Ants In My Tea - 23.06.25

Hello. I flew in from Portugal today and now I am back in ---. Dissociation is really bad right now; I often get this after a drastic change in scenery. I feel the way I did when I first came back to my home town after moving away to uni. Everything is here and the same but it just feels wrong and weird, and somehow this feeling always evokes abstract memories of being sick as a child - I'm not sure why. I had been in the living room with my family but the air was clamouring at my senses and all my clothes felt wrong so I left to sit on the grass in the back garden, barefoot. Being outside always helps to alleviate dissociation to some extent, although nothing can ever cure it. I am changed, but the house is the same, right down to the moulding cup of tea neglected on my night stand and the unmade bed with mounds of unorganised clothes at its feet. But I will be okay by tomorrow, I literally always am, and every time it gets easier to remind myself of this.

The flight home tested my OCD much more than the flight out. Both airports festered heavily with thick crowds of people moving in antlike patterns, with bursts of occasional organisation, where everyone snapped into a queue and moved in impatient unison. I found it hard and I felt so sick the whole time. Something in the clouds was shaking the plane the whole way through and at points I genuinely thought I would throw up. Like a twenty-year-old child, I grasped my mother's hand from across the aisle and I searched for it frantically whenever she had to let go to let someone pass. She stroked my arm and called me "sweetheart", which she has either never done, or hasn't done for so long that I don't remember it. It was a kind thing to do, but it did attract memories of sessions with Janine and I found myself reflecting on our mother-daughter dynamic in the midst of everything. She shouted for my brother to "look after" me and he swapped seats with his girlfriend to be next to me. I am certain that - is also neurodivergent in some way and he understood how I was feeling. In recent weeks, he completed his engineering degree and found real passion in chemistry and physics, so to calm me he pulled out a notebook and provided a visual lesson on what pressure is, how it works at high altitudes and why the unhappy weather sends the plane dipping up and down and up and down as we climb through the clouds. At first, I was pessimistic –

Just took a sip of lemon and ginger tea and the bitterness rolling down my throat made me think of vomit and being a child and now the dissociation is back. I need to add more honey next time.

- and, to be honest, at first I didn't want to hear it. I know it's so awful and embarrassing, but I was literally writhing in my seat with nerves, scratching my skin and folding my legs hard to feel contained, but he pressed on through that behaviour and eventually I started asking questions through my clenched jaw and I got really into the conversation. We spent the whole two hour flight talking about physics and when we descended, I didn't feel nearly as affected by the juddering of everything that was around me. I really love my brother. He gets on my wick sometimes but when he does something like that, I am reminded that he really does still view me with the same care and love that he did when we were little. I am grateful to have a sibling that I get on with because I know a lot of people don't connect with their brothers and sisters at all outside of family niceties.

Even with the dissociation and the insidious apparitions of childhood trauma that come with it, I feel very full of love right now. It was a beautiful holiday and I enjoyed seeing my family. We used to scream at each other so much and make each other cry every single day, but it's not like that anymore and I am grateful. The sharp edges of those days are still being shed, and I sense that I am the last person to let them go, but they are definitely going. Although I am not the origin of any of the family tension, it all seemed to have culminated in me. For years I was the big family problem, so obviously it will be harder for me to move into this new dynamic that everyone has adopted.

I just looked down at my tea after drinking from it for the past twenty minutes to find it was covered in ants. Time to ask my boyfriend (AI) if I am going to get sick. I am joking.