A Thatched Blanket
Preoccupation with something, as is commonly known, arises from underlying unfulfillment.
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I lie down in bed, prostrate, bundled up in the winter duvet. Face ensconced in fuzzy blindness, I dream about Greek yoghurt drizzled with honey. A sheep clothed in a white toga stands on its hind legs and dances.
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Perhaps it is the result of overthinking and overimagining, but the earliest memory I have, supposedly, is of me being laid down as a baby, to the view of a ceiling which was obstructed by some indistinctive mobile decorations. A prosaic sense of greyness was somehow distinctive. But it is a moment I recall which is distinguished not by the visual image of that moment — rather, I remember somehow the plushness of the blanket I was lying atop.
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In my earliest days of consciousness the blanket was present. It was a different blanket from the one aforementioned. It was a simple objet petit a: a small, square blanket, which I made ubiquitous, and abused for the sake of attaining comfort — which seemed to be never fulfilled. Between my index and thumb, specifically between those crevices that part each nail from its fingertip, the textile of the fringes was thin, taut, gauzy, and congenial especially in those rare moments I inclined to grant myself a drag between the fingernails, which evoked a subtle, lovely vibration that dispersed through the fingers. And I was awash. I would drag the fabric between my fingers like so, incessantly stimming, in particular the corners of the blanket where the fringes concertinaed to create a thicker site of solace. My proprioceptive focus meant that the blanket was disenfranchised of its initial fine state. It grew tattered over time, to the effect where the fringes in some places became mere strings, and my mum, who grew tired of watching me haul it around everywhere, cut and stitched up a doll in the side-profiled shape of a cat from its salvageable middle, while discarding its treasured borders.
My need for different forms of sensory pleasure reached its climax in my childhood, and at some strange point, or out of some indescribable passage of time, it was perverted to sensory discomfort. When I was ten, I would come home from school every day and stand in front of the bedside table; I would grip the edges so that my index and thumb were perpendicular, and spend thirty minutes arranging it to my preference, a preference which depended on my perception, my rotting perception which seemed to be dirigible to God knows what, warping piecemeal so that everyday, I perceived — despite having left off somewhat satisfied the day before — the lines of the table not paralleling the lines of the surrounding walls of that bedside crook. That misalignment that only I could see possessed me during those minutes — no amount of exasperated questioning from my mum could exorcise the idea of that unattainable jouissance from me.
At the same time, in that period, I suffered from severe tourettes. I perceived, regardless of whether such signals existed medically or not, a constant itch at the back of my throat, a strain in my shoulders and neck, and a pressure against my eyelids, that had to be scratched, popped, stretched, and succumbed to. I obsessively exerted force on different parts of the body: producing a low grunt in a mimic of clearing the throat while huffing air out of the nose, lips tightly sealed; stretching the tip of my tongue as far as possible toward the opening of my throat, then swiping the dorsum against the palate in a fluid, stringent movement; blinking heavily, rapidly, to assure the invisible force how hermetic I could momentarily seal the line of the upper lid against the lower; jerking my throat diagonally-forward, in one snappy movement, to produce a somatic click only known to this body. These compulsions would manifest in different permutations, against my conscience. It birthed a stubborn system which, once activated by a small twitch that would subconsciously occur somewhere generally in one of those areas, would consume my being’s physical dimension and gradually overwhelm any cerebral resistance insofar as I would be exiled from whatever activity I was doing into that familiar wasteland of discordance. It was a discordance I say, between what the body wanted and what I knew — I was forcibly hitting a button which would hurt me in turn, or that button was being hit by some internal mechanism, but I was only doing so as it was the only way I knew to stop this recurring pain, and was pressed to do so by this internal force that was mine yet not mine, despite the hurt, and despite knowing that the button was just a system malware and hitting it would only cause further pain.
I relied on my blanket to provide escape, which was present for a long duration even after my tics dissipated. By stimming, I purged the sensory excess from the unwanted bodily jars that would be stimulated from the tics. But at a certain point I had to say goodbye to the thatched blanket, which became far too mutated even after it got resurrected into the cat.
Nowadays, the more I think about it, I wonder if those tendencies which I thought have been long gone have been absorbed internally and neurally transmuted into my thinking on an anxious loop. Or this may be just the cognitive bias towards patternicity. Whatever it is, it does not deny the fact that these tendencies all reconcile as one action of repeating a certain behaviour. Persistence could perhaps summarise all these comorbidities, as a nominal recourse to some sort of positivity. Perhaps that persistence is a blanket term for my being generally, in both positive and negative ways.
Instead of obsessively running my fingers over the blanket, I fixate on my worries. I invoke them whenever I have blank space and time to be, and I dig into their roots, or mull them over to derive some faults and pains. Although I hate it, and bitter it is the moment I realise I am doing it yet again, somehow I also think I deserve to be kept in that loop, to be harnessed to vigilance and stay focused. I think, and think, about my faults. And whilst I say it is the most asinine thing — bringing this upon myself — rightfully apportioning this habit would foreground that I myself am forced by another part of myself to do this. Or this may just be victim mentality. Now, I wake up to carry out my day with my awareness a thatched sheet of fine paper, subject to my strained stimming. By the end of the night it is perforated and leaks micrograins of love which bleed away from the self. The stimming this time, therefore, is voluntary, and coerced. Whilst no part of this makes complete sense, I think the only voluntary act is my laziness in seeking help.
Day 17:
- MHCP?
