Furioso
Follow up to self sabotage and Tired? Try sustainability.
It doesn’t matter too much what is the trigger. If it’s self sabotage, if it’s the brain shutdown, if it’s an innocent remark by somebody you love, if it’s a random picture you see while doom scrolling, if it’s a targeted attack by an evil person. I’ve had all of those.
It is a moment. There is no build up. It’s like a flick of the switch. And then it starts. The furioso, the tornado, the whirlwind. And it doesn’t stop. The inside of my head spins and spins. It feels like how I imagine Clockwork Orange feels like.
You can’t divert your eyes. It’s inside. You can’t turn the screen off. It’s inside. You can’t describe it. It moves too fast for talking. You can’t share it with anyone, it’s flickering lights at best. Fragments overlapping each other. Coming and going. Lightning fast.
Good things. Bad things. Memories. Concerns. Ideas. Potential conversations. Faces. Mythical figures. Feelings. Past conversations. Pain. Injuries. Hopes. Dreams. Abstract… things. Maybe it feels more like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it’s not linear. It’s circular. It goes away, it comes back. In random order. No resolution, nothing goes away. You can’t pause, observe, resolve and drop. It’s too fast. More show up. And it keeps spinning.
Did you feel exhausted? Not anymore. You’re wide awake, alarmed, ready. But there’s nothing to do. There is no enemy to fight, no predator to run away from. You can’t verbalize what is going on, all you want is to shut it down. And you can’t! At least I don’t know how. Counting breaths? When the last syllable of “Ten” leaves your mind or lips, it is back. Right were you left it. But faster.
You try to write into a journal. No man can write that fast! Not even a woman can. You try. It’s scribbles, unreadable. I remember a movie where there was a journal of somebody going mad. It looks like this. It’s not letters, it’s just lines. Because you are trying to take it all out, but there’s no time to properly form a letter. There’s more and more coming, it’s pushing, pushing. And you try and you can’t capture it all.
Utter overload. It takes the toll. The brain does not let you sleep. You need to calm down, but how? Weighted blankets, walks, exercise, shower, food, building legos, going to sleep to a different room... You can’t really focus on anything. It works for a little bit. But then after a few seconds… it’s back.
I didn’t ask for this! Leave me be! You yell in your head.
Then you are too tired to yell. So you just beg. And it keeps going. And it keeps coming. And there is no way out. You feel like there is no way out. And that it will never stop. It feels like you will never be able to do anything in your life again. You are absolutely and completely drained.
You know you need help. Somebody to hold your hand. Call you. Ask “How are you?”. Show an interest. Say a few soothing words. Be there with you. They can’t be on the inside, but they can show they care.
But you can’t verbalize what kind of help you need. You just feel you can’t do this alone. You are too tired to say what you need. You don’t know what you need. What would help. And it keeps spinning for you. You feel desperate.
Conflicted.
You know you need help. But you’ve been told since you were a kid that you can handle anything. You feel ashamed. But you know now better. There is nothing to be ashamed of. But you feel it. Asking for help is not natural. You need to overcome something. An inner conflict. Some stupid feeling of disappointment. And you don’t have the energy to overcome it, because all of your energy is in the tornado in your head. And the energy is depleting.
You just hope that it will stop and you will fall asleep. At some point.
And then you wake up after a while. And the very instant your consciousness boots up, you’re spinning again. No. Please, don’t do this to me. It’s debilitating. You can’t cry. No energy for that. Blanket over your head, please shut down. Doesn’t help.
But that little bit of sleep was enough. You are finally able to pick up the small amounts of energy that is now there and you ask for help. It’s a text. You can’t talk. But it’s not “help me”. It’s pages and pages of text. You are trying to express what you’ve just been through, because it needs to go out. You can’t be with it anymore.
And what you write doesn’t make sense. So you feel you need to explain and add more. It gets entangled, deep, full of negative emotions. You write more. Very bad things about other people that you just saw in your head. All you want is to get it out, so you’re not alone with it anymore. You are trying to make it smaller. Smaller tornadoes spinn slower, less energy to spin. Right? I don’t really know.
Oh yeah, also it’s 4AM so it’s not like people are there instantly.
And then people finally respond in the morning.
“Please don’t hurt yourself.”
Then you start crying. And it finally stops.
It never occurred to me that I should hurt myself. It never occurred to me that somebody would think that I would do that. It’s a shock. The exact shock that you need. The kind of help that you need. It’s the reverse trigger.
You still can’t really talk. You can’t describe what you’ve just been through. It’s surreal. Unreal. But you are finally out of it. Empty.
That reverse trigger is just a start though. It’s like any other ilness, you need to rest and recover. I stay in bed. Some people rather go to crowded places to not feel alone, I prefer to hide in my bed where nobody can get to me. I don’t want any new input unless I can control it.
People call you. They are so decent that they first ask over text if they can. That is probably the most considerate thing anyone can do for me at that moment. They call. You can’t really talk, you just cry. I had to hide my head under the blanket for the first phone call. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want the world to see. Even if there was nobody around to see me.
A different friend comes over after a few hours. You can finally talk. You even laugh together. You go for a short walk late in the evening. It’s dark, peaceful, quiet. Empty. Exactly like I feel in that moment.
You pick up some melatonin to fall asleep. It helps. You sleep for 6 hours straight. You still wake up at 4AM. But there is no spinning. You wait in anticipation. No, it’s not there. You feel like Smeagol when he gets rid of Gollum.
It’s such a relief. You are ready to throw some of the bits out of your head. You start writing. Here, journal, people. Doesn’t matter. It gets out. You cry. A lot. You book a psychotherapy session. You feel better every hour. You sleep some more. You’re starting to get through. This one.
The most fucked up thing in all this is that I am smart. Very smart. I rationally and logically understand all of this. I understand the reasons, I understand the solutions, I understand some of the biochemistry in this. I’m pretty sure I could be a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist if I wanted to.
So I know all too well that the only right way how to stop this from happening is to not get into the situations that allow the trigger to trigger.
I need to take care of myself better. I need to build new habits. Ditch some old ones. I need to ditch some people. Maybe find some new people. Maybe I need medication. I definitely need to learn again how to relax. I need to find a sustainable pace for my life. And when I find it, I need to not add more when I get comfortable!
Now I know again that there are people in the world that care. That don’t want me to hurt myself. My interpretation of that is not only physical hurt. The simple fact that I get to the trigger means that I’ve been hurting myself, maybe subconsciously.
I have been reminded again that somebody on the outside cares about me. And I am not alone with it. Even if it feels like it. I am not alone with it. Never alone. Not even when Furioso strikes again. Maybe it won’t. And if it does, it will pass. It always does.