Once a month or so, I meet up with some friends to tell stories. It’s a lot like a book club, but instead of reading a book we draw a prompt from our storytelling cards from The Moth. Last time we met, the prompt was Burnt: when the candle burns at both ends. Life and health were (and are) happening, and I never really got around to preparing a story. All I could give them was, ‘I’m too burnt by life to have a story today’.
It wasn’t untrue.
I’m knackered.
I’m tired of not being able to breathe and not getting any decent sleep. I often wake up feeling more tired than when I went to bed. I’m fed up with being in pain and wanting to do things but not really being able to. I get frustrated when I can’t think clearly, or when I have to read the same page over and over again to comprehend what I’m reading. Everything around me is moving so fast, and it’s increasingly difficult to keep up.
And my lungs are bleeding, again.
To the point of needing transfusions.
When I’m exhausted like this, it’s as if the walls I’ve built around me become more permeable. Things find a way to slip in, breaching my protective mechanisms. The things I normally keep at bay, because they’re too heavy or intense to think about, begin to pour in without really having anywhere to go. So I write. I write to understand the universe, to make sense of the world around me, and inside of me. To travel down the hidden paths that are so wide yet not available for exploration. I write to organise myself, to try to map out what’s going on with my health and emotional state in some kind of attempt to predict where I’ll end up.
I look in the bathroom mirror just to make sure I’m still there, but all I see is someone I don’t want to be – irritable, scared, and not particularly pleasant to be around. I’m standing there alone; door locked, trying to find the strength to plaster on my stiff upper lip and reinforce my walls before I enter the day.
Yet, I feel thin as rice paper.
Is this how it is?
– Florence Welch
Is this how it’s always been?
To exist in the face of suffering and death
And somehow still keep singing.