Is DIY a New Mental Health Issue?
By drkevin
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When I was at school, DIY was a colloquial term for masterbation. It still is I think, when it consumes the rest of your life and the peace of others. One of our neighbours is like that.
He is a single man, early retired and always covered in grey dust. His only visitors are tradesmen and surveyors. He has spent three and a half years so far renovating his house and many years lay ahead. This is assured, because his 'to do' list gets longer, not shorter.
His motivations are debatable, but appear to be a deep seated desire to become Bob the Builder, or a regression to the Lego stage of human development. There is no plan, realistic time frame or coherent budgeting. It is a way of life, hobby and obsession rolled into one, and it has left him almost impoverished.
The first two years were for him ecstatic, as he knocked interior walls down with gay abandon. He has now just parted with twenty thousand pounds to hire professionals to repair the damage - the exterior walls having lurched inwards with lack of support. He is a toddler with a grenade in his hand.
But has he learned his lesson?
Of course not. He is now transferring the bathroom from the back of the house to the front, where there is no existing plumbing. The sewage pipe will apparently run almost horizontally under his floor boards, through two interior walls and out into the back yard where a trench will be required to connect it to the main drain.
This man exists to make noise, and if he falls out of bed one day you can be certain he will grab a hammer on the way down to complete a Ginger Baker drum solo. When he dies he will still manage to nail down the coffin himself.
Amen.
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My dear friend has lost his
My dear friend has lost his balance. He falls down continuously. He's lost control of his dream which was pretty much impossible to begin with yet we all enabled it.
He has been working on his house now for the past 40 years. He retired and decided that he would become self-sufficient. He bought a dilapidated Victorian house on 8 acres of land. He raised his own food. He built a hoop house. He became a beekeeper. He grew his own weed. He put in a pond. He's a carpenter. He's a mechanic. He's an electrician. He worked all day every day while keeping a good buzz on. The only time he stopped working was when somebody came over to his palace which became a time for a party.
He never married. He got help from random handymen and farmers who became interested in his dream. He put up a magnificent porch around his palace. The porch took about five years to complete. Meanwhile the rerst of the house continued to disintegrate.
He sold his corn and his honey at a stand near his house and at some local open markets. He was always upbeat and committed to his dream of self-sufficiency.
Those dreams are distant now. To pursue his dream, he neede to be in tip top shape mentally, physically, spritually and emotionally. The house and the property overwhelmed him when he lost his sense of balance. The loss of balance oozed beyond the physical. The property was way too much for him in his weakened state. Everybody encouraged him to sell. He would hear nothing of it. This was his dream. This was his life.
Eventually, everybody stopped visiting. Everyone still loved my friend but his surroundings had passed the hoarder stage into the surreal. The outside was beginning to move into the inside. It's not good when snakes are living in the house.
I don't know how he survived the last few winters. He began leaving the house for a weekend or two and staying with friends which encouraged more of the outside to move inside. No one could convince my friend that the house and the dream were killing him.
Finally, last winter, the pipes exploded. My dear friend could no longer live in his house. We tried tough love. Nobody would enable anymore. We tried to get him food and other public help which he refused. One day, he fell again this time near the street. He couldn't get up. Someone found him before he froze in the snow.
Meanwhile he was not paying his bills. Now there were squirrels and raccons and God knows what else living in his house. He decided to move to a sleazebag motel. He took a couple of his cats with him. The owners of the motel threw him out. They took him to a public assisted residence, against his will.
Every time I call home, I ask about him and the news is never good. Even as I type this, I'm hesitant to get my next report. The property itself is probably worth a mill. The next owner will immediately tear down the house or spend another mill rehabilitating it. A person of welalth would be able to realize my friends dream in six months instead of forty years.
He's not gonna sell.
He couldn't stand to see his property in the hands of another. Meanwhile the value of his palace is decreasing. Nobody has been able to correctly diagnose his illness since he lost his balance. It might have been the time that his tractor fell on him when he was struggling to preserve his pond.
My friend was the kindest, gentlest of men. Always willing to help out. I love the guy as do we all. We just don't know what to do. I even dreamt of him last night
When I look back at pictures of his palace, I can see now that what we all thought was a dream was in fact a deadly nightmare. Be careful with dreams, they can turn savage.
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