name it but my most favourable name to be called is simply just a "fucking cunt".
I haven't yet read that book. I don't think I'll bother. I don't care much for people like myself. Unexplained and strange.
How much do I know about my past?
find out below 👇 the paywall is the complete version of the 13 page ebook, no bells or whistles, no holes barred. Warts and all account of my personal history and experience. Very sensitive information that I should probably never have written! I'm an honest ‘writer’ and also a messy f*ck head with immature takes on life experience, hence my decision to add the *secret section* 👇
Nothing much more than being an unwanted pregnancy. Premature baby. Bald until the age of four. Ginger haired lost little girl. To my seventeen year old mother I was my dad's kid. To my seventeen year old father I was my mum's problem. To my grandparents I was worth fighting the courts for guardianship.
Thankfully, for the sake of not knowing any different, they won. So, I was able to rejoice in the intermittent knowledge that everyone fought for me. That's the closest offer of an emotional connection I ever got with the family.
I was quiet. I didn't bother asking questions about the big stuff. Like, who the fuck are you making me hug now? You say that's my dad. What is dad? Some guy with the same colour hair who makes me laugh at Christmas. Wakes me up at daft o'clock to open all my presents.
He loves ripping through the wrapping paper so fast so he can do his job with me and fuck off even faster to his other real and important family. I'm not allowed to ride my new bike around the corner to his house to play with his stepchildren anymore. Apparently, I am a disruption to their family.
I am told by nana in a pitiful voice "stay at home today love, your dad can't have you around there every day anymore" it's not his fault. I knew that as I still stuck my bottom lip out, sulked and stroked the tassel streamers connected to my handlebars. Something else stuck out. I couldn't process it but I knew that I was being rejected again. There's no place where I'm supposed to be naturally.
Everything is manufactured by my grandparents. I don't fit in. This is just somewhere else to stay when I have nobody or nowhere. This is my nowhere home. Mum at least disappeared too far for my young imagination to even contemplate. I am in Manchester, the north-west of England and she is in London, the 'down south'.
I imagined as far away as being on the moon somewhere dressed up and dancing with the dazzling stars. I worry about her all the time. Recurring nightmares of her falling off a ladder, in through an open window to a tall exitless room. There's a deep drop and the walls of fresh plaster offer no grip to climb back up. No ladder inside. She's stuck. I cry and cry and yell at her to stop. I don't wet the bed. I just wake up and run to the bathroom to pee. Constantly.
When I'm old enough to meet her properly, I overhear her story. She's going to be in a big magazine. Women's Own or That's Life both or something. The big exclusive pays a couple of grand. It's the 90's and that's mega money. They think it will look good if she stands with the glass in hand next to her daughter. I am neither proud nor embarrassed about this. I am properly perplexed.
Why has she come back now that I'm eleven? Is she staying? Will she take me with her? The magazine people arrived. I learnt that mum had climbed through a broken window, fell and cut her inner thigh. She went to a well known hospital in London. They stitched her up and sent her home.
Four miscarriages and one ectopic pregnancy later (also a shit tonne of abdominal and cervical pain over the years that had passed) mum was advised to have an hysterectomy. She was only in her early thirties.
When she was under anaesthesia in the operating room they found buried deep inside her a ten inch shard of glass. The culprit to all those years of agony. Possibly, contributing to those complications during the pregnancies. Also, it was too late now to look back.
Mum had just been sterilised and had an emergency hysterectomy. Meaning, no more other chances (for the rest of her life) to even think about starting a family with anybody else. Must have fucked up a lot of opportunities for good solid intimate relationships, it did have repercussions after she married years later. The husband cheated to make five more kids on top of his five already. He'd married saying he was satisfied. Imagine if that happened to anyone - male or female - it's fucking heartbreaking.
So inevitably she had nothing good to look forward to in the short term (and long term) just a huge dose of HRT (which she refused) due to early menopause - and all thanks to Kings College Hospital for not getting her to x-ray and so she sued for compensation. I think she won.
I didn't know that much detail. Kids were seen not heard. Obviously, I needed to be seen to help the case. Young mother of one blah blah blah. Felt embarrassed years later seeing my sappy-faced mugshot on the center pages. Just clinging on to her arm oblivious. Story of my life. Just. Clinging. On.
Once the magazine people had gone I went to sleep; when I woke up the next morning so was she. Gone. Back to London. Back to alcoholism. Back to beatings. Back to misery but at least she didn't have me to deal with.
Thankfully, life does dole out to us successfully delegated small bloody mercies. I took it all in. Alone again. Disconnect. Smile fixed to my stiffness, with a hard faced strength the only way I could do with styled 'disassociative' grace.
