Six Impossible Things

I’m back in London for a couple of days, before I head back to Leicester for a bit. I’ll be back and forth like this for a while, as things we set in train while my dad was in hospital still require attention. Next time I go up, there is also a friend’s birthday party and a road trip with my friend Matt in amongst it all. These are nice things. I say that like being at home with my parents isn’t nice. It is, but being at their house is not the same as being in my home and chores mass on the borders of both dwellings as I live this in between life for a while.

Things are generally heading in the right direction. My mum and dad are together at home, so there are no more days shivered into splinters by hospital visits and long waits for hard pressed consultants to give their benediction to whatever actions are required. There is less asking permission and more finding ways to do things that work for us. A lot of the things we are organising now mean that life going forward should be easier, whether there are more medical emergencies or not. But it is a lot.

As the intense pressure of: ‘Now. Respond NOW. Do ALL these things in all these places,’ eases off, I am beginning to show signs of wear and tear. The equilibrium of earlier weeks has shifted into something darker and, for me, slightly more manic. Even the things I am doing differently and in a more healthy way, like accepting help from other people, coming back home to recharge my batteries and saying no to things, is still doing. Doing things is hard work. Doing things differently than I have done them for decades is even harder. Sometimes not doing things is the hardest work of all. Alongside this, there is other family stuff happening which ebbs and flows, foreground to background, sidelines to centre and back again, rapping on the door of my hard won peace of mind.

Even with help, things are fraying somewhat. I am not sleeping well and I didn’t read my book for three days last week. This sounds trivial, but for me it is a sign of deep, mental, disarrangement. ALARM. ALARM. The klaxon has started sounding. The nice things which are coming up are beginning to give me anxiety, which eats away at some of the pleasure of them. Yesterday I woke up with a migraine, which nagged and nagged at me, causing me to push my hand into my eye socket just to drive the pain away for a while. I feel pressed in on all sides. My chest is a little tight. My jaw has to be unclenched by noticing and a force of will. I’m struggling and it feels like a betrayal. I’m not sure what of. Myself, my family, my therapeutic work? All of the above.

I spent today catching up with my London life and taking time to think about where my head is at. I have been wanting to write for a few days but I have felt a physical resistance to sitting down at the laptop. I was thinking about something funny that happened earlier and caught my inner voice going: ‘You can’t write about that.’ Attempting to unpack it opened up a whole can of worms. The first, and most pressing feeling was that I needed to write about how I’m really doing rather than employing my old trick of covering up trauma with humour and pretending that everything is great. Then I felt that I couldn’t write about how stressed I am, because things aren’t as bad as they could be and I don’t want to start a pity party for no reason. Then I thought about how everyone I love will feel if I articulate how difficult I’m finding things now and how that’s not fair on them, because they’re going through a lot. The old chestnut of: ‘I can’t take something which isn’t about me and talk about how I feel, because then it will be about me, and that’s selfish,’ trotted out to see how much shame it could wring out of me.

The brain monkeys chattered on until I knew that the only healthy thing to do was to write it all down. When I write it down, I move what is in me, outside of me and that gives me space to think. It isn’t the same when I talk things through with people, unless it’s in therapy. When I talk to people, lovely though they are, they often, inadvertently say the wrong thing, which sets the brain monkeys shrieking again. The page never does that. It is mute and forgiving in a way that people are not.

The difficulty with life is that it isn’t black and white. There is nothing straightforward about it. In the midst of the bleakest times, there will be times of joy and laughter. In the midst of the sunniest moments there will be despair and sadness. One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves as human beings is that there is a right and wrong way to feel in any given moment. That’s what I’ve been telling myself for a while now. ‘You can’t feel that now. You can’t talk about that now.’ That stuff hasn’t gone away, it’s just sat in the background waiting for a time when I’m not on full alert and that time is now.

The second thing I’ve ben telling myself is that it is wrong to feel more than one feeling at a time. This is plainly bullshit. To misappropriate what the Queen in Alice Through The Looking Glass says, it is entirely possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast. I know that’s true and yet it didn’t stop me telling myself differently and believing the lie. That’s bleakly hilarious because it proves Alice right and double underlines how wrong I was.

The reality is messy and noisy. I have been scared, grief stricken, angry and stressed. I have also been happy, hopeful and calm. I have been glad to share these times with my family but I have also wanted to be in France, on holiday, alone. I have been all of these things and more for a lot of the time, some of it simultaneously. It has been unrelenting and even the times where there has been nothing to do have been incredibly stressful. In fact, some of those times have been the most stressful of all.

Times I have lived through recently have triggered massive traumas from my past and I have worked hard to separate from them what is actually happening. That in itself is exhausting. Sometimes I am half way to another place entirely before my mind reminds my nervous system that this isn’t that. Turning away from the past has helped make me grateful for what I have now and at times both terrified and optimistic for the future. All my tenses are muddled up because at times like this, everything collides in a gigantic, temporal soup in which I have found myself swimming and sometimes going under.

I am really fucking tired.

What I am doing here is acknowledging all of those feelings and honouring them. I don’t want anyone to fix them or apologise for them or try to make things better for me. If anyone wants to do anything at all, just know that reading and bearing witness is enough. Thank you.