My Bad Bad Brain

Keeping the world at bay is one of the things I have learned to be necessary to master. The world does not care about the workings of an uncelebrated mind. If you begin to show distress of the physical or emotional, you are asked to find a way to cope that minimally involves other people. Any variances make people suspect that you may suffer from one of the plethora of anxiety disorders, or possibly a bi-polar illness. Unless you chat up the voices they won't try to make you schizophrenic but that isn't for sure.
No, I am not overly-anxious.
No, I am not mentally ill.
No, I do not have a drug problem.
Yes, I do get pissed off because I have a constant companion. A brain injury.


Peace doesn't last. Not in this world and not within my brain. Continuing to post the stories of the people who entrust me with their most precious gifts- that of their presence in the moment, is one of the things that keeps me centred. Posting about my own true self, and my daily battle with my own brain, is hard but necessary. Before the Internet I had journals. Each New Years Day I ceremoniously burned my journal of the year gone past and considered myself renewed. This ritual and the self congratulatory feelings of making it through another year were important tools for the time.

Adrenilin is my greatest enemy. For some weird chemical reason, my already hyper-sensitive body got stuck on overdrive the day I got struck on the head.
This is only cool when you are a hunter gatherer. It would seem that with this aspect I could have been a rocket rider or a stunt woman, but the companion to nonstop adrenilin is constant exhaustion and the after-effects of same.
I got through my teenage years by drinking copious amounts of alcohol. Being blitzed was the only thing that shut the tornado in my mind up. Back then, I thought all of us, every single person on the planet learned how to wrangle brainstorms.
I did not know any different because I never thought to try to explain the mental chaos. I could see in my mind, myself and my memories, and this cavern of static which was not me but was settled upon me. If I tried to look beyond where the storm was, I would faint. Mostly this happened at night. The amount of alcohol necessary to ignore the storm was just shy of lethal. Luckily, I stopped drinking and started an exploration of holistic alternatives in my twenties. Although it was mostly just an interesting waste of time, it saved my liver. Turns out I needed it!

Describing a brain injury is like trying to breathe on Mars. You need certain tools to make it possible. I am unpossessed of these and continue to try to make sense of something that is utterly irrational. I consider my life to be a huge triumph of will over circumstance. The greatest of all victories is the one of seeming to exist within normal parameters. I pass for a body possessed of an unmedicated untainted brain. My personality comes across as eccentric or so I am told, but my ability to focus utterly and completely on what I am doing in my work outshines the quirks. I have learned to be charming. I have learned not to care what other people say. But I have not learned how to just live a balanced life. I hold it to be within the realm of the possible.

One major side-effect of taking brain medications is weight gain. I have to suck it up for as long as I need to earn my daily bread. A side-effect of weight gain is depression. Not content with gifting me with all these bad-fairy blessings, the Universe also gave me the gift of hyper-sensitivity. This is a fairly common thing that happens to people touched in the head. It means that certain senses become like super powers that you cannot turn off. You have to learn to ignore them. The bugger of it is that the injury wont LET you ignore them so again, you end up taking medication. So---- the upshot is that when you should be out and about enjoying the day is likely when a brainstorm will hit.

I went to the Pool today and forgot my ear plugs. Sounds like a minor inconvenience I am sure. -pound pound pound -

Frequently, I wonder what would have been my life-path without the bonk. There is no gain to an unbridled intellect. My grande focusing skill is only possible with medication. The sad thing is that although I can focus, I loose my brilliance.

My brain whine. My sorrow for what cannot be.
Is it shades of the possible I mourn or just sour grapes?
Many of my preferences and life choices were made to accommodate my injury. No that is a lie. *ALL* of my lifestyle choices were made this way. I have to live small to just live. Every day I open my eyes is a miracle. Odds are that one day I will stroke out at an early age or succumb to an aneurysm. No need to hurry the demise.

But my friends, life is a difficult choice.

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When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.
= Tuli Kupferberg