I’ve been having a pretty rough tome in my offline life, so I haven’t been very productive.
Category: Mental Health
-
The shadows reached out to me,
enticing, enchanting.
“Come back to us. You were always one of us.”
—
I wrote that several days before I landed in the hospital. Given my depression and generally hopeless mindset, there’s likely no relation to what actually happened, but it’s still unsettling to read retrospectively.
-
I spent 8 hours in hospital on Tuesday for having a seizure. They found no cause, and I was useless because I remembered nothing about it. It was like the blink of an eye: I was reading my phone, then suddenly my dad was standing in my room looking at me in horror.
“You just had a fit,” he stammered at my blank expression, before calling an ambulance.
How could I have a fit – a stereotypical epileptic fit from what I looked up later on – and have no memory of it? All I felt was tired and my mouth felt numb. Nobody in my family is epileptic. This made no sense whatsoever.
It happened. And after eight hours, bloods, chest x-ray and a CT scan (had that yesterday), nobody knows why. I suppose there’s a “life comes at you pretty fast” joke in here somewhere, but mostly…I’m scared. Did I cause this with my admittedly not exactly clean living life? Is it finally time for, to quote my favourite novel, “the momentum of change” to begin?
I don’t know. I’m the sort who acts fairly blasé about the idea of my death, but death is still a frightening concept even to the most suicidal.
I don’t know where I want to go from here. But I don’t want to stay here.
-
I don’t have a title for this, and I’m unsure whether it’s a poem or a stream of consciousness. But this is an ode to Queen. -
I followed Ariadne’s thread leading me out of the maze.
A slow process of many years, of trickery and wrong turns.Thankfully there was no mythical beast to worry about here.
The maze was a rose garden of eternal twilight. It was beautiful.
Not everything beautiful is harmless.I was pursued the entire time by whispers: taunts, threats, mocking laughter. Why leave at all, what if the whole world is like this?
Because if I never left, I would never know what the real world truly was, beyond the red and green stillness that concealed, that misled.
So I persevered. I found sunlight at last, and other people. No more thorns tearing at my skin to keep me inside.
It’s a hard world. But it is the real world. I couldn’t stay in the dark forever.
-
I just want to be well again. I recognise a lot of this is self-inflicted bullshit (it would be silly to blame everything on mental illness – explanation is not an excuse) but still.
Maybe I should rephrase that as ‘stop being an idiot ‘.
On the plus side – I am always reluctant to talk about anything I am working on in case I jinx it – I wrote a large part of a script treatment yesterday and that was the first day I didn’t cry over anything. I listened to some of my favourite Queen songs, a joy that I suddenly lost last year when every single time I’d try even their upbeat stuff I’d burst into tears, thinking how fucking unfair it was that Freddie isn’t here, that he couldn’t see how he is still loved. The man whose last words to his fans was “I still love you.” The euphoria of BoRhap had worn off (not my love of the movie – I’ll die defending that movie just as i’ll die defending Christopher Nolan’s work that some have so gleefully misrepresented to outright lied about – just that I no longer found myself able to enjoy the fan side) Same with Nirvana and a lot of other bands and authors and films I love. Everything I loved was suddenly tainted.
I just couldn’t enjoy anything I used to. I’d watch stupidly camp movies because I couldn’t stomach anything else. Funnily enough, Candy (the novel) was one of the few things I could manage. Maybe it was the security blanket of experiences that I understood a little, but I had enough distance from it I could still get through it (I was skipping chapters though). One day I’ll get to the movie, but it still seems too soon. Yes, I know Heath has been gone 14 years, but that was a deep wound. I miss him everyday. People can think it’s stupid all they want. I’m beyond caring. I miss him. I don’t regret my tattoo tribute to Heath one bit. All the people I call muses have helped me through tough times, so people can take their judgemental crap and shove it up their ass.
That and Stephen King were anchors during a dreadful and lonely time. Movies, music and literature have always been my “friends”, and suddenly we weren’t friends anymore, just acquaintances that barely callled. Not the best comparison, but I’m recovering from a booster jab that knocked me back, the Christmas debacle (I may share that story one day, it was awful but also kind of funny) and blood samples I gave today. Cut me some slack. 😉
What I said in another post about my cemetery visits is true. I’ve always liked cemeteries – not for aesthetic reasons, but because I liked to imagine the stories of the dead.
I’ll never know anything about those people, and it is not my business to know then and now. I just felt a kinship with the dead because, to be blunt, I wanted to join them. In the past I could divert such feelings with whatever media I enjoyed. But I didn’t enjoy anything then. Maybe, as Jim Morrison sang with perfect morose inflection, this was the end.
am I glad I didn’t follow through? I don’t know. I feel I made a solid enough decision to “keep [myself] alive”. I guess that will have to do. Apologies to my family and friends if this is upsetting to read about. I love you all, but I can’t lie about what a struggle I went through either, and you had to put up with a lot of bullshit from me. I lash out sometimes when angry and unhappy. It’s not something I’m proud of. I hope you understand.
I originally wrote this on Instagram. I cleaned up the format, spelling and grammar but it is pretty much as is.
If you can possibly spare anything at all, my Cashapp is £SaferThanHeaven84, my ko-fi is:
https://ko-fi.com/emmaslens and my paypal is emmaconner84@gmail.com.
Bloody Roses 