Existing in Time, An Exercise in Letting Go

So, I know I have already made a blog post about Night Vale, but when I sat down and tried to write this week’s initiative post it didn’t feel authentic for me to write about anything else. I could write about another podcast or perhaps my thoughts on the direction of the media industry but that really wouldn’t reflect where I am this week. So, I won’t. I am going to talk about Night Vale and the propensity I seem to have developed towards lying on the floor in a sort of upside down fetal position…

So,

Without further ado,

Here goes;

These days I have my anxiety reasonably under control, but mental illness isn’t the kind of thing that just goes away. Even when you’re off the pills and you’ve got it all sorted out it never really leaves you, you just learn to live with it; you find strategies to stop it completely destroying your life. This week I could feel it again. It wasn’t a panic attack, simply the unshifting feeling of emptiness that comes and goes from time to time. It is a relic of emotional reactions to non-existent issues that I find very difficult to extinguish considering they have no real causal trigger that I can resolve. They come and go and I have learnt to live with that however it makes accomplishing anything extraordinarily hard, so each time they happen I search for different ways to combat them. This is where Night Vale comes in.

I have learnt that mental illness is similar to physical illness, pushing through just doesn’t work. So, when I got this feeling, I shut my computer and lay on the floor, pulling my knees to my chest and thinking of how I could turn my mental state around. Happiness is a tricky thing and damn difficult to find sometimes but I am nothing if not persistent.

Time, I have found, is the main source of my anxiety so I let time slip away and tried to think of what I could do to reorganize my brain. As someone who has an analytical relationship with film it simply does not work to calm me down so I get away from screens. I need things that slow the world down: paint, pencils, books from dad’s library… but I wanted to close my eyes and those mediums didn’t allow such a thing.

As my mind flitted back over my happy moments, like impatient fingers flicking through records, it stopped two summers ago on the roof of my dad’s house. The sun was blaring down and I was cutting in the second layer of paint dad had been rolling onto the exterior of our second story, and, in the background, was Night Vale. Perhaps my recent return to the series was what triggered it but that was the memory my mind seemed to set upon. So, I grasped around for my phone and turned on episode 2 “Glow Cloud” before placing it directly above my head and closing my eyes. I willed the heat on my back, the overwhelming brightness of the sun reflected of the corrugated iron and it came with a sonorous voice announcing: “the desert seems vast, even endless, and yet scientists tell us that somewhere, even now, there is snow. Welcome to Night Vale.”.

My breathing steadied and I let my body fall away from my room, away from the night and the cold. I let it fall back to that summer and I simply listened as Cecil updated me on the events in the absurd town of Night Vale. It was nice to escape to one’s imagination in such a structured way. I could let my mind go as Cecil’s narration kept it contained; kept it from straying to places it ought not go. Disengaging from visuals calmed my mind, I felt less was demanded of me. My attention was carried by the narrative instead of struggling to keep up with it. Time could be felt, but it had no pressure, in fact it had the opposite, it alleviated pressure; the long breaths of the podcast made time feel as if it were in abundance. Before even reaching the podcasts completion I felt my mood shifting, my mind reorganising and steadying itself. Before this I had relied almost solely on tactile objects to center me, but this had been better. It had been faster too. It was a re-evaluation of time, a reassessment of existence, of sorts. As Kyla had put it, time is sounds canvas and existing within that time reverted my fears. It took the weight from my gut and the suffocating air from my chest and let it out breath by breath.

As the episode came to a close Cecil reflected, as he often did, on the events that had taken place, and they were words I didn’t realise I needed to hear, until I heard them.

“…But, and I’m going to get a little personal here, that’s the essence of life, isn’t it?

Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they’re happening they feel like the only thing that matters, and you can hardly imagine that there’s a world out there that might have anything else going on.

And then the Glow Cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find that, as time passes, you remember it less and less. Or absolutely not at all, in my case.

And you are left with nothing but a powerful wonder at the fleeting nature of even the most important things in life – and the faint but pretty smell of vanilla.”

That final line took the last of my despondency away. It was an acceptance of time… A willingness to let it pass over and take aspects of our lives, both good and bad, with it. This was especially poignant coming from within a medium that uses the contours of time to articulate narratives. It felt nice to lie down and be transported to a place where I felt safe, with a deep and resounding voice to remind me that time is something I should not fear. It was nice to be left, on a Sunday afternoon, lying in the middle of my room, legs to my chest, with the faint yet inexplicable scent of vanilla hanging in the air.