This world is only as real as we feel it to be. Sometimes I feel terribly disconnected and then, even worse, I’m dragged back into it with that awful grinding sensation in my stomach as I recall yet another thing I should have done, someone else I’ve managed to let down or disappoint. Is it only late at night that relatively trivial problems seem to loom so large? I suppose it’s such a quiet time without the usual plethora of distractions and so things take on undue importance. It’s enough to keep a fellow from sleep.
It’s irritating too – I need to organise a couple of things this week and do some more promotion to ensure that a show on Friday isn’t a total audience washout. Thing is, the latter certainly isn’t something within my power to fix. Folk will come or they won’t. Nonetheless I worry about it. I feel a great responsibility for such things, which I really shouldn’t. But I don’t really know how to stop them from bothering me. The other tasks that have startled me awake are also very much “it’ll be ok, or it won’t but there’s little I can do to fix it” and yet… Here I am typing about them as if they matter.
I reckon they’re just surface distractions which my brain has selected to shield me from the horror of going back to work tomorrow (I say tomorrow… I need to get up in 5 hours!) and that tomorrow evening I’ve got my first counselling session with ISAS. Neither of these things truly fill me with dread, but perhaps I’m just pretending that they’re aren’t happening. So hard to second-guess your own mind. I have been figuring out my goals for counselling though, or at least putting more thought into what I want to talk about in them.
I think I want to have the support to go back through my old diaries and letters from the time (of doom) and see if I do remember it as it happened. I know that I need to come to terms with my past, whatever that means, and these are my pieces of evidence and accounts of myself from back then. Some of it’s not that old, I can dig out whatever I managed to tell my Dad about ten years ago which was fairly traumatic too.
See I’m relaxing already, although that might just be my cocktail of amytriptyline, cocodamol and whiskey… not a long-term solution. And that’s what I’ve painfully slowly come to realise I need.
