Haunted
when your ghosts are smug, smirking, sanctimonious—and won't shut up
I wake up and take a scan of my body and mind: it’s light outside, so this means I slept at least past 5:30 am. This is a good thing. But the tell-tale nausea is there, heavy in my belly, creeping into my chest cavity and keeping my breath shallow.
Anxiety. Verging on panic. It’s back, it’s been back for a few weeks.
I’ve been pushing through, trying to act as I imagine people do who somehow manage to work for living. Fake it til you make it. Isn’t that what they say? Compartmentalize rigidly. Put the intrusive thoughts in a box, tie them up tight, hide them away on a shelf far back in a deep dark closet. For awhile it’s been working, even though it takes a good part of the energy of each day. Talking myself out of just disappearing, convincing myself I really can keep laying down words in a Scrivener project.
This morning I hope I can do it all over again.
By the time I get to the kitchen, though, I’m starting to feel breathless and the tears are leaking against all my best efforts. Conversations with ghosts from my past take hold of my mind and I’m screaming at them to LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE but it doesn’t work. They grin at me, smug, giddy with the knowledge that the most recent snub—real, not imagined, flagrant and indisputably mean-spirited—has been even more humiliating than they could have hoped. They giggle and clap and carve another notch in their belts.
I make my toast and coffee: rote muscle memory. This is the hallmark of a true ritual. It’s not always lovely and enchanting. Sometimes it’s just going through the motions. Just going through the motions is a sort of comfort too.
But this morning it’s not comfort enough. I am scheduled to have a mammogram in just a few hours and dread sits heavy on my chest, squeezing me from the outside in precise counterweight to the anxiety pressing out from the inside and the sensation is so fucking unbearable that tears and gasping breath are the only pressure valve keeping me from flying apart.
I load the dishwasher. I eat toast and drink coffee and try to read a few pages of my Scottish mystery.
But sometimes ritual needs a boost. I take a klonopin and hope it will help.
Someone knocks on the door and the dogs bark ferociously. I jump at the noise, so sudden, so sharp, it jolts my insides, my mind knocking against my skull, my heart beat beat beating hard. I’m sure it’s D, our precariously-housed neighbor who comes regularly for a sandwich. I’m usually happy to make one, to add a piece of fruit and something sweet if we have it and a can of soda to a bread bag. But right now I can’t. I just can’t. I can’t drag myself to the door, I can’t bear to be perceived, I can’t possibly make even the most nominal of small-talk.
I put on headphones and turn music up way too loud.
Klonopin helps but not enough. I call to reschedule the mammogram. It’s not the mammogram itself that feels impossible—I’ve had dozens of them and they aren’t so bad. It’s not even the fear of cancer, which actually haunts me way less now that heart failure came on the scene. No, it’s just the insurmountable effort of getting dressed in something appropriate for the outside world, of stepping into the soup of this Philadelphia heat wave, of driving to the same hospital where heart failure became my new companion, of walking through the too-bright fluorescent hallways, of sitting jumpy in a waiting room ambient with indistinct chatter and relentless, mindless morning TV and—I can’t.
I just can’t. It will take only a few hours of a morning, but will knock my legs out from under me for the rest of the day. I will be left with only weeping and trying to breath, and failing to shut out the intrusive voices of ghosts.
Instead I reschedule, then put the headphones back on with the too-loud music. I hide myself in the sanctuary of my home, and I write this. It helps. Maybe later I can make something pretty. I am painting walls and bookshelves, still mulling the possibilities of bright yellow ceilings.
Maybe later I will be able to work on a project that has seemed so promising but right now just feels stupid, vapid, embarrassing.
If only I can figure out how to shut up the ghosts with their chattering teeth and their sanctimonious smirks and their breezy mean-girl spitefulness. What works for you? I’d love to know.
Thank you for sharing this with us. I find that my ghosts tend to just want to be heard out, and I ask them what they *really* want, and most of the time it’s confirmation of some self-belief I haven’t fully processed. They pull me further into full integration of myself, even if I may never reach it.
Wow Marta, this is so beautifully written, so evocative. I know this place--or one a lot like it--well. One thing that helps me is writing it out--like this, though mine are way more "barfing it onto the page" and less the poetry of this piece. Another thing that helps is Internal Family Systems, which has given me a paradigm and tools for working with the ghosts. It has allowed me to befriend the ghosts. Not that they don't come around and take over sometimes still, but now I have a pretty reliable path back to a not-haunted state. Very much a skill I'm still learning but it does seem to get easier bit by bit.