[TW: some content inappropriate for those in a precarious state]

I am in a state: I am in sea of agitation and panic. It is easy to see, but impossible to tame. I can’t make decisions. I can’t speak fluently. I want to buy a bottle of water? Wait. I have to find the exact change, but what if I can’t count out the change? What if the barista in the franchise coffee house thinks I’m slow, stupid or scary? Everything upsets me. I want to resist resorting to the precarious blanket of my little yellow diazepam tablets, but I am painfully aware that I need a strata of my mind subdued and softened. Because it has split itself into distinct, nightmarish layers that distress me, but also, perversely (mostly) protect me.

Let’s start at the bottom and travel upwards. Let’s be Dante in Denim. It is the bottom that has the loudest presence; the bottom with the most recognizable form and texture and the greater penetrating voice. When I hear it, and I should emphasize that I hear it above and below my daily activities, I listen hard because I don’t want to miss a beat. I listen to Plath’s ‘great tap root’[1] because it knows me better than anyone. ‘Tap root’ Emma believes herself to be eloquent and insightful. But what she says might frighten and disgust those closest to me so, for the first time, this post comes with a TRIGGER WARNING. ‘Tap root’ Emma hates herself, feels worthless, empty, worn out, fraudulent. She looks at the past and the future and want out. She provides calmly what seems like entirely appropriate solutions to her mental turbulence. She dots all the ‘i’s and crosses all the ‘t’s. She knows what she wants: simply to finish what her aching and tired body has started.

‘Tap root’ Emma sees the world in stark, sharp sunlight and dark, pitch darkness. Sometimes simultaneously. It lives in her solar plexus and in her ears. She hears her heartbeat melding with the sounds around her; the iPod on as a constant buffer between the jagged barbed wire of the noise of real life. When outside, there is not a single moment where a carefully compiled playlist is not dictating the extent to which she can protect herself. But then come the ear-worms, the ‘head music’ that she has allowed in unwittingly. Loops and loops and misheard or mangled lyrics winding up inside her head like a spinning wheel.

One song in particular returns again and again and I am sure it wants to kill me: Life on Mars? by David Bowie. I cannot put my finger on why it frightens and sucks me in like a black hole: “It’s a god awful small affair” and maybe it is; is life really a “sunken dream”? Perhaps I have fallen in love with the idea of Mars being an empty, quiet space without a human being in sight. But I don’t really think that I can deconstruct it to that degree because I have so much of a visceral response to it. It is quite inexplicable. It hits my solar plexus as viciously as the dark and destructive thoughts that live in my deepest recesses. It punches me square in the forehead too, winding me.

So to the solutions: quick and easy or punishing and long? But I’m a coward, so no proper spoilers. Maybe freeze to death in the snow, shaking and shivering amidst the silently falling snowflakes. I’ve tried this and I decided that being really, deeply cold wasn’t particularly pleasant, so I went back home. Then there are the most obvious approaches – too boring and prosaic to mention here. But I also have bursts of impulsivity that tell me to run head-long into hard objects, usually the fireplace in my bedroom, which seems rather silly now that I’m actually writing this. This is the dark heart of me.

Then there is middle ‘Idiot Wind’[2] Emma, who converses with ‘Tap root’ Emma frequently, but wants desperately to do things, to fulfil obligations and be responsible. Go to work, fucking cope, get on with it you little shit. I don’t have the kind of job where I can take time off, so I slide into work and slip quietly away at the end of the day to sit with exhaustion at holding it all together. I suppress the urge to cry during the day and I try to find distractions, to find books to divert me. I always gravitate to the morbid or the dense and consuming. But she carries on like a shark slowly moving through an oil slick. ‘Idiot Wind’ Emma ensures that food is on the table, even if it is only oatcakes and hummus. She feeds the cats and sets the alarm clock extra early to accommodate the dragging, medicated corpse that flops out of bed in the morning. Not quite ‘Tap root’, but definitely blown around in her own ‘Idiot Wind’.

And so to Five Alarm Panic Emma. She is the top layer. She is the PANIC MONSTER. The lightning bolt that shoots through me in spiky waves and halts my breath and stuns my brain. It has two manifestations: firstly, I shake and sweat and become confused, I often cannot read or follow instructions (tube maps, for example are like spaghetti to me); secondly, I begin to stutter, sometimes completely blocked and unable to say anything. I can’t make decisions or continue the thread of conversation if it is free flowing and organic; organization has been lost at this point and I have become trapped in an adrenaline firework display. Sometimes I see the same face everywhere. And it is horrific. So how can I address this?

At the beginning of the week, I agreed to do some guided meditation (not sure if it was maybe some kind of hypnosis, I didn’t actually ask!) to address my high anxiety. I was, admittedly, rather skeptical about this approach but, at this point, you’ve got to try something, right? But what I experienced was highly unpleasant. Every time I was asked to focus on what might be the most stressful or anxious thoughts I had, I began to panic more and felt sick with anxiety. I started to sweat. I was reduced to the point of tears (but as is becoming strangely frequent, tears without actual tears). Suffice it to say, this approach was somewhat of a failure, but I wanted to explain why it was a failure: the core of the matter comes down to how I communicate with my inner layers. Five Alarm Emma is a sentry. Five Alarm Emma holds back ‘Tap root’ Emma: she agrees with her sentiments, but is frightened about the consequences of fulfilling obligations to her deepest voice. But she also feels so agitated that ‘Tap root’ Emma seems slow and pathetic. She tells ‘Idiot Wind’ Emma that she is more of a shit than ‘Tap Root’ Emma. So this state is more upsetting than either of the other layers: even as Five Alarm Emma stands sentry, she also stands in judgment. She can’t hold a pen, but she could hold a knife if it weren’t for ‘Idiot Wind’ saying that that it is essentially idiotic and selfish, but also messy.

So, I’m stuck at the top and the bottom of my depression. Gone is the Emma full of enthusiasms and grand ideas and energy. Perhaps the layers of depressed Emma just about hold the pieces together, but I get the sickening feeling that Five Alarm Emma only has a finite amount of strength left before the dialogue is reduced to a squabble between my deeper levels: who will win, ‘Tap root’ or ‘Idiot Wind’?

[1] Elm (1965) from the collection Ariel: ‘I know the bottom, she says, I know it with my/great tap root:/It is what you fear./I do not fear it: I have been there.’ (stanza 1)

[2] ‘Idiot Wind’ from Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks