Shrinking

My world is small these days. The long commutes and drives, the exploration, the excitement for new places and new things faded away, as over a decade or so an anxiety and dread grew stronger with every passing year. I’ve watched as long commutes were replaced by shorter journeys. Long wanders from the front door were replaced by driving to the wild moors, away from people. The contraction accelerated in recent years. Panic in familiar places. Dread of driving. Inability to go outside in the garden when neighbours were in theirs. An all-consuming anxiety. The grass grew long and I imprisoned myself, pacing, restless, missing the wild freedom I needed, sitting instead on the sofa in our dark stone house, relentlessly scrolling. Hoping to escape via a screen into a world that was just outside my window. I grew quiet. I grew numb. The last year, even the moorland faded from my reach. My car broken, anxiety too great to catch a bus. Cancelled and ignored plans. An invisible forcefield across the driveway gate that I just could not cross. After a long retreat of the tide, over all the years, I had finally reached a singularity. Stasis. Immoveable.

I fought and fought it but it still consumed me. Some deep, primal fear of perception, of judgement, a need for invisibility, a rage against all I used to do and just could not propel myself to do any more. I wanted to escape reality and scrolled incessantly. Screaming in silence, in under-stimulation, a prison of forced apathy for this neurodivergent brain.

But amongst it, finally, I started to find compassion. A small spark where I thought it would never end. Eventual beginnings of neurodivergent understanding took a while to land, initially numb, then growing, seismic pulses reaching back over the decades. I lay still and I felt them wash over me, colouring childhood memories with understanding, filling in blanks across these forty-plus years. A delayed grief for the death of my dad, layers upon layers of confusion, questions, slowly softened by the man who appears in my dreams, finally whole and here. The instability of the pandemic, the raw anger that still ricochets through us all, the pain, mass trauma, but business as usual. The ghostly imprint of a distant job that left me shell-shocked, with flashbacks, nightmares and avoidance that continue to this day, whilst huge chunks of that time are missing from memory. This body has felt it all. This body still feels it all. This body needed to still, and process, and hide away for a while. Perhaps this was its way. Perhaps this was needed. In stillness, I began to work through it all, relentlessly, fiercely and deeply supported by my husband, my only safe place, the person who helps me come back from it all, always. Contained in these four walls, a beginning, and an end.

So I continue my tiny, comfortable journeys – to university, to the shop, occasionally for a coffee in the neighbouring village. Familiar visits for holidays. Tiny movements. The moors wait, visible from where I sit in the garden, proud that I can hear a neighbours’ party and still sit outside, something I would have hidden from a few months ago. The difference now is that I know I will walk them again. The momentum is building, swelling, quietly but strong. This forty-second year is teaching me, and I am learning anew. A new understanding and trust that my world will expand again once more, in time. Tentatively feeling into my brain, into my soul, slowly discovering how to act on the things buried within. Enjoying bubbles of colour rising to the surface, long buried under layers of being countless versions of someone who was never actually myself. With this, the anxiety is receding. My soul, strengthening, not as afraid to be seen these days. The curiosity and hum of life pulling me back.

With my little broken car booked into a garage, I hope small wheels will soon carry me in return to those familiar places. Revisiting spirits of stream, grass and rock. Fingers tracing leaf fossils older than the land on which we walk. A slow re-immersion, a new season of exploration, following deer-trods and footprints once more. This anxiety, this shrinking has taught me much. How much I value the wild expanses and deserted moorlands. How much I need to feel wind on my skin, to breathe sharply in ice-cold water, to follow colours and move my body and drown in sounds. To explore this land, create familiarity once more. This house has held me, even when I felt the walls were closing in around me, and I look at it with new eyes. The jumbly, messy garden with its riot of life living here with us. The stone walls, once under oceans, permeable, providing shelter for us alongside a cacophony of other life existing on this little patch of land, in this minute sliver of time.

The deep knowledge that everything moves in cycles. My deep thaw is starting, even as the season turns to autumn here. Maybe this is my planting time, those few months before Samhain. New beginnings. New paths to tread. Slowly, I step outside the gate.