Dante's Epiphanies
August arrived and I left the beach, moving north to try college. For a few months I stayed in a house full of college kids, my brother and some of the geeky friends I had in high school. It was a relief to be with friends, but my experience left me feeling isolated. One of the boys was the other Merit Scholar from my high school class. Sometimes we would sit up on the roof at night, just talking. The pitch of the roof gave repose to study the stars through the ancient oak. His course had been steady, continuing into computer science that we had both delved into. His path had not ventured far from home, while mine had veered way off and out. I could hardly relate where I had just been, only that I had returned certifiable and we could only laugh about it.
I dropped out of college after a few months, derailed by intense emotions and perceptions of a “big-picture” that drowned me, imagination mapping out years of pain or failure ahead of me if I stayed on this course, or that one. Goals materialized into anxiety, contentment for life ahead was short-lived, falling into a pit of despair I had constructed from thin air.
(scientific explanation PTSD, avoidance)
Rule number 1- Recognize big picture thinking. Stay in the moment.
What does my particular brain injury feel like? The hypothalamus' primary function is homeostasis, maintaining the body's status quo system-wide. About the size of a pearl and located in the center of the brain behind the eyes, the hypothalamus is responsible for hormone production which govern body temperature, thirst, hunger, sleep, circadian rhythm, moods, sex drive, and the release of other hormones in the body. The hypothalamus uses a set-point to regulate the body's systems including electrolyte and fluid balance, body temperature, blood pressure, and body weight. It receives inputs from the body, then initiates compensatory changes if anything differentiates from this set-point. It controls the pituitary gland through tiny capillaries. The pituitary gland is a pea-sized structure located just below the hypothalamus and attached to it by nerve fibers. It is part of the endocrine system and produces hormones which control other glands as well as various bodily functions. Hormones produced by the anterior lobe regulate growth and stimulate the adrenal and thyroid glands. Oxytocin is also produced by the posterior lobe, aiding in uterine contraction during childbirth.
Hyper-perception can read too many things into situations, then exaggerated emotions linger. Random hormones surge like waves, all or nothing, full throttle coursing through my veins. The smallest thought of want sinks to desire low in my chest, dilating my pupils. Adrenaline scrapes my brain like sand, hyping me out of my seat. Anger enflames to rage, charring reason to ash. Happiness feels like my heart stretching out my hand for rainbows, angels singing on a pin. Normal life became over-stimulating, overwhelming the brain until ears are ringing and exhaustion beats down. Contentment became the elusive rare oasis I could only crave, a faraway symphony with a slow dance denied.
What does that do in an ordinary day? Imagine shopping in a grocery store, facing all the cereals. There are just so many choices, with too many decisions. Frustration leads to real tears and humiliation. The brain cannot cry and do math at the same time, so when this happens, I do some random mental calculations, like counting backwards by 3 from 96, trying to regain some composure.
I had to get to the bank before it closed on Friday; cashing a check would see me through the weekend. Stepping off the bus, I realized it was getting late in the afternoon. Ten city blocks stretched out so far ahead, so my brain responded with adrenaline. Not a little bit, but a lot. I feel the wave of hyper rush from my head to fill my chest with an ache, I have to run. Feet uncontrollably start walking faster like a kid, leaving my boyfriend behind. I think, Stop, then I go back to him and consciously pace myself. I want to just walk slow, but internal pressures drive me to walk faster again. Stop, and I wait for him to catch up, apologize, and then as hard as I try to force myself to just walk, dammit, I can not calm the force in my head. The walk breaks into a run, completely leaving my stunned companion even though I didn’t want to. A block later he finds me sitting on the curb, head in hands, trying to just turn it all off. It was only a trip to the bank, and now my relationship is in jeopardy.
Sex became so intense, a drug. Mix that with impulsiveness and, well, whatever. (diagnosis: Nympo) Here is an interesting fact: There are three primary parts to the brain, which evolved in stages. The first houses the essentials, like the brain stem and automatic body functions. The second stage more toward the center, involving emotions and other things. The third is the higher thinking in the cortex, for interpretation and personality. If the brain puts a lot of effort into emotions, access to the cortex is literally shut off, called decortification. Hence, people may say, “I was so angry, I didn’t know what I was doing, “or, “I couldn’t help what I was saying.” In my case, a little happiness escalates to bliss. That is just fine. Yet, with the intensity, the cortex shuts off and I become scatterbrained for hours, feeling quite actually stoned, without access to higher processing.
