Coffee Slut

A friend’s baby grandson has been rushed into hospital. I have everything crossed that he makes a swift and full recovery, though I am more than a little impressed that it took four grown adults to hold him down in order to draw some blood.

And, in other news, someone on a web forum I frequent has been fussing because an egg has been smashed in a clutch under her broody hen.

I try to avoid outright bitchiness.

I try to avoid making comparisons between people’s lives.

But in this case, I can’t help but feel that context is everything.

There’s a scene in Ice Age 2 where Scrat, the sabre-toothed squirrel, pulls his prized acorn from the side of a glacier, thereby cracking the ice and causing the entire thing to give way.

He desperately tries to plug all the holes, and being an animated movie, it’s all rather comical and jolly.

Poor old Scrat

But some days, that’s how it goes. Something starts leaking, so you plug it, but the pressure builds elsewhere, and you plug that, and before you know it, the whole thing is helplessly out of control and all you want to do is stop plugging the damn thing and let it drown you.

And you thought kids’ films had no bearing on real life?

The other day, a friend asked me what it feels like when I “wobble”, a term that seems to have entered common usage to describe me at my low points. It’s quite a generous description, evocative of towering jelly, when it reality it is often something rather more akin to crossing the Grand Canyon on a tightrope.

Anyway, in reply, I set off with a metaphor about the Veil in the Department of Mysteries in Harry Potter, and how you are part of the world, but looking in somehow, but that’s utterly inaccurate and I cannot work out where my inspiration for that came from. Other ones come to mind, from cycling uphill in the wrong gear to trying to do ballet in steel toe-capped leather boots, and while they perfectly sum up the transition from good to bad, they don’t really come to close to what it’s like when I’m there.

Yesterday, I went for a long walk in the woods and hills and it dawned on me that there *is* a way of helping my friends understand what it’s like, and it’s so obvious, I can’t believe that I’ve been wrestling with it for so long.

Physically, it’s simple. The first “stage”, if you will, is that my skin starts to itch and crawl, and my muscles twitch and if I don’t get up and move, I could scratch the skin right off my body. Luckily, moving around and doing things is a great help, even just going to make a mug of coffee or tea.

Otherwise, think of the usual physical signs of anxiety and panic. Tight chest, closed throat, sweating. It happens so often, I can’t actually think what they all are.

As indications that I am becoming unwell, I can cope with them, deal with them, mostly manage them. That’s what I think of as wobbling – might fall, haven’t yet.

But when it all happens too fast, or I didn’t succeed in staying on top of things… That’s when it all goes to pot, when I really do plummet into the darkened depths below.

And then… communication becomes an issue. When I first became ill, I would make a little panic room in my mind and lock myself in there, protected from the outside world by locks and bolts and drawbridges, etc etc etc. Now (and this is a sign, I tell myself, that I am getting better) I try not to do that and let people in.

But.

Communication.

I can’t.

If it’s anything more complicated than a yes/no question, I can’t answer. And this what I have been unable to get across. It’s not when I was locked up in my little room, whose walls ensured that words and questions couldn’t penetrate. Now, I hear everything that is said, loud and clear, but the words for me to answer just aren’t there. I want to respond, but it’s like a deserted, empty house. You know where its residents, the furniture, ornaments should be… but there’s nothing there. Bare walls and vacant windows. And so I run from room to room, but the tools to construct an answer are absent, and the longer it takes, the more the question is repeated and the house grows and the rooms get bigger and emptier and the corridors longer and still I don’t have any means to respond.

++++++++++

I feel like I should be putting together a pithy concluding paragraph, but in a wonderful example of true irony, words fail me.

Um.

Quite.