“A Wrackspurt. . . they’re invisible. They float in through your ears and make your brain go fuzzy,” she said. “I thought I felt one zooming around in here.”  Luna Lovegood, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. 

For the past 13+ months I feel like I have been doing battle with a wrackspurt . . . and mostly losing. I consistently find myself unable to think – unable to get my thoughts into a sensible order. It has been of a cycle that has caused me to live a bit reclusively; I’ve had limited contact with the outside world. (That sounds so sci-fi it’s ridiculous.)

I haven’t felt at all like myself and I guess one could see why. My temperament leans toward anything BUT reclusion and the zooming in my mind that I am used to are thoughts and ideas and plans for fun. This past year has not had any of that.

Why am I bringing this up?

Today I was driving down the street and I survived a wrackspurt attack and then had a moment of clarity. . . understanding, if you will. A dear friend wrote to me last night and I shared a couple of thoughts with her. She wrote back today and pushed me to think a bit further and even commit to action and my brain shut down; I could not respond to her.  My brain went fuzzy and I didn’t know how to explain to her what I was thinking (’cause I didn’t know) and didn’t have the emotional energy to try to focus enough to work it out. I went back to making Halloween costumes as if the conversation hadn’t happened.

In my car this afternoon, on the way to pick up the kids from school, I found my thoughts returning to my friend and the conversation. My first thought was fear that she would be upset with my silence but that was short-lived. She has known me long enough and loved me through enough that this fear was unfounded. My thoughts moved forward and I heard myself think, ” Why can’t I get my thoughts together? Why don’t I want to put the effort in and do what she asked?” The next thought was like a movie screen – not so much words of explanation but a picture of what was going on in me.

I keep thinking my life now . . . the way things are now. . . are temporary. I think somewhere deep inside I just keep waiting for things to go back to normal. NOTHING is as it was and, in my humble opinion, NOTHING is as it should be. I keep being shocked that I am where I am living as I am living with the people I am with and without the people I am without and I keep waiting for it to be over. It isn’t a conscious and purposeful waiting. I honestly don’t know that I have had the thought before today, but the thought today was more of an “oh, yes” instead of an “Ah Ha!”

It seems silly that I have moved around quite a bit in my life and all of a sudden I am not taking issue with the changes. As I try to process the whys, I realize that there has always been a constant home, an anchor of sorts. That has been tampered with and it feels like the fabric of reality has a rip in it; nothing will ever be solid again. Every moment seems precarious. My heart is cynical. heavy. bitter. alone.

Even this entry feels disjointed – wrestling with wrackspurts as I write. I am hoping my friend will read this and know what I didn’t write back today. And I hope another friend reads this and knows why I haven’t returned her call yet. I fear a wrackspurt attack while we converse (by pen or voice) and the fear can be paralyzing.

I was just reading through a bit more of Harry Potter and it seems Luna’s father created some sort of wrackspurt siphon, “to remove all sources of distraction from the thinker’s immediate area.”  I gotta get me one of those!! Until I find one  – patience please, dear friends.