building works

Today i’m gathering in my raw torn stretching edges and folding into myself. 

It’s been a harrowing week - the kinds of days that push every neuron into overdrive. Reaching for the right information, fitting it into context, battling with the extremes of these visceral reactions; of a brain in relentless overdrive.  

Some macro context to my angst won’t surprise anyone; Systemic changes are being cemented, via an elected group of humans whose values are entirely different from mine. Like very many people in the UK and beyond, i’m frightened to see what that world view, given licence, will raise into reality from the germs of the human fear that fomented it. 

Building change

There’s personal stressors too. We’re having some major building work done on our home, and the excitement of diggers and welding sparks is giving way now to anxiety over how i’m going to keep the 6 of us (plus cats!) fed and bathed and warm in the middle of a building site in the leafy midlands. Middle class angst telling a grain of the truth of the every days of displaced and bombed out mums in same worlds. My bricks going up while theirs come down.  

It’s been an exciting year, a year of learning and community within my small cohort of learners. Thrown together as we were by alignment of stars and application and with the architecture of bonding built into the programme. I’ve learned this; All healing happens in community and without it to nest the self in, all the best theory is worthless. Interaction and relation is where the new learnings and the new safety happens.

Risky Strategies

Still there’s risk of the profoundest kind in that necessity of communion, and my muscles and brain recoil from it as much as my bones long for it. Sometimes the best thing to do is just screw up your eyes and take a deep breath and full speed ahead though right? That’s been my high risk strategy throughout 2019. Sick of the stagnation of healthy opportunity and labouring through misunderstanding after presumption i’ve run headlong into every new possible; my legs wheeling round like road runner and my body at 45 degrees to the floor in permanent dream pose. Perhaps it was all a mirage. Lots of energy has been expended and lots of cheerleading from the sidelines heard but my landscape hasn’t changed any. I’m not yet kicking up much dust or moving ground and I don’t know where my head should belong.

I am sick, still, of waiting for valued productivity to start and opportunity to move me forward like one of those airport travelators that seems to take my contemporaries gliding through vast corridors to a waiting lift off - still that pitied fool that didn’t know where to get on, now stuck walking alongside and dragging my baggage with broken wheels. 

This week it’s all too much stretch. Too much pain and only howls to explain it. I can’t afford to die again so rebirth will have to wait a while.

Grey Wolf (Canis lupus) Stalks Forward - captive animal

This morning I was supposed to be going to a conference at the Wellcom in London but indecision over spending the cash to get there and other responsibilities sent me over the edge. Bloody waste of a morning. So instead I hid in bed and wrote.

The conditions for functional coping are so nuanced, so precise, so delicately engineered. This is tolerance of the most niche kind; personalised, individual. I’m in daily hostage to my neurochemicals.

ADHD in action, or is that inaction?

Everyday things are rarely enough to make systems begin. The sure windup of oiled machinery rarely gains its own unchallenged momentum in this ADHD mind. Rote learned Sensible ideas do raise a rational response. But, lacking sufficiency of regular neuro-fuel, this brain is now trigger happy on adrenaline; conditioned by parental and school frustration to ‘Just Do It!’ To ‘stop daydreaming’ .

I tell myself ‘Make a calm choice and follow it through, yeah?’ But there’s importance here. There are consequences and other people. And just as night follows day, the indecision that comes standard with this self determined action potential gives a generous slug of the fight/flight ‘drug’ to my brain highways. Flooded thus I’m Driven and galvanised (and brilliant in an emergency!) and ideas and connections come thick and fast. All the world seems possible. Things are happening! I’m doing it!

Adrenaline junkie

It’s a thrilling ride. But I need wolves to chase me - to flee from. I Need need, to focus the adrenaline. Without it - unchased and unrequired - I tip quickly into a vertical free fall of anxiety. Hyper aroused and hyper alert to every twitch and light and sound. The crash is swift and brutal. And the critical thinking functions - of balance, of reason, of consideration - are subsumed by survival instinct. Alive but paralysed. Inert, voiceless, scarcely daring breath. The wolves were there all along - but they weren’t chasing, they were hidden; waiting to tear apart and devour the spoils of that impulse to creativity. The ideas and connections slip away back into the recesses, leaving me with little but a memory of how stars are made, and a surer knowledge that functional usefulness and brilliance alike are trapped in a maze of mirrors and menace.

Fuck it.