Limbo

Just to get that out of the way, no, I’m not talking about that kind of limbo. You know, back-breaking dance moves under a horizontal, lowered pole. The kind of stuff that accounts for about 76,8 % of spilled beer at parties.

I’m talking about limbo as in, a state of transition where everything seems a little surreal and out of place and weirdly slowed down. Not that I have any indication of what that’s actually like, but I always picture myself being on a Zero G flight I’ll never be able to afford, and the plane has just reached the upper end of the parable, putting everyone on board in the desired state of zero gravity where your hair starts sticking out and you can do somersaults in the air (unless you have to puke, which is fairly common). For a very short period of time, given the amount of money you pay for the experience, you are seemingly weightless and everything you know, including the most fundamental rule of physics we are usually subjected to, is coming to a halt. I imagine that time and space lose a little bit of their usual meaning in these moments.

So now that we have assessed how much I want to be floating in the air for 10,000 bucks (or not, I’d surely be one of the pukers), let’s return to real life where limbo states are actually pretty common - and free, yay! It’s just - we don’t usually enjoy them very much.

Let me give you an example many of you might be familiar with, depending on how you found this blog. In 2017, I had the somewhat bold idea to build my own tiny house and live in it full time. Part of that plan was to find a property to rent where I could put the house. When the house was done (or at least done enough) in 2018, I had yet to find a place to park it though. It wasn’t lack of grit or initiative on my side, it was simply hard. I’ll spare you the legal details and administrative challenges but for well over two years, I had a house on a trailer sitting in my parents’ driveway and I couldn’t put it anywhere, until we finally managed to obtain a building permit for my parents’ garden where it resides to this day.

In my experience, limbo states happen when a situation had a certain drive behind it, like personal action or a dynamic that’s outside of your control, just like the plane burning up a ridiculous amount of fuel to shoot vertically into the air. And then, all of a sudden, you take the drive or the dominating factor away. The plane just floats. And for at least a brief moment, you’re like ‘Oh-oh’.

I continued building my house well into 2019 but the uncertainty concerning my parking spot and living in an unfinished building with no water connection for an additional two years has since become my definition of limbo. You want things to go somewhere, but for reasons sometimes outside of your control, they just won’t. And because you can’t simply walk away from many things, whether it’s a house you built or a flight you’re on, you are stuck. You will feel uncertain about the future, maybe anxious. You feel thrown. And you will certainly question your life choices (like building a tiny house for 35,000 bucks instead of spending the money on three Zero G flights).

A lot of people would probably cite Covid times as one of their most intense limbo experiences, where some of us couldn’t even work their jobs, with no timeline when we were ever allowed to return to it. It can be intense.

Knowing a little bit about psychology (fourth-semester here), I had a gut feeling that limbo states were back on the menu for me as I slowly worked my way towards recovery from ME/CFS. As with any severe illness, particularly if it’s chronic, you eventually get to a place where in order to cope with pain and loss of function, you have to let go of any expectation on yourself, whether it’s coming from you or from someone else. You can’t live up to anything if you’re mostly stuck in a recliner chair with a sleeping mask on. Little by little, as my condition was progressing, I dropped out of regular activities, jobs and meetings with friends, until about the only expectation I had was to deal with my level of functionality in the most positive way possible. In the worst weeks, I could eat sitting upright and go to the bathroom and talk a few words with my parents, and that took up all my energy.

I’ll talk about my approach to recovery in a different post, but basically, when things slowly started to get better, I knew that I would eventually land in limbo land for a while. My most severe sick days are over. My initial belief that my illness was at least partially a strictly structural or physical disease that I didn’t have control over has been challenged. I am hopeful that I can make a full recovery with the tools I now have.

But, and this is a common experience in many different forms of recovery, this shift also comes with a feeling of displacement. I am not consumed by being sick anymore, but I am far from being well. I sometimes have enough energy to participate in parts of life again - and that builds expectations, externally and internally, that I can’t yet fulfill (and maybe never want to fulfill again?). I have no timeline for my recovery, so I can’t make any plans. I take it day by day, still reeling from my experiences just a while ago. In short, I’m still hit by the past but can’t move on to the future yet. The present feels shaky, timeless. Building trust in my body is a crucial part of my recovery but even so, you can’t help but fear relapses sometimes.

I don’t know what my life will look like when I have recovered, and I can only really start building it for good when I am recovered, so where does that put me right now?

