Managing ourselves is difficult. In the midst of a raging storm, clarity and acceptance can be frustratingly out of reach. Sometimes your body takes over and you become a passenger in your own mind. It is a frustrating fact of existence that we process things intellectually and processing them emotionally at different a difference pace, and that gap is what makes resolutions arduous.
Three weeks since my first attack in eight years, I’ve had four others. The truth is, while I may have found some logical, methodical posture in which to brace the ongoing storm, my mind is fractured still, and I am, emotionally speaking, hollow. During the days my faculties keep the panic at bay. I make plans, seek out inspiration, find solace through works of art. At night the terror returns and leaves me with many a sleepless night. During those sparing moments where sleep does come to me, they are besieged by nightmares. In the morning I wake with a heart thumping and that dizzying sensation of freefall.
Some of these nightmares are familiar to me – the familiar bleak scene of a wintry high street; of hectic faceless suited men marching to and fro; of a figure huddled beneath a soot-stained corner, before him a rusty pot cooking a stew of newspaper, belt, and ramen seasoning; of hunger, cold, rain, and despair.
And some of these are new – a deceptively wonderful life shattered by a cringe-worthily cliched act of infidelity: the dream of a life where I seemed to have everything I wanted and are now living with her, that girl of my dreams, and return one day to find lingerie strewn about my opulent house and her in bed with another guy – that guy.
And some of them I don’t quite remember except by their negative space, by the bitter aftertaste in my mouth, by the messy aftermaths of a tear-soaked pillow. Some of them undoubtedly involved work, many involving families, and all of it revolving my inexplicable, irreconcilable sense of isolation.
These are the times I know that I am actually not alright. That when your life falls apart it doesn’t magically fix itself through resolutions and aspirations and enlightenment is not an overnight fix. Problems are problems are problems – anxiety is a reminder that they’re there, in the background, always present and impossible to be banished by optimism and positive intentions, and what little strength one grows from hardship will be measured, sooner or later, against the monstrosities that have kept your life at bay.
In the aftermath of these attacks, I am left to ponder the nature of grit – on how one perseveres through times and avoid being capsized by the whirlwind of his own psyche. I’ve always tried to – at least in front of the people who don’t matter – measure up to some arbitrary benchmark of masculinity: that one should take on emotional and physical strife unfeeling, unreflecting, and move on. It’s a façade and it’s clearly not working. Perhaps in doing so, in the obfuscation of authenticity, I am paradoxically endowing suffering with more meaning than it possessed.
Pain and suffering are inevitable. But on the flipside of that silence is the roar of a quiet life, of sunshine on your skin, of trees sprouting, of your kind friends’ unbidden embrace. Perhaps through an honest admission that I am not alright, and the humble acceptance that there is no other way to fix your life other than to take it one day at a time, through a momentary masochistic indulgence in the sensation of falling into pieces, one may finally acknowledge reality and then focus on moving on.
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