(I'm still in Guanajuato, spending Christmas here before heading on a road trip to the jungle/subtropical rainforest for the New Year's Eve)
Yesterday I experienced an episode of sleep paralysis. I was peacefully chilling on the hammock on the terrace, fell asleep and at some point found myself awake in my body unable to move, hearing my own breathing and my heart racing in panic. It probably lasted a couple of minutes, but it felt like hours of pure horror. It was all blurry, I was falling in and out of sleep, dreaming that I fully woke up and left the hammock, but then instead of the concrete of the terrace floor, I felt sand beneath my feet and I knew that I was on some unknown beach, still dreaming. When I finally managed to wake up, both my mind and my body, I couldn't believe what had just happened, even though I experienced episodes like this before. It is a feeling of a complete loss of control, helplessness, being tied up and not able to do anything to get out of the situation, even though you're fighting so hard. The most disturbing thing about it is that you can feel some weird presence, as though someone or something is pushing you down on purpose.
I went into the kitchen and frantically started to make some food for the Christmas dinner in order to forget about this experience, but the whole evening I couldn't help, but think about all the horrible tricks your mind can play on you.
I might be a bit over-dramatic here, but it also got me thinking about my worst moments while living in Iceland. Sometimes I truly felt as though I was on the verge of being stuck forever in a black hole and the weird presence pushing me down in that case would be depression. I have been struggling with this particular mental health issue my whole life, but in Iceland it adopted a form I couldn't quite understand. On the one hand, I managed to operate in a more or less functional manner, I connected with people and made friends, I was able to play music live, to organise gigs and to write for a magazine, I earned money working in different jobs and I lived in a nice, warm house. On the other hand, my mind started wandering into really dark places and I felt haunted by the things it was coming up with. It all escalated in the summer months which felt very unnatural - not only during this time the island is graced with nearly never-ending daylight which is difficult enough to adjust to, but this year the summer actually never came and it was cold, rainy and windy almost every day (unlike the previous summer I spent in Iceland which had a much more positive vibe to it). I started crying a lot, mostly in private, but also in front of people, sometimes at work. I was constantly thinking about the end of the world and how humanity is working for it, about the Holocaust and the banality of evil, about the small things people do which have the most fucked up consequences, how we are all constantly hurting ourselves and everyone else. I was basically feeling sorry for myself, the people around me and the world in general. Fortunately, there was always someone or something that managed to snap me out of it, but nonetheless, the feeling of impending doom was always there, somewhere in the background.
I think I got myself into a place where I had nothing to look forward to. Before, when I started to have glimpses of this miserable state at my first job in Iceland at a guesthouse in the middle of nowhere, I could just quit, pack my bags and move to Reykjavik in hope of changing my situation for the better. After spending so much time in Reykjavik, a metaphor of a person as a strange flower or a plant which is only allowed to grow a little, but never to fully blossom, came to my mind, cause this is how I felt like - stunted and pointless.
Was it my fault that I was feeling this way or was it the place that was the culprit? Was I indulging in some masochistic drive or was it the alien/familiar surrounding that made me feel somehow imprisoned? I have no idea and I'm thinking that in order to describe it well would be to say that my relationship with Iceland became toxic and that it just stopped serving me well. I remember thinking that even the money I'm earning seems worthless, as I have no struggling family I could send it to (as many immigrants do), nor any elaborate plan what to do with it, and that it was unfair that I could earn so much more than a person doing the same job in my home country. This is an extremely privileged position to find yourself in and the awareness of it only made it feel worse.
On a lighter note, I remember that at some point I started laughing at myself and at the absurdity of the whole situation and maybe this was also the time I thought that I have to leave the island and go traveling. I'm counting my blessings, as I'm having a great and eye-opening time here in Mexico and maybe I wouldn't have appreciated it so much if I haven't been through all of this. Iceland made me feel a lot of bad things, but I learned a lot as well, had many amazing moments, and all in all, I think it changed my life for the better. It also gave me the courage and the financial means to do what I want right now, at least for some time. I still think that the place has a lot of potential and I'm keeping fingers crossed that with time, it's going to become a better version of itself. I'm glad I know people who are there and who are putting a lot of effort and energy into making it happen.
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