That Other Me
That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life. 2016 I walk and walk and walk, taking a roundabout course from my home, unable to settle thoughts much too quick to be contained or moderated, the agitation from their mania pulsing through my body. Is this it? That’s a question growing increasingly prevalent in my forties – to have emerged from five years of severe agoraphobia, decades of anxiety and all these other mental health challenges, only to be here, much more capable in some ways but mentally unstabler in others; circumstantially unsatisfied, physically debilitated with chronic…
Contemporaneous: Chapters 65 – 67
65. The one thing I note now is the reappearance of certain memories – being held back by the teacher during recess, the inexplicable bouts of melancholy as a child, being a pariah as a teenager as anxiety compromised so much of my life socially, and then there’s something new, something dark, and I can’t unearth it, I can’t remember it, but it sits behind these things, a secret pulse that has beat all my life and gotten buried under more and more and more shit; and then it’s little things that I’ve dismissed, like bartending early in my twenties and a handful of short, unfulfilling relationships, and then the…