Coping strategies

For these fun times and beyond

Sketchbook drawing, pencil in Leuchturm notebook. Who knew ( certainly not me) that this was laying the groundwork for a book in which there were no animated leaves, no wild and windy nights and in fact, nothing whatsoever of this drawing and yet…I know without the shadow of a doubt that this sketch is part of the d.n.a. of The Boy and the Moonimal.

Ah, the unravelling.

As a knitter, even writing that word makes me clench all those bits that require daily effort on the squeeze-aaaaaand-hold front. However, today I’m not not talking about pelvic floors or even yarn but about anxiety. Specifically, I’m focusing on unravelling the sleeve of care. Not knitting it up with loads of shut-eye, alas. My sleeve of care is coming apart at the seams. Feeling my grip on the day-to-day slowly slipping beyond my control.

And having no church save for the sky, the sea and the forests , I can’t let go and let a higher being take up the slack. Nobody is coming to catch me before I land. I have to do this one alone, in my bed, in the wee small hours of the Night of the Ongoing Existential Crisis.

So, back to the unravelling.

Beginning with migraines, more than four decades ago. First one when I was nineteen. Fast forward to thirty ; now debilitating enough to confine me to bed once a week in the company of a bucket. Into my forties; gobbling triptans on a regular basis and feeling that, thanks to those miracle drugs, I’d nailed the problem. Fast forward to fifty ; on a week’s holiday on Mull to celebrate that half-century’s rotation of the sun, a triptan a day kept the headaches away. Then they didn’t anymore. Several migraines of extreme ferocity and non-compliance with the triptan solution sent me scurrying in desperation to a neurologist who, far from suggesting anything to mitigate the Awful, took one look at me and said, ‘Well, what did you expect at your age? It’s menopausal. You’ll grow out of it. Eventually. ’

May his head explode ( with late-onset empathy).

On I staggered into my sixties, praying as each migraine rolled in that it wouldn’t be one of those ones. Until I stumbled across an article that stated that triptans were probably the cause of rebound migraines and that to put the brakes on what anyone could see was a cortical crapshoot, I’d have to do a complete three month medication wash-out. Not only of triptans, but aspirin, paracetamol, ibuprofen and codeine. No more pills for what ailed me.

I’ll draw a veil. Chronic pain is every bit as boring as it is corrosive. With nil by mouth to ease it, it’s grimmer than Grimm. And then, when the three months of cold turkey were done, (don’t judge me) back I went to worship at the altar of triptans. At first, to my delight it appeared that the wash-out had done the trick. My pain receptors had gone back to their factory settings and I could function safe in the knowledge that if a migraine struck, I had the means to stop it in its tracks.

Until I didn’t. After a year, I had to do the wash-out again. And second time round, knowing what I was going to have to go through and how, essentially it wasn’t a cure, it was a withdrawal from a drug that was adding to the migraine burden, well…that was grim. It was all grim. I went to my GP and she said-

You’ve reached the end of the treatment road.

Not the arrangement of words you ever want to hear from your doctor. Although, I could imagine them as the chorus line for a very bleak country and western song. Pause while part of me goes off and composes something while the rest of me carries on….

Trying to describe what ails me. Artwork for ‘Night Shift’ published by Hot Key. Charcoal on paper.

In utter desperation, I asked for a referral to another neurologist. The NHS waiting list was over two years long. I asked how long if I paid for a consultation? Eight weeks.

Mr Insanely Expensive Neurologist was twenty minutes late for the hour’s appointment, offered no apology, spent wasted the next twenty minutes making sure that I was indeed a migraineur and then offered Botox ( a cosmetic procedure that in some cases can alleviate migraines) which he’d be happy to perform every 8-12 weeks at a cost that was beyond anything I could afford. Alternatives? He made a moue of disapproval at my rejection of his Botox protocol and offered a drug that had shown some promising results if I could tolerate it.

If? Sounded ominous. Side effects? Oh, yes. Very. Lots. As I slowly upped the dose, it became rapidly apparent that my tolerance was zero. Topiramate and I were incompatible.

I persevered for three months during which I still had frequent migraines but I was also continually and alarmingly nauseous to the point that I couldn’t bear to swallow anything except ginger tea and water. Beloved, aghast at the state I was in, cooked dinner every night and sat with me, encouraged me, made me eat his high calorie, high protein foods. (Salmon, gammon steaks and mashed potatoes that were 75% butter. I don’t even like butter but it did the job). At first, I’d manage a teaspoonful and then have to go and lie down, but over time, I re-learned how to eat, albeit in bird-like quantities. Also turned out that I couldn’t simply stop taking the ghastly drug that was making me so ill, I had to do a slow and staged withdrawal from it. That took a further twelve weeks in the company of Messrs Barf & Huey of Technicolour Yawn Inc.

I was still working as an illustrator during all of this. Not because I’m a masochist but because I have no back-up plan for ill health. Cancelling the occasional school visit when I was unable to function without recourse to a bucket and an ice pack. Wondering if my lifelong profession was no longer possible due to what was increasingly becoming a disability. All the while forcing myself onwards till I made it through to whatever lay on the other side of the current journey. Somehow, miraculously sketching out the beginnings of what would eventually become one of my most favourite books, The Boy and the Moonimal, but I didn’t know that, then. Then, I was just surviving. Just.

