The Couch

 

 

When I was ill, getting past 4:00 PM everyday was dreadful. That’s the time my blood pressure would rise and the anxiety that went with it. Four PM was the time I needed to rest after a busy day—it was the time to put my feet up and unwind—but instead of ‘resting,’ my blood pressure would rise, and a gray depression descended along with it. It felt lonely. My body was doing something internally that felt like a betrayal.

I’d meditate, or put on good music, or try to read something inspiring and yet it would be so bad I’d occasionally have to talk to the doctor. (It took the doctor three years to find the right blood pressure medication.) But still, come 5:00 PM all would be well again as I rose from...the couch.

Being sick meant being on the couch.

I’ve always had a dis-taste for the idea of being a ‘couch potato’ and for this time of day even when I was young…and it seems worse on gray cold days. Do you know the feeling? The earliest poem I remember writing, at age thirteen, was called “The Hour that Strikes Four.” But back then I didn’t have the Couch. Maybe it was hormones…

Or is it because of low blood sugar that time of day? Or is it a fleeting depression?  Now that the blood pressure is finally controlled I still look at the clock as it approaches four… and I look at that couch with apprehension.

But I go there. I do it. It’s a new ‘practice’ of mine to go to the old painful spot and dare to be there again just as I used to be…and each time I’m surprised! Despite how tired I might be, that feeling isn’t there. And each time I practice I imagine that the couch and I are becoming friends again.

Do you know this feeling? How have you made it better?