8-8-2021: Day 57
Coming up for breath, inhaling giant lungsful of detoxified air, I can feel a smidgen of life returning to my mind, body, and soul. There appears to be a stretch of deep blue water between the Rock of Ages, where I rest, and the Blackheart man, who has caused countless flight-or-fight responses since his reappearance over a week ago.
Fearing the worst from these psychic attacks, I downed tools and reached for the white wicker medication basket. Gutting, but I’ve been self-medicating for years since the fires of the Soul Asylums broke out. So, back-up the pharmacological ladder, I popped out a big fat 20mg pill for bedtime supper last night. Big Pharma must be somewhere rubbing their grubby corporate hands in glee.
But the sun is streaming down the grassy terrace verge, the neighbourhood kids have a new inflatable beach ball, and the wind is gently rippling through the tree in the distance.
A piece of peace. A piece of time. A piece of reflection.
9-8-2021: Day 58
I woke to torrential rain streaming down the bedroom window in the jet-black of night. A freak weather storm, mirroring the freak storm of my beautiful broken mind. Cloaked in darkness, in the early pre-dawn hours of another dark night of the soul, I double-downed on downers, still caught in the battle with the Voices, who had all turned from angels to demons overnight.
In the choice words of Springsteen, my wakeful night was crumbling into devils and dust, on this, the first day we were due to depart on our family camping holiday to the New Forest.
Come midday I was still anchored to the bed, reeling under the heavy slumber of sedatives. A Rip Van Winkle cloned for the modern day. I was trying to rally my weary body carcass and mind, akin to raising the zombie dead, to gather myself together to go full steam ahead for a holiday in the sun. The wild rugged terrain of the New Forest could have been the dusky red planet of Mars, for all the will and enthusiasm I could conjure up. And I was somewhere floating above the dark side of the moon.
11-8-2021: Day 60
I was alone, drinking from a personal oasis of calm and solitude, sheltering from the beating midday sun, in a wild camping field in the New Forest.
Everyone had disappeared off-site, and I was relishing the peace and serenity the countryside had to offer, watching cabbage white’s flutter over the reedy grasslands and a wedge of geese fly in red arrow formation into the blue sky overhead.
I was engaged, reflecting on the fire storms of the last fortnight, feeling the trauma buried deep somewhere in the mind and belly. A passing cloud blotted out the sun, casting a long laborious shadow over the campsite.
I was reading a book, ‘Finding True North’, feeling as lonely as the endless blue skies and its author – a female psychiatrist retired to a croft in the Orkney Isles – searching for her place in time and space, battling with the rigors of a fragile mental health in a wild inhospitable environ.
And, how, somehow, I needed to find my own core sense of place by navigating the charred fringes of well-being.