Beneath The Bottle

Tag: fear

  • I Want To Know But Not At The Cost Of Knowing

    I Want To Know But Not At The Cost Of Knowing

    Friday was a strange day. At short notice, I got an appointment for the long Covid clinic, something I had almost forgotten about. My GP referred me last year.

    I have suffered from the effects of an Omicron Covid infection since December 2022. The infection itself was not bad. Two days and I was over it. But the after effects wreaked havoc on my body. I can only presume it attacked my central nervous system, damaging key regulators such as the vagus nerve.

    But advocating for yourself does not mean you are going to be believed or understood. I always knew it would be a battle if I ever found the courage to face the brutality of the crippling after effects I have been left with.

    My body is not the same. I do not even know where to begin in trying to explain how severe the symptoms are. And yet I know trying to get a doctor to listen might be even harder. Especially when self advocacy is alien to me.

    Initially, for eight months, I was bedbound. I experienced horrific POTS type symptoms, a racing heart when I stood up with no relief, air hunger, adrenaline dumps. I lay on my bed twitching, unable to talk, unable to regulate my breathing, feeling like I was dying, my body reacting to some unseen trigger. The psychological effect of that was horrific. But the symptoms were real. The feelings were real. There was nothing psychological about lying there with no escape from the hell of severe panic triggered by nothing, several times a day, for hours at a time.

    My body forgot how to breathe. I was winded just by sitting up. It was as though my body would no longer let air in the way it used to. And there was so much more. The desperate need to swallow constantly. A numbness in the back of my throat. The feeling that my tongue was too big for my mouth and not knowing where to put it. The sensation that my throat was closing. The constant unconscious, forced need to tighten throat muscles just so the feeling of dying between each breath would subside. Feelings that lasted all day. Not being able to breathe through my nose with any satisfaction. Everything feels different now. My body is not working how it should.

    And then came this appointment, where I had to advocate for myself. I had to tell this doctor that I was not uneducated, that regardless of my complicated mental health difficulties and my alcohol addiction, I am still insightful, accountable and capable of understanding my own health and the things preventing me from feeling normal.

    On Friday I sat with that doctor and he spoke, but he also let me speak, for one hour and twenty minutes. He gave me the time and the space to explain things. To be open and honest about how Covid had damaged my body, and how there were clearly psychological issues at play too.

    We laughed, and I became teary at times. I try to joke about my broken body, about being scared of my own shadow. I mock myself to show humility rather than accept that perhaps things have never been good, and that being gentler with myself might help. But I cannot do it. I cannot accept that I deserve kindness. I cannot accept that I deserve love. I cannot accept that I deserve self love. If I dared to love myself, I think I would break even more, because how do you show yourself tenderness when you have never believed you deserve it?

    I went through my history. My childhood, my poor mental health, and my current health in relation to long Covid. He joked that his job was to catastrophise, and I already believed the catastrophe before it had even happened. He knew his words would cut through me like a screeching child in a silent room.

    He wanted a full panel of bloods, looking further than the basics. He wanted inflammation markers, coagulation tests, hepatitis B, hepatitis C. He reeled them off one by one. Then he wanted a chest X ray and an ECG.

    I am certain he knew what my reaction would be after the long conversation we had just had. I told him I would find it impossible. Which sounds so crazy. In my head I knew there was no chance I would be able to go through with those tests. I want to know, but not at the cost of knowing. Where does that even come from?

    The truth is, I do want to know if I am ‘dying’. But I also feel it is better for me not to know. The doctor felt it would be more harmful to me to have the tests done than not to do them. Instead, he is referring me onto a psychological long Covid pathway, where I will work with a therapist in the hope of slowly reaching a place where I can tolerate the tests I currently cannot bear.

    And this is where my humiliation cuts deep. From the youngest of ages, my parents manipulated a narrative they wanted me to believe and accept. My mam wanted me to know that there was something wrong with me. From as early as I can remember, she would tell me there was something wrong with me. Then she built on it. As a young child I began to get severe headaches, and this was accompanied by severe sickness. She told the doctor she believed I was allergic to chocolate. I believed her. Until after I ran away and decided to test the theory. It took every ounce of resolve to stand in a doorway after eating a Kit Kat, at the age of 18, taking the smallest bites, waiting to see if I would throw up, waiting for my stomach to turn.

    It did not. I was not sick.

    She told me I had a spot on my head and neck and that it meant I had a brain tumour. There was no joking. No playful teasing. She meant every word. I would stand in front of her mirror. She would analyse my body and with each spot she found the escalation of her diagnosis would mount. It became the norm. She would tell me incessantly, yet she would not take me to the doctor.

    But why was I so sick as a child? The answer may never be proven, and it would be dangerous to say fully what I believe. But I was sick for a reason, and my mam was the only person who had access to what I ingested.

    My dad reemphasised the fear around health. I would hear things like if you are nipped you will get cancer and die. If you go outside without me, you will die. My mam would tell me not to eat apple pips because I would get appendicitis and die. If I took medicine I would die. I was suffocated by the words. I was suffocated by fear that lodged itself into every part of my life.

