They say that when you lose one sense, you develop your remaining senses to compensate -and how true that has been for me.
During my depression cycle, straight after the endlessly tearful waves of meh and worry, past that little wiggle of concentrated creative drama - where my insatiable appetite for stimulation is feasting on gloomy music and beautiful sentences and binging on relationship sitcoms- and during the flat-line stage of nothingness, all my senses go numb and pain becomes indistinguishable from anything else and colour seems muted or misleading.
Devoid of senses, I check my personality Big Five on endless online searches, to confirm I AM an ENFJ i am ENFJ. Extraverted check- Intuitive (well, usually), Feeling (WHAT FEELING)- Judging. Someone who's supposed to be defined by Extraverted Feeling with Introverted Intuition. I am feeler, yet, i am not able to feel or sense, and in turn I lose my anchor on how to think. My thinking is done with my body not my brain, except for the glimpses of a very introverted childhood, i now am fully immersed again in, due to feelessness. (This supports my theory that when I am depressed i become a different personality. One that has to make up for the change in apparatus available to process life.)
Anyway, my senses break one- by one, and i'm stuck in an eerie limbo. Sounds are either loud or deafeningly quiet (cliche oxymoron, trust me i know). Movement is unclear; I could be frozen still or mid-trance and hand to heart couldn't tell you the difference. Temperature control varies on effectiveness of proprioception that particular day. Even peeing isn't a defined need, making that extra self-pity bulb go every so often, when I realise i'm allowing a body need to be met (full of tears and regret and meta-realisation of just how my own mind is abusing my own body). Of course time is another affected perception, Dali's surrealism perfectly summarising a terrible irrelevance to stretches and compactness of a measure of anything, let alone time in my planet of doom.
Anyway, this isn't intended as an essay on senses, the difference between perception and human sensory processing. I am not a sadist, despite my depression, I claim and profess and I promise. When all other senses abandon me in my wasteland state of shitty emptiness, I hold on to the ONE super sense that remains, as if my life depended on it (hah). Trusty old smell sticks by my side. The oldest and most trustworthy sense, particularly relevant in memory recall. One that has been drilled into my brain through aeons of study on eyewitness testimony and how rape victims should have a smelly lineup to pick a perp from, as the only thing you can definitely trust. The thing that lives in the snakelike primitive brain part. The thing that makes babies not get poisoning. The thing that makes love be love. In my powder dry and feeless desert, I can smell the radiator cooking old dust, the clock ticking metallic, the stale water forming bubbles in last night's glass. Perhaps a biological defense has kicked in a tiny bit stronger, with every page that contains self and hurt in it, a survival mechanism to keep me going just that much longer. In the absence of all things sensical, I am stuck in my earth with a glue of smell.
I am ambivalent about this experience, as it is so pronounced, I cannot but face it straight on. In my depressed and tired age, I am not a fan of confrontation. In fact, it feels like my paper-thin constitution is likely to crack and my yolk-like core will spill out of me through the cracks. Oh no, it seems much wiser to withhold the status quo and keep the runny yolk within the paper confines. Cardboard can keep liquid in, if viscous, I think. I hope. Or maybe I really don't want it to and this is an inverted self-hurt and not preservation worry at all? I digress again, I think am sorry.
My reality is not visible to my eyes, but it is to my mind's eye, through the wonder of smell-o-vision. A morning of smelling my phone to switch off the stinky alarm. A morning of overpowering seconds of window condensation, generic must, human and cat bodies, screaming sardines, mountains of hair, cold cheese, aged crumbs, blinding peppermint, matte coffee, all dressed up in cloth and the stench of my own panic. A day of humans commuting on trains with shoes and jeans and makeup and coats, running around deadlines and train times and bus schedules, among a sea of personal and impersonal odours, full of pace and intention. A month filled to the brim full of queasy street puddles, offensively cheesy free newspaper handouts, in a shit London full of pain and pretense and denial.
I could wallow in how my superpower is currently a hindrance to my recovery, you could argue that.
Or, having just gained your sympathy though my comedic depiction of a fucked up brain and pained body, I could pretend I have capacity for hope and give you an uplifting conclusion, so you may want to see me again devoid of awkwardness and discomfort. Hell, I hope this makes you want to call me up and meet up with me immediately (such a pitiful dream of power)!
I smell therefore I am or something meaningful. But to be honest with you this is really not very fun. Oftentimes I feel like a cancer smelling dog, I can smell the sadness in my universe long before there is any awareness that it is there. Perhaps that's the secret in my pathological empathy. I can tell a couple is arguing because they smell a different sort of sweaty to the sexy kind. I can detect a bus running late, because the leaves from the tall tree that can see the bus coming has just fallen near me and told me so with it's melting flicker of frost.
And anyway, perhaps this is a wise strategy to be employed and I should be praising my crappy brain about it. I plan activities and fake it till I make it, as I stand perfectly still inside my cocoon, so nobody notices I am not real. I smell my way around the lift, the corridor, the office, I sniff to detect appropriate small talk tone, I snort a fat line of yay-its-friday, and sneeze on the post-work wine and gossip about somebody's friend's fiance who has a dog he doesn't look after. I am here and I am smelling, and I think I can giggle and I remember I smiled without forcing it last night. I think I am filling up with a tiny tiny bit of colour again. And i "hope" - i do! i really hope? -i hope these past 5 weeks will soon be over.
