On good days, the world and the people in it unfurl out in front like fern fronds. I know this is about us, and the spaces between, and all our pain is healable. But on bad days I’m so friable I unravel like a ball of twine, and go inside. The anxiety buzzes from my limbic system up and down my spine, and even a visit to the supermarket if I'm capable of such a thing in the first place engenders a spidey sensor probe into anyone approaching, as if this supermarket traversing is a danger, as if they’re a tiger and we’re on the Serengeti instead of both choosing from the 87 different varieties of canned tomatoes in aisle 7. It’s embarrassing, this animalic redux. It is one more time my body unspools itself beyond my willpower or desire. It is one of the times that I should be home, in bed, in the dark. And those are the times where I have struggled to be compassionate towards myself right then and there.
Our bodies, when they misbehave, are extremely uncivilised. Our silly civilisation has taught us to mistrust them, to rule over them, to beat them into submission.
I am learning, through the months and years of illness, to be as compassionate towards mine as I would be if I were born in a sane world. It is a beautiful lesson.
The most dangerous people when my body is fizzing up and I'm going off my own dial are the Super-Charged. They are like culturally sanctioned meth addicts, like they’re out of their own bodies. They have scary vibes, buzzing as hard as the fluorescent supermarket lights overhead, jamming the frequency. They are the ones who are still able to Work It, who still believe the lie that they're making it through their own pure yellow willpower.
I’m not happy about this extreme level of anxiety, mine or theirs. My hippie desire is to love the super-stressed world in all its creepiness. Yet my central nervous system is more stressed than pretty much anyone I know and so at the times I'm starting to crash, I get scared of those I would otherwise love. And untrusting. And paranoid. It’s embarrassing. But I guess it’s unsurprising when you find yourself Stopped in a world that increasingly finds it hard to stop at all.
Being Stopped is almost a capital crime. People resent us. We represent that which they do not have time to consider.
Truly, it can be stark, being Stopped. I mean, there must be something scary about it, or we wouldn’t resist it so hard, right? Yet despite its daily terror, being Stopped is not without its charms — sages all the way down through the ages have reported back to the frontlines the peace that comes via solitude, silence, slowdown. My life, carefully curated, could easily appear paradisaical — it’s been many years since I’ve had to rise regularly to an alarm, for example. That idea now fills me with horror. It seems so harsh. The thought of so many people being forced out of slumber by a sharp ear-slap, only to hurl themselves into the traffic, into the car park, into the cubicle, feels barbaric. But they have a level of self-sufficiency, a bank balance, that I gasp towards. I resent being so Stopped that my partner pays all the bills. I resent having ME/CFS, which few understand. I resent the excessive anxiety that comes with it, the draconian depression. I like to think that if I didn't have this illness I wouldn't have anxiety or depression but I know that's not true either. But wouldn't include the level of shame that comes from having an illness that for 30 years has been belittled and which, though now being taken seriously by researchers, still retains the pus-stink of stigma.
What is so true that we hardly ever question it and so it is therefore invisible is the idea that if you live Stopped, you are a loser and it's your fault.
If only we lived in the sanity of a universal basic income time. I could write then without quiver, without feeling like I am a useless blop on the landscape of productivity. I could flourish in my limitations then, not get about bogged down with the shame and guilt that comes from living economically unproductive in the age of the World Austerity Police, brought to you by Glaxo Smith Kline and humanity's own doubled-up hustle in the face of all that crumbles.
Living Stopped would be awesome if we didn’t live in an expensive world and if I didn't have the accompanying issues that stop me from going in the first place. Those bits are not so curatable. When I was able to handle social media, I'd post on Twitter pics of the king parrots and rainbow lorikeets that I can feed out my door at any old time of the day. For the person on their lunch break, that must look paradaisical but out of the frame of that Twitter pic is piles of shit and dust and myself, on the couch like a slug.
The shame is so hot. It reserves its most heated lava for the days my calm runs away like the dish with the spoon, and I'm left with the buzz, the wild buzz that I can't escape from of tired-but-wired. On the days when I need to retreat to bed, to podcasts, to someone else's voice in my budded ears that will mask the drone that is like a million mosquitos buzzing up my spine, into my head.
