(Content Warning – talking about suicide, attempts, ideation the whole shebang, poor mental health and all that jazz)
I think it was talking to Cornish Bloke soon after my Dad had passed, or possibly Tarot Pupil or The Fae Ref as we lost parents or parental figures that year within weeks of each other. In anycase the concept of grief as a heaviness remains with me, it’s from gravare or gravis, Latin in anycase, the same root word as for gravity.
I feel heavy right now. My usual problem is the instinctive reaction of floating away, but now I’m dragged too far down into the earth. Guess I’m caught between the clouds and The Swamp, no likelihood of sticking at ground level just bouncing between the extremes of Dissociation and Depression. Swamp and Sky without an anchor.
I was not ok after I saw the girl on the bridge. I couldn’t process what I was feeling and I had so many nightmares because it was all just too much. I am very sure that what I was trying to do was prevent the Depression that I could recognise as my likely reaction to seeing something that my psyche recognised as Familiar and Home whilst simultaneously being Horrible. I didn’t have words for my Dissociation in the same way as I have had for The Swamp for a very long time or at any rate I hadn’t really processed it as being as much of a problem.
The Swamp was a direct problem when I was the same age as the girl I saw, for the same reasons. The solution was The Sky, Disassociation as a solution for Depression. But I’m not a teenager who might kill herself any moment, or at least not in the same way. I think it’s probably very telling that the last time I attempted suicide it came out of a wide open sky, out of nowhere in a French lay-by after news on the radio seemingly bypassed my conscious thought.
Since getting Chronic Fatigue and working with Hijinks I’ve been very aware of the push and pull between physical and mental illness and I’ve been massively focussed on my Depression because that’s always been my problem, the little (and not so little) voice in the back of my head saying “Hey isn’t suicide a great idea?” The thing is, my solution to getting on for nearly every problem, to Dissociate, is now it’s own problem, I mean it probably was back then just it didn’t get in the way of me doing what I wanted to, it allowed me to be alive to actually do it. But The Sky is as bad as The Swamp if that’s the only place you’re spending your time and if touching ground just doesn’t happen because you can’t find it for all the clouds. I absolutely lost touch with the ground last November, nothing made sense, I couldn’t put seemingly anything together logically at one point. It’s why I just felt tender over Christmas, completely torn up and unable to focus because all of the Ground was by turns invisible and Too Much.
Right now I feel Heavy, too weighed down to the ground.
I think Giovanni served to connect me back to some of my Ground emotions, that whole playing to Bleed thing. It did not help that I walked out of Giovanni and straight into COVID brain. I think in a very real way I’ve been Disassociating to a greater and greater extent since 2010 and the chronic fatigue really coming home to roost. The Jellicle agrees on my timing, I think that in combination with dealing with the traumatic bits of my job the go to Dissociate to deal with everything has played a large part in my becoming very very numb emotionally. I also think my therapist last year was right and that my emotional development is extreme in some places and seemingly totally lacking in others which may be a reason I find it so very comforting to just, be elsewhere at the drop of a hat. It may also be a function of ADHD but I suspect it’s been exacerbated somewhat by life experiences.
Seeing the girl on the bridge was like multiple realities converging and blowing up in neon lights that I’ve got a handle on that type of suicidal ideation but that there’s another more invisible problem now and it’s seeping like fog into everything, notably my ability to mimic logical thought through memory tricks.
And now I’m just Heavy with the Feelings coming on that I couldn’t process even a quarter of at the back end of last year. But Christ am I Heavy.