And I Drown
Some days are harder than others.
I’ve come to find that one of the most painful experiences in the world is waking up from a really good dream. The kind of dream where everything is so tangibly vivid that the real world seems excruciatingly inadequate, because behind the eyelids you didn’t know were closed was once a supernova of colours that don’t exist in our visible spectrum, and light so bright it burns.
But it was a beautiful burning, for I was not consumed by the fire but I was the fire.
And in my dream there was music. There was no volume, there were no majors or minors or sharps or flats; there was no audible energy coursing through the air, but instead the air itself was an orchestra of intricate beats and pulses in beautiful frequencies that isolated my nerve endings in an arctic sea of sound; that turned my blood electric and made my soul sing and my heart dance.
In my every step was a graceful spring, and as gravity released and drew me in rhythm with the sun, I became a wandering dancer who performed for the universe as it painted me with light. I was not a ballerina but I was the ballet, for here in my dream, I was not an artist, but the pinnacle of art.
My dream was not a story, my dream was a feeling. My dream was a crack of lightning in a stormy sky; powerful and brilliant and it set my world alight and it was gone as soon as it came.
I’ve come to find that one of the most painful experiences in the world is waking up from a really good dream, and as you come to, it slowly dawns on you with this horrible sinking feeling - like someone pouring lead into your bones - that that’s all it was, a dream, and you have to get up and open your curtains to see what a shitty day it is outside and go downstairs and take your shitty medication and get on with your shitty life like it didn’t happen.
I go through the motions of my morning and I try to forget that I am Anna. Unfortunately, being Anna is inevitable, and I do not succeed.
“We’ll go around the circle. How about you, Anna?” “I am Anna and I am a mental disease.” “No, Anna,” Jo tells me with light-hearted admonishment, like speaking to a child. “You are Anna and you have a mental disease.”
The conversation plays on repeat in my head as I stare at the clock on my dashboard. Once, I would have had a soundtrack for my sitting in the driver’s seat on a Sunday morning, playing loudly through the speakers and drifting out of my rolled-down windows. I don’t listen to music anymore, and I’ve found somewhat of a distaste for Sunday mornings and open windows.
The digital number 7 goes away and my clock reads 10:58. With some miraculous strength, I open my door and swing my legs out onto the pavement.
I didn’t believe in psychoanalysis when I had dignity and self-respect –the shreds left of which were few – and they began to attempt to diagnose me. But it is as if my mind was a mountain, and now it is a cave; a shell of what used to be a whole, the inside of which is darker than space.
The doctors called the cave Depression, and they told me that I could break out of it, as though if I chipped away at the inside of it with enough Prozac and Luvox I would break the walls and see the light. Of course the antidepressants alone weren’t enough, so they sent in the freak show of a mountain rescue team they like to call “group therapy”; every Sunday morning we pitch up at the community centre like a bunch of kids at day-care to sit around in a circle and discuss our feelings. It makes me feel like a stroppy teenager, sitting there mumbling that I can’t explain how I feel because “nobody gets me”, and Jo – the woman who runs the whole show and insists she has a PhD, but is actually a volunteer and probably lives alone with 6 cats – does less than understand. And so I go along with it.
Some days I think I’m the only sane person in the whole damned world.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
Or maybe we all tell ourselves that, and that’s why everywhere I go people tell me I’m crazy.
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
I feel like Alice; I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole and I can’t find my way out. Strange people keep telling me what’s real and what isn’t, each of them ardent for control and each of them more bonkers than the last. Everyone around me either claims insanity, or claims it for me: A world where sane people think they’re mad, and mad people think they’re sane.
But I’m not Alice.
And this is no Wonderland.
