I wake up writing. This happens on many mornings. I wake up and I am halfway through a sentence. Sometimes I manage to capture the sentences, but sometimes they are fragile and fleeting and fugitive and they run away from me before I can get them on the page and I have to let them go and trust that they will come again. Or at least their cousins will come.
I am writing, in my head, in my dreams, about being aware of the crash.
This is what happens when you’ve had a very good time, or when you’ve worked very hard at something, or when you’ve worked very hard in order to have a good time. And then about four days later you go smash into the wall.
I say you. I mean me. But I’m hoping this might be universal. I think it is a thing. It feels very human.
The crash takes many forms. It can come in slight grumpiness at first, as if those are the outriders, sent ahead. There’s a scratchiness, and the kind of tiredness that I stupidly ignore (because I’m not working down a mine, and really). I get out of any routine and my sleep patterns become erratic and then, in this case, my body says, ‘Stop.’ Everything started hurting yesterday - head, back, stomach. I rang up my last appointment and cancelled it and went to bed like an old lady before darkness had fallen and I dreamed of grand hotels in Piccadilly and I was on the top floor and my shoes kept changing colour and my telephone didn’t work and suddenly the floor started trembling and I thought, ‘There are no earthquakes in Piccadilly,’ and then the entire hotel fell, slowly and graciously and not at all scarily, to the ground.
So I woke up writing about the crash.
I think of my brilliant friend Jane, who goes into technical ideas about the body and the nervous system where I cannot quite follow her, and wonder what she would say. She talks fascinatingly about nervous system collapse. You have to be careful then not to do any big physical movements - running or jumping - because the nervous system will shut down. I’ve worked with shut down horses and it’s as if they are not there. It’s sad and almost sinister. Quite often they look at me as if I am not there, as if they are blind although their eyes can see. I think the nervous system, if it is constantly sensing threat or being wired for threat or having to defend itself from threat, almost literally takes the living creature out of the world.
And perhaps in some way too much fun and loveliness gets confused with threat. It’s what Brené Brown calls foreboding joy. In some strange, profound part of our human psyche, we get scared of joy, because it’s going to get taken away from us or it’s a presage to disaster, or some such psychological muddle. Maybe something of that was happening and I ignored it until the body said stop.
It’s really interesting writing this now. I wanted to get the half-waking sentence down and take it somewhere, but it’s five-forty in the morning and even though I went to bed at old-lady-time my brain is still not yet up and running. Everything in me knows it is very early, perhaps too early for coherent thought. But this felt important, somehow, and I wanted to capture it. I wanted to say to the people out there who are also having the crashes - it’s all right; it’s part of being a sensitive, sentient human being; get enough sleep and allow yourself to go gently.
I wanted, I suppose, to say that to myself.
I thought: we moderns don’t remind ourselves to go gently nearly often enough.
And there it is, at the last, the reason I squinted my eyes in the early morning to write this down. I smile as I write and I feel my entire body open up as if to say, ‘Yes, yes, there it is.’
Go gently. That was it, all along.