Living in the Moment

It is not long till midnight. I am typing in the dark, the deep dark outside a chink in the curtain, the screen illuminating enough for me to see the papers on the grotty desk in front of me, the outline of that cool porcelain sculpture I did quite a few years ago now, the still-unfired one, which makes me happy when I look at it and reminds me that I really need to go and buy another bag of clay and start doing something more now I have some extra bouts of energy in which to do so.

Oh, man, I love that sentence.

Creative commons - free to use but please link back here.

There is something to be said, I suppose, for health issues that force you to see how you're always walking on the edge of where the ocean meets the land just like you're walking on a wire in a circus (thank you, Adam Duritz). That line that is invisible but weaves its way through every single day. For a long time it's been a particularly drab and shabby line, like it's made out of old wool that's got balls on it like an old jumper that's been around too long, and it would lead from the bed to the couch and to the kitchen and the bathroom and often back to the couch.  Other times, like recently, it's been a line that's opened up forests on one side that I can trip off into.  Nothing major or extraordinary for anyone but me. Going to the supermarket and going for a walk in one day.

Other days I walk along that thread and fall into the sea.  Sometimes it's a bit heartbreaking. I never know when I've overdone it.  I'm asked again to give up what I've been given.  Which is the whole of life but with so many couch-filled days in recent years I have a tanty and lose perspective when I fall back into the fog again.  Even if I know that these days it's not going to be a life sentence, that I will climb back out at some point.

On Sunday things were good enough that I went with my mum to see a local Aussie muso, Billy Miller, play live at the Caravan Club. We stood for about three hours. That's nothing to people who do that every day but for me it was a really big deal. There was no way I would have been able to replicate it the next day.  My feet were so fucking sore.

The recplication the next day is the biggest test of CFS. The point isn't so much whether you see me today, walking in Belgrave, coming from the doctor's, into the Book Barn to buy pens, to the library to drop off a book and pick up a new one, to the post office. Doing chores. Flittering.  I would have seen quite chipper to you, I'm sure. But you see the adrenalised version, not the ATP-deprived one the next day who spends more time on the couch.

Still, I've had lucky days recently where I've done something like that and had No Payback The Next Day.  That feels miraculous but really it's just functioning mitochondria.

It's not what happened on Monday though. The day after Sunday's three-hour-standfest the world had that greyness to it unrelated to the sky.  As did Tuesday.  Feeling the anxiety running through my body, different from a mind-manufactured sort.  A buzzing kind that at the same time puts a sense of doomish urgency into everything.  Why are you sitting on this couch?  You need to be not sitting on this couch, or else if you just sit here like this that will be a terribly wrong thing to do and something bad will happen.

This kind of anxious body-fuelled thinking is problematic at any time, and I can generally take steps to ease off its push.  But Tuesday it was difficult because the next day was the funeral of my ex-father-in-law, which I very much wanted to attend. We still kept in touch from time to time. The last time we spoke was via email a few weeks before.  We had great conversations when he lived in the granny flat and Mark and I lived in the house.  He was a gentle man, a kind one too, and I wished to go and pay my respects not only to those who are living, but to him.

I don't believe that we are gone from the earth when we are gone from our bodies.  In our age of one-size-fits-all knowledge, the sort that is peer reviewed, double-blind, placebo controlled, many have little time for the perceptions that come from the subjective space.  That sort of knowledge is good but it brings with it hubris if it's the only kind you ascribe to.  It upsets me, really, this disrespect for our subjective life.  It's my life in here.  It's just as real as the life that is out there.  It can't be branded, it can't be monetised, it can't be shared, it can't have its privacy taken away from it, and I won't allow its dignity to be annulled by those who claim the experience in here is inconsequential just because they cannot measure it with a measuring device.

My ex-father-in-law is gone, but I don't think or feel that he is gone. Even anxious, fatigued, inflamed, the strange toxicity that comes when these fatigue situations happen, as if something in my body is struggling to work and instead is spinning its wheels, splattering genetically dysfunctional mud all over me.  I wanted to be there.  Even though I began worrying about what other people would think.  Paranoid things.  Like, would my ex's sister glare at me at the funeral and refuse to say hello?  Would they all think I was a freak, in my childless, cloistered life?  Would I drive off the road halfway there and cause a multi-car pile-up because I was spacey?  Would people believe me, if I didn't go, that I wasn't pikeing out because funerals are difficult but because I actually didn't physically believe I could get there?

7am is not so much of an issue for some people. For me it's been one for more decades than I care to count. Perhaps this was one harbinger of the CFS that would come in my late 20's, the endocrinal dysfunction that made getting up such a holy horror. 7am for me feels maybe like what 3am feels for some other people if they've got drunk the night before. I dunno. Maybe. How can we compare our own internal experiences to each other?

What happens when you know you have to get up at 7am and you're worried how you'll feel? You wake up at 5.30 and don't go back to sleep.  And so I finally conceded that this wasn't going to happen for me.  That to drive when I felt like that was an irresponsibility.  I would have had to leave home by 8am, drive for two hours in peak-hour traffic, and then turn around and drive back again a few hours later.

And so I just had to be there in spirit instead.  I guess if I'd died and some people couldn't make it to my funeral but were willing themselves there in spirit, that would be fine with me.   Maybe I'd see their colours anyway, flowing out like ribbon, connected to everybody and everything wherever they happened to be.  Time and space not always so constraining.  Do we sense people after they have gone? I feel like I had some kind of communion with Mike in the days after I learned he died. (How lovely of Mark to let me know. He didn't need to). How can we tease out the strands of what we wish to be true about life continuing after life, what we may be inventing, or what we may be perceiving on a plane that's not visible to us, not parked at any airport, not existing at all according to many and yet which many others claim to swim in their whole lives?

These kinds of experiences are between you and yourself.  They are the last bastions of privacy in an internet age :)  Nothing to be proven.  Nothing able to be proven, just felt, or sensed, and wondered at.  A space, like the negative space between two objects that you are taught to see when you are drawing.  Once you see it, you can't not.  You draw better when you draw the shape of the space in-between.  That nifty little technique brings all of the world into the fore.  All the empty spaces fill.

Night Owl

Powerful owl by WikiWookie (cc)

I've been hearing him outside most nights lately.  Oooh, he says I don't know how many houses or streets away, and it echoes into the air, reminding us that we live on the side of a hill.

If I was going to have any sort of a totem, surely it would be him.  On rare occasions he will come sleep on the branch of a tree that we can see from the decking.  If I lean out of bed in the mornings when he is there, then hypothetically (the window is dirty) I would be able to see him.  I feel both a sense of cameraderie, but also a feeling-better-by-comparison when I see nocturnal animals asleep at the time I finally manage to haul my arse out at 9am or thereabouts (if infection persists, add an extra hour).

My mind ran ragged all day today, in some sort of a PTSD twitch, flitting from one thing to another, feeling stressed and anxious and ungrounded, unsafe.  And then this evening my mind settled and so now, suddenly, everything is much too interesting to sleep.  Why would I want to sleep?  I'm here in front of the computer working and I've still got a stack of different webpages open and I'm still flitting from one subject to another - to yoga pages to remind me why I really want to pick up my practice again even though some strange part of me doesn't, to an author whose creativity books I like, to how-to articles about internet CSS, and suddenly while they all looked interesting before, now they look even more interesting because it is the night, my body's weak, I'm on the run, no time to speak*, and the dark outside feels warm and enclosing, like black velvet, and I am inside, and the interwebs is a magic.

Oooh.

*This song qualifies as an earworm because:
(a) it rotates in my head; and
(b) I hate it.
Thus being the qualifications for earwormery.

4.56 am

... and just going to bed. Hmmm. Last night, after my art therapy session, I had this massive, massive headache. Never again will I doubt that suppressed anger causes headaches. This was old, old anger, and it threatened to pop the top of my head. Maggie did some reiki on me, which was strange in itself. She said she could feel sort of tiny little electric shocks on her fingers. Weirdness.

By the time I got home after art therapy, I was feeling so bad, with such an awful headache, that it got me moaning. And yet at the same time I was starving. Which is a strange combination. But it's been a strange week.

