It’s just after midday on a Sunday. I’ve swapped the hotel bar for an industrial-chic yoga studio complete with ash wood furniture, medium-grey walls and fat plants springing out of invisible pots like permanently inflated airbags. It’s the kind of faux-Scandi space that formed the backdrop to photos of kale smoothies back in the eat clean era. 

I arrived here late for a class that I’d convinced a friend to do with me. My first thought after accepting that I wouldn’t be let into the studio was that I could drop my stuff off in the changing room and go for a run; I had forfeited a non-refundable session and, with that, the privilege of rest. Engaging in another, more intense form of exercise would serve as a proportionate punishment, remedy my dopamine deficit and give me a replacement excuse for the grossness of my hair when greeting my punctual pal after her class. 

But the moment I placed my bag down, I felt unexpectedly relieved to have escaped an hour of controlled breathing. I had a brief spat with my inner critic, who insisted that this temptation to simply sit and wait for Megan meant that I was no longer just unreliable but also lazy, and then I decided to stay still. ish. Writing = producing = not wasting time etc. (yeah ok mate I know).

The other day I was talking to a friend who’s currently travelling around Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He said that he was struggling with crippling intrusive thoughts as a result of anti-malarial pills, which reminded me of an experience I had while on antibiotics a few years ago. It was the height of COVID, I was studying for the FE-1 exams and, within a couple of days of taking medication innocently prescribed for an eye infection, I began to flit between anxiety, dread and the sort of grief that makes you feel like you’re going to keel over.  

One night, after several 4am wake-up calls in the form of an overbearing metallic taste in my mouth, I reached for my phone — my chalazion-encrusted eye stuck half-open — and began a deep dive into this niche and potentially imagined physical side effect. I hadn’t expected to find reams of posts from people warning others of the intense (and in many cases entirely unprecedented) bouts of anxiety and depression they had experienced while taking this drug. 

An even more obscure side effect was a sudden urge to write poetry. Surprisingly, this wasn’t mentioned on the online forums, but I’m convinced that my fleeting obsession with verse was a direct result of whatever bonkers carnival my neurotransmitters were throwing that week. Beyond a pair of rhyming couplets for Mothers’ Day at the age of 7, I had never written a poem before. I had, perhaps obnoxiously, long felt that my mind and body harboured some sort of emotionally charged yet impossibly slippery textual globules, but I’d come to firmly believe that they would never make it into the realm of consciousness because, no matter how hard I tried,  I couldn’t pin them down and reify them through the written word. Attempting to do so in a way felt like a physiological battle, one in which I would engage sporadically and briefly before invariably assuming Plath’s poetic persona: “The tongue stuck in my jaw. / It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich. I could hardly speak.”

But then, in February 2021, I ended up on some whacky antibiotics, and everyday for a week, I would sit down at my desk to put in a 12-hour study shift only to oscillate between crying spontaneously and throwing up word-paintings. 

I haven’t written a poem since; it’s as though I no longer have access to the part of my brain in which elusive ideologies and historic feelings finally congealed into language. 

I read some of these poems back when trying to find an admittedly unconvincing silver lining for my friend by talking about potentially positive side effects of side effects, and while I can recognise the ideas and sentiments behind the pieces, their abstract renderings feel pretty alien. Some of them made me laugh, which I don’t think is what my tortured poet alter ego was going for oops.

Anyway, as someone who has an odd and undoubtedly frustrating need to over-explain things so as not to be misunderstood (armchair psychologists, we can circle back to this one), the authorial abandonment that comes with the publication of creative writing in general and poetry in particular makes me uncomfortable. But I’ve come to think that there could be something liberating in the loss of narrative control and something democratic in producing work that can be appropriated by and filtered through the subjectivity of its every reader.

I therefore enclose herewith some Clarithromycin-induced crap. 

UAE

This one made me chuckle because apparently my medicated mind had a bone to pick with the whole concept of Dubai. I kind of appreciate the indignation of the poetic voice, but the intense earnestness of the whole thing is, in retrospect, pretty funny.

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