10-9-2021: Day 91
It was mid-afternoon and the slate grey clouds were blotting out the remnants of the Indian summer sun. As the clock hands on my watch ticked to 3 o’clock, the fragile piece of peace in the silent house felt like it was about to shatter, as a darkness visible threatened to consume the remains of the daylight.
I could feel a malevolent force swirling about my person. Something more akin to the ‘death eaters’ in Harry Potter. Something more than a deep depressive mood. Something more forbidding hanging on the breeze.
It was time to grasp the nettles of fear creeping and choking my thoughts, growing ever upwards through the wooden floorboards.
Hours later, I lit a single candle beside my bed, as I felt the darkness run through me. It would be a dark night of the soul, and I would wake from a grave violent nightmare of being stabbed by a monstrous psycho with beer bottle glasses.
14-9-2021: Day 95
Raindrops are falling on my head. Falling and creating perfect concentric, overlapping circles in the muddy puddles. Falling and kissing the musky tarmac running parallel to the River Adur.
Strolling over the old Shoreham toll bridge, I am contemplating the ‘World Hearing Voices Day’ on this day of days wondering how many of the millions of global voice hearers were out of their socially imposed and manufactured closet.
In so many ways, voice hearing is one of the last social taboos, from the burning of Joan of Arc for witchcraft, to the modern-day inky barcode tattoo of the paranoid schizophrenic. The closet of the voice hearer is more aligned to a reinforced steel prison cell.
But, striding out along the riverbank in the rain, I feel a wave of optimism breeze off the water. Escape from the closet might be akin to miraculously finding fucking springtime out the back of the Narnia cupboard, but the more I travel down these roads, the more the closet prison door creaks open.