View From The River

A confession; a mantra

There are certain moments that act like a turned-over corner. They mark the page in the long book of your life, making them easy to turn to and remember. One of these moments is the experience of perching on a GP’s hard chair, the fluorescent lights harsh, and admitting in a cracked voice that you’re not coping.

I’ve done it three times in my four decades. The first was as a student failing her A-levels, not long before I collapsed entirely and dropped out. The second time was as a young and newly single mum, after my grandmother died, when the terror of what adulthood truly meant met me like a fist to the gut. The third time was last month, on a Wednesday.

I wrote a long post about it, or half a one at least, full of pronouncements, shame, courage, and then I got very sick with bronchitis and life stopped. There was no coping or not-coping for a while, just heat and stillness and the spasmodic pulse of my body as I coughed and coughed and coughed. I’d think back on that half-finished post from time to time, what I had written and all that felt certain as I wrote it. The days slipped past, and as happens when you write about yourself, the self that had written it began to feel further and further away.

I am still not recovered. Getting there though. Nothing external has changed in the interim. I am — have been — simply in the river, moving, as I always am. The view looks different now. And because I haven’t had the strength to fight, just float, I have been able to really look at that view again, instead of flailing and splashing and trying to cope.

Thank you, bronchitis, for this gift. I do not think it was a coincidence that you came along.

This year has been one of quiet terror and desperation. I don’t like admitting that. There has been joy and beauty too, and lots and lots of love, but underneath it all, I have been a rat scrabbling at what felt like dark, enclosed walls, trying to escape. I began the year with new layers of pain and symptoms that catapulted me into a barrage of medical tests. I feared for my life. The tests ended up revealing nothing new, of course, and yet despite every reassurance and however hard I tried to ignore and push down what I’ve continued to experience, I’ve found myself haunted by the exhausting conviction that an alarm was — is — ringing, ringing, ringing, devastatingly, out of sight. My body has felt terrifying. I have lost all trust in it.

Running on his own, precious, parallel track, my son had a breakdown. On track number three, circumstances meant that I felt under increasing pressure to provide for us all financially in a way I only seem able to fail at. Rather than morph into an expansive, steel-cored, powerhouse of energy, responsibility, effort and achievement, I struggled to work at all. And I couldn’t fix or escape any of these things. I clawed and scrabbled and tried and things just felt worse, not better.

A dog barks. A man in a cafe loudly sips his drink through a straw and for a panicked second I am convinced that is somebody choking. Fraser drives a little too close to the curb and my heart stops. I flinch and freeze, over and over.

“I feel frightened all the time”, the self of last month admits to my doctor. “The pain is constant and it’s… broken something in my head, I think. It’s too much, I’m finding it just too much.”

We talk about starting HRT soon, to see if that helps; anxiety meds to slow my racing heart. Pain relief is difficult — my gut and my kidneys can’t copy with much now and I react to almost everything I’m prescribed. I say no to antidepressants. I go home and pore over my plans, my strategies. I write out my determination and courage and begin to try to form words to share that will mean I am not rejected.

And then I get sick and my body says STOP. STOP ALL THIS.

I have read a lot, unable to do much else. Whilst reading, a mantra found me: “This moment matters.”

I have chanted it to myself lying still with my pain and my strange, confusing body. I have chanted it as I listened, my heart twisting like rock under glacial pressure, to my son talk. I chanted it yesterday as F wheeled me to the community centre for a change of scene and I watched a man with a learning disability, one eye bulging white and sightless, lean over his chair, twisting his hand to make shadows on the ground.

It is the truth of what I have forgotten this year, and remembering it has shifted something inside me again. I do not want to keep trying to escape my life — my beautiful, complex life.

So often the forced effort, hustle, plans and ambition that we encourage and affirm in each other are just a desperate attempt to escape the here and now. They hide so much fear and rejection. So much no and not this. My own fear fresh on me, I can see it, smell it, in almost everything I see online. There is very little peace or love-for-what-is in anyone or anything and I recoil from it.

There must be a different way, I think.

No answers, only new questions, and a renewed commitment to hold still.

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