Sending greetings from the midst of therapy. I have been hard at it all week and only just in a position where I feel I can write about things. I feel like I need to be clear though, that I am more than just my pain. Despite what it looks like here. I am not just sitting in the middle of the Thames, bawling my eyes out and endlessly talking about woe 24/7.
Even in the depths of despair, I move. There are things to be thinged, snacks to be inhaled and walks to be walked. In the last week I have been to the Yoko Ono exhibition at Tate Modern, which was fantastic. I have done a pottery class in which I made approximately zero pots but did learn to feel when my clay was centred, which is a huge deal. I have had a flying visit from my lovely Tilly as she hot footed her way back to Finland where she is spending her time dressed as a crocodile, frying sausages - as you do. I have read books and had my hair done, and eaten egg and chips at the greasy spoon. I have been working on another doll, more of which later. It is not all waily, waily, wringing of hands in the darkness.
But, the waily, waily bits are the things I need to write about, because a big part of learning to live my new and improved life (version 9840.5) is about being honest with myself and noticing the things I do and the things I think and spotting where there are gaps which may be chasms, down which my Bambi-legged mental health might plummet. The bridge between my mind and the outside world are the words I use to shape and understand my experiences.
I have been doing a lot of writing behind the scenes, which I have been sending to my therapist, who earns every penny I pay her. A lot of this writing is to do with my extremely fucked up relationship with my body. It’s something which I keep trying to work on because I’d like to be friends with myself at every level, inside and out. Of all the things I’ve done, therapeutically speaking, this feels like the hardest and most intimate. The waves of fear I wrote about in my last piece, keep on coming. My ability to sit with them varies.
I was reminded this week, that a few years ago I must have come to a similar realisation about my body, because I paid someone a fairly hefty deposit to publish a book I was going to write about my messed up relationship with my body and all the things I was doing to reconcile with it. I even had a plan, which I wrote down and everything. I thought that if I paid this person, that would be the pain point I needed to actually do the work instead of talking about doing the work and then failing to do it. Or worse, talk about doing it and then deciding to lose two stone in a ‘healthy’ way instead. I thought that them holding me accountable might also help.
It was not the pain point. It was not even close to the pain point. The first chapter of the book was to be about working with positive affirmations and looking at myself in the mirror. I thought: ‘That’s easy to do, and free and there are no excuses I can make to stop myself doing that work.’ It turns out that it may be free, but it wasn’t/isn’t easy for me to do at all. I found it so unbearably painful that I stopped dead in my tracks, buried my head in the sand and never got my deposit back. It also turned out that someone else holding me accountable is absolutely useless if I am not willing to make myself accountable, and at that point, I was not. This time, I am, even if I keep trying to bunk off.
Last week, when I most wanted to run away from everything, my debit card stopped working and I ended up stranded for several hours in a downpour in North West London until I could find a way to get home. The new hairdresser I had worked really hard to find, cancelled because of some stuff she had going on in her own life. Other things that I had planned fell apart. Parcels went missing. All the wheels came off.
Everything conspired to keep me focussed on the work I needed to do. I should have been grateful for that, but I reacted with my customary grace. I had a huge, Violet Elizabeth style tantrum about the whole thing. Then when I was thoroughly exhausted by myself, I did the necessary. Grudgingly, painfully and resentfully, I did the fucking work, and boy, am I mad about it.
I am never, ever going to be one of those shiny haired women who create Instagram reels and effortlessly whiz us through the ways of their pain and decide that more broccoli and water blessed by the Dalai Lama is the way forward. Mostly I approach wellness like an out of control tumbleweed made out of jam, bits of lint and fury. There is no gratitude here. Not at the moment.
Whatever I did must be working though, because on Monday, all my lost parcels arrived at the same time, someone glued several wheels back on and my hair finally got done. And now, here we are.
Over the years, one of the ways in which my poor mental health has manifested itself has been through intense panic attacks just as I am on the point of going to sleep. They are terrifying. One minute I am drifting off, the next I am torn into wakefulness, often with such violence that I sit up and scream. They sometimes get so bad that I have dealt with them by refusing to go to sleep at all until I am so exhausted my body simply turns off. This ‘solution’ has always made things much worse for me, because being exhausted is a sure fire way to make any mental health issues I have, a thousand times grimmer.
When the panic attacks get really bad, they start shifting from a night time exclusive to any and all moments of the day until I am a haunted wreck. I have learned to understand them like an alarm clock. When they start coming, it’s time to pay attention and deal with whatever is causing them, before the time I cease functioning as a human being. In the last fortnight, since reconnecting with my body, I have been having the panic attacks at bed time again. This time they have been accompanied by a few episodes of night terrors, in which I wake myself up screaming, lathered in sweat.
The fear is always the same. I have a fear of dying. I say fear. It is an all consuming phobia of epic proportions. It is so bad and so constant that even as I type these words I can feel nausea rising up into my throat. It has been like this since I was small, really, really small. As a child I barely slept and when I did I would have nightmares and terrors all the time. I have scars on the insides of both my cheeks from constantly waking in the night having bitten my cheeks to shreds. I quite often wake up with blood, pooling in my mouth. I am not a person at peace with sleep or death.
