Noise in my brain
The digital clock sat on a shelf above the flatscreen television in the bedroom. Its numbers are red lines and they don’t glow the way your phone and computer screen do. That sickly blue-white hue. Absolute joy poultices. The digital clock stares a strong red from a time when electric objects were reliable and built to last. Before you had to weep and pray for the blinking WPS button trick to work. Technology is now a thankless act of negotiation and begging. You know neither side wants a solution, yet here you are trapped writing reports and appearing at committees to explain what’s gone wrong when you haven’t a clue about how to make it right. In short, printers are still terrible machines.
The clock glowed red and certain and told me it was 4am on the dot. I had woken up from a nightmare, but not in my head. I had cramps. My torso twisted. Parts of my thighs pinched inside. I eventually stumbled to the kitchen to boil the kettle for a hot water bottle. I took some over-the-counter painkillers. They only punched away some of the pain. I breathed in and out and looked at my phone before giving 6am the chance to take me back under before the working day began. I got through it all.
When you have an illness like endometriosis, you get used to questions not having answers. Specialists tell you that inside you look fine, there isn’t much more they can do to help. So you dip your feet into the alternative. War with the part of your brain which says be careful and the part which wants the mystical to work. People mock crystals and acupuncture. What they’re really mocking is someone desperately trying to help themselves. They’re mocking the last vestiges of hope. When nothing works you end up counting in bed, waiting for the pain to pass. You ignore the whispers that say your body is trying to tell you a secret it wants gone. Something has to be wrong for a human to be crying at 4am in bed. I found solace in short chats online with other people up before dawn.
The next day I went for a massage in an industrial estate. The usual knots were there but then he touched one part of my lower back and I yelped. That part of me burned and I never knew it burned until a stranger touched me there. He told me to come back after lockdown and to take care of myself. This all passed while I wore a mask with the mascara gone panda under one eye from the few seconds of tears I allowed myself.
As a woman, you get used to people asking if the reason you’re in a GP waiting room could be stress or anxiety. A woman could have shrapnel in her arm, be covered in coal dust and a stranger’s guts and someone would ask her if she’s stressed and anxious. Because those emotions can cause aches, you know.
The same week we went into lockdown, anguish erupted with nearly every woman I know over the Mother and Baby Homes Records bill. We tweeted furiously, we pleaded, we watched survivors explain where their pain is coming from, how they cannot trust. We shared this article. We begged.
The disappointment and anger brought me back to the day we found out Savita had died. For hours, I sat in front of a computer in the Trinity Arts Block using my sister’s login details to read Twitter and newspapers. I had just been let go from a job and needed to find another one. The chunky Dell I had brought to college in 2008 was running towards obsolete, so I was now that pitiful creature - a graduate still lurking on campus. I didn’t send a single CV that day. But I couldn’t summon any feelings of mortification and uselessness because I was treading water in the bog Irish women regularly find ourselves: this country has taken us for fools, it is hurting us again and again, they keep telling us it is all in our heads, I am so fed up.
Cleanse your mind with The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix and this conversation between Megan Nolan and Doireann Ní Ghríofa on YouTube. Or, empty your wallet. Subscribe to this newsletter for $30 a year. Or $5 a month.