First hints of mental illness
Dad's got a flat in Ancoats. I'm about eight or so. Fuck knows. It's before he lived around our corner with the wife and kids. Much earlier than that. He keeps old coins behind glass in frames as art. I've visited once or twice with Nana.
It's a high-rise building. The lift stinks of piss even Nana flinches. It's not very big I can't remember if I used his toilet but everything else was all in the same room. Kitchen sink, gas cooker with a hooded grill, bed and settee all in arms reach.
He doesn't really speak to me. I just look around sitting quietly. Mostly thinking about the coins. Not so shiny. None of them. Just silver and bronze. I ask once "are they your medals from the war?" They both laughed. I didn't know the answer.
I don't remember. I still keep looking up at them from my chair near the bed. None of them shiny at all. I look forward to getting back home to my own big room at Nana's house. I'm tired, cold and bored here. "Let's go".
Uncle Nobhead is the only one laughing. Everyone else is worried about something. Nana's upset and keeps sobbing. I hear my dad is in hospital for his head. I don't ask anyone anything. I just get the gist that it is serious.
I'm scared. Is he going to die. Will he be able to walk, talk or speak when he gets out. Will he look funny. Like deformed and ugly and scary. I hope he is okay because I think I feel something for him. I don't want him to die. I love him.
Uncle Nobhead is still smiling. Drinking a pint of famous grouse. He tells me my dad got a drill lodged in his head. He shows me with a finger spinning around and around his temple. I laugh. I don't get the joke. I ask is there a huge hole. I figure it out that it will be only small. His brains won't fall out. Then panic. Why is everyone so seriously considering the impact of the situation. Was there too much blood loss? Is that it? Will he die still.
Turns out to be schizophrenia. He didn't fall off a ladder. He stepped off the F-u-c-king edge of the world. He didn't lose blood. Much worse than that. He lost his sanity and even I knew the capacity of that loss. I couldn't process it then, but in hindsight, we knew that he'd lost that precious magic which we can never get back.
More precisely like my precious time and innocence. Like virginity. Fingers around and around running around. My little mind's eye remembers. How much I prayed for places exchanged. I wished so hard in silence and solitude that fucking horrible uncle Nobhead would die. I wished my dad's sister had never married him. I wished my dad's life hadn't changed as it ended by chance.
When he got out of there, he did look scary. Funny not haha funny as in "don't stare" weird as in 'who the fuck are you!' He had gained a lot of bloated weight due to medication but Id seen fat people before. Just no any fat and angry madmen pale skin without eyebrows and the look of a paranoid corpse serial killer.
Obviously, and instantly, surprisingly (even to me) - I absolutely welcomed him in; with wide open arms. He was home. So it was I had for the first time in my life, felt a connection. A kin with him.
He checked my sweating hands, opening finger by finger, one by one. Nana looking on. I humoured the connection between us. He said he was searching for weapons.
That's the first time I got the in-joke and yes he was only joking. In that moment I loved him. I lost my ignorance. I gained a Dad.
I understood that crazy is good. It might be because we're Northern but we never ever get our sense of humour lost.
I had many a year to laugh with dad and and a lot more to cry after he lost his life. I haven't cried since my dad died in 2017 - no tell a lie - I cried on my 41st birthday but, I didn't remember that straight away so it doesn't count.
I was trying to just set the scene so play along with me and take me like a shot of tequila, you'll get to know the ropes before we're done with all of these self-reflective introductions.
So, I only cried as I was told my dad had died in bed, unexpected. I only cried because I was high on drugs and thought that's how I should react. I faked it somewhat. Then couldn't stop. I was detached. I over reacted. If ever there was such a thing.
I emotionally collapsed. By trying. To do the right thing and not give the clue that five minutes previously I had been rocking conspicuously, sweating, twitching, gurning, and.. masturbating.
Oh my god! I don't know what you must think of me but we don't take drugs and make a cunt of ourselves expected that kind of thing. "Hello it's your brother" - "oh is dad okay, don't tell me he's been sectioned again!" - silence - silence - "no. He's dead.". Ok.
3 December 2023
Dear Chasers💗
Waking up from, by way of snapping out of, a drug riddled trance where I’m in a tongue sucking, mouth drooling, body twitching coma of a high from the night before. I deciding that everything I had been through in life and built my belief system from, had been a fucking lie. I watched a short video featuring Jordan Peterson about Nihilism and couldn’t get my head around it because I was feeling nihilistic at the time. So I swerved that video and moved on to another about Jung vs Jordan Peterson’s opinions or something, again the conversation went right over my head. This man is an intellectual giant among people like me, or just me.
I sat there slumped and crumpled with my legs wide open across both sides of the recliner sofa, alone and coming down from what had been an interesting encounter with one’s dilapidated old and forgotten dark night of delving into an uncharted psyche. I gathered my thoughts around the mistakes I had made the night before. Nothing major or anything to destroy my soul the way I thought my mind was inviting and destruction might be slowly incoming but events that I wasn’t in control of were coming back to hound me in the wee hours of the night and early morning.
