This is a list of things I need to do today:
Do the dishes from last night’s cereal, this morning’s oatmeal
Get the spider’s web off of the windowsill
Sweep front walk
Fold and put away laundry
Clean up kids’ room
Sweep back porch
Clean kitchen floor
My plan is to photograph these tasks, so that I will have more to show for having done them. Photography is a strong mental health recovery tool. At least, for me it is.
Some days, everything is fleeting and my mind feels segmented between thought and action, some great gulf threatening to rise up and swallow volition, sever me from the shore and leave me to swim, to float, to drift as I walk from room to room, unable to keep a grasp on what exactly it was I was planning to do next.
I think they call these symptoms disorders of thought, perhaps disorganized behavior? Ah, it is what it is…a crisis of communication between a triumverate of thought, feeling, and action, some synaptic static that leaves me stuck and gasping.
*****
infant bird, not yet fledged, fallen from the edge of nest
loving the air
hating the air
because it does not hold
and on the ground
the wings are quite useless
the legs small and spindled
catching on leaves
the sky simple light
when viewed through the trees above
My home! My home!
How do I get home?
*****
On days when my brain is haywire – a perfect term that adequately denotes the way my brain feels when it slips into dysfunction. As if my neuronal pathways have been replaced with strands of dry grass, cool and dusty, smelling of sun and dew. It is not, I must admit, entirely unpleasant to have a head stuffed with hay. The disruption to communicative mechanisms is so great that one is left in a state of soft catatonia, a kitten asleep in a loft.
Which is precisely why it is so dangerous. I mean who doesn’t love to feel like kitten asleep in a loft? The only problem is that I AM NOT A KITTEN AND MY HEAD IS NOT A HAY LOFT.
To shoo away the cats, I re-visualize my brain a vibrant green field, a forest on edge. As the sun rises higher, the insects do sing and life begins again.
I have wanted, over the past few months and, more specifically over the past few minutes, to write a series of visualization prompts for use as a coping mechanism for psychiatric symptoms on the cognitive and communicative spectrum, meaning these disordered thoughts and stumblings in conveyance.
******
The walls fell down, and it was like water rushing into the living room.
How do I get out?
The sofa!
The pictures!
Oh, whoa is me…oh, whoa is me…
And then the waters recede, leaving a sodden but salvageable mess. There will be scrubbing and examining, bemoaning loss and labor, and slowlyslowlyslowly the floorboards will dry and the walls will be painted, perhaps a warm light golden and the window will be open and life will have somehow returned to normal, though better than normal, because that was then and this is, of course, NOW.
…another dog named Obie.