Dear reader,

I’m L, a mental health statistic from Wales. Depression and anxiety are just words, I hope to depict what they actually mean in a sporadic, disorganised stream of mental wanderings and experiences. If I were to organise these in any way, then they wouldn’t represent my mind, which is a cluttered hurricane of thoughts, some of which pass too fleetingly even for myself to catch their drift. Sometimes I might use my poetry to explain things differently, such as now, to let you have a good scratch around the surfaces of my mind:

The Eye of the Storm

Reaching the eye of the storm in my head

Akin to loss of gravity and time

Parameters of such restraining strength

Loosen, lighten, and release my mind

It is only here that I feel free

A limitless expanse of weathered slate

Island refuge from ferocious seas

Frees me from the will to contemplate

The horizon’s dark conspiracies

Its raging ocean storm attenuates

All light before it swallows all my pleas

Colours blackened by the swelling seas

Quick as that world within an atom came

My mind’s eye is flooded once again.

Just to contextualise that somewhat, I wrote that while in the ‘eye’ of a nervous breakdown. I don’t cry often at all, my emotional emptiness won’t allow me, but sometimes there’s really nothing I want to do more. That universal indicator of despair just doesn’t manifest in me, that is until a breakdown. When the floodgate breaks, damn do I know it. I’ve cried so long and hard during a breakdown that my whole body reached a state of complete and utter numbness, with almost soothing waves of a pins and needles-like feeling, and most welcome of all, an absolute stillness of thought. This is the ‘eye of the storm’, and the only time I can ever truly possess a clear head. Trouble is, it never lasts long, and only comes around once in a blue moon (not that I want a breakdown a day). It really is a blissful, meditative state though, just a shame about all the volatility surrounding it. I referred to this state as a ‘world within an atom’ because a clear mind really is another world to me, without all the torturous mental interference and physical constraints of daily life: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’ (Hamlet, Shakespeare (1603 ish?)). 

Anyway, I don’t want to ramble on too much, this was supposed to be a general introduction to me but as usual I’ve been drawn down a particular thread of thinking by my complicated brain. This blog’s main purpose is to provide an outlet for my thoughts and frustrations, maybe even some positivity every now and then. If you have anything to say on what I’ve written, whether you can relate or not doesn’t matter, the brain is the most complex thing that we know of in the Universe, so does anyone actually entirely understand another person? Trying to understand each other though, on an individual level and on much wider cultural, religious, and political levels, seems as important as it has ever been right now. We are all related, and we must remember that. So let’s try to discuss things on equal terms, listen to each other, no prejudice or judgement. It doesn’t even matter what we talk about, or who’s talking, just that communication breaks down barriers. So as nothing will come of nothing, I’ll see what comes of this.

L