Mania. I imagine it presents itself differently in everyone.

For me it’s the complete disorganisation of thought that I so desperately hate. I revert to completing the tasks that I know how to do as an expert without thinking, so that I don’t have to try to create the order I crave and need because I feel woefully unable to do so. On days like this I’m completely out of control and I cannot stand it.

Today is manic. I can’t sit still. My fingers ache. My entire body feels like it’s on fire and I keep agonising about all the things I need to do that just cannot find motivation to do. Everything is so heavy.

I managed to drag myself to work and back, without really thinking about it at all. I got out of bed, showered and got dressed. Auto-pilot.

I painted my face with horrendously expensive makeup to cover up the sins of a life well travelled, to hide the reality of my tired and ageing jowls. I brushed the tangles out of my hair, laced my shoes and hefted my backpack on, racing down the stairs into the brisk morning air.

I watched as my body carried itself to the train and departed the station like I’ve done every working day for the last six months. Today I’m a passenger on this journey. I have no control of what is happening here.

I walked from the platform to the lunch bar I frequent every morning, greeted the barista warmly as I do every day and sat amongst the freight trucks willing the sun to warm the chill that I haven’t been able to shift for what has seemed months on end.

People made jokes. I laughed. I told some of my own. I put headphones on and drowned out the sound of other people going about the same day as I, with Jeff Buckley’s ‘Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin‘ on repeat to quell the sensation of lightning splintering from every nerve ending. Again and again.

On days like this, I feel like I’m drowning. But today I carried myself home.

Home enveloped me in it’s arms and let me cry about everything and nothing. About the words that I can’t express, the truths that I can’t share, the horrors that will never escape my lips but remained trapped like prisoners – not for safe keeping, but for safety.

Home walked with me down the filthy city streets and got ice cream.

Home stroked and wiped the tears from my face and told me that the world wasn’t all bad.

I’m glad I made it home today.

This is a love letter to my closest friends.

It won’t seem like it at first, but stay the course.

Life is morbid; it’s a series of traumas – some small, short and sharp; some so poignant and altering that they cut you off at the knees, immediately cauterising the wounds so you continue breathing even though you wish you hadn’t. We have no choice but to collect these experiences like tiny treasures we don’t want, hoisted on our backs like our most valuable possessions. We keep these in chests, with many locks interwoven in heavy chains, down deep.

Some of us are lucky enough to bear witness to these tiny treasures and are able to continue to tell our stories.

I share anecdotes often, based on my collected treasures. They’ve been branded into my psyche and occassionally the resulting burns scab up and itch. It’s when they itch so terribly that the load becomes unbearable, I speak out the trauma so it leaves temporarily, escaping from my lips and into the atmosphere, dissipating like smoke in the air.

The people closest to me know that my most successful coping strategies are…well, them. I talk about my treasure. About the things that brandish blades into my oesophagus, the things the bury themselves into my temples and furrow deep behind my eyes.

About the feelings of abandonment. About the hurt that I’ve caused through reckless words, careless actions and bouts of mania – and the guilt. There’s always guilt, whether reasonably applied or not; since I was small, I’ve carried the sins of those that came before me even though I know I have never had any ownership – eventually those that came before will die and I continue to live in the hope that the guilt will be buried with them.

About the day more than a decade ago, I found out my closest friend had died.

About the faltering relationships I once held so close as a child, that have been irreparably damaged.

This is salvation. This is reprieve.

And in that there is lightness. I discovered through many years of being medicated and being in therapy that the most effective way to deal with the itch was to talk.

And I talk a lot. I make this assertion knowing that every single person that walks a similar journey has different coping mechanisms.

They’ve shifted the burden from the hip I carry mine on, to their shoulders to even out the weight of it all – this is perfectly acceptable, I don’t pass judgement on those whose coping strategies differ from mine.

I’m grateful for the safety that enraptures me when I’m hand-in-hand with my friends as they delve mindlessly down the path of the labyrinth that is me, to find the chest where the treasures are kept – because I asked them to accompany me on an odyssey.

I am grateful for those that ventured down, down, down with me where my treasures reside, braving the ghouls that hide in the darkest parts of me looking for excuses to start wars, to pick the locks and let the treasure tumble unceremoniously to the floor.

