The fog is lifting

"there will be storm at last, storm, glorious storm."

Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash

Oof. This has been a week. I’m still not entirely sure what’s up with me right now but it has been bad enough that my parents are now either inviting me for dinner, or inviting themselves so that I am not alone. Apparently I was completely incoherent, and although I’m faintly aware that I was trying to talk about something I have no recollection of what was actually going on.

Tuesday was the worst I’ve felt in a very long time. The heaviest weight sat on my chest and on my head the whole day. I felt like I was drowning, doing all I could to scramble and scrabble to the surface for air. I felt as if I was inside my own head looking out, and just observing everything I was doing throughout the day. I had so many Zoom meetings that day too, I’m amazed no-one noticed that a piece of me had broken. Frayed so thinly, and then just snapped.

I didn’t leave the house that day. I wanted to stay inside, retreat and wallow. I wanted to cocoon myself in my duvet and build a small fortress to keep the world out. I wanted to descend so far inside myself to find and pluck out whatever it was that was making me feel that way. This is progress.

But I think in the end I had to surrender to being in and staying in that pit. Accepting that, for now at least, there was no way out. Resisting would only make things more difficult and trying to escape it wasn’t going to work either. My body had put paid to that just a week earlier. So there I was nursing an injury I’d given myself by overtraining, with no hope of physically pushing through it without causing myself more damage and I just had to sit with it. And I did. And I let that feeling consume me. All day. I ate the things I wanted to eat. Chocolate, and lots of it. I let myself get frustrated with the restlessness of wanting to do something and then being so incapacitated that I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. I got anxious and angry and upset and I begrudgingly rode it out.

I was hunkered down in the storm of myself. My thoughts and emotions whipping and hurling themselves around whilst I sat numbly in the middle of it all. Powerless and really quite unwilling to do anything about it. My ego was screaming to get out, wanting to face the storm head on, goading and daring it to do its worst, like a small defiant fishing boat being tossed and toyed with in the great Atlantic swell. My soul was below deck, tied down, whimpering and holding on tightly to a flickering hurricane lamp, praying to Neptune and all manner of other deities to keep us safe.

I drew myself a bath, lit a candle and found my book. I shut the world out and locked me in with myself. The water was hot, almost scalding, and I gingerly lowered myself in. Taking time to adjust to the heat and the steam and the feeling of the water on my skin. I have been neglecting my Piscean need to be immersed in water and it was showing up in a big way. I was uncomfortable, and it felt unpleasant, and perhaps I have been a fish out of water for far too long. But I endured it for almost an entire hour before I felt like I had had my fill. I ate my dinner bundled up in my comfiest clothes and then I went to bed.

The next morning I woke up and the fog had lifted. I was completely myself again. The storm had blown through, and had dissipated, appeased at last. And all that was left was that calm, after-the-storm stillness, with just the smallest prickle of electricity giving any hint that it had even happened at all.

---

The sun drops luridly into the west;
darkness has raised her arms to draw him down
before the time, not waiting as of wont
till he has come to her behind the sea;
and the smooth waves grow sullen in the gloom
and wear their threatening purple; more and more
the plain of waters sways and seems to rise
convexly from its level of the shores;
and low dull thunder rolls along the beach:
there will be storm at last, storm, glorious storm.

From ‘Circe’ by Augusta Davies Webster