Boyfriends were rarely more than impulsive desires since I usually felt they deserved better. Relationships ran a quick course of bliss until some irritating little thing. Again, with no limit switch, irritation caused an argument, debate became anger, and then I would flame to rage. I couldn’t control what I was doing, swinging insults and punches. If by then I hadn’t convinced myself that it was their entire fault, very few friends would stay past the first apology, too many deal-breakers on all sides. My brother would say, you’re not crazy, but why do you have to be so promiscuous?
(a scientific explanation of Gating)
At times I would be down to pocket change, and could see my future only a half-day at a time, working temp-jobs and donating blood. The only thing I really cared about was billiards, winning a few bucks here and there with bar games and tournaments. The only thing I really cared about, I wanted to be a professional pool-player.
Give me a simple job, be clear on the task that must be done, and I could focus on that for hours, burning out only after I forgot to eat or rest. Make the task more complicated, like adding being around people to talk, and my brain would overload with too much input, succumbing to exhaustion with ears ringing.
For a short while, I worked a part-time job making sub sandwiches, proud of the fact I learned how to scoop an avocado quickly. Slice it in half with a huge knife around the pit, and twist the avocado apart. With half in one hand, throw the knife blade onto the big seed, jamming the edge deep, then pull the knife out with the pit stuck to it. Throwing a big knife at my open palm was a little thrill, tempting fate. At the end of the day closing shop, I’d be sweeping and a song from high school would play. Suddenly a wave of longing would overwhelm. I can never go back; I’ll never have love, is this all there is? Is everything lost? The despair would sink me to a chair breathless and I’d be contemplating suicide again. This led to my first rule: Don’t do it; God had wanted me around after the first time for some inexplicable reason, remember?
I was acting bipolar, even though psychiatric medicines didn’t work. The rose-colored scar stitched across my forehead was just a curiosity. Sometimes I’d run a fingernail across it, or habitually run my fingers across my numb scalp.
In “Self-control,” who is doing the controlling? I discovered that in order to function in society, awareness needed to rise above “me.” I had to build a façade of calmness. Success relied on how well I acted the part, a continuous mindfulness.
Epiphany: I am not my mind.
One little part-time job was at a factory making back-packs. Sometimes I inspected, or trimmed. Once, I finished zippered pencil-pockets, turning them right side out and poking the corners straight on a special machine. I zoned into the task, oblivious to the bustling surroundings, meditating on timelessness. The expected quota was obliterated, and I realized a few people were standing behind me with clipboards. But come the end of the week, an existential crisis hit and I could not continue. I picked up a temp-job packing blue fertilizer. During the first break, I noticed a co-worker go off to the side, warming himself in late-morning sun on the abandoned railroad tracks. He pulled out a harmonica, and began playing a soulful song, so talented. I was enthralled in the peace. Here we were getting paid minimum wage at a nothing job that would last maybe two weeks, and he was dirt poor and happy. What was his secret to be so content inside?
…
Planting a Seed
mind the eye
mind the I
seeing the world's reflection
inside-out
if lost is a place
where on a map
is contentment...
ever found
if money's enough
full of emptiness
hunger's on the menu
eat the recipe
make-up on a mirror
shoes on defeat
all that's built is broken
steel as good as rust
love what will
will what may
will lets go
love's will creates
spark the seed
mind inspired
poke a finger in the dirt
and out springs light
…
The circumstance was not the problem, but my perspective. Feelings cannot be relied on when making decisions. Emotions are not reliable, bubbling up at a moment’s whim, caused by something inside or something outside. Any little thing and there was no bottom to sad, no limit to happy, clouding judgment, which has also become impulsive. It means small problems at work lead to quitting jobs and an afternoon later hopping a bus clear across country. By the time the mind settles, I could literally be in a different state. This has happened more than once. I’ve had to develop another a rule to live by: no major decisions for three days, or I’ll wake up to a f-king stupid expensive car in my driveway. That has happened more than once, even decades later I have to be so careful. Let me tell you, any used car dealer who says they are there to help a veteran, is most likely just paying lip service. Just saying, in case you didn’t already know.
(explanation of Limbic Hijack…)
Rule of Life- Never make big decisions until after 3 days.
By this time, I hopped a bus back to Southern California, first to LA for a couple months, then to a tiny High Desert town. Found a job as a cabinetmaker’s apprentice. Let me set this picture for the reader: I decide to play in a pool tournament one evening, walk into the bowling alley, start warming up on a table, and who comes in but the guy who drove the car, the driver in the auto accident, from 2 years ago and 2000 miles away. Turns out he was stationed at the base in the next town over. We started dating again, which was rocky but had relationaships been anything else for me?
