Perhaps it is Brian after all!
It is 08 58 am (Saturday) I am waiting for that pre-booked call. The mortgage deal is expiring and it is time to talk about a new deal.
Like many of these appointments, they take more room in my head than needed. Every so often in the past week, a reminder had appeared at the front of my mind. It is fascinating how the brain does that.
I have become more aware of my brain in this last year triggered largely due to my reaction to the initial lockdown in March 2020. It took seven weeks before I began to emerge from the havoc my brain experienced. I had never contemplated being at home so much and engaging in activities that only occurred in ‘the other place’. ‘The other place’ is the term used in the British ‘House of Lords’ referring to the ‘House of Commons’ and vice versa. For me home symbolises the ‘private space’ and ‘the other place’ refers to tasks which I have agreed to do usually for a fee. It doesn't mean I am not me but it does mean my time is that of another which means only the bits of me that they seek, such as my writing skills, are to the fore.
My brain likes ‘a time and a place’ the time given to tasks for another occur in a particular space, not my space. That was until Lockdown in March 2020. It resisted what was being expected, that the other’s time was at my place. It cried it was an infringement on its private space ( I hadn't realised I was sharing it). I knew I had to get on with it but he (am I now referring to my brain as a person?) was having none of it.
My mother used to say, “You’d fight with your shadow” in this last year my brain appears to be that shadow. Maybe he is called Brian? You know those of us who always spell Brain ‘Brian’ maybe it is Brian after all? It is not so much fighting with him but listening to him. I know him well. I guess if he has been here since I have we shared the womb and share this body, a twin perhaps?
Up until this year, I saw Brian as part of me now maybe he is my alter ego. Brian worries about such things as this morning’s appointment. It is he that notices an advert in the paper that makes worry seem positive pointing it out to me as if to justify himself. I can’t help notice it an advert for Life insurance.
Brian is raw, he says it is as he feels it. If you come against him you will know it. He will become entrenched until you show some humility. He is quick to see ‘them and us’ and he will make a story out of and if it goes on it will become ‘a history’. It seems he becomes defined by the challenges others and maybe life presents him. In his world, he has his tribe and you have yours and he doesn't like mixing tribes for then some make take advantage.
He did get used to lockdown as I got used to it and eventually he settled but once he settles into that he resisted he then resists moving into another phase. The phase we are now in is a return to the ‘new normal’. He is struggling with that in not a dissimilar way to the first lockdown.
I wonder at times whether he is my child, a partner, a brother, a best friend. The thing is no matter how difficult he can be I love him, I can’t be without him. Somehow him being him tells me who I am.
g ( audio version below)
