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 his right forearm had now 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.

As he started 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 it, his eyes were starting to prickle; 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 notepad.  His handwriting was almost indecipherable: penmanship of such illegibility 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 clear to him as he lay there in a crumpled heap; he had somehow let a scarily overpowering genie out of the bottle.  And he couldn’t conceive any way of putting it back. 

Equally, though, 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 at this point, he might as well try arguing with an incoming 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 little choice but to start looking for answers. 

He couldn’t know it at the time, but these would turn out to be broadly of three types: Whats, Hows and Whys. 

He would get his What answers by engaging in a series of healing activities.  That was the simple part.  But he would need a bunch of How answers to determine what those activities should be. 

How was he to make sense of what he was experiencing while working with different therapists, or in the aftermath thereof, and what to do next as a result?  Like everyone else he’d grown up with ancient stories of people being possessed.  And while he didn’t buy the narrative of them being possessed ‘by devils’ he was pretty confident no one had ever satisfactorily explained what all these phenomena were, nor how to cure them.  Surely he’d have heard about it if they had.  That’s not to say none of it had been worked out.  Epilepsy, certainly.  That seemed to have been understood for decades.  When he was younger he’d worked with children who were on daily doses of Epilim or Tegretol, and even then could still often have epileptic fits.  He wasn’t an expert in the field, but had enough working knowledge to be confident what was going on inside him wasn’t that.  Nothing like it. 

It would more likely fall under the heading of the-as-yet-unknown, for which no one had come up with a cure.  And if your condition is currently incurable, logic dictates you can’t heal yourself by staying within the tramlines of what humankind has decided is possible.  So this journey would likely demand he explore beyond the limits of what everyone else had already determined to be ‘the way the world works’, because the way his body was now working didn’t fit within that.  But how do you eschew the collective sense of what’s real, without losing your grip on that reality?  If you step outside what everyone has agreed it’s OK to believe, and start believing other things, you surely run the risk of people turning the conversation – with soothing enthusiasm – to the subject of rooms with comfortingly squashy walls. 

How, then, could he safely look for the How answers he needed?  It would take a while to work this out.  But eventually he began realising he could start by quietly exploring how rigorously (or not) certain societal norms had been checked, before they’d been taken for granted by the wider populace.  He would hardly be the first to consider this.  

QI was a programme format built on nothing else.  And Bertrand Russell had long-since observed: ‘The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.’  

So, maybe, if Damian were careful enough, diligent enough, humble enough, and perhaps skilful enough, his questioning might result in him discovering an occasional blind-spot in some of that collective thinking.  Then he might possibly be able to find ways of filling in some of those blanks, in such a way that society’s agreed reality could be expanded, or refined, without it having to be contradicted. 

But, blimey, that sounds like a lot of heavy lifting for someone to have to do.  Especially from within a body – and a life – which that individual could barely control.  Why the heck would anyone put themselves through that?  Hmm.  Why indeed?

As it turned out, each of the steps he’d take on this journey would be leaning heavily on those Why answers.  Before long he’d be encountering unimaginable challenges: maddening paradoxes; blind alleys; frustrations; and years of inner turmoil and feeling heartbreakingly useless.  So he would need some pretty hefty Whys that could give him sufficient motivation to keep going.  In the early years, when asked, he would repeatedly (if wearily) say “…because I just want to be well!”  Who wouldn’t want that?  It was surely rational enough.  Rational, certainly.  Enough?  Perhaps not.  Not given everything that was coming his way. 

The truth of it was that, although he was only subliminally aware of them at the time, he had deep-rooted reasons for being so driven to heal himself, which were never just about him.  Even before his body had lost the plot, it had never been just about him.  There were bigger stories at play, about which he would – for decades to come – be only partially cognitive at best.

But all of that was way off in the future.  On this pivotal Monday morning, as he lay there with the Axminster imprinting itself on his cheek, the notion of expanding humankind’s sense of what’s possible was hardly front of mind, or even visible on a distant horizon.  His immediate concern was to answer the question of where to even start with any of this. 

Perhaps he should – detective-like – commence his investigation by retracing his steps: those ill-fated decisions which had led to him now having his face so intimately acquainted with his office floor.

© Russell-Olivia Brooklands 2025