Lately there is a strange sense of a kind of semi-ordered chaos: as I am by turns angry and disoriented, or surprisingly pleased, or overwhelmed, or insulting, or reasonable, it seems as though I have been pushed (or: as though I have pushed myself?) into this psychological place.
The physical/real-world explanations are obvious: months of anxious preparation and attempted rigid control related to the medications I'll start on November 5, exacerbated by new, unexpected appointments and ultimatums delivered by the hospital and my acupuncturist over the past two weeks; plus the start of the school year, with the usual huge increase in questions, responsibilities, spreadsheets, meetings, and swarms of alternately sensible and nonsensical phone calls and e-mails. (And why am I waking/sleeping erratically, missing meals and not caring – even missing my pills?... no no I promise not much, just, well, twice in the last week. Which is a lot for me.)
After a quiet summer, with some too-rational part of me having pathetically planned to maintain total control over the medical situation, it all feels like an onslaught of demands: and the fact that I can handle many of its individual parts makes everything worse, because I cannot simply collapse and say, I can't deal with anything at all.
And then there are the more distant worries – that the trip to Berlin in two weeks will be chaotic and exhausting, that the school year will be difficult to get through, that winter will be uncommonly depressing... and, behind all these smaller things, like those low noises in the film Inception that signal the multileveled darkness of dream time, the sight over Skype, most weekends, of my mother in the hospital, with my sister talking to her kindly, taking such loving care of her: but Mom looks very, in fact painfully, near the end of her long disintegration... so, yes, you can figure it all out yourself: funeral, sorrow, loss, guilt, and that sense of disorientation and collapse that can't be sidestepped, no matter how long one has prepared for it.
There is one distant, nearly abstract idea that suggests that this is not all hopeless – that, in fact, I have deliberately driven myself (I have deliberately been driven?) into this space of what feels like crisis, chaos, disaster. (Rather than, for instance, depression: because becoming increasingly unable to feel is of course a strategy against stress and fear.)
It's connected to something reasonable but surprising that came up in a lecture at the Jung-Institut this summer, when a skilled analyst listed the personal traits that were required in a patient for (Jungian or Freudian, or Adlerian or Gestalt for that matter) analysis to be a good treatment choice.
One of them was a high tolerance level for anxiety: in other words, analysis is not at all like simple therapy – it's not to make you feel better, not in the short term anyway. It is designed to push you into the things you find most difficult to handle, into the parts of your mind that are the most primitive, or shallow, or confused, or even (slightly) damaged, so that you can learn to deal with them rather than avoid them.
Which might mean that my lack of control lately is a good thing... not much fun, admittedly; but a step forward, rather than one back.
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