Observations on breaking

I am fascinated by the limits of my mind and body and what happens when I get there. Because I am a bit shattered, my concentration is shot and I’m having trouble holding clear lines of thought. Forgive me if this is a less coherent post than usual.

Aspect one is pain, of which I have a lot just now. I know why, some if it will improve in the next few days, which may help sort the rest. But, yesterday, I hit the kind of pain levels that mess with my brain. I can tune out small pain, cuts, blisters, etc barely register. It’s funny because I haven’t lost my thinking to pain this way since the early stages of labour. Watching my mind fragment, my lines of thought disintegrate. Today is a bit better, but blogging is hard work. I’m stopping more to pick up my threads. The words are not flowing.

Aspect two is panic. I’ve spent years with fear. I’m better than I was in that I no longer start every day waking into a full blown panic attack, but small panic bursts are still a daily occurrence. It doesn’t help that post remains a panic trigger. I’m working on that. Something for another day, perhaps. So the adrenaline fear spike is part of my inner landscape. Was that a mixed metaphor? Not sure, keep pedalling… fear is part of what I get. Only I seem to have broken the adrenaline side, and this may not be a good thing. Fear, since yesterday, has been arriving more like a slap in the face with a wet sock. I experience something, but not what I normally get, and it doesn’t feel like healing because the fear is still there. Early days, and only a suspicion that you can burn out an adrenal system. No insight really.

So on a normal day, my sense of self owes a lot to my emotional responses. How I feel about things is part of what makes me recognisably me. That’s not working properly. The pain and fear responses are… weird. I know I’ve been hit by a bout of depression – that at least is behaving in a normal way, unfortunately, ‘normal’ for depression tends to include a deadening of self in the first place.

The other key thing for me is that normally I have a very clear and coherent flow of thoughts. The inside of my head is normally like narration in a book in terms of coherence and clarity. This is a defining feature of my sense of self. I usually know exactly what I am thinking and why, and I think my way through and round everything I encounter. This is intrinsic to my sense of self. The absence of it is disconcerting. Wandering about with no coherence, not feeling like someone I recognise. Disorientated, lost. Not knowing if it stays like this or how things go from here. Needing to work, needing to be functional, and everything is so much more difficult than it ought to be.

Odd, finding that my identity was made of a few flashes of brain chemistry and my ability to hold an inner monologue. No idea who I am without that, and surprised to realise how fragile and barely real I was all along, and how easily that sense of self falls apart.