Sitting in the X-Ray clinic, waiting for my mum to have another MRI for her chronic head pain. Although there is low music playing in the background, I fill filled with silence & yet simmering anxiety. It's 6:56pm & the night approaches & I'm alone again. My anxiety rises from the fear that I won't sleep, when the darkness covers everything & I'm left alone with my thoughts. My thoughts have made me a prisoner in my own life & my fears guard my cell creating the illusion of no escape. My comfort zones have become my coffin. Leaving no room for the freedom & courage I crave & fear simultaneously. I can be surrounded by people but the loneliness only becomes more intense.
What was my question? At this moment I have no idea lol.
Hope your Mum is OK - she is in good hands - remember that. Hope you are OK too. You are a great writer, penning your feelings like that. Maybe writing, shaping up some stories, might help you through?
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My mum is good, although the loud drumming of the MRI scanning always promotes more of a headache.
Thank you for your compliment, I would love to write. I sometimes ponder on the possibility of starting a blog. I would love to shine the light on what depression & anxiety looks like. I'm sick of the stigma & long for anyone who suffers with a mental illness to truly know how wonderful & normal they really are. Plus I look like a poster child for "happiness", & would love to show that it hits anyone & we shouldn't be judged by how we look.
I would love to write a book but a common saying is "write about what you know" & all I know is unhealthy childhoods, traumatic life events & mental illness. None of those things excite or inspire me to write.
I use to oil paint but my eyesight have detoriated to the eyesight of a 75 year old. My optometrists own words. Haven't painted in so long, use to do portraits & copy my favourite painter, trying to duplicate his work solely because I couldn't own the real thing lol. I'm scared I've lost my talent. I knew what brush to use to produce a a certain affect & other skills & painting techniques long forgotten now.
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Then paint with words and phrases - creating colours and textures, landscapes and perspectives. Make your jottings your sketches and your books and blogs 3D canvasses for your imaginings in gilded frames.
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Who is the poet now? Lol. I love words, they evoke emotions & create worlds of delight & beauty. I use to write poetry & it helped a lot for my teenage depression fueled angst. I got so famous at it, I started writing romantic poetry for my friends to give their boyfriends. Hated it, I hate lying even in my poetry. How could I express or begin to understand what they felt for someone else. How can I tell what lies dormant in their hearts waiting for the right words to give it wings. Yes I love William Shakespeare lol.
How did your Mother get on with the scan. The hospitals in the UK play calming music in reception and in the scan room to relax the patient so they do not move about
If you ever go for sedation they used to ask the type of music you enjoy and play that for the patient, I seen me take in a CD for them to play
Loved heavy metal at that time
Have you talked to your Doctor regards your health concerns, write down your feelings and fears, including lack of sleep. It becomes easier if you write things down to explain your problems
BOB
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I've had GAD & chronic depression for years. Spent so many years focusing on fixing the problems of my past. Things can't be undone. And at 45 truly sick of the hoopla, I think you should focus on what you want...rather than what you don't.
I have extreme chronic endometriosis pain so I take 20mg of valiuum at night. Combining that & sleep meditation usually makes falling asleep easy for me (a long term insomniac). It's usually my cat that wakes me up every morning at 2.30am. She is sooooo lucky I love her.
Having only 5 hours sleep effects my cognitive thinking, which for me can be a downward slide in to a bout of depression. Plus makes it harder to focus & study. Usually aim to keep my mind as blank as possible, putting no pressure on myself to feel I need to know all the "answers" right now. And to just aim to have a "day", instead of a "great day".
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BTW my mum went fine with her scan & we walked home hand in hand....it was almost romantic lol.
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As we get middle aged we need to let our past move on and we need to get on with Life in general.
I had the same problem and to be honest I walked away from family members I was sixty nine and really I was happy with general conversation before moving on, not looking back once more. Now at seventy I just want to be able to relax in my later years and keep my mood positive until the end.
BOB
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Definitely how can we ever truly experience peace & happiness if we continually live in the moments that caused us the greatest pain.
