THE COLOUR OF MADNESS
A Blog About Living with Mental Illness
Living in a Strange & Foreign World
Right now I look around the room, the walls bend and curve oh so slightly in time to the pulse of the universe and shadows slip in and out of 3D formation. I am wondering how I got here, I’m lying on a bed that isn’t mine, in a house that isn’t mine in a world that doesn’t belong to me.
My ears ring faintly, a steady constant white noise that isn’t a bother, sometimes music plays from its staticky flow. My peripheral vision is fuzzy, I know that means the scene before me is not mine to view, yet I can’t seem to pull away from it. Shivers run through my body in a quest to change places with it’s rightful owner but we are so tired by the weight of gravity that nothing happens.
A clock ticks on the wall, intermittently taking my attention as I realise it is simply marking moments that are gone forever and doing so in infinite circles. It doesn’t care about the repetitive nature of its job, it just carries on indefinitely, around and around as all the while we watch on claiming that time is linear.
There are no categories, boxes nor beginnings nor ends save for the ones we impose upon ourselves.
We are supposed to be taking on a business with the husband in July, I’m expected to be responsible for the secretarial side of things, learn how to use MYOB etc. A job that once upon a time I may have been able to do standing on my head (despite inevitably being bored to tears).
It isn’t simply that I don’t want to do it, although that is also a factor, frankly I am simply not able to anymore. My attention is too divided, my ability to organise anything without a manically driven hyper focus has become foreign and impossible to recapture. In matters of daily function, I have trouble simply remembering to feed my fish and have a shower.
I can’t help run a business, especially one I have no interest in. My only discernible skill seems to be relating to folk through suitably adequate descriptions of my feelings as I experience them. On paper only of course, please don’t ask me to speak or form a logical thought about something in person, particularly if it lies outside the realm of my own personal experience and current emotion for I seem to have trouble speaking coherently and can no longer grasp new ideals nor even wholly remember previous dearly held beliefs unless I find myself delegated to the script writer position within the inner green room of my mind and I only have to watch as an actor magically speaks on my behalf.
It is though all my dreams have blurred with my memory and they are simply a faraway recollection of a story line that may or may not have ever actually belonged to me.
My presence in the world seems to lessen as each day passes. More and more often I find myself unsure of what reality is, or claims to be.
Perhaps I am existing in a coma or as the grandiosity within would have me believe, ascending to a higher realm. It’s hard to know what to believe, they call it dissociation but perhaps it is more a realisation that I was never here at all, this, nothing more than a figment of our collective imagination.
Katie
THE COLOUR OF MADNESS 