How long can it go on? And who am I to question it? It’s not even a question of understanding anymore, but accepting. I accept my fate, I accept my life. I accept my shortcomings, I accept the struggle. I accept my inability to understand. I accept what I will never become and what I will never have. I accept death and I accept life. I have no profound realizations — it is blind acceptance and some kind of faith.

Keith Haring, Journals,  February 15, 1989

Let me begin by saying that these were prescribed to me legally. By gentle nudging from my sister, I was referred to Dr. Benzo in the summer of 2025, on one of those blushful, halcyon days of my youth. After very little verbal probing I burst into tears on her stuffy brocade couch and was promptly written up a scrip for many a white, indented pill. I held off on taking them for a while, actually believing they would dim my inimitable spark (neuroticism)—though one day, as happens to all the Greats, the call of the void sounded particularly sweet. I was warned about the especially addictive nature of Alprazolam, or Xanax™, both by Dr. Benzo and by popular media. It seemed to me some miraculous alchemical creation, providing immediate mental silence and calm, emboldening you to take life by the nuts, so to speak.

One thing they don’t tell you is that it achieves this by making you sleepy. Your synapses aren’t firing wildly and burning off the ends of your C-fibres anymore (or in the wiser words of my sister, something long-winded about the affinity of gamma aminobutyric acid) because you really only have the capacity to think about which surface in your vicinity would be most suitable to lay on. In the winter of 2025, no longer blushful or halcyon-like, I was placed in a curious and consistent fugue-like state by virtue of the consumption of these pills. Another thing they don’t really tell you about these magical Tic-Tacs is that they give you short-term memory loss. The passage of time had no rhyme or reason, just flowed, sometimes speeding up and then slowing down, and if you could imagine a strip of white fabric chewed through in some places by moths, you’d have a pretty good notion of what the mental record of my day-to-day life looked like. I can’t very well remember what I busied myself with, or lack thereof, I mostly remember feeling as though I was at half opacity at all times, my nascent panic morphing into a persistent shroud of directionless misery.

Now living in a Plato’s cave of my own feckless construction, I began to feel as though I was becoming increasingly disconnected from my material reality. My inner world, though amorphous, made some sense; I was often in conversation with myself as happens when one reads, an activity which constituted the bulk of my free time, or rather time in which things needed to be done and weren’t. Sometimes, when I was out of the house, it felt as though I was viewing my corporeal body move through the din of bustling students and pubgoers, really often one and the same, my consciousness enclosed within a translucent spectral form attached to my body like a slanted shadow.

Funnily enough, all I wanted to eat was Cheerios. Not Honey Nut, but the barebones libido-decreasing fare. I think ‘want’ is the wrong word. It was, as I called it, kibble, and to its assigned purpose it served. Unfortunately for my flatmates, this meant that I would occasionally trudge toward the kitchen in my John Lewis bathrobe (I WILL perform my ennui in the trappings of the well-off) to cantankerously fill the one bowl I owned with about four times the normal serving size of my Nestlé-produced feed. Say a quick ‘hello’ and then off I went. To what, you say? Nothing. The CIA black-site of my rented student room where I played judge, jury, and executioner. After some real, hard-hitting introspection, I came to realise that my mental wellbeing and my consumption of Cheerios were inverse lines on some wacko’s graph, and so my cravings served as handy harbingers for impending doom and gloom.

Around Christmastime, I decided to wean myself off the pills, realising I wasn’t exactly in the tax bracket to become reliant on these things, and thus my road to Calvary was interrupted by my wallet. Looking for a layman’s substitute, I drew the conclusion that the closest substance to Alprazolam was most probably Night Nurse. I, to this day, have many questions about that wonderful substance. Why do you think they made it so heinously, radioactively green? Do you think it was meant to appeal to some biological instinct, that as the animals we are we would quickly realise that this colour does not exist in the natural world and so, shouldn’t be ingested willy-nilly?

These ground-breaking questions require ground-breaking minds, and I write for the Postliminary. Though if I were to impart any wisdom, I would say that 1. I don’t know what’s in Night Nurse, but I like it, and sometimes I think of treating myself to a cheeky 15ml after a long day, and 2. A cheat code to stop obsessing over outcomes past is to start obsessing over shitty things completely in your control. For me, that took the form of knitting. It was entirely refreshing to be immediately awful at something and to know you were on the right track— and if the fickle fibre art gods decide to smile upon you, you might even be able to make a wonky scarf as testament to your divine perseverance. My proximity to the hole-y taught me the important lesson that at any point in your life, at any time, you should probably spend a lot of money on pursuing a newfound passion, and this will most definitely be a great idea with even better returns. Believe me, I made these slippers myself.