Monteverdi: Orpheo
Monday morning and I'm bunking group to drink coffee and read anther great American beat novel. I ate a whole meal last night and slept for twelve hours, and I didn't, I really didn't want to spend my newly discovered vitality on being miserable, upset and exhausted, which is what group always makes me. I've been working every evening this week. Again, I fail to find any sort of balance- from not working at all I go to working every day without any space in between, and I can't figure out how you know when you need a rest or a holiday, unless it's when you are physically incapable or moving your body anymore. Like I can't figure out how you know when to eat unless you are shaking and your blood sugar is so low that you can't walk downstairs because your depth perception has gone peculiar. Black and white thinking is an innocuous sort of phrase, and it would be fine if it was just thinking but it's a big think for simple words. It's what happpens when the world and everything in it fails to make sense to you. It's not just people love you or hate you, it's that you are either full or empty, running or stationary. It's a very physical thing, and until you have tried to live like that for a week you don't know how diibilitating this disorder can be.
The fact that people can manage the miraculous balancing act which is health, mental and physical, without even thinking about it seems to me impossible. At the moment, I have to do everything consciously. I have to go through all the steps, asking myself what I want, what I need, what the situation is, what other factors are in play, what the repercussions will be, how I will feel tommorrow- writing the whole thing down if necessary. Deciding to eat or sleep is a process which can take fifteen minutes of reasoning and a few minutes of medtative analysis while I try and work out if I am hungry or tired. Don't even get me started on things like aranging to meet people. Things like that entail days of agonising and days afterwards of mental self-flagilation and often it just seems easier not to bother.
It seems hard to believe that recognising physical signals and knowing when to respond to them and how are things that you learn, but they are, and I am. And my god it seems hard. To carry the balance simile a little further, what I lack is any sense of true. One knows instinctively, through whatever cunning thing the inner ears and brain do, when you are the right way up, and when you aren't, and when you are safe and when you are about to fall, and what to doo about it. There is a similar instinct in almost all other areas of life, from the basic to the complex, from when to eat to when to love to when to be happy. And how much. The how much is often the problem. If you lose your balance your ears tell you how far to right yourself so you don't go too far the other way. I'm like one of those toys with a round base that swing constantly and frenetically in action and reaction from one side to the other and round and back constantly on the brink of toppling over completely. Whatever the emotional equivalent of my inner ear is is fuckt, basically, so instead of knowing how far I've fallen and how far backwards I need to go I have to measure the distances, do the maths, then measure again and hope I got it all right and then travel backwards and try aand assess whether I am upright because there is nothing external to tell me.
The nothing external is the other problem, and that's where your traditional new-pilot-in-clouds metaphor comes in. If there's nothing to tell you whether you are the right way up then you are liable to fly out of the clouds upside down, except there is no outside to these clouds, There is just smoke and uncertainty. I have no idea which direction I am facing most of the time. So I'm taking a morning off, and reading cheerful books about starving men and drinking coffee because I sat down for three quarters of an hour last night and decided that that is what I should do. Put like that I say, jesus, just give me a gun so I can shoot myself. Being alive should not be this much hard work.
The fact that people can manage the miraculous balancing act which is health, mental and physical, without even thinking about it seems to me impossible. At the moment, I have to do everything consciously. I have to go through all the steps, asking myself what I want, what I need, what the situation is, what other factors are in play, what the repercussions will be, how I will feel tommorrow- writing the whole thing down if necessary. Deciding to eat or sleep is a process which can take fifteen minutes of reasoning and a few minutes of medtative analysis while I try and work out if I am hungry or tired. Don't even get me started on things like aranging to meet people. Things like that entail days of agonising and days afterwards of mental self-flagilation and often it just seems easier not to bother.
It seems hard to believe that recognising physical signals and knowing when to respond to them and how are things that you learn, but they are, and I am. And my god it seems hard. To carry the balance simile a little further, what I lack is any sense of true. One knows instinctively, through whatever cunning thing the inner ears and brain do, when you are the right way up, and when you aren't, and when you are safe and when you are about to fall, and what to doo about it. There is a similar instinct in almost all other areas of life, from the basic to the complex, from when to eat to when to love to when to be happy. And how much. The how much is often the problem. If you lose your balance your ears tell you how far to right yourself so you don't go too far the other way. I'm like one of those toys with a round base that swing constantly and frenetically in action and reaction from one side to the other and round and back constantly on the brink of toppling over completely. Whatever the emotional equivalent of my inner ear is is fuckt, basically, so instead of knowing how far I've fallen and how far backwards I need to go I have to measure the distances, do the maths, then measure again and hope I got it all right and then travel backwards and try aand assess whether I am upright because there is nothing external to tell me.
The nothing external is the other problem, and that's where your traditional new-pilot-in-clouds metaphor comes in. If there's nothing to tell you whether you are the right way up then you are liable to fly out of the clouds upside down, except there is no outside to these clouds, There is just smoke and uncertainty. I have no idea which direction I am facing most of the time. So I'm taking a morning off, and reading cheerful books about starving men and drinking coffee because I sat down for three quarters of an hour last night and decided that that is what I should do. Put like that I say, jesus, just give me a gun so I can shoot myself. Being alive should not be this much hard work.
posted by tattybluetrees at 4:45 AM
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