I remember once feeling like I was losing my mind - in the depths of heartbreak, my brain untethered itself from my body, and floated away from it, watching it function while occasionally demanding that it do strange, inexplicable things. These days, instead, my mind and body have both been taken over, a Hulk slowly inflating within until I can feel it pressing against my flesh from the inside, taking over my eyes and ears, my arms and legs, all of my organs, raising my blood temp to boiling and making my eyeballs vibrate inside my skull. My thoughts are like candy floss, tangling around each other until I can’t tell the beginning or end of a thought. If I write something down on enough lists, sometimes I’ll discover later that I’ve managed to complete some task, but anything that requires decision-making is utterly beyond me.
And when there’s only a tiny bit of myself left, buried under the grief and stress of the last eighteen months, I can’t even really hear it anymore. I can’t hear that voice insisting that I don’t really want to move out of my life, I don’t really want to flee abroad on my own, I’m sure I don’t want to go out of my way to push away those closest to me. I stand in the middle of Boots and think about dyeing my hair, which becomes cutting it all off, which becomes flying to a new country and committing to some bigamous marriage with someone who won’t even speak my language. But I don’t even feel like this all the time - there are vast swathes, the majority even, where I’m happy, sensible, sad but whole - but when I do feel like this it expands in my memory so that it overwrites the previous day or week and suddenly I’ve felt like this forever, and won’t ever feel anything else again. It is so boring.
The woman in the shop who fits my new glasses is a rung up to feeling better. She performs such wonderful, purposeful goofiness in a too-low chair that if I speak softly enough and carry myself out carefully enough, I can keep that full glass in my head and feel alright for the rest of the day. The good feeling dissipates by the next shop doorway. A gentle council employee with a massive watch who gives me my parking permit within two minutes is another rung up; hand over hand I think I can lift myself out. Things which are not rungs up but instead are a foot on my head: staying up late; eating garbage; cutting myself off from people; lying like a rug on the floor instead of going for a run; reading bad books; watching bad films; accepting unnecessary pressure. I know this, and I maintain those destructive habits.