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.

I feel like most people have a story to share about having their heart broken, shattered into a million pieces so much so that it’s a physical sensation, one that feels like all the nerve endings in your fingertips are exposed. It’s raw and visceral, like a persistent cat scratch, or the dull thud of a clenched fist taking shape, pummelling your internal organs like minced meat.

In my lifetime, I’ve felt this only twice. Bitterness at being left behind? That’s not heartbreak, not at least in the way I think about it . Your muscles twitching and flexing in anger at the thought of someone you thought was faithful to you – who wasn’t? No, that’s not it either.

The first time I had my heart crushed? I was 14 years old. Being a teenager was gut wrenching for me, a distant memory I visit infrequently because the very thought of the precocious, inspired little girl I was who imagined the entire world was within her grasp, but knew she didn’t deserve it? Even thinking back on it now, the lack of self worth and constant comparisons to other more beautiful creatures that graced the backdrop of my life is palpable. I looked to others to tell me that I was worth something, anything, and now when I think about that time in my life I’m angry at myself for ever being that…pathetic.

In any case, when I was 13 and in high school, I encountered a boy that would change my life and the way I would move through this world forever. I remember seeing him across a crowded block, shuffling from side to side waiting impatiently outside his English class as the schools’ bell rang out through the courtyard, signalling the end of lunch.

I’d recently enrolled at the school, after being frozen out of my previous college – but that’s an entirely different story. Relevant to the person I am today, but one less filled with heartbreak and with humour and irony.

As I was making my way to my science class with a bevy of new girlfriends, I looked up and noticed him immediately. He had a shock of the most amazing natural hair, that billowed out from his furrowed brow highlighted with teasings of auburn and blonde. I remember with curiosity asking my classmate who he was, and she told me his name with the distain in her voice loud and clear. I presumed this was because he was some kind of teenage lothario who really should be avoided for the sake of sanity.

But I couldn’t look away – and for further clarification, I was a 13 year old girl surging with hormones and ideals about love and romance.

As it goes in high school, the rumour mill began to fly thick and fast. My memory is hazy of that time, but I believe I wrote a note to him that said something along the line of wanting to get to know him better. I bravely handed the note to a trusted friend, who passed it along during a period where they shared a class together.

And then? I waited. And waited.

The embarrassment of knowing I had let this boy into my innermost thoughts was excruciating, and I took every opportunity to avoid him in the corridors, dashing into the bathroom when I saw his friends pass by. I would forever be known by them as the sad new girl who had a crush on their friend and the thought of facing any one them was excruciating.

After school everyday, I would make my way to the local depot to alight a bus home. The depot was the local hotspot for kids after school who wanted to socialise into dusk, meaning it was becoming more difficult to avoid the boy and his friends as more time passed. My friends told me I was overreacting and dragged me along with them to the depot, despite my protests that I could alight at a different stop by walking a little further from the school.

My anxiety reached new peaks one day as I saw him and his ever present best friend milling about in the local takeaway bar, waiting on an afternoon tea of deep fried treats. It was all I could do not to run screaming from where I stood, so instead? I checked the bus schedule and hid around the corner until the time came for me to dash into the safety of my carriage to freedom.

One of my friends came to find me and coax me back to the area outside the library overlooking the depot, where the rest of the girls sat in a huddled semi circle discussing the intricacies of high school life, boys they liked and just general musings. I told him I couldn’t bear it, and he laughed and told me I was being dramatic.

And then it happened.

Across the street from where I’d secreted myself away, the boy and his friend had been hiding behind a panel van. Unfortunately, they hadn’t seen the driver return and the van unceremoniously drove away from the spot where it had been parked, leaving the two boys huddling and exposed.

I thought I would die. They’d been spying on us! I convinced myself that I’d become this huge joke between him and his friends, and they’d been watching and laughing at me, knobbled knees jutting out from my awkward tartan school uniform. The weirdo who runs to the bus as it arrives.

“Oh my god, they’re coming over!”, my friend exclaimed. I wanted the ground to cave in and swallow me up whole. Even thinking about this whole scenario now is cringe inducing, like recalling a scene from a made-for-television movie. I froze.

“Hi”…I heard an uneven, stammering voice.

“So, I got your note.”

Again, I willed the earth to hear me and collapse beneath me. I looked up from my shoes – I had been staring at intently for some time – and came face to face with the object of my affections.

“Oh, yeah”. I bit the inside of my lip, which is something even more than 20 years later I still do when I’m nervous.

There was an exchange between our friends, both jovially encouraging us both to further discuss the situation in which we’d found ourselves in.

“So, I ah – I was wondering if you’d maybe, like, umm…” he managed to spit out. I could feel my face my face flushing a bright rouge, the heat working it’s way down my body like an all enveloping rash.

“Aren’t you going to give her your number?!,” my friend exclaimed, frustrated at the length of time we’d been standing in front of each other, both awkwardly pulling at our own clothes as some sort of refuge.

“Oh yeah, give her your number…”, his friend muttered, paper and pen at the ready.

He scribbled on the back of a textbook page, folded it over carefully and handed it to me dutifully.

“You can call me if you want to?”, he said as a half-statement, half-question. I remember saying thank you and watching them through lowered eyes walk away from the spot, where I still stood frozen, cemented to the sidewalk.

I remember the elation I felt at the fact that there was, or potentially would be some reciprocated feelings to my overbearing (and obsessive) teenage lust. He might not necessarily know me enough to like anything about me, but he knew enough that he was intrigued by me and wanted to know more. That feeling, even now as an adult and encountering other people who are interested to know me, even platonically, is incomparable.

And the rest? Well, it’s long buried. I did call him and we shared hours and hours on the phone, but for months at school we would observe each other across courtyards in quiet reverence. Talking on the telephone was easy, but fronting up to each other in person remained difficult for sometime. He eventually asked me to be his girlfriend and I accepted, ecstatically. He was everything I knew I wanted then.

But time is cruel, and so is high school. We experienced many firsts together; I can’t speak for him and say that I was his first love, but he was definitely mine. We wrote each other long love letters, that were never about anything in particular. I spent evenings in his home with his family long past my curfew, to the chagrin of my mother – I just so desperately wanted to occupy the same space as he.

But so did many other women, which would eventually be our downfall. My relationship with this boy played out like an incredibly far fetched episode of a tele-novella, which lead to some of the most painful, heartbreak I will ever know. The details aren’t important to understanding the story, but for years I held on to the memories of our initial courtship, hoping like hell we could one day get back there. We were both too young to fully comprehend so much of what we did and said, that the unfortunate part is that rekindling never happened.

Thankfully my story didn’t end with the death of my first love and neither did his.

I moved across an ocean at 18 to learn how to be a person without his name being uttered in the same breath as mine and to break the bonds that he had over me, for no other reason except I loved him with all of the naivety of a 13 year old girl.

I met other people who enjoyed my company, men and women. I shared many things with them that shaped my view of the world, and taught so much about who I was as a person – without him.

Most of the people that are in my life now? They don’t even know he exists. He is apart of a chapter of my life that I penned and shelved away in the depths of my archive many, many years ago.

He is now married happily to a stunningly beautiful woman and has had many children. I am now married with one son, refusing still to grow up to maintain some of the childlike joy that I had before I had my heart stomped into obliteration.

And for the most part? I’m happy. I’m fulfilled, blessed and loved. My heart is still a huge open wound, but as an empath I fear this will never change.

But even so? I’m not sure that I’d want it to.

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