‘You’ll be alright, just be brave’.
‘Just get on with it’.
‘It’s just a little bump in the road, you’ll be fine before
you know it’.
There were a million other phrases that friends and family
would use to tell me it would be ok.
Admittedly some of them were stumbling over their knowledge
of English vocabulary in some kind of awkwardness or another, trying to find
something to say when they didn’t really know what to say. But honestly most of them just plain didn’t understand. They
didn’t understand that I was in pain. Not physical pain, but an odd kind of
mental anguish experienced by only a few.
I think that was the problem. None of the people I spoke too
had any experience or point of connection to what I was going through. No-one
except my wife, who sat with me day after day, night after night, and put up
with it first-hand all the time. She couldn’t quite get her head around what
was happening or how it felt, but she saw what it was doing to me and
understood from there. But no-one else did, if I’m honest.
I felt sad, and lonely, like nothing would ever be enjoyable
again, and like I was completely useless at absolutely everything. I couldn’t
go to the shops on my own; I don’t know what I thought would happen, but I knew
it would be awful and that the world would probably end. I knew I wasn’t
capable enough, mentally or physically, to get out of the house and walk
anywhere.
Had there been some grotesque abnormality on my face, people
would have understood. Had I lost a leg or another limb, they would be able to
see the pain I was in. But the reality was I had nothing ‘wrong’. People didn’t
know that I could simply be sitting watching television and launch in to some
kind of full-blown terror-panic-lunacy episode, where I would be feeling sicker
than anyone in the whole world had ever felt in their whole life, and my heart
would be beating so fast I thought it was going to explode. People wouldn’t
understand how I felt like I was trapped in the burning wreckage of my body and
couldn’t escape, or how the terror would rise up in my mind without a moment’s
notice and cripple my entire life and my entire future. And I couldn’t explain
it to them. I couldn’t find the words to explain just how terrifying it was. I
still can’t.
And without any ability to put the fear in to words and make
people understand how I was feeling, I was totally lost. It was as if my whole
body was burning itself to death from the inside, and without any visible signs
on my skin or my face, no-one even noticed.
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