philosophy

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for professional help.

Somewhere between the last tick of the clock and the first drip of morphine, the bells started ringing again. Not church bells no. Church bells are polite, distant, Sunday-morning illusions. These were division bells. The kind that toll when your mind’s had enough of being reasonable and your body’s thrown in the towel. The kind that echo through hospital corridors and half-remembered dreams of youth, when the world still felt like it might one day make sense.

They said there were “High Hopes” capital H, capital H, as if that made it more official but I don’t recall signing up for the sequel to Pink Floyd’s existential midlife crisis. I was too busy trying to work out how to get out of bed without summoning a small army of pain gremlins. They march at dawn, those bastards, armed with canes, cramps, and a sick sense of humour.

I remember when the grass was greener. Before it was paved over by mobility scooters and medical appointments. Before every sunrise came with the question: “What part of me’s not working today?” I used to walk no, stride across fields, the wind howling like some cosmic prankster whispering, “You’re immortal!” Turns out, I was just really bad at reading the fine print.

Now the wind howls through the cracked seals of my van, Rusty One, smelling of WD-40, dog biscuits, and defiance. Yopi, my furry therapist and four-legged anarchist, sits in the passenger seat judging humanity with the serene disdain only a dog can manage. Together, we drive through Dark’s World a place that’s half blog, half fever dream, half post-apocalyptic memoir. (Yes, that’s three halves. Don’t do the maths. Reality stopped balancing books long ago.)

Chronic illness isn’t a slow fade. It’s a dark comedy written by Kafka and directed by Monty Python. One minute you’re philosophising about consciousness, the next you’re wrestling a wheelchair that insists on acting possessed. “Exorcise this thing!” I mutter, as Yopi gives me the side-eye that says, “You bought the cheap batteries again, didn’t you?”

Every day’s a strange mixture of grief and giggles. The body fails, the mind rebels, and the soul just sits there in the corner, rolling its eyes. I’ve met God or at least the cosmic version of a system admin and let me tell you, they’re as confused as the rest of us. The script got corrupted somewhere around 2020. Now it’s all patch updates and glitchy humans pretending the world isn’t buffering.

But there’s poetry in the breakdown. Beauty in the absurdity of a life that refuses to play nice. When you’ve lost enough, laughter becomes rebellion. You laugh because the alternative’s a long nap you might not wake up from. You laugh because, deep down, you know the universe is trolling you and you’ve decided to troll it back.

Sometimes I watch the leaves fall like burnt-out neurons and think: this is the soundtrack to every high hope I ever had. And then that eternal voice drifts in from the background

“The endless river… forever and ever…”

Yeah, alright mate but this river’s full of potholes, hospital letters, and dog hair. Still, we sail it. Because what else is there to do but keep floating, sideways, through the muck of memory and malfunction?

In Dark’s World, there are no “motivational quotes.” Just dark jokes and half-empty mugs. We don’t chase perfection. We chase moments small, absurd, brilliant flashes of clarity. Life is an out-of-tune guitar still being played because the song’s not done yet. You make noise. You make meaning. You keep going.

And the bells? They still ring, faint and distant not as warnings, but as reminders. That even when everything breaks, the music doesn’t stop. It just gets weirder, more honest, and a hell of a lot louder.

So here’s to the fallen and the foolish, the sick and the sarcastic, the dreamers and the defiant. We’re still here rolling, writing, laughing, swearing, and refusing to shut up. High hopes? Not quite. Just raw, crooked, darkly glowing ones forged in hellfire and humour.

And somewhere, far off in the fading light, a bell rings again. It doesn’t divide anymore. It just echoes.

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.

𒀭𒊩𒆳 ᚹᚨᚱᛚᛟᚲ ᛞᚨᚱᚲ ✦ 𒀭𒊩𒆳 ᚹᚨᛏᚲᚺᛖᚱ ᚨᛗᛟᚾᚷ ᚹᚨᛏᚲᚺᛖᚱᛋ @goblinbloggeruk - sick@mylivinghell.co.uk

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for professional help.

People love to quote Plato like he was the first bloke to stare at a wall and call it a revelation.
“Look,” they say, “we’re all prisoners in the cave of illusion.”
Nice theory, mate.
Try living in a body that’s staging a coup d’état against your nervous system, and tell me again about shadows.

Progressive MS the words themselves are a joke.
Progressive, like I’m advancing somewhere.
All I’m advancing toward is gravity, confusion, and the slow betrayal of my own wiring. My legs don’t walk, my hands improvise, and my mind sometimes wanders off without leaving a note. If that’s not Plato’s cave, I don’t know what is. Only mine’s not carved in stone it’s flesh, bone, and electrical static.

Plato imagined people chained, staring at shadows, mistaking illusion for reality.
I get it. I mistake memories for motion every day.
I remember what it felt like to move freely the smooth mechanical grace of a body obeying thought.
Now it’s all echoes on the wall.
I reach out for those memories like a fool, knowing full well the limbs won’t answer. That’s the cruelty of it: the mind remembers what the body refuses to perform.

They say gnosis that secret knowing is enlightenment.
Bullshit. It’s not light pouring in. It’s the realisation that there is no exit.
The body is the cave. The mind is the flickering torchlight throwing half-truths across the wall.
The trick isn’t escaping — it’s learning to see in the dark.
To live with the shadows long enough that they start whispering secrets.

Some days the fog rolls in, and cognition slips through my fingers like smoke.
That’s when the cave gets loud echoes of frustration, grief, rage.
But beneath that noise, there’s something else: stillness.
When the body fails, awareness sharpens.
It’s like the universe is saying, Fine, you can’t move so you’ll learn to observe.
And in that stillness, gnosis crawls in. Not as comfort, but as clarity.

Plato’s philosopher escaped the cave to see the light of truth.
I’m not escaping anywhere.
The ascent isn’t physical; it’s inward.
It’s turning toward the source that’s both pain and perception, realising you were never separate from the wall, the fire, or the shadow.
You’re the whole damn projection body, soul, and malfunction.

So yes, I’m stuck in my cave. But it’s mine.
The shadows on the wall are memories, regrets, small victories, and dark jokes that only I laugh at.
Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they just sit there, silent and honest.
And that’s enough.
Enlightenment doesn’t mean walking out into the sun — it means looking straight at the darkness and recognising your own reflection.

Maybe Plato climbed out.
Maybe I just learned to redecorate.

Either way, the cave’s got Wi-Fi now, and I’ve got words.
The shadows move, the neurons misfire, but I’m still here still watching, still learning, still goddamn alive.

Plato had his cave. I’ve got MS, a powerchair, and a front-row seat to the shadows. You don’t escape the body you learn to see in the dark.

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.

𒀭𒊩𒆳 ᚹᚨᚱᛚᛟᚲ ᛞᚨᚱᚲ ✦ 𒀭𒊩𒆳 ᚹᚨᛏᚲᚺᛖᚱ ᚨᛗᛟᚾᚷ ᚹᚨᛏᚲᚺᛖᚱᛋ @goblinbloggeruk - sick@mylivinghell.co.uk