In a place of tremendous fear, to be honest. And I know why. Imagine going through an intense phase where all your focus and energy is needed just to make it through. Like climbing a ladder on the outside of a very tall industrial building. One foot after the other, you have a certain rhythm that keeps you going. And then, suddenly, you’re on top - and you bet that the first thing you do is to look down and get scared af about what you just did. That’s okay. If you expect it to happen, it’s actually much less terrifying. I feel like one of the most important things is to acknowledge that limbo states are almost inevitable at certain stages of life and that they are not a sign that things fall apart even more - even if it feels like it.

Feeling uncertain, overwhelmed or out of place when in transition doesn’t mean you have to follow every fatalistic doomsday prediction your brain will come up with, though. It’s scary to see things change just as it’s scary to be stuck but your plane is not going to crash and you’re not going to fall from the building. It’s normal for fear to come up when it finally has a chance - when so far you were too busy to survive to even go there.

I learned from my experience with my house. Waiting, as I did back then, is not the answer because it creates tension and puts you in a passive state. One thing I definitely don’t need is more freeze responses in my nervous system. Instead, I deal with the fear through somatic tracking and other methods. Trust me, ignoring the fear as you stare down thirty feet of empty wall space is not going to make you less afraid of heights, and insulting yourself for being afraid in the first place doesn’t do the trick either. Gradual exposure can help, though, and knowing that whatever the phase, it’s not permanent.

I’ve also come to appreciate the limbo state simply for the chance to take a breath. After an intense and steep ascend, the plane is now sitting weightlessly in the air for a few moments (or you’re panting from all the ladder-climbing), and although you don’t really know what the second half of the parable will feel like (or whatever the heck you’re doing on top of an industrial building), you kinda have a feeling that it will be a hell of a ride. So why not take a moment to honor your experiences, maybe sort your shit out, face your fear, do a few dance moves - under a pole, if you must - and shout ‘Here goes nothing!’ before you continue on your journey.

Enjoy your flight, everyone. You paid a lot to be here.

The pattern-seeking machine

Let me take you back a few years. Quite a few years, to be precise. In 2007, I was in 9th grade and I wasn’t exactly what you’d call popular. Neither did I have any intention of being ‘popular’ - but I certainly wasn’t calling for the estrangement and bewildered looks I got either.

So we were enjoying German class. That is, I was. Most others in the room were more or less waiting for it to be over. Our teacher presented us with a poem. No further comment, she just read it out loud, let it linger in the air and asked, ‘What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear this?’

My hand shot up, as always. And as always, she waited a few moments to see if anyone else was participating (a futile attempt that year, most of the time). Finally, she nodded at me. ‘So what was the first thing you noticed?’ And I said, without hesitation: ‘The meter is regular.’

Silence. And then, roaring laughter, somewhere between incredibility and dismissal. Even my teacher laughed - but in her defense, she smiled at me and I knew it came from a place of respect. ‘That’s the first thing you notice?’, someone asked from the back.

Yup. Can’t help myself.

My brain has been a pattern-seeking machine ever since I can remember. In an attempt to categorize an overwhelming world, especially for a neurodivergent child, I used my IQ to find matches and correlations and other logical connections between things all day long. I knew on which step of the staircase my dad usually coughed when going downstairs. I could tell by the sounds of passing trains outside whether it was 1.08 pm or 1.21 pm (there are two at 1.21 pm and from different directions). And by the age of 15, I was first hired to proofread academic texts before publication because I was able to reliably detect double blanks in printed paperwork.

I love when things make sense. And since surprises are kind of an ambivalent thing for me, I also love being able to predict what’s happening. Especially in the realm of great unpredictability - human interaction.

Well, actually, human interaction isn’t that unpredictable, not even in extreme forms like violence (read Gavin de Becker). But it was hard for me to figure it out when I was young and unspoken social rules didn’t come intuitively to me. I remember the looks I got when I was playing cards with a few kids on a vacation and I helped myself to a second biscuit - as it turned out, it had been the last one and no one else had had more than one. I was vaguely aware of that but I hadn’t understood until that moment that this meant I wasn’t supposed to just take the final one. My parents had certainly raised me to be compassionate and forthcoming and I was definitely picking up on that but alas, the world continued to be confusing. All these expectations.

