17-9-2021: Day 98
I’ve been lost in the Trenches for over a month now, wandering like a ghostly infantry man through the narrow dug out and fortified tunnels of my forty-seven-year-old life. Constricted, contained, and cemented in a military prison of the mind. Devoid of motivation, mental faculties, and mindfulness – there is the odd chink of daylight – but otherwise I’ve been submerged in a shadowy maze, looking for a lantern, to shed flickering candlelight on the unmapped route out from this psychic battlefield.
The psych meds are crushing my vibe, mashing my mojo, and suffocating my spontaneity. Like a doped-up albatross round my neck, they have reduced my progress to one foot in front of the other, and its muddy underfoot. Memories of stomping round the sticky mucky fields of Glastonbury in the mid-nineties, and the sound of suction, like a toilet plunger, sounding out with every glued-up step of my festival wellington boots.
While the fear of failure is bogging me down, I allow it to run through my mind, body, and soul like a fever. It will pass, as will time in the Trenches.
19-9-2021: Day 100
3.23 am. And I was contemplating life, swirling down a whirlpool plughole of alcohol-fuelled excess, frustratedly gripping the chunky dining room table of family members not seen since before the first chapter of Lockdown.
It was a familiar, ages-old family portrait, painted in the mashed-up colours of an early hours drinking session.
I was fast disappearing down a K-hole of my own manufacturing, trying to articulate the here and now’s of my own medicated state, but everything was being lost in translation. A message in a bottle, the umpteenth beer bottle. But all I could feel was the grip of psychosis and blind drunken fear, guilt, and paranoia.
This family reunion was holding up a mirror to my own destructive life patterns, of falling headfirst into debauched addiction and its gaping pitfalls. A reminder these booze-fuelled expeditions were a rugged wake-up call to arms – on this, the hundredth day of my mission impossible, towards full recovery and a life free of psychiatric medication.
20-9-2021: Day 101
Reclined in the car seat, eyes closed, I was lazily daydreaming the last sunshine of summer into the ashes of late afternoon. Tuning into the chirping birds and random conversation snippets of patients in the doctor surgery carpark, I was waiting patiently for my man.
Waiting for my man from the pharmacy dispensary, tagged conveniently next door to the doctors, to hit me up with my white paper bag full of pills, thrills, and bellyaches.
I was idly dreaming up a Golden Arches style drive-thru drug store, where you could rock up for a rapid psychiatric scan, mental health diagnosis, and pick n’ mix assortment of pharmaceutical pills. All in the space of time it takes to sign off a GP’s ‘script’.
Opening my eyes, I heard a cackle of a magpie, watched her fly off from the tree branch, and go in search of fool’s gold.
And in the blink of an eye, my man arrives at the car window and hands over my white paper bag stash of psychiatric medication.