Alchemical water

WATER IS THE COMMONEST SYMBOL FOR THE UNCONSCIOUS.

…Here again the dreamer, thirsting for the shining heights, had first to  descend into the dark depths, and this proves to be the indispensable condition for climbing any higher.

The prudent man avoids the danger lurking in these depths, but he also throws away the good which a bold but imprudent venture might bring. - Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 40-41

The crowd ebbed and flowed in a formation that I felt haplessly unable to navigate. It is at times like this where I feel less than human, when the lights are too bright, and by illumination juxtapose me to the world around me revealing my fundamental inability to flow within it. I hit the elevator button with the heel of my phone case, not really looking up, the new book I’d procured from the library ‘for sale’ shelf further burdening the messenger bag slung over my shoulder. 

“I used to read a lot of Stephen King” 

The librarian had said as I slid the thick hardcover titled “INSOMNIA” across the counter. The premise was gothic and  formulaically one I was fond of– the byronic sentiment of suffering leading to extrasensory perception. I smiled at her, said something like “oh, really?” in a tone that sounded wholly unnatural in delivery despite my best efforts at friendliness. She was goodnatured, but I could tell she noticed that something was off about me, and once again I found myself envying the innateness of others. I condemned my lack of conversational fluidity much more harshly than I’m sure she ever would have thought to. My time spent exiled to a room full of radios has further solidified my phenomenological spectatorship. I find it does nothing to return me to the ordinary world no matter how long I listen to others speaking. I can understand,  but not mimic without scrambling the signal. 

The support group was small, I didn’t go into much detail. 

“You seem very level headed.” Someone had said. I internally laughed at how vastly my affect must differ from my internal state, one in which I am incessantly seeking how to feel human again. I fidgeted with my studded bracelet,the star shaped pimple patch on my face, but strangely enough I was not nervous. In settings like this ,the pressure to disguise social peculiarities is lessened: my silence is passed off as pensiveness as opposed to a propensity for spontaneous mental evacuation. I itched to dictate the events occurring within the room in my pocket gray leather bound book, but refrained on account of confidentiality. I have been questioned about the habit on a few occasions, and most of the time I allow my notetaking to be viewed as some sort of journalistic pursuit rather than having to explain that my constant dictation of events anchors me to present awareness more than my faculty of memory or tactile sensation.  Instead I let the fuzzy, static film of half presence overtake my visual field, creating auric outlines around the other figures in the room against the stark white walls. 

“I, um. I’ve just been having dissociative episodes.”  The others watched on expectantly, but I couldn't bring myself to extrapolate on what it feels like to not be able to draw a boundary between the self and the strange murky depths to which the dreaming mind ventures forth by night. To be a waking, constant somnambulant. 

“It’s just hard to function normally.” I received a few understanding nods, some advice about the program I will attend next week, one through which I hope to mend this alchemical severance of mind, body and spirit.