Tiny Scattered Thoughts

November 3, 2022

It’s been a very long time since I have felt this way. Felt like I don’t know myself at all. I feel a distance, a huge distance between me and my writing self, and perhaps even from my self-exploring self. 

 

The notebooks on the top shelf of the three-level bookshelf in my writing room are suddenly unfamiliar. I don’t know which one to reach for when I want to write something. I had a clear, though loose, classification of what goes into what notebook. But right now, I squint at them as if I’m trying to remember something from far in the past. Are they alien objects or is my mind disintegrating? The answer is sadly clear. 

 

And for the first time in years, I feel in need of a therapy session with someone else. Someone who will listen and make sense of my patterns, of me. Who will paraphrase and reflect back what I say. Hear what I didn’t say, see what I am unaware of, ask the questions that will help me probe further. For the first time in a decade or more, I can’t do this for myself. Stress levels too high or the mind disintegrating? This time it I can say that it is stress that is causing the disintegration of the mind. Slowly, gradually, like the temperature turned up in the pot with frogs who don’t feel it going up. Yes, I didn’t realise just how disintegrated and depressed — so much so that I couldn’t write — my mind was feeling as the stress increased gradually. 

 

But I have today? Written I mean.

 

A recent shock transported me out of the slow boiling pot, directly into the fire. Ya, a series of shocks first, and then an intense thunderbolt. I feel trapped right now in certain circumstances that I feel unable to describe clearly and think through. Unable to share the specifics with others. This makes me lonely.

 

Shocks are painful. But they do bring one back into one’s body, into the present moment. Though it is a choice after whether to stay there or float away to reduce the pain. I feel trapped by the things I cannot yet share or describe clearly. Some of it is related to a collective, a community, and some intimately personal. For weeks I have been wanting, but unable to shift this state. I hate it.

 

The shocks have made me contemplate integrity, as they have originated from behavior that I consider untrustworthy. I’ve thought about the integrity of leaders, of people I look up to, of people who are acquaintances or closer friends, of family members, and most of all myself. I have reflected on the ways in which others might define integrity differently from me and thus act differently. That there may not be absolutes. Or that they may be unaware of their lack of it. I feel like I have been given a chance to examine my life and see in which direction I have moved. I have thought of a time when I didn’t act from a place of integrity and am glad to see that I am closer today to being the way I'd like to be. Integrity is important to me and at times it isn't easy. 

 

My panic attacks increased over the last week or two and the need to let everything go — untie all bonds — and start life like a newly conceived fetus, grew. Often it felt like the only way to get out of the trapped feelings. But to sever all bonds is hard to do most times? And I don’t know how. 

 

Then last night as I lay in bed feeling sorry for myself, I sensed something or heard something from my belly, my tanden — the centre from which, many traditions believe, life force is received and disseminated to the rest of the self. It felt like a clue, but then it was gone. 

 

But for some reason all that remained of that little flirt of a clue was a feeling that a profile pic change would be good. That sometimes a small, almost insignificant, change sets off a series of flutters that can create a storm. 

 

How do you change your ‘trapped’ states?