Doppelgänger

I know. I said I’d not be writing here again, but somehow, after a few weeks of really disturbed sleep, I felt the need to keep this one separate from the rest. Is that OK?

It’s rarely the title of a blog comes from a whole album, but I am currently blasting out Curve’s Doppelgänger. I feel like the whole mood of this is where I am at right now. This came out in 1992, just before I landed at university, and the whole aesthetic feels 2026 somehow. Heavy basslines and ethereal lyrics. What’s not to love?

So, better get to the point. As I am writing this, it’s a new moon in Aries tonight, seven planets are in Aries right now, and your local friendly Aries baby is feeling it. ALL of it. So much so, I cried like a baby this morning for what felt like an eternity. Then the need to write struck, hard.

The reason for the tears? My health, not just the current situation, but the whole combination of everything from the start of my life… That’s a lot of weight right now. And it’s a weight I need to desperately let go of.

Shall we start at the beginning? Unravelling this could be interesting!

I think I might have written about this before, but I can’t remember 46 blogs in, and I’ve got no idea.

I was born with a skull defect. A condition called Saggital Craniosynostosis. It means that I came into this world with a funky-shaped head. There are four plates in your skull, and basically, the suture that runs down the middle of my head fused before I was born.

Long story short, I had to have major head surgery at 12 weeks old to correct it. It’s why I’ve got a long, thin face, because even though my head is apparently ‘normal’, it’s really not. I don’t really have so much of an issue with it now, but it has potentially had a knock-on effect on other things.

I have tilted optic discs in both eyes.

It causes a lot of excitement at the opticians, and the eye hospital went hard down the route of me having Glaucoma. Except I don’t, it’s just dicky nerves in my eyes that fuck up my visual fields.

So far, so good?

So the issue with that is that I am now having problems with my eyes. Periodically, I get double vision, it’s pretty funky and slightly terrifying because it comes and goes. Not good when you’re on the M60 at night in a storm… I know…

So whilst the original issue is long sorted, the knock-on effects may well still be coming out 53 years later.

But if we work down my body, I also have spine issues. Neither of which is related to my odd head, but both are due to accidents.

Starting at the top, I have issues with my neck. Funky shit happening at the top, around C1 and C2. If we go to the bottom, I have issues with L4, L5 and S1. Both similar, but from different accidents.

The top end is probably due to going face-first down some marble stairs, smacking my head on a landing, fracturing around my eyes, but also most likely fucking my neck too. That fall was 14 years ago.

The bottom end is being a stubborn cow and deciding to move a desk on my own 30 years ago… I know, I am an Aries after all. Not only are we stubborn, but we’re prone to head and face injuries.

No shit! If anyone digs up my skull in the future, they’ll be freaked out for sure!

Two issues that have given me the mother of an odd face and skull.

So why is this an issue?

My birth was not easy. I was an emergency section, and I had complications. It’s a story that has been told many times in my family, but it’s not really mine to tell. I am part of it, but it’s not my version of events. I’ve been struggling recently to come to terms with how my life started.

In my darker moments, I’ve often wondered if that has some impact on me, other than the actual, physically observable stuff that I know about. It’s hard to say.

Sometimes I struggle with the choices my parents made.

Sometimes I wish I knew someone like me. I think the chances of me meeting another me are slim. I worked it out, well, an LLM did. And there is probably only one other person in the UK who has my traits… That being ginger, left-handed, green/blue eyes and a shit cranium birth defect.

The issue with all this is that our mental and physical health is so intertwined. Through the grieving process for my Dad, I’ve noticed that my physical health has been so much worse than normal. It feels like all the things that have happened to me up to the point of his passing have all come together at once to create the situation I am in now.

The new moon in Aries tonight is about a whole new start, not just a few tweaks.

My last therapy session was this week, and we talked about dropping some of the baggage that doesn’t belong to me. And whilst I own the fuck out of my birth defect and my injuries, perhaps it’s time to put them down and start over?

Of course, I can’t change the past, but I can as hell change my future. It feels like now is the time to start moving forward. I’ve been saying this for a while, but this time I feel it in my bones.

Probably all the scarring, right?