The Pill Diaries - Week 46

WEEK FORTY-SIX

In Recovery by shezhough

21-4-2022: Day 315

The celebrities were lying on the polished wooden floor like freshly woken corpses in a morgue. Eyes closed. Focused on the powerful breathing instructions being delivered by the ice shaman, celebrity, Wim Hoff. It was a reality TV show with a difference, a poker card twist of universal forces, unfolding in a Big Brother chalet, somewhere in a snowy, mountain-peaked backwater, of Europe.

Watching with an aroused sense of wonder and disbelief – as the group meditation went deeper – I was witnessing a synchronised exorcism of a fashion, before the candid BBC cameras.

The camera never lies, but it does dodge reality. One-by-one, the sold-in-Magus, Hoff, drew out demons, haunting ghosts of trauma, and golden tears of joy from the household names assembled by the Corporation. As the curtain closed – ritual done, an ecstasy group hug, and consciousness expanded – there remained a compelling sensory heatmap of the divine bossing its playground.

23-4-2022: Day 317

Love can blister, scar, and clog the natural energy flow of the heart. This was the soul thought transcending the warm night air, as I watched the boy dive off the deep end of his swimming lane at the Friday club.

I was reeling from a volatile domestic with the enduring love affair of my life. The birth mother to my two teenage children.

A Voice once said the heart was a lotus flower – which can either open to the light of the world or curl up in a bud in the darkness of its shadows.

For thirteen years my lotus flower was trapped in the darkness, when it began to open and bend towards the light. And transfixed in the moment, I felt the growing pains of our damaged roots watered on pure love alone.

Watching the boy power through the water, butterfly style, I was left swimming in an ocean of regret, at harsh words exchanged, between man and wife on an unknown voyage on stormy seas.

24-4-2022: Day 318

I was fumbling in my black flak jacket for another pair of headphones gone AWOL, when I found in a hidden zip pocket the tiny obsidian stone. The black crystal had been there for an age, buried to keep the evil spirits at arm’s length. I took its discovery as a good omen of the rocky road ahead to beat the addiction game.

The game in question was withdrawal. Withdrawal from powerful psych drugs dreamt up by Big Pharma white lab coats to siphon off the billion-dollar C.R.E.A.M for industry fat cats.

Only seven days prior, I had dropped down the dose to the unscripted, self-medicated, bare bones of a 2.5 mg pill every evening. After a long night of the long knives, I was feeling the benefits of an elevated vibration, dreaming of freedom from the mind shackles of pharmaceutical prison.

And, as I rubbed the shine on the obsidian like overworked prayer beads, I whispered a silent psalm to Self.