I dialled home delivery, ate it, and went to bed at 7.30. Slept until 12.30 when pop goes the eyelids and I get my very own night watch for the next four hours. It's amazing how quickly four hours can go in the dead of night when you're feeling like you're the only person in the world. It felt like it dragged and yet at the same time I managed to fill it in pretty easily, polishing off a bit giant wad of the latest Wally Lamb book I'm reading. But oh, there's nothing lonely like 4 am.

Getting to see it twice in one week is not really my idea of good sleep hygiene. I feel like a skanky sleep ho, right about now.

Fell asleep around 4.30. Slept till 9.30 this morning. Felt like shite all day. Looked forward all day to getting home and getting to sleep at a reasonable sort of hour.

And yet here we are.

I began my week with a Eurovision Song Contest get-together which had me going to bed at 3 am. All of this has been combined with me fighting off (successfully so far) the onset of some sort of cold, or flu, or ear infection return, or something. I don't know what the hell is going on in my body this week. It's all discombobulated.

And yet, in the midst of all of that, art therapy breakthroughs for me. A sense that old habits are being dislodged. This new birth in the midst of all this feeling unwell and gargantuan headaches and upsettedness and crying jags.

It's enough to make a girl want to take the day off work tomorrow. Luckily for me, my work is flexible on its starting times. Which basically means for me that even though I have had this crazy non-sleeping night, I will still be able to rejig things so that I can fit in a five hour shift by the time I wake up at lunchtime. And hey, my job might be boring but it is perfect for circadian morons like me :)

Here's to better sleeping habits for the rest of the week

May bloom, May wilt

Hats off to the month of May
With it's falling leaves and its glistening days.

Well, so you may say, Mr Fanning, but there's quite a lot that's not particularly glistening about it from where I sit (the thighs of my football team, with linament, kicking goals, notwithstanding. Mmm). The leaves are falling too in Melbourne, but so, alas, is my really ultra crappy circadian clock's ability to read the signals.

Yep, it's happening already, folks. Two days of cloudy skies and the circadian rhythms are already starting their downward decline. I can feel it. For example. It's nearly 9pm and I am just gearing up in the kitchen, cooking pumpkin soup and mushroom risotto. And here it is, the beginning of the downward slide, the thought that going to bed a little later is starting to seem appealing. So tonight, I may choose to go to bed a bit later thanusual - say, 1am. Tomorrow night, 1.30. Before you know it, I'll be up till 4am.

It happens every day, the same. Wake up in the morning, back in first gear again. Thinking, ggggooootttt tttooo gggeeettt mmmooovvviinnngg. Feel slightly haggard all day, everything a bit of an effort. Come the evening - how delicious Winter evenings are, all cosy and closed in and raunchy - and then, oooh, how interesting everything suddenly appears and off I go, playing and cooking and loving the feel of the closed-in Winter night, all quiet, most normal people all cosy and snug under their doonas. Yum.

Every year without fail you can set your clock on the fact that my circadian clock can't.

But is there anything wrong with that? Why do I feel this nervous kind of anxiety about what they will think about my strange hour keepings? I have a job this year which allows me start at lunchtime - even, if I really want to, even later than that. I have no children to get me up at 6am. I can keep these hours and nobody is going to yell at me.

Surely my hours are the more civilised than the 6am wakeups or the bizarre habits people like Kent keep, getting up at 5.30. Or my friend Bettina who gets up and walks her dog first thing in the morning in the dark before work (I'm jealous really. I can't think of anything better than that). My days are just different, that's all. I'm circadianally challenged. Like, you know how morning people start off guns blazing and then end the day generally sitting down quiet and slowly gearing down until they stop and sleep? Well, I just do it in reverse. Spend the first - oh, I dunno, seven or eight hours sitting around trying to crank it up. Doing stuff, and even sounding quite chirpy and stuff, but still, you know. I'm pretending to be excited. I was still getting about in my dressing gown this afternoon at 3pm. Had a shower at 5. It's now almost 9pm and suddenly it's bright eyed and bushy tailed and, you know, wanting to write poetry and play music loud and get into it.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Right?

(It's a bit of a bummer, though, 'cause every time I get up in the morning I have this strange idea that things are gonna be different for me today, and so I try and do stuff - like, physical stuff like vacuuming. When really, everyone knows that vacuuming happens at 10pm).

Embrace your eccentricities, Suzie. Embrace. How dull if everyone was exactly the same, right?