It isn't that I don't recognize wallowing in a pit for what it is - or the evils of the predicament - it's just that I don't really know how to get out of it. There is all the well-meant mass-produced advice and hard-hitting pep talk in the world; I could recite it, too. You try sitting covered in sludge, brewing and stifling within the narrow, airless hole - walls at once slimy and sticky - rotting and not knowing if the stench is of you or your surroundings. Then you sink your teeth into the walls for grip because your nails are broken and your fingers are blistered stubs - forced-eating gunk to make any use of the exercise - claw your way up to emerge into the light and triumphantly shake off every bit of the grime you're covered in, then throw any generic advice my way and I will swallow it whole.
My sometimes-favourite bath foam is dramatic self-pity. But it makes exfoliating the more rewarding.
What I really want is specific steps. I want someone to tell me what exactly I want, where I want to go. Hand me a map with the path highlighted and what sign posts to look out for. Explain why each action is of value, and why the values are important to me. In specific terms. Not because I want to be treated like a child; I need help - the case-by-case variety - and isn't asking so very adult of me? Even more my admission I don't know how to walk, much less which direction to start in.
There, I've said it: I don't know what I don't know.
I do know that I need to stop eating my feelings. People, I think, say food is a comfort thing. A natural impulse. Something you can do when there's nothing else you can do. I think that we eat when in distress because our bodies register what our brains sometimes do not: that food is a true form of nourishment, and pleasure. Not many things in the world are really either. And we reach, instinctively, out for whatever might sustain, and what little that brings real joy. The trick is only to remain master over the urge - like anything that spins out of control, so easily theorized - and not let it master you.
Food, though, is not nourishment to the soul.
Food cannot replace everything - though I'm sure we make it try - certainly not sadness, nor its sister, loneliness. Loneliness breeds psychosis, which breeds jealousy and contempt, mother and father of irrationality. Irrationality breeds fear, and fear may be a useful place we go to to learn, but fear - of the unknown, of losing control, of your being your own self-destruction, of echoing history, fear of being alone - if she paralyses you, how ably, really, are you of pulling up from the sludge to learn, if at all?
Fear and sadness and isolation all magnify in the dead of night, of course. The dead of night is never silent. There's the insistent hum of the fridge, the hoarse, dry exhales of the heater, the dull buzz of thoughts in the back of your head which bleed darkly into each other so they grow, constant, uncontrolled, and prevailing until you cannot stop the sharpening frequency that beckons them now as the pushy front line - blunt, incessant blades slicing raggedly into the sheet of blackness that is your mind. The dead of the night is but a macabre playground for night time minds.
Some days, I feel like an ice-cream cone dropped on a mid-summer's day at noon. Some days, I am a deflated balloon. Some days, all I want is to be rid of that hot prickling in my eye. Some days, it just kills that I cannot have everything. Like new space, and comfort. Fresh air, and familiarity. To be alone, and not lonely.
There is no solace in solitude - solitude only slaps reality in your face. Like magnetic attraction. Or gravity. Otherwise, we cruise too easily and boldly through happy realism. Solitude makes me turn in- and onto myself - I'm expert at that. But as when with solitude, it's all one can do.
I suppose there's nothing like a low to make higher the highs.
Continually, in the background, I play jazz that feeds my soul and shatters the brawn I need to just up and go.
No comments:
Post a Comment