The only embarrassing things that I had done and been responsible for was making one twisted voice message to a complete stranger about their YouTube channel! Something that could have been addressed online in public area as opposed to prying into said person’s private time. Thankfully, they were very polite to me.
Then spent some sort of an hour or so, composing a comment for another stranger ready to reply to something on social media. The next time I opened my laptop I read last night’s ‘writing’ which was a ridiculous mess and almost illegible in terms of making any sense. Fortunately, I had been blessed by a rare splash of heaven-sent sanity, in that I managed not to post it in the end.
This is exactly the main reason I don’t want to write my newsletters when I am high because it feels like I’d spend a lot of time editing it down to be read. They say you can’t edit a blank page and it’s better to get a shitty first draft together, and I have so much more focus and time on my hands when I’m on it but I don’t connect my thoughts as well and feel it would be insincere of me to do it to people. I want to be present at all times in my written word endeavours.
Apart from those minor errors in judgement, there was nothing too bad to cause me such despair. I had dodged a bullet (and a train) prior to getting deep into the cocaine. I arrived at my destination in the dark and rain at about 8:00 pm at night and waited by the railway crossing for the ‘lucky lucky man' (as they say in Ibiza) to arrive with six bags of snow. I told you it was going to be a white Christmas after all. I took the phone call that he was in a car on the other side of the crossing, looking over the gates that were closing. He was chanting in my ear saying “c’mon jump over the gates, quickly, you’ll make it” he was laughing as he kept on drumming it into my head.
I am so nervous talking to people who I don’t trust and so naive in following instructions that both the visual and auditory information hit my brain. I went into sensory overload for a moment and was considering taking him seriously there and climbing over the gate. I hadn’t spotted the train yet but was aware that the gates were closing for a reason.
I felt daft at the time. I know he was joking but the sinister part of it was that he disrespected me enough to play that joke on me. I had been foolish enough to dance to his command. I took him at face value and I shouldn’t have.
Now in the reversal of previous events playing back to me in my mind - I decided that every one in my entire life has had that same disrespect for me. I was never and have never been and still aren’t fucking wanted by anyone. Not the way I want other people. Nobody wants me the way I want for others. Life is not going to get any better. There is no crescendo of joy at the end. I am not living to find the end of the rainbow.
I am experiencing a life of not being loved or wanted. The punchline is devastatingly bleak and obvious. I will die having never felt what it is like to live as a loved being and would never learn to understand what it feels like to know you are wanted. My life’s ‘best bits’ have probably already been and gone and so I am living on now to fall into the rest of hell until I understand completely that things will never be fixed.
I tumbled into this thought pattern and couldn’t concentrate enough to take my mind off this depressive expression, not even self pleasuring was working out for me now. It may come as a shock to you that by this time of day 7:57 am, my partner had already given up the fun and had been asleep for a good two hours before me. I was up and hankering on the last traces of cocaine in and out of my system. I had one line left. I hadn’t taken anything since 4:00 am hoping that the coffee I just made would re-balance my internal mental suffering. I sound quite lofty here and trying not to do that.
After the final line I did what people do best - self excavate every memory that has ever haunted me and christened those thoughts as absolute gospel truths (that and a bit of forced masturbation!) gotta keep it real guys. It’s not me if it’s censored. I was close to it gets to having a weeping-wank in a semi-suicidal capacity; knowing that the sleep deprivation was getting to me. Yet, I continued to chase that high and drive myself and the entire night, into the fucking ground.
I am back now from the self loathing pit of evil self pity. There are sadder things going on all around us and even around me in my small triangle of people. There are people dying having been through a much more troubled existence than mine and I can only imagine how it must feel to die having lived a life of abundance, with love and happiness and joy. To say goodbye so soon, leaving all that life behind. I cry for everyone else again, fuck myself (no pun intended) and count my blessings as they should be but this got me thinking. Oops!!.. not that thinking thing again. The thing I keep on playing with yet cannot do constructively… haha!
What if my everyday existence of being tanked up on pharmaceutical drugs, i.e. my medications which makes me feel confident in life, secure in my relationship, not phased by the constant fear of bigger shit going on around me. What if that is the real false sense of reality? What if the cocaine blues are just opening my eyes to the real reality around me?
What if happiness is the one and only real delusion? ...
Thank you for giving me this feeling of friendship and for want of a better term ‘a safe place to speak’ Thank you for being here with me and reading this tonight! BIG soft Warm HUGS Lots of Love from ME..xxx💗
(I’d never leave you without a full themed song… today’s was an entrance song so skip back up to the top if you missed it. xxx)
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