It’s only a passing thing, this shadow

Feeling mildly calmer, with the phrase ‘one day at a time’ pulsing gently in my consciousness as if from somewhere simultaneously within and without.

I grasp at some semblance of realisation that the terror I feel is the most logical thing in this chaotic world: anything awful can happen at any moment and feeling secure is actually the biggest self-deception there is. Something about reconciling oneself to the chaos, to the unknown and truly coming face to the face with the fact we can only take this shit one day at a time, one moment at a time.

If I am experiencing what I am experiencing in order to reach a place of tentative peace with the chaos, with the unknown, to live with the perspective viscerally, not just cerebrally, then I welcome it. I don’t feel like I have a choice at this point…

It’s a kind of alchemy, this process of turning anxiety/terror into excitement about the potential for all that is. The potential in every one of us at all times.

My mind is flooded with terror and black waves of stomach-churning doom but I visualise white light, all around, within and without. I visualise raising my hand up into the cosmos and reaching my finger out to the brightest star I can see. I touch the star then bring my hand back and touch my finger to my heart and from there the star’s light spreads all through my body, chakras and whatnot.

My friend who does Reiki rings me one sunny morning to ask me to hang out with her in London Fields (she lives right on the park) and I’m in bed, another long and painful night, sobbing as soon as I try to open my mouth to attempt to articulate how far from London Fields I am located. She suggests doing some distance healing on me.

‘Are you lying down now?’

‘Yes, I’m in bed [I have been for probably 16 fruitless, agonising hours]’.

‘Ok, hang up the phone. Love you.’

When she calls me back later she tells me she cried and cried as she did my healing, a first experience of this kind for her doing this Reiki stuff. She tells me I need to eat, she felt the hunger of my tense, snake-ridden stomach that I know I’ve been neglecting because of pure incapability. She tells me I am in a process of significant transformation and that I am surrounded by angels and light. My brother is here, she says.

I speak to them all the time, I tell her. I ask them to take away my anxiety, the nausea, to help me sleep. To just switch my mind off for me.

Keep doing it, she says.

I will survive this.