You become starkly aware, when illness and disability visit your life, that you’re residing on the left-hand side of the spectrum. A few steps along to the very far left will topple you right off the edge of everything into the ultimate stopping of age and death. The Super-Charged accomplished people of the world, the achievers of many to-do lists, are situated at the far right end of the spectrum, impenetrable to all that, ensconced in their urgency. It’s easy when you are Super-Charged to become terrified of all the bits to the left of you. In this regard I’m almost glad I’m forced to live regularly Stopped. It’s almost a comfort, a sane reminder in a world where everything just keeps damn well going when it's increasingly apparent that the gears are grinding shut. I have plenty of time to ponder and observe. It’s just really bad for the bank balance.
I don’t wish to judge the ridiculously busy. We live in an expensive world where someone once decided we must pay merely to dwell on its surface. It’s not so weird that being busy carries a gold shiny cultural badge, especially in an age where the changes keep coming, our world keeps rocking us like earthquakes, making the future unreadable. The cultural shininess of busyness adds to its addictiveness. Being busy can become like a validation mask that’s been on so long it gets stuck to your face. Our device-driven age can make you forget you’re even wearing a mask, that you’re running from anything. Our phones are the ultimate grout that pours itself in between all the little minutes here and there that we used to spend daydreaming, thinking, balancing out the action.
It’s true that I’m a little paranoid from my life in the underworld, but I’m sure I can sniff the suspicion of the brutally busy to people like me. The Stopped represent the dark. Stopping brings a chill. The void that oozes open when we stop to do nothing threatens to engulf us whole. That dead zone is like something ominous that lives in a swamp. We panic without our phones, without being relentlessly pushed out of our fear of the lurking shadows by the next tiny digital ding of Pavlovian treat.
I sometimes retreat into contempt for the pathologically busy. It’s a defensive move. But my time-richness means time for pondering. My internal world feels fertile and clean when the brainfog isn’t too high and the fatigue too broad or the depression too heavy or the anxiety too fuzzing, when the moon is in Neptune and it's between 2.03 and 2.35 pm. The pathologically busy get to be busy all the time, but they look itchy and yearny and discomfited — and yet I’m jealous of them. I don’t want to be them, but I want their social credit. Living in the underworld dredges your confidence. Sometimes you come up for air into a brightly lit social gathering and you so feel you do not belong here, that you have inadvertently brought up with you large tendrils of seaweed from the swamp, and when someone asks you questions you will not have any answers that will grant you an inch of social cachet. The people that ask me these questions about an above-ground life make me feel panicked, stretched, unsafe as a selkie. They feel like those night-time photos where cars and lights are turned into long flashes of coloured neon. They look exciting, but at the same time it feels like if I were to able to reach across the distance from me to them my hand would go right through them. And that if they saw where I live in the sea they would recoil. Maybe I stink of the void.
I guess that’s one true benefit of being Stopped – once you're forced to face that void, the terrifying thing some people run from all their lives, the easier it is to brazenly walk into it, laugh and sit in its middle. And it turns out to be not so empty at all. In fact, this space turns out to be the most fullest empty void ever. It’s a strangely silent place, dark. But alive. Like a womb. Like a comfort, this darkness, where there’s nothing to spreadsheet, nothing to need to upload as your status update. It is a warm covering where you are not required to be shiny and shipshape. It is a yin space, wordless, unrepresentable. It is a surprise. It hasn't fixed me though. Being fixed doesn't even mean anything here. It doesn't stop the hell that is tired-but-wired, which keeps me suspended like in some super satanic brine. But then that passes, eventually, and when it does the void of nothing is where I fall into and it's nothing. It's everything. It's what I remind myself of when I am barred from entering.
I'm sure this space is a partial remedy for the anxiety that ails us all. Stopped and Super-Charged alike. The surprise of peace, a surprise of joy, hidden right in the middle of everything.
Photo by Patrick McManaman on Unsplash