For decades, this fear has been the subtext of all my therapeutic endeavours. Sometimes I have attempted to push it to the forefront, but as I find it virtually impossible to talk about without vomiting, that’s never been very successful.
Things are a little different now. I know that the reason I am having these panic attacks is because I am walking into the forbidden territory of my body. I am so afraid of my body and what having a workable, gentle relationship with it will feel like, I am attempting to frighten myself off. The fear is so big, it is difficult to sit with. The most logical thing to do is run from it and shut it down before it overwhelms me. That’s what my head is telling me. And for once, my body is in accordance with my head because my body is going all out to make me run. Sweating, shaking, puking, crying - it’s a whole showstopper in and of itself.
I have been thinking about the ‘why’ of the death/sleep thing, given that I am practicing sitting with my fear and when I’m doing that, there isn’t much else to do. I think there are various reasons for it. Some of them are to do with events that happened to me as a child and which I have hard coded as critical to avoid in future if at all possible. Those things have required me to be alert and to protect myself as much as possible, hence sleep being a very bad thing.
A lot of it I think is to do with the perpetual feeling of being out of step with the world, which I have very strong memories of as far back as I am able to think. The world did not make sense to me. I remember a perpetual feeling of bewilderment and fear. I needed to be alert and pay attention to avoid getting into trouble or out of my depth. It didn’t work, but then I felt like I wasn’t doing enough of it, so I just learned to stay awake longer. I didn’t have any other resources to hand then, so I just did more of the same. As an adult I know that doesn’t work. As a kid, it was just something else I had no clue about.
I didn’t have a good sense of what was real and what wasn’t as a child. I had an extremely fertile imagination which leaked into my day to day life. It was fuelled by my insatiable reading. I knew television wasn’t real, because my parents had sat me down and told me so. They didn’t tell me that books weren’t real though, so I just assumed they were. I was a devout believer in magic as a child. I believed that the reason I hadn’t seen the things I read about happen yet were purely practical. I was in the wrong place, I didn’t pay close enough attention, etc. I believed everything was possible and all would be revealed to me sooner or later. I think I had a similar issue with dreams. I can still remember dreams I had as a child as vividly as if I dreamed them last night, or as if they had really happened. I wonder now if I just had no boundaries between sleeping and waking. It was all the same to me and one could leak into the other. The problem was that a lot of my dreams were horrific, which meant it was just better not to dream them at all. At least when I was awake, I had some level of control. I could allow the good magic in and keep the bad stuff at bay.
As for death being my jam, phobia wise. I think it’s because it is the most acceptable thing to be afraid of. If you say you’re afraid of death, very few people go: ‘Oh no. Don’t be silly. Of course you’re not afraid of death.’ Which is what happened to me time and time again when I did talk about other things I was afraid of. I think I realised pretty early on that I was not allowed to be afraid of almost everything else, but nobody was going to argue with me about death. So death became the acceptable vehicle by which I could express all my fears. Death is the ultimate trump card. Death always wins.
The thing about death is that it is inevitable and unknowable. You can’t make people go and stand at the top of the Eiffel Tower to conquer their fear of it, or sit on a plane, or whatever mad things people do in aversion therapy. You can’t tell people it’s going to be ok, because you need to speak to Sandra, because she died and she’s absolutely fine now. In fact, she’s never been better. Death is the full stop to every conversation. Death, I think, is the way I learned to get people who couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge my fears to take me seriously. It’s not something you fuck around with. Just like I learned that people took me seriously when I was nearly dead, which had interesting implications for my health, I learned about the power of Death. I learned that to flirt with these big, dangerous things, gave me what I needed in the short term and as a child, there was only the short term. The long term was impossibly far away and far too big to take seriously. Unlike death and ill health, which everyone took very seriously in a very immediate and gratifying way.
The big problem is that the more I used it, the bigger it became until it is now a fear which eclipses the sun. It is virtually impossible to talk about. It takes every ounce of courage to write about it. It is so big that at times it swallows me whole. I have given it such power and it wields it with terrifying efficiency. Keeping it at bay has been the constant job of my life. It is my shadow, my shame and the heaviest weight I carry. When it pushes its way through my defences, I know things are about to get serious.
In the past, at times like these, I have found ways to put that fear back in its box and walk away. I have been too busy, too scared, too lacking in resources to even think about dealing with it. Now though, I am trying something different. Instead of taking all my fears and feeding them to Death, I am attempting to articulate them as they arise and own them, no matter how small or silly or potentially humiliating they are. I am trying to starve Death out rather than trying to starve myself instead.
I am working on sitting with fear and thinking about what it means rather than letting myself get swept up or run away. I am persevering with building a relationship with my body, no matter how frightening it is, because it’s my body and I deserve to be able to live in it without punishing it or diminishing it or letting it out to other people who just fill it with their own insecurities.
It’s a messy business. It’s causing the night terrors and the panic attacks. It’s causing me to keep trying to run away. It’s causing my spending to go a bit mental and my eating to get very weird. It’s throwing everything it’s got at me, but I’m still here. I keep knocking myself down, but I keep picking myself up again. That’s all there is to do.
❤️
"it's a messy business". so very messy. thank you for allowing us to with-ness you.