The Closed Door

 This keyboard has been as my piano. When I am fully in harmony with my emotions and deeply connected to my thoughts the words, like notes, stream from my fingertips. In the years previous to these I have created symphonies. But then one day that stopped. I didn’t know why, only that it had. That music and song has been silent now for almost 7 years and I still lack the knowledge to understand why.

My words have produced as many happy melodies as it has sad and melancholy tunes full of anguish and pain.  I have never been afraid of the notes they created.  The page was my spirit flowing like a mighty river from the deep chasms inside me. I allowed that river, its turbulent swift currents, its quiet and peaceful eddies, its offshoots down babbling brooks over soft stones. And most times I controlled all of it, channeled it, molded it, rode in it and above it and often even below it. It carried me sleeping on its ripples, tossed me down its raging waterfalls, even drowned me in its deep darkness. But I always allowed it. I was one with it as it carved my canyons scribbling my unspoken words upon its walls.

But now it is as if there is a dam. I am blocked. Solid walls raise up before me. I am in fog. Sightless, without words, devoid of meaningful thoughts. Afraid to speak aloud whatever horrible truth I am blocking with my own mind. And I have no idea why or what this is. Only that it is there. An immovable object blocking my path. 

I receive writing prompts from an author via email every week.  They are things for me to contemplate to bring me relief and clarity.  I usually delete them because as I begin to process the thoughts they are too much for me now.  But this week I sat with one a while.  I let it stir about it my head beneath the hard bone where the connections lay dormant. 

Excess. It wanted me to name my excess and get to what lies beneath it to find my hidden pain.  Well that seemed easy.  My excess is food.  I eat too much.  I eat too often.  I eat when I am not even hungry. I eat because I am not stomach hungry but soul hungry and food eases that if only temporarily.  But why?

I then realized I have another “excess” issue.  My screen time. I am obsessed with my phone.  I will doom scroll for hours mindlessly.  And it is not feeding me any useful nourishment for my soul.  Like food, it is only a substitute for whatever it is that I am lacking.  It is so bad that I will do it when I am watching a movie or working.  I will just have a need like a needle to my vein, to pick it up and open an app.  Sometimes I will try to avoid opening the doom scroll and will just randomly open apps like the weather or the traffic. It is a bizarre ritual and one I have no reason for.  It busies my mind when I am already busy. It is as if my brain needs to be focused on 12 things at once.

That path led me to my multitasking habit which I guess you can say is also an addiction. I was an epic leveled up master at what I considered the absolute art of the multitask.  Like a juggler with 10 balls in the air at all times.  I owned it.  I created it.  I am nothing without it. 

At work I used to see this as a positive quality. I was probably the only person in my department who chronically spent their days managing multiple things all at once.  I was an artist with a brush on each finger, artfully and skillfully painting my canvas.  I used to think I was only successfully managing what was given to me, thrown at me.  But in reality, now looking back on it, I can see that I created the situations which gave me that drug.  I set myself up to catch the balls others were throwing.  And I could not catch enough of them. Outside I looked like a hurried tempest but inside I think I was more of a sick addict, my eyes rolled back into my head as the drug I injected slid so easily through my veins.  It was the relief of chaos and my mind craved it. 

But when I lost my job, the multitasking stopped.  I tried to recreate it at home by busying myself with tasks about the house that “needed” to be completed.  But in reality, it was never enough.  No matter how long the To Do list was or how over occupied my mind was with senseless tasks, it never matched the level of what I had achieved at work.  So, in that pandemic I returned to my overeating and food addiction, a demon from my past.  And when that was not enough, I added in the ultimate and unending drug of social media.

Apparently, I was quite a master at shutting out whatever I was trying to silence.  But now as I am able to sit, finally, in the silence, I hear it from behind its door.  It is now trying to be silent itself so I don’t find it in the darkness.  It hides from me.

What is it that I am trying to shut out with my excess?  In this moment I call to it.  I know it is there.  Damn it.  Why won’t it answer me?

For too long the excess has blinded me to whatever it is that lies behind this closed door. Solid, locked before me, I have hidden it away in shadow for far too many moons.  I must know what is behind it and more importantly why I have sequestered it there for so long. 

Before me, on my old vision board from 2020 is one large word that stands out against all the others, capitalized in red ink…COURAGE. At the time I made the board I had no real idea why I chose that word for the goals I was setting ahead of me but now I see it.  My soul must have felt its need which means that deep inside locked away in a safe place in my brain is what I seek if I can only release it.

It is my ultimate hope that this is what Ketamine will do for me.  That it will free my mind from its chains and allow me to open this door before me, to face whatever is behind it. That it will extend and stretch the neural pathways to create the new connections necessary to overcome and to align. It is my hope that I will finally unlock whatever hides in shadow behind the tightly locked door before me and reveal everything I need to repair what is broken inside me.  It is possibly asking too much.