Uncomfortably Numb
I went to buy a present for someone the other day and the store has closed down, the place where I’ve shopped for 20 years. Outside, drug addicts and hooligans are being chased by police down the streets I used to wander alone through all night. It’s a weeknight. Everyone’s foreign in a both literal and figurative sense. The past I knew sounds like a narrative to describe.
Sure, it wasn’t like bad things didn’t happen before: look at what happened to me. But if this is what’s happening out in the open, I can’t help but wonder what’s happening behind closed doors.
I’m out of touch. Literally. I’ve cut, burnt, and sliced my fingertips so much at this point I can’t properly feel what I touch. Not intentionally, I may note. I try to trace the lines of someones body and I literally can’t feel it. I can’t feel them. I have to use the flat of my palm and fingers to feel them, like I am groping them. I feel ill.
I think about picking them up. Holding them. Lifting them up, and putting them down. I think about holding hands, and being unable to feel anything except their palms and their fingers against the back of my hand.
I realise it extends to much more than my fingertips. I can hear my body respond, but my brain doesn’t pick up the call, along with my nervous system. Every bit of my logic is saying, yes, feel, experience, be.
Straight to voicemail.
“We’ll get back to it later.” It says, in the same tone you get when you’re on hold and told someone will be with you soon. You’re more likely to hang up the call than sit around for 3 hours on speaker waiting for that response, or more likely wander off into a room at precisely the wrong moment when someone does finally respond, only for them to hang up on the moment your hand touches the phone after sprinting across the house.
Feeling hurts. It’s inevitable. But when my fingers are like this, and I am “feeling too much” (dysregulation), and I cut myself while washing up, I can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional, or rather, an act of the subconscious. I went nearly over a decade without being able to cry. Now it feels like I swing between feeling too much and feeling nothing at all. I can’t cry when I try to, when I need to. I’m forced to when I don’t want to. There’s parallels to a lot of other stuff with me, especially bodily actions, but, all I can do is tell myself to not “try” to do something. Which ironically enough in itself is pressure, and pressure is all the problem. Trying to not try is still trying.
I can be made watery-eyed from the simplest things. See the title of the website, it’s the wrong translation but that’s what I was going for, I hadn’t used my German in years when I thought of it. I began it in a period of overwhelm, where it felt like everything made me watery-eyed. I experienced what I initially thought to be an episode of psychosis, but really, it was dissociation and a nervous-breakdown.
It’s easier to think you’re sick than to think you’re stressed, or out of sync with life, or the world, or your expectations of it. I think that’s another big reason as to why there is such a focus on diagnosis now. The world has changed unfathomably quickly, and most can’t keep up. That is, in itself, technically, disorder, in a literal sense: one is out of order with something, in this case, the world. But that is an external disorder, not an internal disorder. Both have interactivity with the inner and outer world and affect one another, but the origin is important.
Maybe diagnosis is, as people argue, simply catching more due to awareness. Maybe the spikes in diagnosis are response to the rapid changes in the world causing disorder.
Either way, there is an undeniable and significant difference between a paranoid schizophrenic, someone with autism, and someone with an anxiety disorder. All are generated and more importantly managed internally to vastly separate degrees. Risperidone is required for one, the others have a much wider set of options. Only one of them is curable.
Maybe I’m only comfortable being numb, because as long as I am I don’t have to acknowledge I’m out of order in the world.
And that makes me uncomfortable.
TGIF. Time for a drink.