Day 216: Clockless

Oh hey, you. I’ve been slepping. That’s like sleeping, but lighter, when you were so tired last night you couldn’t get to sleep, your brain kept scrunching everything up tight yelling “Get to sleep! You have to get to sleep!” - and in the end you drifted off about six, then your alarm is piercing the emptiness of your room two hours later, a muddy daze of shower and walk in rain and bus and work, mind twanging in and out of focus, useless all day, then you finally come home and your legs are throbbing, your eyes are diodes, too zonked to eat tea, sit in your office chair for a while and then go fall in bed, and there you are slepping, in and out of consciousness, knowing you can’t be properly asleep, that you have to do the day’s blog before you can rest, but you’re not getting up yet, another ten minutes, another fifteen, on right through evening into another time - not night… the reverse side of night, with the phantasms howling and dark spectres creeping down your spine.

And it’s in this time when the negative voices start up. They’ve been looking for an in for a few days now, since you kicked them out, and in this clockless time with your basic consciousness too tired to switch off but higher awareness fizzling and sputtering out of focus, this is when they make their play.

“You know, it’s only reasonable,” they say. “You’re just a failure, aren’t you? We’re not being cruel, it’s just facing the facts, isn’t it. Look at the facts. We’ll go through them, together, sensibly…”

And then they list everything you dislike about yourself, every secret shameful gesture, memory, moment. All your weaknesses. All your fears. One after the other, a litany of loathing, an entreaty to broken ego.

AND THAT’S WHEN YOU TELL THE VOICES TO GO SUCK IT.

Not a chance, you pesky mutts. Goddamned voices. Not happening. You shake yourself awake and go make a Lady Grey, eat a banana and satsuma while kettle boils, and you go write your blog post, not being despairing or angry or anhedonic, but hopeful and content. This is your life. These voices are your voices. But they are such a small part. They’re echoes of past trauma, no longer holding any but the faintest residual power, so long as you don’t bestow them with more. And that is your choice. Sit through the voices - you gotta do that. You force them down and they just come back out another opening when you’re not looking. You gotta sit through them. But believe them? Naw, man. To hell with that.

MUSIC: Saint Huck, Nick Cave. What the hell put Nick Cave in my head? Where did he come from? I don’t know, but he arrived, from some other place, clanging and crashing cymbals and wailing into the void. Saint Huck is a song about Huckleberry Finn, recounted by a mechanical spider vomiting up its metallic innards after some bad lysergic acid. Jagged, piercing, and spasmodic, it is made for nights like this.