Immobilised

Lessons in stillness and the experience of 'not doing'

Being busy is an addiction.

I know this because I can’t do anything anymore. 

I’m not wringing my hands or calling out for sympathy or even being dramatic. Over the past six months I’ve been stopped dead in my tracks by a health crisis that has immobilised me. I have not just had to go slowly, or take things easy but really, profoundly and totally stop. Everything that was a given for me - writing, reading, gardening, cooking, walking, driving - has gone and I’m left here in the middle of beautiful nowhere, stuck stock still and empty handed. 

I am left with silence, stillness and reflection. 

I have the company of audiobooks (I still have hearing in one ear for which I am truly grateful) three cats that do nothing but eat and six rescue hens that make sure I get up in the morning to let them out and stay up long enough to put them to bed again. 

There has been a slow settling. The things I could do gradually fell away, sinking down to the muddy depths of a past life. The strong currents of a compulsion to do something, anything, eventually and after many battles, fell quiet. A realisation that new limits bounded my life gradually became clear. 

In this stillness, the experience of 'not doing' has been a revelation. 

I knew that in my supporting role (hate the word carer) with MAC (My Adult Child) I was guilty of doing too much. About three or four years into the cycle of hope, fear, chaos and hospitalisation, I understood that part of my heroic attempts to put things right were dysfunctional. I had become codependent and torched my identity on a pyre of anger, anguish and denial. What saved me was realising that I had totally lost it myself. I joined twelve step programmes, worked through many family constellations and found support from therapists and my peers. I’ve come to spend the past three years gradually learning to do less, to panic less, to stop rescuing, fixing and complaining, to separate myself and try as best I could to respect my adult child’s precious human life and allow it to run its own course. These boundaries were always a work in progress. Now, even the fantasy of rescuing MAC from whatever predicament they are in, has been removed. 

In the ennui of inactivity there's been a new experience waiting in the wings.

It is called feeling.

Feeling visceral grief that hits like a storm, shaking my body and drenching me in tears.

Feeling the devastation of lost time, lost connection, lost hope in both our lives.

Feeling the dark depth of pain that being busy had kept me from. 

It’s proved a hard learning. 

Keeping busy was like layering bubblewrap around the most precious and fragile part of myself. The part that I had glimpsed in terror and did not want to look at again. The part I would not give voice to or admit to. The part I wanted to put into storage for safe keeping and forget about, not caring about the cost. 

As a parent witnessing an adult child’s long suffering in and out of altered states of mind, in and out of psychiatric hospitals, medicated into numbness without aftercare or support and all the loss and devastation this brings, there is a deep well of pain, grief and heartbreak. 

I have known this pain has been waiting for me, lurking. There have been moments when I have almost touched it. But no way did I want to go there, not really. Maybe I’ve nodded to the grief in passing, waved to the sadness as I ticked off more stuff from my to do list. I’ve cried a bit, but not howled, wailed or sobbed.

I’ve pretended it was all going to be OK, that I was OK. 

Now, in this new and unwanted stillness, I have finally peered over and into the well's dark depths, and dropped in my small coin of hope to search out its landing. 

Whatever ills have brought me to a standstill, I know that somewhere in these still dark waters of grief, I will find the medicine I have been searching for. 

#mentalhealth #caregiving #psychosis