I became so enamored, stuck on him. A half year later, he was discharged and moved home to the Midwest. Just so happened the owner of the place where I worked started hitting on me so I quit, soon took a bus out there, and immediately got pregnant. Things weren’t working out, (any surprise there?) so I hopped a bus back to Southern California. By the grace of God, I found a women’s shelter/maternity home to stay.
Realistically, I had to prepare to give my daughter away to adoption. I could not see how I could provide for her. It felt like drowning, lifting my baby to a lifeboat. I perused through a few binders offered for me to read, each page a resume from a couple, including roughly photocopied black and white pictures. Smiling from a world of stability where I didn’t belong.
Medical care was welfare provided, which operates on crisis intervention not prevention. My daughter became overdue, but since I carried so small the doctor thought I was wrong on the due date. I now know hormone regulation from the TBI affected my ability to go into labor, but back then it was still all a mystery.
My phone call to the nurse when I didn’t feel well got the response, “that usually happens right before you go into labor.” Two days later, I did, and my friends at the maternity home excitedly saw me off to the ambulance. They couldn’t find a heartbeat on the way there. I was wheeled to another monitor on the ob ward, where that was confirmed. Then I was placed in a small room on a different floor, where I would have to go through all the pain of delivery by myself. A kind stranger held my hand as I went through contractions, the longest night of my life. There was a clock on the wall, stuck it seemed, as the intolerable minute hand wouldn’t move. She was stillborn May 31, Memorial Day. I asked to hold her, a perfect little baby. God, you took Dad, You took everything, but did You have to take my daughter too?
Breathing is a reflex, even when a heart is so shattered and there is no will left to breathe. I had no power against the earth's momentum to stop it’s turning. Life has no choice but to be, and is still a force of instinct even almost crushed in desert sand. I still believed in God only so that I could rail against Him. If people think they control anything in life, they are pretending, deceived.
"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken, contrite heart, broken." - Psalm 51:17 .)
The very next day, I no longer qualified for welfare, (Aid to Families with Children.) With no health care to stay another day in the hospital, I had to go back to the maternity home without the baby they all hoped I would keep. My friends arranged a simple memorial, but I so wished everyone would just leave me to grieve alone, dig the hole myself, striking the ground with an anguished shovel. Instead, I had to sit awkwardly at the front of a few row of seats during a short service, facing her small white casket. On top lay a bronze crucifix, the only thing I could keep. Afterwards, friends and strangers tried to think of what to say, then it was time to leave. But after an hour I wanted to go back. The white tent, the chairs, everything was gone, the lawn replaced flat as if it all had never happened.
I couldn’t even afford a headstone. Within a week, I moved north to stay with my brother. Two weeks later, I managed to find minimum wage job installing windows, keeping it all to myself during lunch breaks at the picnic tables.
(scientific explanation- Compartmentalizing)
No one else had known her, so they couldn’t feel her loss. People don’t know what to say about a stillbirth, or they say the wrong things. You are young enough to have another. There must have been something wrong with her. I could sympathize with the pioneer women on a vast prairie, burying a child anonymously halfway to somewhere. I couldn’t afford a post-partum exam, but a caring nurse at the Women’s Clinic (Planned Parenthood) arranged a doctor’s appointment and found a support group.
Only a few scattered shards remained at my feet to scrap together a life; I had no choice but to pick up acceptance and forgiveness. The glue was grief and bitterness that eventually, gratefully, faded. My God may be crueler than yours but they desire same result.
A few months later I had saved enough to design a headstone. It inscribed a spray of delicate phlox painted blue, her full name, only one day, and “Our Baby” because the adopting family had lost her too. I drove it 12 hours south to deliver it. When I searched for her spot in the grass, I was confused. I thought it was close to a particular tree, but there were two other headstones there. They forgot her. I would not leave until the mistake was fixed. A young man walked back with me, holding a T-shaped thin rod, and pushed it gently it into the ground. No, not there… a little over and pushing it in again, thump. No, that’s not hers, then between… thump, there. The hollow sound of reality four feet down hit me full on and I could finally cry. I wonder what the other two families thought the next day, with their markers moved a little aside and a baby’s appearing between, who had been there before.
Between my experience in the military, the way they treated me as a veteran, and all this because of it, Memorial Day is always a private grief. Perhaps each injured veteran has a personal experience which no one, absolutely no one else can understand.
