Experience

This morning, on my way to the butchers, I took the long way as it's a nice day. 

Don't really enjoy feeling ill though. It's hard to accurately describe the weird hypoglcyemic/metabolic problem that I have, but I know when it happens, and it did then, as bad as any other. I suspect that whatever mental health issues I have, as yet still undiagnosed, they play a part in creating some unholy bizarre synergy.

Consequently it's like experiencing a kind of sensory pressure. Stimulus becomes intense, noise merges into one monotonous experience that threatens to overwhelm while the already bright summer sun threatens to take me out of my skull. All the while I'm walking and my legs, which occasionally are feeling a little wobbly, feel like they are walking a treadmill; as if I'm being walked, not that I'm walking. In a weird way I feel that, if I stop, I'll collapse.

My thinking goes into overdrive and I'm drawn inward, my heart quickens as does my breathing in a stress response type scenario. So introspective do I become that I experience a form of tunnel vision. Occasionally I lose myself in this not particularly pleasant experience before catching awareness of the fact where my head feels like it is about to turn upside down. It's an unsettling sensation; a feeling of complete discombobulation where you catch yourself 'phasing out'. I have had this labelled 'de realisation', but, as with all these issues, I am no expert and no expert seems keen to lend a diagnosis or explanation.

I make it to the shop, which, fortunately, is empty, and I get what I need. I wanted to go to the Post Office, but the queue was such I would have struggled considerably (we will never know). I manage to assuage some of the feelings with a scotch egg. It's not ideal and these experiences are not marked by traditional hunger pangs, but with a rising sense of physical urgency as described that culminate in a need to eat. Were I to deny myself food I dread to think what would happen and consequently I have never sought to put that to the test. I don't think such speculation helpful, in fact I do not care to see people play games with their health. There really are people for home starvation is an issue; this is not a subject for navel gazing or masochism. 

It takes a good hour or so, and a sandwich as well, for my body to calm down. After which I feel pleasantly tired. This is how it always works. I do not know what causes this or why. It is simply how my body functions (or doesn't). I do not post this to compete for the sympathy of those kind enough to give me the time of day. I don't do it to compare myself to others who may have greater needs and problems. In fact I post precisely to make that point; we are all different and what effects each of us might not bother the rest. Life isn't uniform and the biology of the human body is fragile.

But the main reason I post this is because it struck me that my experience, intense as it was for me, is mine alone. I cannot persuade the Tories and the DWP and the Duncan Smiths of the world of my experience. They would not even address that experience as presented; their prejudices and assumptions would prevent them from taking me at my word.

It is a curious and unsettling fact to know that I live in a society where, as intense and uncomfortable my experience was, to others it is nothing, because that society is conditioned not to take me at my word.

...

In other, and sadder news, the passing of a legend. The masterful and creative and intelligent god of thunder, Chris Squire, bassist and singer for Yes, has passed away. Gone but never forgotten. A true inspiration.