Sunday, February 21, 2016

A walk on the beach in the dark with the dog.

The stones are piled high after a storm over Christmas. The wall of them shields the beach from the lights of the buildings on the seafront after a while, and for a couple minutes, you can pretend you're walking alone across the sand on an uninhabited crescent island, the shoring line of rocks is the end of the world, Truman Show style. Rock and sea and darkening, dirty sky.

Then you have to turn around again, though, and see all the lights. But it's ok.

I went for coffee wth my lady colleagues today, in the lovely, posh Avoca Café. We bitched abotu work, inevitably, but it's good for us.

I realised, driving home, that despite the caffeine, I still wasn't rummaging though my hair for ones to pull out. Not that I don't have moments of respite from the urge, but I'm oddly peaceful tonight. It's warm out. The kids and their dad have had a lovely afternoon/evening here -  candles on, even the radiators, as Olivia's downstairs. Axl cleared a space in the kitchen for the speakers, and hooked up his phone, so they've been listening to the Beatles on Spotify all day. It all seems warm and convivial. I brought them home a puzzle to do, a jigsaw and they set it up on the kitchen table while I walked the dog.

But it feels peaceful outside, too, not cold, and I'm not having paroxisms of fear and misery about the situation with Olivia, or my horrible failure as a wife/mother/teacher/human being.

So, let me tell you a thing (bearing in mind that I really don't need to hear anyone's negative opinions on homeopathy - we each find what works, or doesn't work for us, yes?)  - I've never actually got a remedy specifically for my Trich problem. But, having had it for 20 years, I finally asked my homeopath to prescribe something for it, and nothing else. She came back to me suggesting Syphilinum. Now, this isn't a nice remedy. When people have congenital Syphillus, they get nasty - evil, nasty. Like the child in the house my mother lived in whose father was a syphillitic poet, and had passed it on to his son. My mother once found him on one side of the door, getting my sister to look through the keyhole. He was holding a knitting needle, about to stick it through, into her eye... that sort of evil.

Actually, my homeopath also wants to give it to Olivia for various reasons. She can show a sort of meanness and vindictiveness that can seem a bit possessed, at times.

None of it is this clear cut, though, all remedies have various aspects to them. I nervously asked my homoepath if it was a constitutional personality thing, or just for the Trich. Well, she said, it's about destruction.

And of course it is - but I got the gut-punch-resonance one does on occasion, when something feels exactly right. The homeopath once gave this remedy to her farmer son, who kept injuring himself near fatally. Cutting his leg almost off with a chainsaw, sort of accident. That was ten years ago, she says, he's never hurt himself since. For my daughter, it makes sense in terms of how much she's hurting herself with this conviction that she can't wash. Cutting herself off from her own life as a result.

And for me - well, I don't know if you have any OCD behaviours - nail biting, maybe? Maybe you can understand the simultaneous longing for long, smooth, pretty nails in all the nice polishes, and also the undeniable urge to bite and pull and chew that you can't fight, it's stronger than you? This impulse comes from a different part of the brain altogether, and is stronger, far stronger than will power ever will be. Someties will power wins, but not for long.

We will see if this remedy does anything. I know I need not will power boosts, but for the urge to just ... go. So far tonight, it is absolutely absent, though that may not last. But the respite is a lovely thing. To think, there was a time when I was free of it, when I had gorgeous hair.

3 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

If it works for you- it woks.

Mwa said...

I hope it works for you!
I'm wanting to stop scratching at wounds on my face. It's similar, I guess - self-destructive, beauty-destroying, strange behaviour. Makes sense it goes with OCD.

Jo said...

It's a similar thing, dermatillomania of a sort, I guess. Yes, it's all OCD behaviour. There is also a suggestion that it's related to NAC *N-Acetyle-Cysteine) deficiency. It might be worth taking a course of that for a few months. But it's hard to know what the dosage is.