A Swirls story   

Being in a dark place

Something hits you, from a dark place inside, and you feel helpless.

It is what we call a Swirl - your world is suddenly lurching and spinning, and you lose your bearings.

The Swirl disrupts the familiar internal movie, where you write the screenplay, and forces other scenes 
upon you -  a mixture of nausea and anxiety, a sense of oncoming doom, loss of confidence, and 
blind panic. Being forced to look into the abyss of non being.

It is a slide into a sucking quicksand, a whirlpool of chaos, a tilting floor with no walls or ceiling, where 
your self is no longer yours.   It is an encounter, hopefully brief, with madness.

Something hidden threatens to reveal itself, and there will be shame and disgust when it does.

You might try to keep calm and wait for the awfulness to pass, like a dizzy spell, and sometimes it does, 
but usually there is no room for the intentional act of trying - the Swirl disrupts intention, thought and 
action - all three.

It mostly comes on with no warning, and afterwards you feel exhausted and depressed.
If it comes often,the cumulative effect is a kind of paralysis, and you can’t do much - just sorrowfully wait
for the next attack. It is like a repeated trauma, with sometimes savage after effects.

Some may describe it as the work of the ‘internal saboteur’, a part of the self that seeks to undermine 
pleasure and achievement. 

You may ask how could such an attack on the self exist?  But it does. Ask Google. Ask the 
sportsperson about the ‘demons’ that upset their performance, ask the writer who can’t write, the painter 
who can’t paint, the leader who can't lead.

Sports people sometimes ‘choke’ when near to a triumph.  And can’t explain what happened. If they 
could, it would be to understand that it was an attack on their achievement, driven by envy, which can’t 
tolerate feeling excluded from that achievement, and attempts to spoil it.  Even though both the 
achievement and the attack on it are parts of the same person. 
Sebastian Vettel, Formula One champion race driver says: " I think my biggest enemy is me" He gets it.

The saboteur is a self destructive impulse, which lurks in a dark place inside us, and can assert itself 
even when things are going well, when disaster seems unlikely.