The past is lessons, not a prison. The key has always been in our own hands.
I echo RRobin in wishing you and your mum well, LostStars13, and in expressing admiration for your evocative writing.
You mentioned in a comment downthread that at one time you wrote poetry. Do you still write poems?
Do you think you might find inspiration to "write what you know" (as the saying goes) in verse instead of prose? I've long believed that poetry was the best conduit for feelings/emotions -- even the unpleasant ones.
What sorts of things move you to write?
Hello mrmonk,
It was a lifetime ago that I wrote poetry being a teenager at the time. Back than I wrote about the darkness that engulfed me, my feelings of isolation, detachment fron the rest of world & of course the unique excruciating pain that could only come from unrequited love (I was a teenager). The darkness was my depression at its early stages & plagues me still. btw that particular adolescent crush, as adults put it, went on for 7 years on my part...my heart once devoted is quite loyal. It took 2 years of grieving & moving myself to another state to move past it.
Feel like I was born in the wrong era. I don't know what moves me now. I know what makes my heart cry out in pain but it's nothing I want to write about.
If I did write it would only be to ease my anguish & calm my pain if only for awhile.
Now days I have an albeit small support framework of friends but I never let any one fully in. Some people have accepted my depression & anxiety but there have been casualties & I have lost family members & friends who could not accept "me".
I truly appreciate your kind words but find it hard to believe my words could evoke any emotion in another reader. The thought is tantalising sweet & I thank you for that.
There's a quote from a 19th century author that goes something like this: "The poet should touch our heart by showing his own." I think that's true for most writing (especially poetry), including your post, where you let us hear the near silence of 6:56 pm with your words -- I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but I could feel that barely contained anxiety.
I wrote my share of unrequited love poems as an adolescent, too. I discovered the sonnets of Francesco Petrarch just at the right time it seemed then. Oh, how vividly I remember the morning after I had given my "beloved" the overwrought, faux-Petrarchan sonnets I'd written for her, the anticipation to hear her response, the bittersweet rejection. Bittersweet because she was interested in someone else, but then...so was I...innumerable someones -- a world of poet companions always within bookshelf reach. It's been decades now, but I still return to the emotions of that day -- every cringeworthy moment I can remember -- and I hold them close.
I was wondering if you could elaborate on feeling like being born in the wrong era? I often feel out of step with my time and nostalgic for a past I never knew.
Wow....I did feel that anxiety, the shadow that follows me, defines me & that "fear" sat beside me that day. But I'm use to it's presence. I felt so alone amongst people also waiting for loved ones. Alone but not, trying to appear brave but not. To show my heart....it seems so scary. To believe that anyone would care about my feelings seems unbelievable.
I feel that I don't fit in to this time. My heart feels too strong & what other people define as being important or valuable I see no substance to define it as something of such great significance.
I mimic people & their reactions, when it should come normal to me. Everything society deems important, the structure, the benchmarks that must be obtained. They encourage you to think outside the box but there's nothing else I can do. I dilute my personality to appear normal because I'm different.
There's a sleeping guided meditation I listen to where the teacher encourages you to see the shape of the spaces between the leaves, instead of the shape of the leaves themselves. That resonnated with me. I see things & feel things that most people do not. I'm not bragging...part of me longs to be normal. But I don't think I was born to be. I no longer want to be.
I think maybe it's more common then we know to feel as though one was born in the wrong era. To feel lost in this time & place & feel such strong yearnings for things that don't fit into the pattern of our existence as we know it. I don't know or have any true feelings to weigh in on reincarnation or anything of the sort. But there are things, a lingering smell that carrases the face & evokes a feeling, a sight never seen before but suddenly makes your heart ache with such pain as it cries out for something...of what you can't begin to define. To feel like you're leaving your home, when it's the first time you ever laid your eyes on it & breathed in it's scent. I have felt those things. Layers of pain, so intense that surely it took more than one lifetime to collect all that pain...all those scars & all that beauty.
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