On Storms and My Oddness.

All my life I’ve been afflicted with a condition which, as far as I know, has no clinical name. It’s all to do with being keenly aware of every little nuance of my environment. It might be the look in a person’s eyes, or the shadows of moving clouds on a landscape, or a particular smell, or the grey skies of winter. It’s why I took to photography, and then writing, and achieved a modicum of success in both. I seem to see and feel nuances more than most people do. I’m aware that it makes me an odd one, but I assume I’m not entirely alone in my oddness.

But it comes with a problem: people so afflicted are bound to be subjected to a range of neuroses, some minor and some not so minor. I can attest to the fact, for example, that I’ve had something of a neurosis around loud noises since I was a child (nobody ever noticed because I always seemed to be alone when it manifested. And if they had noticed, I would probably have received a slap and been told to pull myself together. I was a boy after all, and that’s how boys were brought up back then.) And therein lies part of the problem with storms.

Storms are very noisy, and so they disturb my peace for that reason alone. But they’re also violent and uncontrollable, and as such might be said to be the epitome of mindless violence. (I find all non-consensual violence distressing, and the mindless sort particularly so.) There’s nothing you can do about storms except protect your interests as best you can, which often isn’t very much. You have to sit them out and wait for them to leave in their own time. You can’t banish them, and hiding from them is injurious to self-esteem. (And such is true of all destructive natural phenomena, of course, so thank heaven I don’t live in a place affected by hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis or volcanic eruptions. I do so pity any highly aware person who lives in Japan, for example.)

So that, in a nutshell, is my difficulty with storms. They sharpen my nerve ends while turning my brain to sludge. There’s no relaxing or working out problems when there’s a storm raging. I sit it out and steel myself so as not to succumb to the psychological pressure. And I’m also aware of a different sort of pressure, a physical sensation in the region of my heart. (This is probably not a good thing since the clinicians tell me that my heart is not in prime condition, and I’ve declined the prescription for beta blockers because I don’t want to become an inveterate pill-taker. Maybe a storm will take me out of here one day, but I doubt it.) And yet here’s the mystery:

I once spent three days in a small Royal Navy frigate ploughing through a force 11 storm in mid-Atlantic and found the experience truly thrilling. No fear, no discomfort, just elation. So how do I explain that one? I don’t know, but maybe it was because storms are quieter at sea. There are no tree branches, you see, to give the wind its roaring voice.