DEAD GIRL WALKING - PART 5
‘It takes courage to endure the sharp pains of self-discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives’ Marianne Williamson
OUTDOOR
I walk through wooden gates and follow the highlighted path. I walk past lopsided trees whose branches, shaped by the force of the clifftop winds, look like umbrella’s blown inside out. I walk beyond the crashing waves, down the rubble like stairs crumbling under my feet. Past the families bracing the blustery winds. Past the coffee shop and visitors’ centre. I walk up a hill and climb over the wooden stile. I step onto a long, dusty, gravelly path – stones crunching under my purple DMs.
I am alone.
The sky is huge, cloudless, stretching out endlessly in front of me. To the left of me is a barren field. To the right a dying, withering, wildflower meadow. There are no people. There isn’t even a bird in the sky. I feel an odd, eerie, silence surrounding me. I breathe it in, stretch my arms, breathe out and marvel at the wonder of it all.
INDOOR
I’m standing in the middle of an empty flat. My footsteps on the laminated floor echo around me.
I feel a sense of familiarity in this emptiness – feel it in the very core of me.
What I witnessed out there on the clifftops echoes the empty, void-like chasm that yawns deep within me. Though I cannot find it in me to marvel at this internal, vacuous landscape. This inner spaciousness brings me nothing but existential dread.
It’s the blank canvas staring me down. It’s the cursor blinking on the blank page going ‘wake up fucktard’.
This place, I am standing in now: this will be my very own home. The first in so many years. Will it feel like home? I always fall short of experiencing such a thing as ‘home’. It remains a very abstract concept. If it were not for my two cats I would remain in deep abstraction.
I use my job as a form of anaesthetic life Polyfilla, filling in the cracks to those inner ‘void’ pangs we can all feel – it’s not just me, right? I have no fucking clue what I’m supposed to do with a home of my own. The one with four walls and a roof. Aside from the daily reprieve I receive from my babies (cats) I am left with choices that demand an energy from me that has been all but depleted by the PSYCH SHOP ghoul hours I work. And so, to feel somewhat part of something, or dare I say it – grounded - I write. I write what I feel.
I write here, to try and understand what my feelings are trying to tell me. They often act like a pack of rabid dogs off their leash, running amok in the wilderness. What part of my conscious or unconscious state are you trying to piss all over now you crazy canines?
‘It takes courage to endure the sharp pains of self-discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives’ Marianne Williamson
I hate to say it, but ‘fuck you Marianne’. Being ‘courageous’ is so overrated. The dull ache of being IN THIS WORLD without THE ANAESTHEITC is so not sexy. I’ve been trudging this path of ‘consciousness’ for 7 years and those ‘sharp pains’ of so-called self-discovery have got me channelling that Dillinger track about wishing cocaine is running around my brain.
Instead, I am the Nurse Neo of my own Matrix, fucking up the meds, taking a red rather than a blue. Red = Reality. Blue = Bliss.
Oh, the bliss!
I have to admit, that even without taking medication of any sort, red or blue - I have a natural inclination towards dissociative processes. Thank God I am not a pilot or a brain surgeon. Now there’s an oxymoron. I am, however, a psychiatric nurse who is lumbered with that thing we call “the med’s round”. So, ‘checking-out’is not always ideal for ward peace.
It won’t come as any surprise that every now and then I get called in by the senior nurse for ‘supervision’. I worry I will be forensically investigated by the NMC (Nursing FBI) for matrixing the patients meds. Oh Dear!
RED PILL: WELCOME TO WONDERLAND
I have now arrived at a place where I do not know who I really am anymore. It’s what many deaths will do to a person. Not just the loss of the ones you love – like my husband – but the deaths of certain ideals and concepts about this world. And also, the ‘other’ me, the me I thought and believed I always was.
The grief attached in letting go of those beliefs or ‘fantasies’ left me bereft with the mother of all hangovers. So, that is how I now find myself standing in the emptiness (outdoor and indoor) looking around, bewildered, thinking – ‘hey where did everybody go?’
THE BIG O
I was there in a big puddle of zero. The ZERO HERO! I have a blank tape of my very own greatest hits – aka false beliefs. The ones that run through on a loop in my head, in my life – an extended version. At least I know what I am working with now. D.I.S.H.O.N.E.S.T.Y. This is not me being mean to myself. It’s my head being mean to me. So now that those false constructs of survival are being deleted, I am left with what exactly? ONE BIG O.
NOTHING - NADA - EL VOID!
This is where the work begins. I read that somewhere once. It's not so much filling the BLANK, as that will never happen, it's more about living with it. I think it was Wilfred Bion who mentioned something about the BLANK or as he called it the BIG ‘O’.
O – our ‘ultimate reality’ where we will find the ‘truth’ of who we really are. But there’s a psychological/spiritual catch to this concept of O. To get to this ‘truth’, Bion believed that we would have to learn to tolerate and get comfortable with ‘not knowing’. Of being able to sit in that void space, for the entirety of our lives. So, in short, without all this psychic pain I would not grow.
That BIG O of mine, I need to see it as a space to explore – like a creative space. Like me writing a book about ‘dead space’… Go figure.
THIS WEEKS RECOMMENDED:
Book: Return to Love – Marianne Williamson
Song: Cocaine in my Brain - Dillinger
Film: The Matrix