Validate Me: A life of code-dependency. Charly Cox

real it is felt

      It’s authentic

      All that you are and all you exude

      Weighs out its aesthetic.

       Self Care

      There is only a trace of anaesthetic

      In the aesthetics

      There is no truth, no freedom

      No Holy Spirit’s leading

      In the clang of rose-gold copper self care

      There is only growth in muddled despair

      There is help in the hurting

      In the muddied soul searching

      In pulling it all out of mind for your eyes to see

      It’s mad – a cruel charade

      For anyone to sell back your sanity

      In bubble baths

      Face masks

      And breakfast in a bowl from Anthropologie.

       The Walk-In Centre

      Looking around, brush strokes of broad bored glances, everyone looks perfectly healthy. A little ruddy-cheeked from the December air and a faint suggestion of office-party regret, but no one looks like they are dying. Not that I know what the early stages of dying look like, but there is a disappointing lack of green gills, limbs hanging off, and intestines snaking the floor like stomped-on internal telephone wires. I suppose they think the same of me. Able-bodied, aggressively highlighted cheeks, bags of late Christmas shopping (the Urban Outfitters sale starts on the 20th so why bother buying all your crap prior?) and a fake limp so bad that I catch eyes with one man who gifts me a gentle ticklish cough, pulling it from his throat in solidarity, and we both do an awkward inward laugh. Ah, communion.

      There is a lump on the back of my knee, which WebMD suggests is likely to be stage IV cancer or a golfing injury. I don’t play golf. I am clearly dying. I wonder if everyone else here has convinced themselves that they are dying too? WebMD has become a form of idle procrastination for me, sometimes even when I am perfectly fine I’ll click the parts of the digitised body and input symptoms just to see what they amount to. If they have any correlation. I am certain now that any time when I feel an organ fizz, I’ve got a spot on my right cheek or my ankles click, I can do some sort of WebMD-informed maths to convince myself I have a terminal illness. There is something about finding logical, even though it’s not, impermanence to life that soothes my anxiety. There is something about finding pattern and reasoning in my body’s shortcomings, and potential failings, that makes the notion of a suicidal thought seem quite quaint when I can convince myself my body is ready to give up before I give it permission to.

      Not that long ago mental illness, albeit taboo and often dismissed even when as real and as profound as someone with suicidal ideation – there was a certain sympathetic coup for it. An arm rub. A waft of misunderstanding that means it is serious. Yes, it was saved for nutters and mad women, but it was also serious. There were institutes. Slurs. But now it just feels assumed. I don’t feel any new communion with the movement of celebrities ‘admitting’ their anxiety and depression, I feel annoyed. I feel ‘fuck’. There’s already next-to-no resource, what happens now more people use it? It also feels a bit self-aggrandising. This idea of admitting.