A good few years ago when I was having a good day I would sometimes be able to get the bus back from seeing my physio and any chance to be outside in the world was, for me, a chance to try to find something beautiful or odd in the world to take pictures of. I had several themes at the time that I would try to expand up on and one of them was reflections. There was something interesting to me about looking at things ‘askew’ reflected in windows and glass.
Waiting for the bus, for me, was an odd experience because I didn’t get out much let alone have the chance to see ‘normal’ people going about their work and talk to someone other than my ill friends on the phone or my love, the only person O regularly saw in the flesh. You get very strange looks when you take out a camera and start taking pictures of the bus shelter on an industrial estate. People are unable to see what you see with your eyes so long unaccustomed to the outside world. They, of course, take it all for granted and see only the functionality. They don’t see what is right in front of their eyes and most of the time their eyes are looking at their phones anyway.
My eyes saw the reflections in the dirty glass of the bus shelter, the bright light of the beacon at the level crossing, the tree in the concrete and, when holding up my camera the reflection of it in the glass like a low incongruous moon or the sun behind clouds.
All it took was a little colour adjustment and some cropping for the ordinary world to become fantastical.
And, once on the bus the reflection of the inside of the bus in it’s own grimey window was just as beautiful to my eyes so sick of looking at the walls of the flat I was normally trapped in and in which I will most probably die in quite soon.
That is why I am trying to post these here now. So that something of the world I saw still exists after I am gone. So that there is a record of my mind before it was destroyed by trying to come off of the Benzodiazepine diazepam that I was prescribed for 20 years for spasm following spinal surgery without any warning that it could damage my brain and cause a physical dependence that can literally destroy every part of your body and brain once you try to withdraw from it (and sometimes while you are still on it in tolerence withdrawal aspects of which I now realise I have lived with for years) and that that destruction can take years and years to repair if it can at all.
There is no beauty for me in anything now because the withdrawal has caused ever perception to become terrifying. The whole of material reality and every sense impression from all of my senses is now a torture. Even typing this on my tablet is terrifying, the feel of it against my fingertips is wrong, the feel of the whole world including my own body is wrong and frightening, the flat keyboard looks ultra 3D and as I press each key it jumps out at me a a thousand miles an hour causing my heart to thump as if I will explode. My garden is terrifying and repulsive to me, everything is chaos and death, everything is gothic horror. Trees seem too alive and too dead, simply looking at the complexity of their branches causes my brain the kind of terror you might feel if you walked into you house and there was a large man with a massive knife waiting there to hack you into tiny pieces. The whole world is like that to me. I am literally terrified of the feel and sound and thought of my own pillow.
While the loss of beauty and the terror of the whole world is almost unbearable I do believe those things are from the withdrawal and, given a few years, might resolve but that is probably not the case for the muscles now crushing my body. That is why I was seeing the physio in the first place all those years ago and he nor anybody else has ever been able to work out why the middle of my back went rigid after a disc herniation and surgery at L5/S1. Nobody has ever been able to work out why that makes my head heavy and why it has prevented me from being able to sit without great effort since then. Now, without the diazepam or any other medication I can also not find a position to lie in that is bearable.
It is a desperate place to be but once I saw beauty where nobody else did. That was who I was. Someone who tried to find beauty in the grime and hope in each useless day. Right up until 2018 when I tried to reinstate the diazepam and it no longer worked but, instead, caused new horrific paradoxical symptoms I thought I would find a way to be well and have more of a life.
Look for the beauty wherever you are. It is right in front of you if you look hard enough.
