Out Of Hand

It feels like a long time since I last wrote on here, which is an  odd notion for me to be feeling given the sporadic and often erratic cycle of my scribblings. I guess it feels like a long time as I drew the image above intending to write about it, and popped it into draft while I blew hot and cold over whether to write my first thoughts. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly bothering me about writing them other than they felt to be thoughts that predictably come up on a semi-regular basis for me… I thought about the times in my life when these thoughts have presented and decided I didn’t much feel like going over old ground writing stories best left to fade…

Sometimes it’s the seemingly insignificant things that people say that stay longest and stir strongest in your mind. A few weeks ago, during what I guess most people would describe as a stressful situation, a colleague turned to me and commented – Your patience is next level! How do you manage to stay so calm? I couldn’t answer, I smiled and let a sound that was a mash up of ha ahhhhh pffffftttt hmmm. I was puzzled, inside I was raging, I was fuming angry and convinced that my temper was violently leaking facial tics, red warning flags to back the fuck off… But apparently not. Apparently my visage was a ripple free placid pool of serenity… I’d asked my colleague, does this face look calm, she affirmed it did, I silently judged her on her lack of people reading skills until I accidently caught a glimpse of my reflection and was surprised(though again, not visibly) to see a my face looking like someone had slipped me botox whilst I’d been sleeping… Though in my mind that face didn’t read as an expression as patience… I memorised the face… Noting to explore this further.

A couple of days later, I crossed paths with another colleague, one I know has a talent for instantly reading faces, expressions and moods. I slipped on my next level patience face as she approached. Karen? Are you OK? Yes, I’m OK. Are you sure you’re OK? Yes, why? Oh because your face is saying – Why don’t you all just shut the fuck up and let me listen to my music! I ruptured with laughter and applauded her evaluation.

Since that point, life does what it does and flips you when least want it. After being problem free with my back pain for a few days shy of a year, my back flared up with a vengeance… Mostly I’m pretty good at zoning out pain, which has caused problems in the past such as a midwife trying to send me home whilst in full blown labour because I wasn’t screaming… This latest pain had me primal screaming a noise eventually banished by prn codeine. I’d never had codeine before, I don’t like pills, maybe once in a decade I might at wit’s end take paracetamol… Codeine was a mind bending two days of Netflix and narcotics and by Netflix, I may mean bingeing boxsets, though I could equally mean drifting in and out of consciousness not sure whether I was dreaming or having past life recalls of being a lounge lizard in a Victorian opium den… The only two things I knew for sure were the backs of my eyelids felt very warm and the inside of my brain felt white… White like clouds buried in fog… My mind was quiet. It felt like for the first time ever though it wasn’t. The last time I experienced that level of silence was aged 16 for 6 weeks during a bout of glandular fever though that silence was inky black broken only by the strange rasping sound every few hours that I eventually realised was the sound of my dried out tongue rolling around my back teeth…

The voices that usually reside in my head decided enough was enough and they tag teamed me to ditch the tablets and get back onto my feet… Back on my feet has been interesting as I’m still in a degree of pain but it’s tolerable and I can easily zone it out… What I can’t do is do that AND maintain a tolerance for idiots filter… So there have been a few interesting moments over the last week or so, notably my mouth freewheeling into an expletive laden rantra lasting a good ten minutes at work. It was obscene… Even by my own filthy low standards. I ran out of steam and was on the brink of hanging my head in shame, when I noticed laughter erupting all around me, and smiles emerging and the words came out – Karen, you should do that more often! That’s a gift!