Just a day

 

I wasn’t going to write anything today because I know it will be miserable when I do.  But, fuck it, I may as well have a stab at trying to express what I’m feeling.  Moany – you’ve been warned:

I have feelings today.  I’m not numb girl today.  I feel incredibly sad and dejected.  My sadness starts somewhere deep within my stomach, a glistening tendon that stretches up, wraps around my heart and crawls up into my throat.  There’s a sensation, physical, of pulling.  I think sadness is usually a pulling sensation for me.  There’s tautness, I suppose a bit like a guitar string, but tautness that vibrates beyond its natural level.  In the lexicon of spiritual folk, my guitar string is not in tune with the universe around it.  It is not perfectly balanced, Yin and Yang, and it is certainly not perfectly pitched.  I’m sorry for the mundanity of that metaphor, I wish I could come up with a fresh way to describe quiet sadness, but at the minute I can’t come up with anything.

I’m writing this down because acute sadness is very difficult to keep within oneself.  It is so dissonant that, while it shouts its presence, I find it near impossible to relax a single muscle in my body.  I feel it in my stomach – growling and churning.  I feel it in my bowels – cramping and urgency.  I feel it in my throat – tight, tight inside.  Focusing on the feeling is inevitable and trying not too is as exhausting as giving in.

I’ve been very metaphorical so I guess I should try to fasten down what is causing this sadness.  I can’t say anything obvious has instigated it, but if I had to honestly describe my current mental wanderings I’d include these as the most pertinent facts:

I feel totally alone.  I am the only person inside my head and it’s very lonely in here.  I crave touch.  I want someone to reach out and stroke my hair, to brush my skin in hypnotic circles until the tension in each part of my physical body has been coaxed away.  I am alone here.  No one can do that for me.

I want a hug and to be comforted.  I want it the way a little girl wants it.  They say babies need their mother’s touch, in part because they haven’t learned at that age to ’self-soothe’.  As such they are helpless against distress.  They need someone to give them what they can’t give themselves.  This is so important that hospitals make certain that babies in ICU can still be touched as long as their medical condition permits this. 

I want to yell at the world “TOUCH ME!  FOR GOD’S SAKE, SOMEBODY TOUCH ME.”  But I am not the yelling kind.  I am the swallow it, ignore it, compress it kind.  Not as much as I used to be, admittedly.  I can express myself to a very few people now, and I mean genuinely express myself, without shamefully omitting things that I think I will be judged for.

I am doing a fair bit of meditation at the moment.  I am working relaxation, meditation, or both, into my day in order to try and get my CFS under control.  Meditation can be frightening.  Lying so still and quiet that everything in the environment falls away, lying so still and quiet that, eventually, all you are left with is yourself, can be painful.  I can’t meditate in the middle of a depressive episode and I personally don’t believe it’s good for me in that circumstance.  Clinical depression is not the time to be seeking inner truths because your ‘inner’ is too busy being lied to by Dread and Hate to cope with stillness.  Perhaps some people don’t find this to be the case, but I’ve certainly found it makes me more agitated than I was to start with.

Now, I can meditate.  I can meditate a little bit, some days easier than others.  If I was very down I wouldn’t do it – I’d try to watch something or have a conversation to quell the noise.  Meditation can be peaceful.  I am not a hundred per cent there yet, though.  I’m still finding unruly thoughts and feelings making their home in the space I am clearing for mental tranquility.  Fucking squatters! 

Anyway, I’ve gone off track there.  Today my sad feelings are coming from loneliness, I think.  I am so lonely today.  It’s long been stated that one can be alone without being lonely and vice versa.  If I were in a crowd right now I’d still feel lonely because no-one in the crowd would know how I feel or care to.  I’m not particularly needy as a person, not compared to some.  But now.  Today.  I wish someone was next to me, to hold me, to soothe me and to let my head rest on their shoulder.