A relentless winter (soft pastels), 2021
Bitterness grows in me like a halotropic root
Berko eats half a bitter gourd every day after his lunch. He relishes it so much that we can easily sneak his tablet inside its ridgy body. It amazes me that he loves bitterness as a taste so much. I have often wondered while watching him eat the gourd, he must be experiencing the taste differently than I do. Bitter must be something very tasty on his tongue...
But how do I feel when I eat bitter gourd or some variant that cleanses my palate? Too much is impossible but a little bit is almost welcome, isn't it? I cannot imagine my diet without bitterness once in a while. So, why also not in life?
I have run all my life trying to make beautiful things and leave no poison in the world. A very hard, nearly impossible aim that I had set for myself. But now I find myself coming face to face with all the sticky, murky, dark things within me. Sometimes I wish they weren't a part of me. Sometimes I wish I could alchemize them all into glorious light. But I can't. Honestly, I don't even want to. I want to be like Berko with the bitter gourd in his mouth, relishing it. I want to honour the bitterness in the palette of my life.
It went a little something like an unspooling of a reel or I imagine the beginnings of a gurgling volcano. Little by little, I started being mean to some of the people in my life, saying it as it is, seeing the truth of the relationships I have. How fragile are they? How durable? How able to withstand a tiny blow of words? Able enough to endure with grace such that I can believe that it, and we, can withstand the many trials of life? It started unconsciously, the unspooling. But once I became aware, I couldn't stop. As friends fell off like dead leaves from a tree, I wished I would stop. The bareness of existence appeared as if a white page that I had to fill. Time, not clock time but inner time, reared up like a Tsunami and threatened to flatten me out of existence. What does it all mean, I found myself asking noone in particular.
Last year brought me close to how many old people must feel as they lose people that connected them to their past. And find themselves physically limited, confronting versions of who they were with who they are in the moment.
I found myself unable to leave the room for months, while leaving the house was out of the question. The sky seemed like it could crush me if I looked at it. Beauty nearly disappeared and every thing around was in the hands of terror. I, for whom movement had been the ultimate escape, was stuck in a room, at the mercy of the mysterious workings of life and its effects on my mind.
As the inner horrors grew, so did the bitterness at the prolonged absence of friends. When I spoke or told them what was happening, my words seemed to disappear into air. It was as if they did not understand, could not fathom my suffering. I kept getting invited outside, getting called on so that they could vent and when I finally put my foot down, disappearances began.
There's something ruthless about being met by silence mid-conversation, more so when a fight is going on...
I spent months on end in utter loneliness, imposed by those that I had believed were close to me. I found myself hearing my own voice once a week when I spoke to my therapist. It went that way for months. From the bed to the keyboard to the verandah-- this became my orbit of movement. There were days when I was horizontal on the bed, feeling something like a black hole inside me. My body felt nearly non-existent. I couldn't wait for the end of the day so I could feel some comfort in the absence of light. Nothing to do, no pressure to perform or try to work or anything. I could be the vegetable I was and fit into the world because of the time of day.
As time went, I started feeling paranoid and hopeless. What if I never could leave the house again?
I obsessed over what I could do to leave as simply as I had until this bolt from the blue had stunned me into this strange state of being. Therapy became a place of picking at this one thing obsessively-- when and how can I leave the house?
As someone who had been on psychiatric drugs before, I knew that the easy answer would be to pop some pills and get on with life. But that didn't seem like the right course. The psychiatrist I spoke to, listened to me for less than ten minutes before prescribing a bunch of pills that would help me be functional. And as much as I was looking to be functional, that wasn't the purpose driving me. I wanted to understand what had gone wrong and fix it at the root and become functional as a result. So it went for seconds, minutes, days, months-- variations of self living in terror, dysfunctional and cut off, vacillating between insanity and suicide. A sense of self so fragile that it was nearly non-existent.
I tried listening to music as my therapist suggested. Light was unbearable. Voices of people would get my heart pumping faster, while the occasional bike passing outside would incite a bodily response as if there was some catastrophe. I couldn't bear to look at my parents, let alone exchange words. Fights kept erupting between them, between me and them. I seemed to be in an endless war with the world and myself. There was no rest, no peace. Going to sleep was like a battle where my body would contort in terror, trying to convince me I was dying. Our dog stopped sleeping with me, my paranoid frame certainly making him paranoid in turn.
When did it all stop, turn, get better? I don't know. Infinitely tiny changes happened invisibly, much of it in therapy I'm aware. A change of inner seasons as the relentless winter began showing signs of spring. No new leaf but a softening of ice, a lightening of darkness, the tiniest hint of space and ease within my body. Once I could stay upright through much of the day and could begin to organize time better, I started looking for work. After a rollercoaster journey that spanned months, I found something that suited me perfectly. Luck favoured me. I came back a little more into the world through the work. I began to find the words for myself. Not just pain and loneliness as obliquely conveyed through paintings, poetry, music, but concrete words to tell those who had abandoned me in my darkest moments how little I thought of them and their friendship. I relished the bitterness. It was born and needed to live its life out before I turned my attention back to leaving only nice and light things in the world.
The golden thread of Life running through (Acrylic), 2021
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