The Meters: handclapping song
I bought an i-pod today.
I drank a lot of coffee today.
I did many, many things today.
Yesterday, something tipped me over the edge from 'feeling quite okay actually' to 'manic as hell'. I say something. I mean individual therapy. After an hour I felt like I had been hit around the head repeatedly with a brick. A very big brick. Maybe a brick the size of a TREE or a HOUSE. Maybe a brick the size of MANHATTEN. I don't know how big manhatten is or even how you spell it but I am thinking that being hit round the head with a brick that size would kind of hurt. So. That is how I felt. Like someone had turned my mind inside out and scraped at the lining ever so, ever so thoroughly. Like I had been given the mental equivalent of a smear-test.
So I did what I always do when things get hairy, when things start to hurt. I ran the fuck away. My mind somehow split away from the pain and ran laughing and skipping to somewhere less real.
All day I have been running running running. Talking nineteen to the dozen, laughing, waving my hands in the air oh yes oh yes oh castles made of thought and breath and imagination. Ignoring the obvious truth, that sure as eggs is eggs my girl what goes up must come down and you no wot I meen. I don't know when the downswing will hit me. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the day after. But soon. And it will hurt; it will hurt like a bitch and it will hurt more than last time or the time before or the time before that because every time I have more invested in it, and every time I am running a little harder, and every time I think [-this one will be different].
I applied for jobs. Ignoring the fact that half the time I am not well enough to drag myself to the hospital, let alone put on my good face and go to work. I went to see people. So many people. So much time to make up for. I must see people, I must show them that I am well, that things have changed, that this is a new start, look, a new beginning, I am going to take up running and I am going to live on oranges and I am going to learn latin and I am going to read Foucault and I am going to repaint my house and I am going to get an ipod and I am going to have a party and I am going to learn to play the piano and I am going to do my garden and I am going to...
In the end, it is sheer exhaustion more than anything else which drags me down. You can't run that hard, that fast, without your muscles filling up with acids. And you can't run from yourself without it catching up with you and kicking the shit out of you through sheer fucking spite. Afterwards, when I am back down again, I will hate myself for this, for being too much. For talking too loudly and laughing too often and waving my hands too wildly and making too many promises (and breaking them) and having plans which are just too, fucking, grandiose. It will feel uncannily like waking up with a hangover and remembering, bit by bit, what you did and said and who with and to whom. I will have the same sense of having been out of control, out of my mind. Not quite there. At the moment, though, it feels like running down a hill too fast. I remember doing this as a child- helping at harvest and then in the evening running down the newly stubbled field, and running too fast, and then the moment in which you are neither running nor falling. Your legs are fighting to keep up with your head and if you stop you will fall and so you have no choice but to go faster until, in the end, you come crashing down, hard and hard, over and over, and your knees are bloodied and your chest is aching and you feel you will never stand again. That is just the cycle I go through. Right now, I am neither running nor falling. Soon, when I am going as fast as I can, and still trying to go faster, I will fall.
This feeling of intense, bubbling, over-flowing well-being is illusory.
Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that, conversely, the depressions are real. I have long ago ceased to romanticize that blank, that desperate darkness. I don't want to be this happy, and I don't want to be that sad. Neither of them are real. What is real is somewhere in the middle, some form of compromise; I might be the only person who aspires to mundanity. To live a life not in black or white but in all the glorious, beautiful, intermediate shades of grey.
Hell, though, at least I've got an i-pod out of it. And I tell you this. It's fucking beautiful. And they don't come in grey.
I drank a lot of coffee today.
I did many, many things today.
Yesterday, something tipped me over the edge from 'feeling quite okay actually' to 'manic as hell'. I say something. I mean individual therapy. After an hour I felt like I had been hit around the head repeatedly with a brick. A very big brick. Maybe a brick the size of a TREE or a HOUSE. Maybe a brick the size of MANHATTEN. I don't know how big manhatten is or even how you spell it but I am thinking that being hit round the head with a brick that size would kind of hurt. So. That is how I felt. Like someone had turned my mind inside out and scraped at the lining ever so, ever so thoroughly. Like I had been given the mental equivalent of a smear-test.
So I did what I always do when things get hairy, when things start to hurt. I ran the fuck away. My mind somehow split away from the pain and ran laughing and skipping to somewhere less real.
All day I have been running running running. Talking nineteen to the dozen, laughing, waving my hands in the air oh yes oh yes oh castles made of thought and breath and imagination. Ignoring the obvious truth, that sure as eggs is eggs my girl what goes up must come down and you no wot I meen. I don't know when the downswing will hit me. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the day after. But soon. And it will hurt; it will hurt like a bitch and it will hurt more than last time or the time before or the time before that because every time I have more invested in it, and every time I am running a little harder, and every time I think [-this one will be different].
I applied for jobs. Ignoring the fact that half the time I am not well enough to drag myself to the hospital, let alone put on my good face and go to work. I went to see people. So many people. So much time to make up for. I must see people, I must show them that I am well, that things have changed, that this is a new start, look, a new beginning, I am going to take up running and I am going to live on oranges and I am going to learn latin and I am going to read Foucault and I am going to repaint my house and I am going to get an ipod and I am going to have a party and I am going to learn to play the piano and I am going to do my garden and I am going to...
In the end, it is sheer exhaustion more than anything else which drags me down. You can't run that hard, that fast, without your muscles filling up with acids. And you can't run from yourself without it catching up with you and kicking the shit out of you through sheer fucking spite. Afterwards, when I am back down again, I will hate myself for this, for being too much. For talking too loudly and laughing too often and waving my hands too wildly and making too many promises (and breaking them) and having plans which are just too, fucking, grandiose. It will feel uncannily like waking up with a hangover and remembering, bit by bit, what you did and said and who with and to whom. I will have the same sense of having been out of control, out of my mind. Not quite there. At the moment, though, it feels like running down a hill too fast. I remember doing this as a child- helping at harvest and then in the evening running down the newly stubbled field, and running too fast, and then the moment in which you are neither running nor falling. Your legs are fighting to keep up with your head and if you stop you will fall and so you have no choice but to go faster until, in the end, you come crashing down, hard and hard, over and over, and your knees are bloodied and your chest is aching and you feel you will never stand again. That is just the cycle I go through. Right now, I am neither running nor falling. Soon, when I am going as fast as I can, and still trying to go faster, I will fall.
This feeling of intense, bubbling, over-flowing well-being is illusory.
Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that, conversely, the depressions are real. I have long ago ceased to romanticize that blank, that desperate darkness. I don't want to be this happy, and I don't want to be that sad. Neither of them are real. What is real is somewhere in the middle, some form of compromise; I might be the only person who aspires to mundanity. To live a life not in black or white but in all the glorious, beautiful, intermediate shades of grey.
Hell, though, at least I've got an i-pod out of it. And I tell you this. It's fucking beautiful. And they don't come in grey.
posted by tattybluetrees at 2:11 PM
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