Sometimes it's hard to tell what to
do during a minor brain crash. I'll be all over the brain map, full of great
ideas while I tool around to the fitness center and the grocery store and stuff,
then get home and my brain falls out from a pain spike or fatigue wall or a
blood sugar drop, and its all black again and there's just nothing. Sometimes I
can't so much as construct a complete sentence, like I've had a stroke or
something. I can't think to make the sentence, and my hand can't hold the pen
well enough to write the words.
This month got a little hard again.
Here came the nasty cold weather and holiday stress, and along with it came the
nerve problems and the dumb. And the crying. I'd love to pop a pill and have
some gooditude, but my chemicals just don't work that way. I fly blind, or I
don't fly at all. But I'm not scared any more. I've already lived the scary
stuff, already faced the sadness of loss. Now it feels like a race against time.
To actually become capable again, to feel my brain come back on and my body work
better, is a blessing. To sit around not making the most of every moment feels
like an ignorant waste after the years I could barely function at all following
my nervous system crashing.
No droop yet...
This month has felt like the Bell's
palsy would come back. I had it really bad in 2004, most likely complicated with
the nerve damage I already had from a car accident. Before the palsy hit the
right side of my face, the 7th cranial and trigeminal nerves flared up in wicked
pain, itching, and numb spots in the left side for 6 weeks, along with the worst
migraine I'd ever had in my life, and when the right side finally drooped, I
lost all tear production in the left side, and had stabbing pain in my left eye
and ear and nostril for a couple of years, long after the droop on the right
side healed back up. I get the left side nerve stuff flaring up again every
little bit and go through spells of maddening itching or food tasting like sugar
or everything smelling like gasoline or one of those really nasty nerve
headaches, but the worst is losing being able to think. It got so bad the first
year that I couldn't type a credit card number into the computer at the hotel
where I worked. I had to hold my left thumb next to each number and whisper it
to myself as I typed it, then move my thumb to the next number, and like that
through all 16 digits. That was pretty tough to accept after being able to ace
college bluebook essay finals from the raw memory of writing them out the night
before. They checked me for strokes several times, just like they checked me for
multiple sclerosis a few years after the accident- always nothing. No sign of
damage, and I was able to hide it for so long that no one believed it when I
finally lost everything and had to get disability. I have so many tricks for
hiding my flaws, they're automatic and I barely even have to think about it, and
most people just don't notice. But it's a pretty serious problem,
nonetheless.
This was my worst brain day in all
of December 2012. I really did crash again from a two hour streak of the old
familiar brilliance and the joy that surged with it back to the empty
nothingness of feeling like a pet fish with a brain the size of a speck. And I
cried. But only for a few minutes. Then I got back up out of bed, moved my
laptop to a different desk in a really dark room, and started making notes in my
spiral. Sentence fragments. Dangling thoughts. I think I sort of remember the
cool ideas I had earlier. I think I can reconstruct what I was thinking. I
think, if I write down a word at a time and let them bump around a bit, that
maybe, just maybe, the ideas I had can still come out somehow and be
cool.
Like someone reconstructing an
earthquake smashed mansion brick by broken brick without a plan, I am
reconstructing my brain today. Like someone who lived in that mansion, I know I
lived in my brain, and I know it's all still here. So I glitched again, so what.
It's not gone. I just have to go over all the little connections and see what
needs to be plugged back in. Some of the fragments kind of make sense. Some of
them make sentences. Some of those will make paragraphs. I started writing this
nearly five hours ago. I have made a hundred typos. I kept forgetting what I was
doing. I lost my train of thought over and over. But here I am, at the other end
of a post now, and I think I'm nearly ready to start working on the cool ideas I
had for my other blogs.
At least my hair is still growing.
See, the thing is, just do it. It
doesn't matter how long something takes, or how hard it is. All that matters is
that you actually do it, even if you crawl through the whole thing with your
eyes shut trying to hold the sensory overload down. All that matters is that all
the tiny little bits come together and make bigger bits. All that matters is
that I'm the only one doing what ***I*** am doing. No one else in the whole world is making blogs like mine and doing what I do on twitter and saying the things I say. As long as I can say stuff, I think it's worth any effort to keep saying.
