A sickness that sounds like cicadas

metaphors being a language for mental illness

We’re told not to panic when a car plunges into water. Even as water floods the car and barricades us in, we’re meant to act deliberately.

So why does translating this inward feel so impossible? Why is it that when the car fills with water for the hundredth time, I shriek and close my eyes?

A therapist once told me to see it as my nervous system simply being overactive. It’s trying to protect me, just not very well. I need to speak to myself as I would a frightened animal.

But when you invite tenderness into the equation, there is a vacuum which needs to be filled. The car might not be six feet beneath a lake, but you’re still trapped inside. Waiting for it to start rolling. Planning, preparing—checking the locks, then trying to find the hammer to break the glass with. You ruminate until reality and catastrophe blur, until you’re convinced you’re drowning even though your clothes are dry.

I remember walking through a park in Croatia and being overpowered by the cacophony of the cicadas. There was something unsettling about seeing so many creatures clustered together—their little legs moving ever so slightly. Their sound was deafening, overpowering my thoughts, drowning out the passersby.

Mental illness resists literal description; metaphor does it better. And like the cicadas, the racket of “what ifs” drowned out any sound of coherence.

The world demands focus. In practice, resistance looks like sitting on the edge of a bed at midday, leg bouncing in that comforting rhythm. I read somewhere it does that to release tension.

On my way home, tires screech; something registers too late, and I roll over a car bonnet. Dazed and startled, I’m sworn at and spat on. The cicadas are still screaming but I can just about hear the driver over them. Red-faced and furious, the driver shouts at the version of me I’ve already outgrown.

It’s like being drunk without that empty, eroding pleasure; coherent, embedded in the world, yet outside the perimeter of normalcy; the humiliating infantilisation—being spoon fed dinner and reassurance. I can feel little insect legs tapping on the rawness of open skin. I open my mouth and they crawl inside.