So, where have I been for the last few months? I could bore you with the whole, long rambling tale of doing too much, burning out, crashing, trying to figure out why I was in so much pain, physical and mental, going to the doctor, finding some answers, still having some questions. Deciding to unmask. Thinking it would make everything easier. Discovering it didn’t. In fact, for a good few weeks I couldn’t even get myself to leave the house without a struggle.
But I’d rather just say I was fixing a hole.
I’ve been waking up at the crack of dawn, then drifting off to sleep and having dreams that seem to open up my whole closet of every anxiety I’ve ever had, riffling through all the clothes I should never have bought, and won’t ever wear again, and strewing them all over the floor. It’s no way to start a day. Sometimes it takes me nearly an hour to figure out what’s real and what’s not.
I haven’t studied dream analysis for a while, because I stopped having memorable dreams. But now they’re back. They seem to punch together when I’m in a low mental state, a bit like hungry seagulls zooming in on a Cornish pasty on the waterfront at St Ives. It all feels very cyclical, going over the same old traumas, all the times in my life when I didn’t know how to express my needs, or even formulate them to myself. I tend not to get too hung up on the details of my dreams. I concentrate on the mood they leave behind, and that always involves some kind of anxiety, past or present.
Last night I was back home with my mother (that’s a story I’ll tell another time). Let’s say domestic stuff was never her strong point, and by the time I was 11 I was basically functioning as her carer. In my dream I was trying to get out of the house and not be late for my last day of school. But things kept delaying me, and most of them were connected to the fact that she’d got the decorators in without my knowledge and now she needed me to choose the wallpaper.
I’m filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where it will go
I was thinking about unmasking yesterday, as in “coming out” as an autistic and/or ADHD individual, something I’d been mulling over for years and finally decided to do after a meltdown on a trip to Paris about six weeks ago. I thought it would all be so simple, just make a decision and bam you live authentically from that day onward. But the trouble is you have to know who you actually are before you can do that.
It turned out I had no idea. I’d been masking so long that the real me had got completely papered over - there was just the odd little bump poking out here and there suggesting that there was something amiss under the white wood chip surface. I felt like a snake in between shedding its old skin and growing a new one. Just summoning up the energy to get out of bed or leave the house was an achievement. Let alone writing something.
That might be why I dreamed about redecorating. You can find all kinds of nasty little problems when you pull off the paper and reveal the flaking plaster. You may go right back to the Laura Ashley pattern of your 1970s teens, or the fairy stickers even further back. In severe cases, the whole wall crumbles to dust, leaving behind brickwork. (It’s especially messy when this happens with a ceiling).
And then comes the decision. Do you have the time, the energy and the money to tackle the problem at source? Or will you have to settle for fixing a hole, knowing that the problem will rear its ugly head again at any future renovation?
I’m painting my room in a colourful way
And when. my mind is wandering
There it will go
Things usually have to get worse before they start getting better. There’s no point picking out the new cushion covers when what really needs doing starts with getting someone in to do the re-plastering. And the last few months have felt very like that stage of the project to me.
You always want things to be completely fixed so that you can get on to a fully productive life and make up for all the time you’ve wasted looking at colour charts. But, assuming you can afford to hire them in the first place, plasterers show up when it suits them, disappear for days on other jobs, go out to the DIY store for supplies, and leave you in a state of what feels like perpetual chaos, ashamed to ask anybody round for a brew.
Silly people stand around, they worry me
And never ask me why they don’t get past my door
There are days when. you want to become a hermit. Where even picking up a book feels too exhausting. Where you just can’t keep bloody pretending any more but you’re scared of the space that opens up when you stop. When you live on toast and biscuits. When you cry because your partner used up the butter. When you start a Pilates routine and end up lying on the mat for half an hour, trying not to cry. When you consume your body weight in chocolate. It all sounds very like depression, a state I’m familiar with. Hello darkness, my old friend.
I’m taking the time for a number of things
That weren’t important yesterday
But this time was different. Not completely, that would be asking too much. There were days when I managed to meditate, and had genuine, lasting insights. Moments when I almost liked myself, or at least didn’t care if I didn’t right now. And suddenly I was writing, more than I had for ages. and some kind of pattern seemed to be emerging. Even the dreams left me less shaken than before. They seemed to suggest there was a way of accepting the anxiety, even recognising the faint ridiculousness of it. If I couldn’t face being out and about, I could take pleasure in weeding the garden. If I needed silence, that was okay. And I found that, for the first time, I could ask someone else to do the cooking. I’m not very well, I told him. I know, he replied.
There are no instant fixes. Well, there are but they wouldn’t stick. It seems that whatever low point I reached, I’d been there several times before but this time around there was a real commitment to the hard work of change and healing. Of going back and comforting my inner child, who needed a big hug a lot of the time. Of negotiating a new identity. Of sticking out a feeler to see what it felt like out there. Of trusting the people who would still be there for me whatever happened. Of forgiving myself for coming out with some weird shit in a conversation, of being called neurotic, of standing up in the pub and politely saying I needed to go home now
It really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong, I’m right
Where I belong I’m right
Where I belong.
I told my husband I had Sergeant Pepper on my brain when I woke up this morning. But not just the songs, I said. The intros. He’s used to my flawless memory for musical earworms. I hummed a few. He only got one of them right. But he knows what I’m like. And then I went to see my doctor and talked about a few possible ways forward.
I’ve got to admit it’s getting better
It’s getting better all the time
Thanks to the Beatles, for quotations. And for everything, really. We can work it out.
