Once a month, I feel an unprecedented sense of urgency about all the life I've let slip through my fingers for the last 3 weeks and I enter into an almost manic state of maintenance.
Life this way is incredibly disjointed, moments of sanity gathered together by fragile thread. I cannot be consistent nor functional, and even as my strength picks up, I anticipate its waning.
I never know what will be urgent to me this time. The order of the books on my shelves? My unanswered emails? Working on the systematic issues in my life that prevent me from moving forwards? The latter being of utmost necessity but incredibly taxing, and near impossible under these circumstances.
This time, after descending into the deepest darkest pits of hell, so dark that an actual demon inserted itself into my dream, I am feeling the temporary emergence again. I can feel the urge to be taken in by it again. The incredible relief, the sense of salvation, the euphoria.
Even though I know better now that this experience is cyclic, it is so charming in its appeal, so convincing in its giving three dimensionality to my life that I find myself being drawn in by it.
I will be worked up into a frenzy. I will answer messages and arrange meet ups and clean my inbox and open 100 new tabs and make a new to do list and start another business and plan my next trip. I will race against the clock to get any of the urgent things done.
I will rage, rage, against the dying of the light. I'll not see the descent coming. It'll take me by surprise like it always does, a week or so from now. It'll be subtle at first, and I will begin to withdraw. All of this predictable and premeditated, all of it visceral and yet masked from my understanding, not noticed until it is too late.
What will I do with my brief window this time? I was just too tired to cope yesterday. Now the little spring is winding up and I can feel the wild darting about for a target. At least I know now this isn't life. It's my life, but it is not a life.
"Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning."
-Stevie Smith
