21

I wake to an exhaustion that tries to wrestle me back into sleep.

Getting out of bed, I perform my morning stretches – the little I can do to get some motion into my neck and back without aggravating anything.

I’m sure my body’s a minefield.

Years of chronic pain, of anxiety, of obsessive introspection, has groomed my mind, and my sympathetic nervous system, to fixate on anything untoward, and then exaggerate whatever’s reported.

While I’m lying on my belly, arms outstretched, and arcing my shoulders and upper torso back and forth twenty-four times, I feel if I just fall still, I’ll drop back into sleep. It’s a weird juxtaposition; in bed, I either can’t sleep, or just can’t sleep well, but anywhere else I feel like I could surrender to a deep unending slumber where I know no more.

But I have to keep moving, have to keep rousing myself. I can’t remember the last time I woke rested, filled with energy to tackle the day. As a teenager maybe? That’s a long time ago, and I don’t know if that was ever the case.

I have hyperactive bursts throughout the day, followed by melancholy lulls. A counselor once told me she thought I was “a little bit bipolar”. I used to think that was true, but with my gamut of mental health thingies, quirks, imagination, and everything else, I’m my own little cocktail.

Everybody is, though. Labels are stupid, a way to compartmentalize somebody, even when there’s still material overflowing, like an untidily packed suitcase.

The thirty-minute walk to work has become too easy – there was a time I would struggle with it. Still, my right foot aches, a mixture of rawness and numbness that, even thirteen years on, I still haven’t grown used to. The cold increases the tenderness and susceptibility, and although I’ve never been a warm-weather person, now I look forward to it because it helps with the pain.

Work duties unfold the way they always have, and there’s a comfort in the distraction of busyness, but there are lulls where the tiredness reasserts itself. I get up then, get moving, although it feels like I might be sleepwalking. I don’t feel fully part of this world, but like I have one foot in another.

It could be my right foot, the damaged foot, the foot that nerve damage has clawed, that Complex Regional Pain Syndrome has twisted into miscommunicating with my brain.

When I first went to hospital after the accident, and following the initial surgery, they kept checking the pulse in my foot – checking to see if it was alive. I never asked, but months later in summing up the potential repercussions, the surgeon told me I might’ve lost it – amputated because the damage would’ve killed it. I survived that, though – just. But it makes me think that maybe some of it died, and that’s part of the world I’m walking in, neither fully alive nor totally dead, but walking, limping, in-between.

Sometimes, when I’m talking to somebody and I’m partly turned, I feel a darkness closing, like I’m fainting – just without the fainting. Years ago, an ophthalmologist speculated this might be a result of a detaching retina, but since that’s never been realized, that’s improbable now.

It could be part of my neck problems, although when I’ve put it to doctors they don’t know just how or why it would be part of a neck problem.

When I was kid and I bent to tie my shoelaces, sometimes, when I rose, there’d be a click in the back of my neck, and numbness would shoot up the back of my head – it wasn’t typical pain, but more a sort of a gnawing, teeth-grinding, hot discomfit. It would happen sporadically for a couple of years, and then it stopped. No doctor, or physio, I’ve ever described the sensation to has ever been able to tell me what it was.

But now, so much later in life, I wonder if all these things, all these pains and sightings and feeling are trying to channel me into some other awareness, and when I go to bed, struggling to find sleep, battling restless sleep, that it’s a world that wants to claim me.