Thought Sharers: I See You

A couple of weeks after it happened, it started to feel less like someone else’s story that I had been living. Every day I noticed a 10-minute burst of normality, of feeling ok. I used this as a reminder that the positive emotions were existing, they were just covered by a smog of soot. I found the numbness was soothing, clearly a defence mechanism to protect the pain from causing too much internal destruction. During this period, I was reminded of how it felt to experience depression. Yet this time, it was welcomed. Speech was not a concept that I was able to explore so I used my writing as a way to document the ever-changing emotions surging through my body at regular intervals.

One evening, as the familiar countryside darkness encompassed the surroundings of the house, feeling too withdrawn to socialise, I decided to stay home whilst my parents had an aperitif. At this moment, my cat decided to fuse the manmade and natural worlds together, dropping a beautiful robin by my feet.

I didn’t know what to do as panic choked my capacity to behave in an appropriate manner. My natural response was to weep, to grieve the bird that lay before me. I couldn’t help but feel that I was mourning the death of other things passing through my existence.

The Robin, a symbol for the loss that I had suffered, demonstrated the selfish pleasure enjoyed at the expense of another.

I felt absolutely helpless and channelled my energy towards the egotistic perpetrator – a character I was all too familiar with. Desperately chasing my cat around the house, I wailed, asking him why he did this, frantic for an answer I could never expect a reply to.

During the chaos that I was prompting, the robin took an impetuous dive over my head, taking cover on top of a cupboard. I stood startled at the tiny bird tucked away in the corner puffing its tiny chest repeatedly, high above any potential threat. As if someone had held up a tiny mirror, all I saw was myself. Wounded, weak, exhausted and not knowing how to call back survival. Yet there was in intrinsic instinct that had been activated.