Self possession

Healing the incurable

Russell-Olivia Brooklands

The pen shot over Damian Prescott’s shoulder, narrowly missing his right ear.  What the hell?  He was the only person in the house.

It was less than half a minute since he’d settled down at his desk.  But now his right forearm had jerked back of its own volition, sending the biro flying across the room. 

This was no way to start a Monday morning. 

He was, however, a man well-schooled in positive thinking, and would not readily be distracted from his purpose.  He searched the floor and located his ballpoint by the skirting board.  Retrieving it, he returned smartly to his desk and, just slightly more warily, tried again. 

Like many a self-development enthusiast before and since, Damian had been swept up in the heady notion of positive thinking.  In recent weeks he’d become a devotee of affirmations.  (So far they’d had zero impact on his life.  But that, he told himself, must surely be because he just hadn’t done enough of them.)  It had been his intention to start today by writing some positive statements with which to inspire himself.  And he wasn’t going to let a random muscle spasm stop him.  Once more he applied pen to paper. 

Again his arm flew viciously away from the page.  This time the nib left a small ink mark on the wall.  And for all that he tried to convince himself not to do so, he was starting to panic.  What was happening to him? 

Whatever it was, he couldn’t afford to have it happen.  Not now.  He was a single guy who’d just left the safe bosom of the corporate world to become self-employed.  He had a substantial mortgage to service and was yet to find any clients willing to help him pay it.

Starting his third attempt the fight/flight/freeze response was rising within him.  This time the pen was flung out though the open door.  He was now seriously scared.  What the heck had got into him?  Literally, what?  Sitting silently on his chair, his hands on his knees, he felt sick.  He tried to control his breathing while searching desperately for a coherent thought to latch onto.  He had nothing.  Who would?  And much as it dented his ego to acknowledge this, his eyes were prickling, and his mind a mass of confusion.  After several minutes of tumultuous inactivity he decided belligerence would have to be the better part of bewilderment.  If positive-mindedness wasn’t getting the job done, he’d see how his body responded to a hefty chunk of bloody-mindedness.

“Screw this.” he told himself “I WILL NOT BE DEFEATED”: a statement which, even as he yelled it silently at himself, sounded way more self-assured than it was – because in truth he simply couldn’t afford to be defeated.  He had only another couple of months left before his gardening leave salary would disappear.  Flight and Freeze weren’t viable options.  His response would have to be Fight.

He found the offending pen on the landing, took it back to his desk and sat down.  Gripping it in his right hand he made a fist around it, determined it was going nowhere this time.  So determined, in fact, that he wrapped his left hand around his right, as tightly as he could, so the biro was encased in a double fist.  “Ha!” he declared to his arm.  “Weren’t expecting that were you?”

Scowling at his wilful limb, as if daring it to try something, he lowered pen to paper.  Both his arms were shaking insanely as he moved the nib across his writing pad.  His handwriting was all but illegible: penmanship of  this quality could usually be achieved only through years of medical training. It took 30 seconds to force out just four characters.  But he was making progress on his affirmation.  “See!”  He told himself.  “I can do this!”  Breathing hard, tears streaming down his cheeks, he started on the fifth letter. He never made it.

A massive convulsion smashed across his abdomen. 

It was several seconds before he was able to raise his face from the floor. His desk was four feet away.  That simple piece of furniture was one solid, dependable object on which he could focus in a reality which had now indisputably, and terrifyingly, lost the plot.  Out of the corner of his eye, his upturned chair was just visible – seeming almost to mock him as it rested, legs akimbo, on its side.  It had tumbled in the opposite direction when he’d been violently thrown out of it by he knew not what. 

Huddled in the foetal position, into which he’d been shocked by the power of that spasm, he found he was shaking with a combination of fear, injustice and uncomprehending frustration.  From a welter of shredded emotions, all flailing for purchase on this surreal experience, one clear thought came to him: “You are in serious shit.  You really are in so much more shit than you could ever have foreseen, aren’t you.”

For the truth was the warning signs had been there for a while.

Seven weeks earlier he’d begun to experience random tics in his arms: the result of an exercise he’d been doing in his most recent personal development training.  But being of a determined, positive mind-set, he’d chosen to shrug them off.  Plenty of individuals in the early throes of personal development are apt to become zealous.  And not for Damian the timidity of folk who might shy away from looking into their personal stuff, for fear of opening some kind of Pandora’s Box. 

But in none of the courses, books and audio series he’d consumed over the last couple of years had he heard of Pandora meting out anything on this scale of violence and debilitation.  Even so, one thing was abundantly clear to him as he lay the floor: he had somehow let a scarily overpowering genie out of the bottle.  And he couldn’t conceive any way of putting it back.  But he also couldn’t stay as he was.  Curling up on the floor wouldn’t pay the bills.  What on earth was he to do?  Indeed, what could he do, given his own body and mind were apparently no longer his to command?  For all the good his self-talk would have, he might as well engage in an argument with a nuclear warhead about the finer points of cake decorating.

Through many long moments he continued staring up at his desk, knowing he had no idea how, or even if, he was ever going to get out of this.  After all, he hadn’t a clue what this even was, nor where it had come from. 

One thing was obvious, though: he had no choice but to start looking for answers.  But where?  Perhaps he should begin by retracing his steps: those fateful decisions which had led to him now being so intimately acquainted with his office carpet.

© Russell-Olivia Brooklands 2024