The day I made my last post was one of the strangest days of my life. I will probably put it down to a confluence of events--viral sinus infection, a sudden surge in Wellbutrin efficacy, a fever spike, unmonitored Nyquil consumption. But after I posted and went back to the shelter, I had a strong premonition of death...which didn't pan out, obviously. But it was a very physical experience. Chills sweeping me, hair standing on end, all of that. My throat closed up and the right side of my face along with my right ear was a dead zone; I knew just how it would feel when my body went into convulsions, seize up and expire. I wasn't sure it would actually happen right then and there; it was more like existing in a world of static and then suddenly receiving a concrete and recognizable transmission that you never received before--wham--which could be meaningful immediately or in the future. I knew I was either going to die or do something extreme and embarrassing.
To cut a long story short, I went with extreme and embarrassing and asked one of the shelter staff to get an ambulance. While he sat and waited with me I kept telling him to write things down--my brother's name, my e-mail password. "Write this down, this is important," I'd say. Important or febrile. Then I went to the ER, waited for about five hours, increasingly dehydrated and hungry and nutty in the head (but not particularly angry, because I felt that I was getting pretty much the experience I deserved), and got finally got looked at, then returned to the shelter. And then yesterday I filled my prescription for antibiotics and did a lot of lying around, hacking and encrusted with snot, confused and poking around in my head at the sensation of the experience as it faded.
It was a precise mirror of the positive experience I wrote about the other day, the childlike feeling that every moment of my life has been good and exactly right: the understanding that I'm going to die, the understanding that I'm alive and have been all this time, that every detail of life is real. I felt terror. I thought that I might someday have to end my own life before it ended itself in some long, drawn-out coccoon of trapped suffering. What I mean is, I recognized how it would feel to have a stroke, to be immobilized, to be handled and moved around without being able to express anything--what can't be suffered is. People suffer this every day.
It's hard to bear that thought. It's like blinding sunlight: you blink reflexively, putting a buffer between yourself and these feelings and realizations. A veil, to put it poetically, which I don't have a problem with. The veil of everyday life, Plato's shadows on the cave wall, the insertion of definition, the verbal.
It's all big and strange and I had to write it down. Now I'm going to eat something, and buy some VHS movies for the guys in shelter to watch, and read more Martha Grimes.
Love, Anna
To cut a long story short, I went with extreme and embarrassing and asked one of the shelter staff to get an ambulance. While he sat and waited with me I kept telling him to write things down--my brother's name, my e-mail password. "Write this down, this is important," I'd say. Important or febrile. Then I went to the ER, waited for about five hours, increasingly dehydrated and hungry and nutty in the head (but not particularly angry, because I felt that I was getting pretty much the experience I deserved), and got finally got looked at, then returned to the shelter. And then yesterday I filled my prescription for antibiotics and did a lot of lying around, hacking and encrusted with snot, confused and poking around in my head at the sensation of the experience as it faded.
It was a precise mirror of the positive experience I wrote about the other day, the childlike feeling that every moment of my life has been good and exactly right: the understanding that I'm going to die, the understanding that I'm alive and have been all this time, that every detail of life is real. I felt terror. I thought that I might someday have to end my own life before it ended itself in some long, drawn-out coccoon of trapped suffering. What I mean is, I recognized how it would feel to have a stroke, to be immobilized, to be handled and moved around without being able to express anything--what can't be suffered is. People suffer this every day.
It's hard to bear that thought. It's like blinding sunlight: you blink reflexively, putting a buffer between yourself and these feelings and realizations. A veil, to put it poetically, which I don't have a problem with. The veil of everyday life, Plato's shadows on the cave wall, the insertion of definition, the verbal.
It's all big and strange and I had to write it down. Now I'm going to eat something, and buy some VHS movies for the guys in shelter to watch, and read more Martha Grimes.
Love, Anna