Read Online Tristimania by Jay Griffiths - Free Book Online

skilled doctor and the metaphoric Saviour. As if the metaphorical vision capitalized the heart of things. As if it crushed everything to its quintessence, the fifth quality, the purest ethereal nature of things, as if I saw the Ocean of the ocean, the Moon of the moon, the Candle of the candle, the Solstice of the solstice, the Midnight of midnight with the I of my i. Alone.
    But living in the world of metaphor can exact a high price. I was very lonely. There is an enormous difference between loneliness, isolation and solitude. Solitude has a sweet serenity, frictionless as flame licking itself. Loneliness is where solitude becomes too poignant and the flame begins to burn you. Isolation, though, has a punitive edge; illness can isolate you and so can the simple fact of my profession; the loneliness of the long-distance writer. Mostly, I love solitude all day and company all night, but I became violently lonely in this illness, not because I lacked company but because I became fussy as a cat over who I could be with, and when.
    I spent most of my time alone in depression’s one-person tragedy, feeling as if I were both the chorus, reading ahead in the script, and also the isolate agonist in a killing tale. I imprisoned myself behind walls of silence: the unanswered telephone ringing itself into oblivion; the kind-hearted emails, not ignored exactly but certainly unanswered.
    Alone, swollen with self-loathing, self-revolted, I saw myself once like a rotting octopus, tentacles of dying flesh suffocating me, poison seeping colourlessly through my veins, all my pointless life incancelled colours draining into abnegation, the nearly nothing meaninglessness of obliteration.
    Privacy can be dangerous, because it gives someone in crisis a place to hide their intentions, to conceal many things, chief among them suicidality. As Kay Redfield Jamison comments: ‘The privacy of the mind is an impermeable barrier.’
    I craved solitude but I also craved company to ward off the devastations of my loneliness. The difficulty was that each need collided with its opposite so that when I was alone I could become desperate to be in company but as soon as I was with people I would often need to be alone. At worst, I’d withdraw instantly as if snatching my hand back from nettles.
    I felt an urgent need to be understood and to be among people with whom I could be unlonely, so that I would not be trapped in solitude but could be released into telling talk. Sometimes I was alone, wanting company but unable to do the one necessary thing: I wished someone would just walk straight into my house, find me wherever I was – in bed, in the corner of the garden, by the stove – and hold my head, find the gentling words; the psyche-whisperers who could find the way towards me, letting words of light, of truth, of love, spool out into the air.
    I yearned for people with minds of silk – delicate-thoughted, smooth against my sore, bruised psyche, soft as mare’s tail cloud and yet with the tensile strength of spidersilk, five times stronger than steel, strong enough to withstand being near madness but subtle enough, sweet enough, silken enough, for me to be able to touch it. Maybe I could use that silk as a lifeline, could hold it to cross back over into the healthy world, finding the silk road between continents of minds.
    But, alone, that transaction of sensitivity, that commerce of silk,sometimes seemed impossible, the risks too great. What if I couldn’t speak? What if they tried to reach me and couldn’t? My disappointment: their hurt. Depressed people can make those around them feel badly rejected, and my sadness and madness could (and did) ripple out beyond me, my rejections causing further hurt to other people. It still pains me that many people around me were hurt by my inability to reach out to them and ask for help, because when I closed down I held on to just a tiny number of close old friends.
    As far as the