Sep 27

 Yesterday was rough. I don't really understand where it came from. But that sudden maximum grief and sadness reaction did a number on me. And like an earthquake that has aftershocks in the aftermath. Those peaks of emotion rumbled on throughout my waking time. Each slightly less than the one before. But still.

By the time I got round to proper sleeping again. I felt emotionally exhausted. Out of the blue. A truly harrowing day.

I opted for watching something high quality in the latter part of my waking hours. Something I knew would be good enough to focus my attention away. To pull me out of my emotional storm and into a different fictional world. This is me practicing a bit of wise mental health maintenance. If you cannot refocus, calm, stabilise by yourself. Then look for help. Distractions that will engage bits of you beyond the conscious capability of will. Beyond just a reasoning mind. Connect on a bit of a more automnic level. Like leading a child around by a spoonful of sugar.

One of those things for me are stories. They can take me out of things better than almost anything. 

But, I find. I am very much like this. I can disappear into things. I'm still me. I still think. But I am entirely absorbed with the journey going on through the TV screen. My thoughts are only about what I'm seeing. What the characters are doing. What would I do. And nothing about my predicaments. My sorrows.

Unless of course something triggers it.

I kinda get it now. Trigger warnings. I mean. I'm fine with them. But holy shit. When something floats across the story. In my case. The loss of someone. Someone loved dying in front of you. And the quiet bit of wisdom is offered in the face of no religion. No belief in a higher power. Say four things. I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Forgive me. And a wall of emotion crashes through me as I put that into context in my own life. Retrospectively I whisper it to Athena. And it crushes me. So very valid. And I can feel that reality reaching out to me. Not just some nonsense bit of fiction. A real world thing. Woven into a story. A hawaiian mantra called the Ho'oponopono. Authentic. And I can feel the deep roots of its wisdom in the lives that people have had, the things they have felt, that have lead them to that set of words.

But.

For the most part.

Stories take me out of this world to somewhere else.

If they're good enough.  

There is a saying from Albert Camus that goes - Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. And the related saying from Picasso, Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.

That. Is to me. A fundamental part of the human experience. A truth. Through a lie. Because. We can't often face the unvarnished truth. We cannot face the blunt, straight forward communication of a truth. And so we have to be circumspect about it.

In that way. I find a lot of truths in fiction. Some of which are barely fiction at all. More like. Facts. Rearranged. And turned prosaic.

Like a well crafted bit of philosophy. Their condensed wisdom can be some of the most precious bits of knowledge there is. Indeed. Camus' statement itself. A philosopher. Is the quintessence of this. Short. To the point. Profound. Acknowledging the mirror of philosophy that can sometimes be found in art, fiction.

So.

Some of my wanderings through the works of fiction. It not escapism. It is. Finding the nuggets of wisdom within their paths. Or. More commonly. Finding the things I already know, laid out in a hundred different ways, in all forms of prose and poetry. A reassurance that there are minds out there. Exploring those paths. That I am not alone. That above the noise, and lies and hurt and misery. Those places are explored. Thinking. And feeling. And above the pettiness and narcissism of our current era. It is a soothe I suppose. Perhaps. Some aspects of art are always this. A soothe. At a different intellectual level.

Today I have tried to pull my waking hours into something approaching normalcy. This is incredibly hard for me. I cannot do my usual tricks of yesteryear by simply staying up longer, fighting tiredness before collapsing into bed, sleep cycle reset. Can't do it. I become gravely ill when I so much as graze that level of tiredness. I must sleep. Now. That, perhaps, of all my symptoms since becoming ill is the one that is always true. Always present. The earliest symptom. That dreadful sudden absolute need to sleep right now. Or become increasingly ill, very quickly.

So. It's hard for me to move my hours. I have to move them little bit by little bit. And frustratingly. Any kind of ill wobble, nausea, exhaustion, dizzy, everything. Forces me into sleep anyway. And destroys any kind of control I had over the process, typically resetting me into some dysfunctional pattern again.

Difficult.

Today I have the tiniest glimmer of life.

I can tell.

Because I mull over the idea of cooking something nice. I mull over the idea of tidying up a bit. Whereas shortly before, there was nothing at all. No glimmers of desire to do anything.

So today. At of course, 7am in the morning. Which. Is currently my late afternoon. I have very hap hazardly and quickly thrown something in a pot.

I have decided I want to make some kind of funky marinara. A pasta. In actuality. I want to give polpette di uova a go. A sicilian lean times recipe where meat was scarce. But. I don't have the ingredients or energy to quite get there. So I opted for whatever I could muster.

I don't have the stuff to make a soffritto. So. I have made do with a shockingly non kosher soffritto. What I have in the freezer. And left over in the wastelands of my cupboards.

I have recently realised that I could have in the past just made big batches of soffritto and frozen it. Why it has taken me decades to realise this I couldn't say. It's so obvious. I think. Perhaps. Because until recently I always cooked from fresh. When I had energy. But as my energy disappeared when I became ill, and I had to change tactics to relying on things like frozen onions, frozen peppers and the like. I had not made the jump to, wait, I can make soffritto in bulk when I feel up to it and then freeze it in bulk. 

When I next get a bit of energy to go out. I will get myself the basics. Celery. Carrots. Onions. Chop em all up. And bag them up. I'm wondering whether I should get a nice blender of some kind to save me the effort of all that chopping. Which sadly does take it out of me these days. Feeding a bunch of carrots celery and onions into a food processor doesn't sound too draining. Bag it into some kind of portions. And then bust it out as a base for anything italian related.

Anyway.

My hodge podge today. Is onions. And then... sketchy. Some carrots mixed in with peas and sweetcorn. And some peppers. A soffritto proper it is not. But. Eh. It's. At least on the same planet.

Some high quality extra virgin olive oil. A good dose of chopped garlic ( also frozen, pre chopped, so easy for my no energy days ). And some high quality tomatoes. And then. Just because. Some chicken stock.

And then, because I am low energy. And get tired. I leave it to go rest. Slow cook it out for 6 hours once it's all been softened and the onions go translucent.

So.

I've cooked.

Which in the past six months for me. Is like a planetary alignment. I think I've cooked maybe twice in that period. Ho hum.

 

My Not Soffritto

Ready for the slow cook. Tomatoes. Chicken stock.
And some spinach thrown in for good measure.