Self-Awareness
I wrote this a week or so ago when I realised I was beginning to crash. I don’t usually have the foresight/wit/willpower to write about how it feels. That in itself is part of the problem. I was then unsure about whether to post it, because y’know I feel pretty much fine now. That of course is the other half of the problem – addressing the damn things when you’re well enough not to feel like you need to.
Oh Look – A Precarious and Invisible Cliff
So, it’s a weird sensation- this sudden lurch down a level of feeling. I feel it as a sag in my bones, and in the thinking meat beneath them. I’m not saying my brain’s in my marrow; I just meant the skull. Everything is duller, and thoughts and action have a blurry motion trail that envelops the next thought and the next till all of them are cloaked in a thick miasmic fug.
That’s how it seems to me anyway. I feel as if each individual act or feeling stacks up until there are too many of them that feel wrong and they begin to topple. Somehow the blurring occurs after that fall commences. These are messy mixed metaphors (like a bush full of fish), but it’s proven a difficult thing to grasp and summarise.
The Early Bird Catches A Mental Illness And Lays An Egg (in your brain)
I don’t usually catch myself this early. I don’t think I become aware of the downward spiral until it’s well on its way to the hellish basement of self-worth. So this is probably a good thing. Self-awareness enough to recognise that my mind has taken a turn. Aware enough to do something about it? I don’t know. In the meantime, until such optimism emerges from the sad brain clag, I should really think about why I’m feeling like this.
It’s cyclical. I know it is, but someone’s gotta be cycling, right? It can’t just be a solitary spinning wheel with my mind stapled to it (presumably deflating the tyre of vitality), though that would account for the sensation of being pressed down. Did you know that one of the interesting things about wheels is the shape they make? I didn’t, but someone or something told me about it, or I dreamed it (and so it may not be true). Anyway, if you measure the movement of a wheel by tracing out a fixed point on its circumference it does weird things like being briefly motionless when it’s touching the ground. It doesn’t draw out a circle, it’s a weird series of rises and falls; both more like the feeling of up and down and less like a cyclical thing. I may not have a good grasp of cyclical as a term.
Evasive Manoeuvres
Well that was great. Instead of penetrating the psychic mire I distracted myself with whimsy. I suppose that’s good – at least it wasn’t whimsical musing on forms of self-harm. See: “optimism”. Back to the point: since I can’t pick out a single event that would give me a little push, then a confluence of events or incidents seems more likely (avoiding that horrid notion that it might be a cycle with zero agency on my part – that seems unacceptable to me). In which case I may not be able to find the causes but I can try to identify symptoms, be aware of them (at the least) and maybe be able to do something about them…
