Forty Days and Forty Nights

It's not just swarthy-hued prophets who wander in the wilderness. Having just returned from a brush with the more frayed and distant edge of sanity I can confirm that mere mortals are just as liable to play footsie with the station at Tooting -just short of Barking. This is also why the blog may have seen less regular posts from me over the past week or so.

Being grounded - a juvenile term that reveals precisely how we are viewed by our keepers - and all it has entailed sucked me right back into prison. Not the fluffy prison of no bars and lots of bunnies but the prison that always lurks beneath the surface here. The one we all try to pretend we have left behind...

Locked in a holding cell before being wheeled out for my Adjudication I could sense the familiarity of the situation. It was not a comforting familiarity but one that reached deep into my soul and my whole life's experience. It had a powerful effect upon me and all of my instincts came to life - a battle was in the offing and it was my most familiar terrain.

And yet it was a cognitive dissonance, an elephant on the summit of Everest. Here I am, on the verge of release, and all that I could see, all that filled my vision, was the fog of war.

The weekend was a nightmare, my periodic depression and mild mania rapidly cycling to the extent that my mates felt the need to take steps to see that I had a period of deep sleep.

I temporarily lost all sight of my potential future. I was unable to feel, smell, recall, memories of home and all that means. All I could see was an infinite view of bars and locks. Such is the effect of the ball of shite that has been mindlessly wrecking the life I have been living.

I was lucky; in the end "prison" didn't quite suck me back in but it was a close call. Many are not so fortunate. Having made their error and finding "administrative measures" endlessly crushing them, they succumb and get sucked back into "prison", making even further mistakes in reverting back to old survival instincts honed in Closed prison.

As that fruitcake  pointed out, if you stare into the Abyss for long enough, the Abyss will stare back at you. This time, the Abyss blinked first.