3-9-2021: Day 84
The meds had long kicked in since the unwelcome and traumatic visit of the Blackheart Man, so I dropped the Olanzapine dosage to 17.5 mg. Shave a little off. It’s a little victory hard earned. Sometimes the meds feel like being wrapped in a warm duvet, drowning out the white noise of life. Other times they feel like a ticking time bomb to physical ruination. It was the latter on the Friday night, approaching the witching hour, with a feeling of total wipe-out as I self-medicated with a heady cocktail of 17.5 mg and booze.
After a quick internet search on the symptoms of warm patches on the feet, it threw up the shady diagnosis of diabetes. I could feel the coil, the mortal coil, coil round my body, as I watched King Gary’s comedy wedding farce unfurl on the BBC.
The raw truth is I don’t know how much lifetime I have on these highly addictive psych meds. I read in some tweet these meds can cut short life by twenty-five years. All I know is I am poisoning my system, careering down the slippery slope of life without a handbrake.
5-9-2021: Day 86
I was on a family stomp, over Lancing Clump, a farmed hill on the edge of the Sussex Downs, beating a path through the freshly cut, golden harvested wheat. I was striking out on my lonesome, separate from the pack. A lone wolf, with an ear worm of the Wurzel’s ‘The Combine Harvester’ song for company.
I was contemplating life and its myriad of pathways – some golden, others blackened – relishing the arse end of summer, with the sun crisping up my neck from drug induced photo sensitivity.
The first to the summit of the Clump, I was harvesting my memory reserves, recollecting the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin about an imp who spins straw into gold. I rue, through greedy eyes, the power these supernaturally spun fields of golden wheat would bring to life’s treasure table. And I closed my eyes and reflected on the line from the Bob Marley tune, about wisdom being more precious than silver or gold.
7-9-2021: Day 88
Gabor Mate was looking tired and weary. A lifelong career studying the effects of addiction and trauma on humanity had taken its toll, with seventy-seven years of endured pain chiselled into his craggy facial features.
He was being interviewed on a world-wide broadcast zoom call about the impact and link between trauma and spiritual awakening, and his words were resonating at a high frequency somewhere around my mind, heart, and soul.
Enlarged on the screen, the thick hooded and sunken eyes of the Hungarian immigrant physician betrayed his vulnerabilities. Somewhere inside the deep-set pupils there lived the suffering of his grandparents who were killed at the hands of the Nazi’s in Auschwitz.
Since watching his film ‘The Wisdom of Trauma’, I have been following his work and wisdoms, from a fascinated personal standpoint. And as Gabor signed off from this interview, his parting words rung out true and prophetic, that we are all merely ‘dust with consciousness’.