It’s Friday night and finally everyone is in bed, myself included. Lately it’s only when I slow down that the pain arrives, which is usually at night. I am terrified that it is an indicator of something serious. Secretly, a small part of me hopes that it is, so that at least then I will have a reason for feeling this way. Somewhere recently I heard, or read, about the idea of suffering. It was definitely in a church context, though I can’t remember where, when, or in what language it was. Perhaps it was in French, but when was the last time I was in a French mass? It will come to me. The idea was that suffering is a part of life. We can’t be naïve and think it’s exceptional, that we are the only ones hurting, that it is unfair. On the contrary, it is a normal, common, even essential part of life that we must accept. It sounds so simple and obvious now but when I heard this it was a realisation. How could I have not known? How did I go this long in my life thinking that my unhappiness was somehow exceptional, that everyone else was walking around with either most things going well or most things going terribly and here I was, wondering selfishly, why my life hadn’t been better, easier, more perfect? Where had I even gotten the idea that it was going to be like that in the first place?

In recent months, since the accident, I have had a really strange new problem of remembering things. I mean, I’ve never had what I imagine is a normal memory of events, conversations, or linear things. What I have I can only describe as impressionistic, if that is even a word. For example, I just had a random visualisation of what I imagined someone else was doing the summer I lived in Copenhagen for a school program. It was twelve years ago, and I was extremely anxious all the time as I had put everything I owned in storage and left the US in May, in time to arrive in London for the wedding of my dear friend Jessica on the 24th of May, 2010. I was in Copenhagen, after a stint in Paris learning art restoration, and I was not coping very well. I had left DC without refilling my anxiety medicine prescription, a fine example of me not prioritising my mental health or taking care of myself. I found myself in a new, strange, and wonderful place which I loved, but I was so crippled with anxiety that I couldn’t truly enjoy it. One of my coping mechanisms, besides junk food and alcohol, and collecting textiles, was being really sarcastic and bitchy about everything, and yelling ay my boyfriend on the phone about practically anything.

I had never really been very good at communicating with new people, unless they were as weird as me or really friendly. It strange to write that, to look back and read it and wonder, what does that even mean, to say that I’m weird? How have I come to identify that way? At what point did I recognise that I was functioning in a different way than others?

Another thing I remember about that summer was how odd and out of place I felt. I don’t know what I expected, maybe some sort of repeat of art school where most people I met in classes were very low key, when no one was very loud or colourful, which is an ironic thing to say about art students. I found that before, in every making-based environment I’d been in before, everyone was just there to do the work, talk about the work, and generally connect through the dialogue about that work. The dynamic of this summer felt very different. I remember it felt immature, not serious, yet it was an intensive design program. Egos were huge and cliques emerged almost immediately. I wasn’t interested in trying to one-up anyone and had no strength to try to fit in. I was 34 and tired from my life and the losses that I had endured in the years just before. I had thrown myself into a new life to try to recover from them instead of perishing in a hell of grief and loneliness. Maybe it was just me projecting but I am fairly certain that I am good at reading interpersonal dynamics and I found it all quite strange. I found myself on the outside and not particularly liked. This was an odd, uncomfortable, and difficult feeling for me as since I’d learned to like myself. Since my mid 20s or so, I discovered I was likeable to others. It was depressing to suddenly find myself unlikable again. In retrospect, I think I was deeply anxious about the instability I had created for myself, as my plan was to not return to the states, but to marry Cyrille and remain with him in London and build a life together.

So this memory that I mentioned, the one that drifted in and out of my head whilst writing this, was an imagined scene of a friend from this program, a very nice girl Indian named Anita from Canada, biking around Copenhagen with a group of girls, having a great time, being free to travel throughout the city with the wind in their hair and having the best summer ever. See, we were told we should rent bikes at the beginning of the season. For some reason, probably not being able to make a decision or commitment because of anxiety, I didn’t, even through this is the way to get around the city. I instead took the bus – no fun. So anyway, this memory was a completely imaginary, and it made me so sad. Sad that I couldn’t even participate, that I was left out, and that I’d done it to myself. Again, I hadn’t taken care of myself, and was suffering because of it. Probably because I didn’t think I deserved it, and then didn’t think I deserved to have friends, on top of that.

Although this imaginary memory from 12 years ago is clear, in both vision and feeling, I find myself losing grip on real thoughts and memories now. I’m losing words for everyday things like when I was cooking and was trying to find a smaller… something… I looked around the kitchen in our weekend gîte to see the thing that was too big so that with it I could also find the word… pot. Only on seeing it could I remember what it was called. Then a few days later, I couldn’t say the name of a close friend. When I tried to say it out loud it came out Justin instead of Julien. When I am working, and by working I mean thinking, I just get lost and forget what it is I’m doing and I’m just blank, not distracted, just void. It’s like there is a plastic tent that has cordoned off a work space so that you don’t inhale the construction dust, and I just can’t find the opening to get though it to find my thoughts on the other side.