    Eating became immensely hard. My parents diatribe of constant fear. They would make me chew and over chew, they threatened that I’d choke if I didn’t eat so precariously. Each mouthful was painful. I would feel overwhelmingly nauseous, and every attempt to swallow took careful timing and accuracy just to avoid the dread. My mam would cook food and force it upon me that carried further choking hazards. It was as if she readied me for battle. Fish with bones was a favourite. I was sucked into a vacuum of fear, daily, constantly. There was never any sense that I could be fixed. In my world, you were either fine or you died.

    I do not believe that I was or am fixable.

    I cannot face those tests because if there is something wrong, in my head, then to me it means I am dead. And if there is something wrong, it also means my mam was right. It means there was something wrong with me all along. How do I ever recover from knowing she was right after all the heinous things she has done?

    So the shame of carrying what my parents brainwashed into me lies beneath everything I do. The fear never fades. Their words never fade. I am a prisoner to the persistent, constant voices of my parents, the ones you trust because you have to trust them as a child, because at that time they are all you have.

    I know some people will read this and think I am no longer with my parents, so why does it still have such power over me. But that is the point. Trauma like this does not stay politely in the past. It changes the architecture of your mind. It settles into your body, your instincts, your reactions, your beliefs. My parents did not just frighten me. They taught me to distrust my body, to fear illness, to expect catastrophe and to believe I was never safe. I may have left them, but the system they built inside me did not leave with them.

    And whilst there is rational within me. The overbearing, all consuming fact remains that they formed my entire sense of self and only by rebuilding that can my thought process fully be eradicated and rebuilt.

    And maybe that is the cruelest part of all, that even now, their fear still speaks through my body louder than my own voice ever learned to.

  • I Have A Confession

    I Have A Confession

    I have a confession to make.

    I’m actually quite scared to divulge this really quite petite fact that holds little significance in the grand scheme of things.

    But I need to make it less powerful, to reduce the imaginary pull that seems to reel me in to the hold it has on me.

    Under my desk is a bag, and inside the bag is a can of lager. The bag is covered with my blanket. It’s a safe space, one nobody in the house would dare to go near or touch, and I know this. The place was chosen to keep it safe, hidden by choice. If I had wanted it to be found, if I had wanted sanctuary from the mental battle currently engulfing me, I’d have put it in the fridge where everyone would see it.

    The deviousness of hiding it somewhere nobody goes is a choice. There is always a choice.

    That solitary can is my get out of jail free card. For me, it’s how I move around the board when everything becomes too impossible to handle or cope with. I’m still trying to decipher whether I’ve kept it as a deterrent, a safety net, perhaps; a reminder that the choice is there but I choose not to take it.

    Or whether it’s actually there as an emergency, like a defibrillator placed perfectly.  Just in case.

    Alcohol has become my “just in case.”

    It was my crutch. My reliance. But I’m tired of the monotony of drinking to excess and the downward regression into anxiety, pain, dread, and shame. Yet I’m also painfully aware of my inner need to survive, to survive to raise my children, to survive to simply exist. Alcohol, in a twisted way, allows me to survive.

    It destroys me, I know. My drinking crushes me. Mentally, it pulls me under. I isolate, I hide, I retract from a world that feels too loud and demanding.

    But the noise. The endless noise; it stops me from seeing clearly. Everything becomes blurry when I’m sober. I hear too much, feel too much, and my brain can’t keep up with the incessant waves of fear, panic, and expectation. Alcohol dulls it down.

    Because the withdrawal from society in active drinking gives me peace; but the withdrawal from alcohol in sobriety terrifies me.

    To others, it might look like oversensitivity.

    To me, it’s survival.

    I know alcohol won’t solve anything. I know it doesn’t fix the pain, but do they see me? Do they feel the ache that floods every nerve? Living hurts, and there’s no softer way to say it. The pain may change form, but it still exists. And it can be utterly debilitating.

    So this can of lager, this confession, I need to take the power out of it.

    Perhaps binning it would solve everything. But it would also take away my safety card, and sometimes, holding onto something, even the wrong thing, feels safer than letting go completely.

    I know my thinking is flawed.

    I know that the problem isn’t the can of lager. It’s me. My inability to cope without something that helps me to breathe through the pain.

    Because right now, I feel like I’m sinking, and there is no anchor.

    If this were anyone else, I’d know exactly what to say.

    I’d tell them tenderly that alcohol doesn’t heal pain; it only mutes it until it comes back screaming. I’d remind them that what they’re really reaching for isn’t the drink; it’s peace.

    But when it’s me, everything changes.

    Logic becomes fog. My own advice turns to whispers I can’t quite hear over the noise.

    Because I know what it’s like to sit in the dark, heart racing, eyes burning, wanting the world to stop spinning for just a moment. I know the exhaustion of surviving when every breath feels heavy.

    I know I’m damaged. I know I’m broken in ways that words can’t capture. I see it in my shaking hands, in the silence that follows my tears, in the way I pretend strength to protect those I love. Some days it feels like I’m hanging on by my fingernails  and they’re bleeding.

    That can under my desk isn’t just alcohol.

    It’s a symbol. A promise of escape. A threat dressed as comfort. A reminder that control is both my safety and my prison.

    I tell myself I keep it as a choice, that as long as it stays there, I hold the power. But maybe the truth is this; the real power lies in not reaching for it.

    Maybe one day I’ll throw it away. Maybe one day the pull will fade.

    But tonight, this confession, these words, are my first step.

    Because saying it out loud, admitting that it exists, that I exist like this, is me taking the power back, even if just for a moment.