The word veteran itself carried so much shame. I don't like to acknowledge it at Memorial Day parades or hang out with groups of veterans. I was an 18-year-old girl injured right out of boot camp. I hadn't accomplished anything or learned anything or fought anywhere; I was a nothing and the other soldiers would agree. The military blamed me for the embarrassing mess I had become, and I believed them. I can count the times I've been thanked for my service on one hand, but even so I don't feel I should be. Sometimes I ask for the military discount or disabled waiver and get blank stares with a frown.
You? You don’t look disabled.
Yes, I know, you have to see the disability to approve.
Most times I'd rather leave the explaining behind me with silence my answer. Or I could write a book.
…
It had always been someone else’s fault when I was so angry. Or it was the job if I was so unhappy. Or where I lived if I was bored. There was so much out there that needed fixing. I began to realize over the course of those hellish five years that the only common denominator to all the chaos was me.
Epiphany: if happiness is not found out-there but in-here, the same goes for my problems.
The connection between outside stimulants and my own extreme moods became undeniable. I began to see the connection between discomfort and sugar; it brought on irritation for the entire day leading to temper tantrums, sometimes even headaches. I tested for allergies and discovered that yes, I was allergic to sugar cane and sugar beets, and the reaction was magnified since my hypothalamus cannot efficiently regulate stasis for feelings either. Just about anything delicious has it though, so eliminating it had to change my status quo of existing. I began to religiously read labels and make the seemingly constant decision knowing some really tempting foods come with a cost. Every now and then some ice cream, but here comes a headache and try not to pick a fight with anyone, even though people can be so irritating. It’s me, not them.
A full glass of red wine has me weeping in self-pity in an hour. Even only half a cup of coffee jitters not only my hands but set me on a wide swing back to mind-clouding weariness. I can manage a tea but not every day.
Epiphany: I am not how I feel. If I could influence moods, I also had the responsibility to manage them.
(When you know better, do better. -Maya Angelou)
The exercise routine I learned in the military is more than a habit, working adrenaline off until exhaustion so I can function more calmly. For the first couple decades it felt like someone cracking a whip in my head every day to get moving. Day in, day out. I’ve discovered not long ago that hard strenuous exercise is another way to stimulate the pituitary gland; I had hit upon this routine by chance early on because I could feel it work. A couple hours hard exercise every morning usually does it. If I sit too long at a desk, my feet go numb and fingers turn blue, no matter the temperature. At first I looked for jobs that would work me hard, like millwork or cleaning stables, or if I couldn’t do that, I’d try to run a few miles, or bike to work, or split firewood, or do something.
A perk is the rush of endorphins that exercise brings. Literally, a tingling rush. A lifeline, it keeps me from sinking into mind fogging depression if I go without it after just a few days.
A small dip in blood sugar escalated to chills and dizziness. I snacked all the time, carried snacks with me, could not leave the house without food as if this isn’t America with a mini-mart on every corner. Many tests over the years for hypoglycemia came back normal, so it was just a mystery to live with. Now I know the hypothalamus is just overreacting to small changes in stasis.
Emotions serve to reinforce a perception. This is important to understand. But even perceptions are relative back to what one feels.
Epiphany: I see what I think I see.
Life continued. As for the chaos in my head, my only strategy could be to pretend a façade of calmness on the outside, like someone overcoming paralysis who has to mimic the action of walking.
I thought the feeling of Love was a picture, a thing. My picture of what a husband should be was … all that. Much of the time, my first husband and I had something good. But when my guy didn’t resemble that though, my frustration with him caused so much arguing. I believed things had to be just so, and if they weren’t, it was always his fault. The fighting ironically wrecked what love’s really all about. Deep down, I so much wanted family, but the responsibilities to commit to our young family became my ultimatum to him, the wrong way to start the foundation of a marriage.
My ability to judge the scale of my surroundings had been set to black or white. A good day and life has always been good and always will be. Until a bad day comes along; it has always been bad and will be forever. On a good stretch, the mistake starts when I let down my guard. Thinking I am healed, I don’t maintain that constant objective oversight over my brain anymore. But then I read a situation wrong, put a negative spin on it and the mistake cascades down the system. First, it cycles into over-reacting emotions, which affect what I see, which magnify emotions again.
I went to a counselor for exhaustion. I was prescribed ritalin for attention deficit, and inderol for stress.
I may be able to snap out of it at this point, hibernate and rest, Or I could forget the mindfulness process altogether, taking my own judgment too seriously and falling into the Pit again. I get lost in my brain, can't see the forest for the trees; don't even realize how deep I've fallen into rage or despair until the smoky fog clears. Waking to suddenly think clearly again. Blue Skies. But now I’m standing in ashes surrounded by the abandoned charred stumps of bridges burned, jobs lost, friends gone, relationships ruined. Damned decades of this.