During my depression cycle, straight after the endlessly tearful waves of meh and worry, past that little wiggle of concentrated creative drama - where my insatiable appetite for stimulation is feasting on gloomy music and beautiful sentences and binging on relationship sitcoms- and during the flat-line stage of nothingness, all my senses go numb and pain becomes indistinguishable from anything else and colour seems muted or misleading.
Devoid of senses, I check my personality Big Five on endless online searches, to confirm I AM an ENFJ i am ENFJ. Extraverted check- Intuitive (well, usually), Feeling (WHAT FEELING)- Judging. Someone who's supposed to be defined by Extraverted Feeling with Introverted Intuition. I am feeler, yet, i am not able to feel or sense, and in turn I lose my anchor on how to think. My thinking is done with my body not my brain, except for the glimpses of a very introverted childhood, i now am fully immersed again in, due to feelessness. (This supports my theory that when I am depressed i become a different personality. One that has to make up for the change in apparatus available to process life.)
Anyway, my senses break one- by one, and i'm stuck in an eerie limbo. Sounds are either loud or deafeningly quiet (cliche oxymoron, trust me i know). Movement is unclear; I could be frozen still or mid-trance and hand to heart couldn't tell you the difference. Temperature control varies on effectiveness of proprioception that particular day. Even peeing isn't a defined need, making that extra self-pity bulb go every so often, when I realise i'm allowing a body need to be met (full of tears and regret and meta-realisation of just how my own mind is abusing my own body). Of course time is another affected perception, Dali's surrealism perfectly summarising a terrible irrelevance to stretches and compactness of a measure of anything, let alone time in my planet of doom.
Anyway, this isn't intended as an essay on senses, the difference between perception and human sensory processing. I am not a sadist, despite my depression, I claim and profess and I promise. When all other senses abandon me in my wasteland state of shitty emptiness, I hold on to the ONE super sense that remains, as if my life depended on it (hah). Trusty old smell sticks by my side. The oldest and most trustworthy sense, particularly relevant in memory recall. One that has been drilled into my brain through aeons of study on eyewitness testimony and how rape victims should have a smelly lineup to pick a perp from, as the only thing you can definitely trust. The thing that lives in the snakelike primitive brain part. The thing that makes babies not get poisoning. The thing that makes love be love. In my powder dry and feeless desert, I can smell the radiator cooking old dust, the clock ticking metallic, the stale water forming bubbles in last night's glass. Perhaps a biological defense has kicked in a tiny bit stronger, with every page that contains self and hurt in it, a survival mechanism to keep me going just that much longer. In the absence of all things sensical, I am stuck in my earth with a glue of smell.
I am ambivalent about this experience, as it is so pronounced, I cannot but face it straight on. In my depressed and tired age, I am not a fan of confrontation. In fact, it feels like my paper-thin constitution is likely to crack and my yolk-like core will spill out of me through the cracks. Oh no, it seems much wiser to withhold the status quo and keep the runny yolk within the paper confines. Cardboard can keep liquid in, if viscous, I think. I hope. Or maybe I really don't want it to and this is an inverted self-hurt and not preservation worry at all? I digress again, I think am sorry.
My reality is not visible to my eyes, but it is to my mind's eye, through the wonder of smell-o-vision. A morning of smelling my phone to switch off the stinky alarm. A morning of overpowering seconds of window condensation, generic must, human and cat bodies, screaming sardines, mountains of hair, cold cheese, aged crumbs, blinding peppermint, matte coffee, all dressed up in cloth and the stench of my own panic. A day of humans commuting on trains with shoes and jeans and makeup and coats, running around deadlines and train times and bus schedules, among a sea of personal and impersonal odours, full of pace and intention. A month filled to the brim full of queasy street puddles, offensively cheesy free newspaper handouts, in a shit London full of pain and pretense and denial.
I could wallow in how my superpower is currently a hindrance to my recovery, you could argue that.
Or, having just gained your sympathy though my comedic depiction of a fucked up brain and pained body, I could pretend I have capacity for hope and give you an uplifting conclusion, so you may want to see me again devoid of awkwardness and discomfort. Hell, I hope this makes you want to call me up and meet up with me immediately (such a pitiful dream of power)!
I smell therefore I am or something meaningful. But to be honest with you this is really not very fun. Oftentimes I feel like a cancer smelling dog, I can smell the sadness in my universe long before there is any awareness that it is there. Perhaps that's the secret in my pathological empathy. I can tell a couple is arguing because they smell a different sort of sweaty to the sexy kind. I can detect a bus running late, because the leaves from the tall tree that can see the bus coming has just fallen near me and told me so with it's melting flicker of frost.
And anyway, perhaps this is a wise strategy to be employed and I should be praising my crappy brain about it. I plan activities and fake it till I make it, as I stand perfectly still inside my cocoon, so nobody notices I am not real. I smell my way around the lift, the corridor, the office, I sniff to detect appropriate small talk tone, I snort a fat line of yay-its-friday, and sneeze on the post-work wine and gossip about somebody's friend's fiance who has a dog he doesn't look after. I am here and I am smelling, and I think I can giggle and I remember I smiled without forcing it last night. I think I am filling up with a tiny tiny bit of colour again. And i "hope" - i do! i really hope? -i hope these past 5 weeks will soon be over.
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