If you cannot ask for what you need, as a child, then your ability to think and feel is damaged. You are forced into a space of minimal agency where you are largely unable to negotiate your way through daily life. You have no voice, no confidence, and may grow up like that. Someone else holds the initiative, which makes you feel ashamed, and brings on the swirl experience.
A swirl looks like this:
And feels like this:
" I feel helpless, worthless, hopeless
I have no energy, no purpose, I feel isolated
and overwhelmed
I am despairing and afraid
I am in a space without hope, and panic is threatening me I cannot sit still, something is agitating my body and my mind, and I feel very anxious."
To frequently suffer a swirl or vortex makes me withdraw from life, because it is all too hard to manage. I become alienated from friends and family, effectively a hermit, trying to avoid being hurt, even by sympathy. Sympathy makes me feel ashamed, patronised by someone who doesn't know what it's like to be in a swirl, in a vortex.
If I suffer from the swirl infrequently, I can get on with things, enjoy life, and banish the sense of panic and helplessness to the memory box. But it doesn't take much; an imagined slight, some bad luck, a parking ticket, to bring the swirl back - often in a split second - and I have to struggle against it by restoring perspective. Am I really being got at, or is this just daily life within a society that is too big to care about me?
What is unique about the swirl?
Swirl is a metaphor to describe an existential mood state. It is a deeply unpleasant experience that borders on despair and anguish.
A Swirl is like a black hole; we fall into it or get sucked in. We feel overwhelmed by something stronger than ourselves.
When in this state, emotional paralysis takes over. We lose voice, agency and will. We feel diminished, and sure there is no escape.
It may pass, as moods do, or we may find our own way to overcome its sometimes devastating effect.
What is unique about the Swirl is that it denotes a range of distressing experiences that go together and relate to an internal physical, emotional and mental space which however may have dimensions and coordinates that we can begin to recognise. Understanding them helps us to find a way to conquer it.
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I feel helpless, worthless, hopeless
I have no energy, no purpose, I feel isolated
I feel overwhelmed
I am in despair and afraid
I am in a space devoid of hope
I am all I and no I
Panic is constant
Roses don't smell of anything
I've had wild thoughts that I was dying, and panicked
I can’t sit still, something is
agitating my body and my mind, and I'm anxious
It’s like being in a closed space, it's claustrophobic. How do I get out
when I feel swept up in a swirling vortex?
Someone inside me is intent on soul murder; who is it? Can I talk to her?
Will she answer? Is there anyone there?
No, it’s just me and my fear, we’re bad company. But what is the fear? It’s not rational, I can’t explain it but it’s all mine, it gets going inside me.
Is my chemistry out of balance?
Are they ’bad thoughts' because I feel guilty, ashamed, remorse, regret? It’s funneling, whirling, gaining momentum and force, like a tornado, a circular swirl with an empty centre.
Is that centre lifeless, something annihilated? Is that the fear, the panic, the high anxiety?
The Swirl is different from other emotional states because it brings together descriptors like panic, anxiety and fear and places them in a three dimensional space: i.e. sucked into a swirl as into a whirlpool.
There is a force acting on me.
I’m being pulled into somewhere horrible, sucked into a whirlpool of awful feelings.
I’m lost in the energy of the Swirl.
It’s a frightening space, somehow familiar, but also alienating .
Swirls
A swirl is not your friend it walks beside you, but sometimes it is inside you it makes you feel bad, useless, hopeless and lost.... it sucks you into a vortex of fear, or anger, or both. It's like a virus, airborne, seeking a host body. Sucked in, helpless in its grasp, you feel there's no escape, and you are distressed and disturbed. Is it something you've done, or not done.......do you feel ashamed? Your head feels full of pressure and empty of thoughts, feelings of dread fill you up. You have to find your thoughts again. Where did they go?
The swirl experience.
The swirl experience involves the coming together of certain emotions. These always involve self deprecation.
The feelings may include fear, anxiety, shame, anguish and despair. In addition feelings associated with diminishment. It is the combination of these feelings with a background anxiety that gives rise to the felt power or force of the swirl.
Energy
The power of the swirl lies in its energy. It creates a force or resistance that makes it very difficult to think or reflect. The swirl experience is one of alienation; alienation from self and other.
Swirls are dynamic
Swirls are dynamic. They have power, and invariably that power takes the form of negative energy. So, when a swirl finds its prey, the individual feels acted upon. Unfree and helpless.
Distributed sensorium
There is a homology between outside and inside. As one moves into a swirl, as one is sucked in by it, senses contract. The distribution of the sensorium becomes skewed. What this entails is the inability to draw on one's senses to provide information that would otherwise nullify the swirl. The result of the coerced withdrawal of the sensorium is invisibility.This is an experience of extreme diminishment.
There is an analagous process in the political sphere when certain groups are excluded from the political process, and become so diminished that they are invisible to the dominant group.
To enter the swirl
To enter the swirl is to become disconnected. One becomes temporarily disconnected from others and from oneself. Painting by Edward Hopper, who portrayed 20C alienation and loneliness.
