Some days it feels like whatever protective skin I’ve grown over my emotions over my lifetime just gets burnt off, leaving my nerve endings exposed to the elements. I can usually tell when it’s starting again because music soars and swells and drags me around like a rag doll, colour and smells burn in my senses, and everything is larger, wilder, & more intense. Wind in the trees feels like something trying to commune directly with my very being. It’s all very dramatic and swooshy and, unfortunately, much inclined to tip me into cavernous dark. It perplexes me because I don’t understand where it comes from when I have been careful to do all the sensible things I am supposed to do. It perplexes me because a lot of the experiences are fantastical – the detail is excruciatingly wonderful, the caught breath power driving swoop of feeling is dizzying – but there’s a corresponding emptiness that dictates that this isn’t real, this isn’t true and actual, my emotions feel raw and amplified but nothing quite .. connects? It feels intensely lonely even when there’s no practical reason to feel so. It’s like suddenly my entire being decides to go into “receive all broadcasts” and has no filters to process anything through. Simple things hurt. Enough is badly defined. Meaning is scrambled and beyond my reach. Forcing myself to do mundane tasks is difficult.

It will pass in time and I will do the necessary sensible things to keep myself going and will return to my more usual cheerful appreciation and more domestic awe in some little time. Some part of me will resent switching off the extreme, will go on craving this sort of ‘wired directly to something‘, but it’ll be soothed over with whatever psychic jelly is usually buffering for me. I have no idea why this seems like a good thing to say right now.