This didn’t make it into the final book either, but once more, was part of its d.n.a. Or, if you prefer, the bit of the iceberg that lies below the waterline. Invisible, but absolutely essential.

Towards the end of this sorry tale, I did an event/reading in HM Prison Peterhead to the children of convicted criminals. Plus their Daddies who were serving very long sentences. The event was during prison visiting hour in the school summer holidays. What did you do on your holidays, dear? I saw my Daddy in prison. Scraped raw by my efforts to wean off Topiramate, I wasn’t able to put enough distance between my emotional response to the inherent sadness of living through such a childhood and the job I’d been hired to do. Afterwards, in the visitor’s room - a kind of antechamber to the tightly-monitored family room where prisoners mingled with their families under the supervision of armed guards - I was unable to stop crying. For the sadness and waste of lives and grey grimness of it all. Fortunately, the children had gone by then.

That was nine years ago. Much has changed. The migraines, thankfully, have gone. Much more importantly, that world of nine years ago has also gone. Gone, as in, for ever.

In the interim between the Before Times and The New Awful, we’ve weathered a pandemic, are directly embroiled in several horrible, destructive wars, one ongoing genocide, are witnessing first-hand the consequences of our climate-heating chickens coming home to roost, and are enduring a dismaying lack of global ethical leadership against a bloodstained backdrop of AI distraction.

So, we’ve certainly moved on. However, many of those Daddies whose children I spoke with will still be locked up in their punishment box on Scotland’s North Shore. Their children will be nearly old enough to vote. Their Daddies lost that privilege and many others when the doors of the punishment box closed behind them. The world the Daddies left behind no longer exists. Imagine. I mean really, imagine what it would be like to finally serve your sentence and emerge into what used to be a familiar world but which now would feel like a completely different planet.

In legal and societal terms, when they leave prison, the Daddies have reached the end of the treatment road. By a vastly different route, but the destination is the same. In fact-

We’ve all reached the end of the treatment road

From now on in, it’s bumpy, bumpitty, jeez mind the pothole, yikes that was a close call, look, there’s grass growing up the middle of this route, nope, it’s not appearing on Go Ogle Maps, ah, no signal, anyone got any idea where we’re headed, definitely going to run out of gas soon, are we there yet…?

Into the territory of the unravelling adventure. Come lie awake with me. O, the thinks you can think…

---

Told my healthcare provider
my heart done surely broke
I said, Doc you gotta help me
feels like I'm gonna croak.

And the bot said:
Thankyou for calling i-health
your call is in a queue.
Press 1 for Body Uplift
(we'll turn you into glue)
Press 2 for Mental Reset
(we'll code a brand new you)
Press 3 for Diet Assist
(we'll analyse your poo)
Press 4 to cure what ails you?
? ? ?
There's nothing we can do.

You've reached the end of the Treatment Road
Your call is in a queue
You've reached the end of the Treatment Road
The rest is up to you. 
The rest is up to you. 
The rest
Is up
To you. 

---

So - for what it’s worth - here are my current coping strategies, most of which are impractical for the many Nights of the Ongoing Existential Crisis but are highly effective for daytime use. In fact, the only one I use at night is my meditation practice. Still practising after all these years….

Trying ( and failing) to stay off social media.

Trying ( and failing) to avoid the news cycle.

Reading. Falling into the embrace of a good book. Or an audiobook. An immersive story about someone who isn’t me ( thank god) but in whose story, I can find aspects of shared experience.

Exercise. For sure it’s sore, or hard or, in the case of cycling, just so bloody dangerous out there on the roads alongside cars with drivers who’re every bit as distracted as I am. But in amongst the ow and the gasp and the fucksake- that was close, there’s a space where the anxieties are so muted as to be inaudible.

Meditation. In theory, this enables me to step back from the stream of whatifferies and marvel at its endless flow while not attaching a narrative to any of it. In practice - well, that’s why it’s called your meditation practice.

Work. I love my work. I love doing my work. I am never less anxious than those times when I’m in a flow state. To be fair, it’s not all splishy-splashy watercolours and gorgeous smudgy charcoal statements - I have to spend some sacrificial hours swearing like a fishwife as the effing pictures inside my head refuse to be captured on paper. However, the bliss when they begin to form, when a story goes in its own direction or a fortuitous flick of a brush turns a workmanlike wash into a blaze of Gliori? Yes. That.

Knitting. Oh. My. God. No idea why Buddha is never portrayed with a set of circulars in his lap, but maybe to be fully enlightened means you knit by simply being. Be that as it may, the simple task of forming a series of locked loops with a length of spun sheep wool (or silk or whatever) is about as Zen an activity as I could imagine.

Unless - yes - one last and very wonderful thing

Making music. Preferably with other people. Making harmonies with other humans. Listening and joining in true communion, a wordless, soaring, swelling, breaking, reforming, pouring of hearts and souls and lives into a communal endeavour. Adding our own small contributions to the whole. Like drops of water in an ocean, our lives, our hopes, our anxieties, our thoughts all coming together into one limitless present moment.

We’ve got this. The rest is up to you.

Sweet moo-sic. Personal portfolio work. Charcoal and chalk on paper.