SITTING ON THE SEABED
by Trish Connolly
Adjective;1. Unable to find one’s way; not knowing one’s whereabouts.
Synonyms; off course, disoriented…adrift, going round in circles, at sea.
Lost to Lyme
Sink past that again, deeper into the darkness of this disease and there you find us – blinking into the abyss: Irish people, Irish women – lost to Lyme. Disoriented and unable to find our way because there is no map to this.
I’m here too.
Another ‘hysterical’ woman rinsed out by psychiatry, dreams flushed out by chemicals ,the sale of which keeps the pharmaceutical industry a well oiled machine (we have our uses, us mad, bad and sad, this hidden in which way we boost the economy). This place is where they relegate us when our illness becomes relentless
Writing for an MA in Women’s studies -in the way we are in our worlds- was where the sickness became apparent in me, in everything around me. It was where I learned to scream with my mouth firmly closed. Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed as ‘hysterical’ rather than recognised as simply being in distress, more likely to feel dismissed. More likely to be over-medicated for conditions that are sinister symptoms of a disease that will rob a human life of all it could be.
And I should know.
How many of you reading this have been referred to a psychiatrist before being tested for Lyme, for infection or autoimmune disorder?
How many have felt the debilitating side effects of antidepressants and even more paralyzing the exclamations of a person who has only just met you -the sick, tired, stiff, sore version of you and without knowing what or who you used to be is certain that this is ‘all in your head’.
Oh yes, all in your head is an actual condition; psychosomatic illness, the result of psychological distress.
It refers to the health institutions inability to say they don’t know or to give up before even beginning.
For Lyme these tired doctors seem have no road map either, warning signs to signal peril – yes, shortcuts maybe, but not the map.
Are they often lost too? not able to see what is not so obvious, too fatigued to think things new.
They are the boat, the vessel full of knowing is floating, another weight on our sea of agony.
I trained in health care – not quite in the boat but perhaps the life-buoy on the side.
Thrown overboard for turning into a diseased hindrance – now the postgrad version of the dreams lives along the seabed. It’s darker here, quieter. Surfacing takes an energy long since lost.
Lost.
Adjective: 2. denoting something has been taken away or cannot be recovered.
Synonyms: past, former, forgotten, unrembered, unrecalled.
There is no place for the anger or the grief to go.
Where is the place for this version of myself? With the one that once was still living inside?
In a clinic on the other side of Europe and far away from home there are the others, each the same, each here, empty of life and full of confusion and pain.
‘I just want my life back’ this lady says,
Before she even tells me her name.
Lost.
Her name, her very self, the reason for even saying it in the first place.
Strangers but we know each other uncomfortably well.
All of us.
It is everything I have and more to come here, and only in the shadow hope has left behind. But what meaning would life have had if I had given up with the one’s who never knew me at all?