I’m grateful that once the chains are untangled and the locks are discarded and set aside, and the lid groans angrily as its lifted and the treasures are discovered, exposed and shared – that they stay.

That they stay and help me heave the treasures back into the chest, wiping beads of sweat from their brows and smile while I return the chains and locks to their rightful places.

That they stay and drag me screaming back from oblivion to the fire to warm my cold, dead hands.

That they stay and crawl with me towards the tendrils of eternal sunshine.

I love you.

I am forever grateful that you will always help me to find the light.

Lazarus.

Artist Credit: David Flores

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the motivation to put figurative pen to paper, or even figured I had anything worthwhile to talk about.

I forgot that blogging had a therapeutic element to it for me, a place where I can express my thoughts and feelings about the world in which I’m moving through where people can be drawn to if interested, or repelled away from because the sentiments in my writings are either lost on them or just a singular point of view that they don’t share.

I worry often when I write that I expose too much of my own naivety, my own insecurities – because so many people I encounter assume that the representation of me as a person in my professional life is someone who moves through the world self-assuredly, unapologetically and confidently.

Ironically, the aforementioned adjectives are not descriptive words that I would ever attribute to myself, at least not in my current state of existence.

If I had to translate my own self-valuation into words, I would use ‘awkward’, ‘inconsistent’ and ‘hot-headed’. This is not to say that I’m not trying to become the perception that some people have of me, it’s simply that these are the things that speak the loudest to me when I traverse the ugly parts of my personality, unwittingly. My brain often goes to these places in moments of quiet, of which I have allowed myself tonnes of in the last six months. For the purposes of my own survival through debilitating anxiety and depression, getting to know myself intimately has become necessity.

I think these thoughts have hampered my ability to do this thing that I love so much; write. I haven’t written music in years, convincing myself that I had nothing of note to offer the world poetically. I’ve had the beginnings of a fictional novel becoming less and less topical and relevant on my desktop for about 4 years, fearing that by self-publishing what I think is a decent piece of writing will be slammed relentlessly by the rest of the far-more-talented world. I convince myself constantly that all of these creative ventures I have attempted aren’t good enough by any stretch of the imagination, so I move on to Netflix marathons and Pinterest boards, packed full of DIY projects that I know I will never have the motivation to attempt or talent to complete, leaving most projects unfinished.

But, I digress. This is current me, all wrapped up in ill-fitting clothes. These are all things that I want to change about myself. I don’t know what it is about 2018, but I feel…different. Like the winds of change have come through and swept me up on their laurels, to push me violently into uncomfortable experiences and out of the status quo that is me.

The beginning of this year began tragically for my family, with the loss of my paternal uncle to MND and the end of mourning for my cousins’ son. A week prior, my youngest brother got married to his long time girlfriend and we got to celebrate the beginnings of the newest chapter of their lives together. My sister announced her long-awaited pregnancy at Christmas, elating my parents and siblings with the addition and extension of our family. Two colleagues lost their lives unexpectedly. I reunited with my mother, after an uncomfortable and extended silence.

The juxtaposition of these happenings and experiences speaks so much to the uncertainties of life as it exists for all of us. During all of this, I felt like a passive observer, on the outskirts of everything happening around me – unhelpful, more than anything. Useless. I think this may have been behind my significant desire to change how I move through the world, less aggressively and with the type of kindness that I have lacked in the last 30 years on the planet. Watching how quickly things can go from celebratory to grief-stricken has been so transformative, and made me want to be more thoughtful about how I interact with other people.

I want to start reading voraciously, like I did when I was a precocious child; I want to tell my friends every time that I think kind thoughts about them and share them, even at the expense of us both being uncomfortable; I want to watch awful gaming walk-throughs with my son and listen intently as he describes what is happening on-screen and see the joy in his face that Mum is taking an interest in his passions.

I just want so desperately to be better than I am today – I know that’s probably what every person wants whose not a complete narcissist, but I really can’t articulate that any better. So I guess this new attempt at keeping record of my life, this new blog, will be a place where I can come and explain my rationale for my decisions.

All I can hope is that my words, regardless of what they are, are received with the positive intent and love that I mean them to be.

x C