Finding patterns in people’s behavior, in license plates and price tags (I recently figured out which specific number on these printed labels from the butcher’s counter indicate how many customers the store has had that day) will be a live-long endeavor and helps a great deal when you’re very sick and unable to entertain any other distraction. It makes the world more manageable and turns everything into a real-life scientific study.

But as we all know, every study has its flaws. The patterns we see might just be the patterns we always saw, the patterns we want to see - or no patterns at all. And the confidence of your predictions, whether it’s about the number of cars you’re going to encounter on a familiar stretch of road, the response of a loved one to something you say or the amount of pain you will be in two hours from now - this confidence is heavily influenced by the accuracy of your past predictions, especially the high-stakes ones.

As of late, with the divorce and several other personal relationships falling apart, I realize I lost quite a bit of my confidence in my ability to categorize human behavior and to deduct accurate predictions from it. If asked again, I might even question whether that poem’s meter is actually one hundred percent regular. (I’m sure it was.)

There are many more tools I rely on these days to make sense of the world and navigate my own journey, not just pattern-seeking, but it’s still very important for me and I’m sharing this because beneath the obvious impact, drastic life changes and chronic illness also often influence our general ability to make sense of the world, which has vast consequences. Somehow, instinctively, we assume that we must have been fundamentally wrong about many things if we ended up in this painful place.

Well, at least that much can be said with confidence, deducted from patterns I’ve observed for a long time: Everyone can (and most will) end up in a very painful place at least once in their lives. And everyone’s predictions are flawed to an extent. While we don’t have to adopt the idea that we brought all this misery onto ourselves (a rather problematic thing to say, depending on the circumstances), we can still take the opportunity to overhaul our machines, you know, some oil, some tightening of screws, that kind of stuff. It doesn’t hurt to ask, ‘Maybe not all of the patterns I detected were accurate, were they?’

But just because our lives seem to fall apart all of a sudden, that doesn’t mean that every prediction, every network of logical connections we formed in our head (I often picture mine as neural networks or trees) was incorrect. I’m reminding myself that I haven’t been hit by any of the cars whose speed I calculated before crossing the street. I somehow made it through adulthood so far without breaking any major laws (I hope) or starting fist fights with people (I hate fist fights), despite the fact that I sometimes seem to read people ‘wrong’.

My pattern-seeking machine might be off sometimes, but not that far off. It might have led me into treacherous social waters sometimes, but it also guided me in making art, form long-lasting friendships and take care of myself when I realized I really needed to. I think it’s just time for an upgrade and I’m working on that now. And with time, I might be able to regain the confidence I had when I was 15 and all that mattered was a regular meter in a poem from a few hundred years ago.

Tabula Rasa

Here I am. 33 years old, recently divorced and severely sick back home with my parents. Within the last few months I‘ve lost the ability to do my work, both on YouTube and in props, to live by myself and run my own errands and ultimately, to socialise meaningfully with anyone.

This is not the entry where I explain about ME/CFS or what else led me here. The time for that will come. Right now, in this moment, I keep thinking of this term. Tabula rasa. I have a rather useless degree in classics so I can explain to you where it comes from - it describes a wax tablet often used by students in the old, old Roman days that, after being written on, is then wiped smooth to make space for the next exercise, thereby erasing what was before and starting with a blank slate.

Except that‘s not entirely true. As is the nature of a wax tablet, you‘re only redistributing matter. Everything is still there, it‘s just going to take a new shape in the next round.

And that‘s what I‘m trying to do. Not that long ago, I had a life; I had hobbies and (multiple) jobs and friends and a marriage and countless random experiences. Me getting sick has been the wiping process - all meaningful bumps in my inner landscape reduced to a flat line, to the point where earlier this year many days consisted mainly of lying down with my eyes closed and without any distractions, because that‘s the only thing I could stand.

And now, there is nothing. To redistribute and draw new lines and form new words, I need energy, and it‘s not coming back quickly. I‘m no longer in the business of wearing a sleep mask all day but I am also still housebound most of the time. These have been the toughest months of my life.

Since I can not currently share all of this on YouTube, as I normally would, and since these times command changes anyway, I‘m now, and with a pain-ridden grin in my face, returning to something I have loved forever and had to abandon a bit for a while for various reasons: writing.

I‘ll turn this new space here into my journal, detailing my recovery (I‘m optimistic) and probably many more things along the way. I can‘t do much right now, but this I can do and it brings me some of the much needed joy that keeps me going. May this, if nothing else, entertain you for a few minutes. I‘ll see you in the next one.