Storying Sheffield

Planetary Being

It has often been said that you are your genealogy, moulded by our structural conditions, formed through our genetic make up, shaped by the wounds and memories that haunt us.

Perhaps it was destiny or fate that I live life within the extremes, spilt from the very beginning, an identical twin.

My bipolar moves with the seasons as if I am a planetary being absorbing the ruptures in weather, sensitive to the changes in climate, attuned to levels of toxicity which fill our atmosphere.

For the first part of the year, I fall beneath the cracks, a severe depression that leaves me isolated and alone. You hope for a vacation from your mind, some where to dwell, to hide from the thoughts which inform you that you don’t deserve to exist.

Six months or more you are amongst the undergrowth peering out at the world, wondering what it is like out there with the living.

As the summer comes to an end, and changes in my life begin, I feel myself rising. A weight is lifted, light appears to seep through. A bomb which has been left untouched suddenly erupts. No longer dwelling in the undergrowth, I am thrown in multiple directions, where the mind scatters as I try to grip onto the hand rails. A tumult of emotion, from devastation to elation.

I think to myself is this just what happiness feels like, or insanity?

Like the earth itself, looted and damaged, I’ve become the disposable body to human kind. Othered, muted, and forgotten.

It is not a question of living, but merely surviving.

 

JT