Currently (2023) my most updated blog is everlasing.
Spaz is a useful side blog for sorting other stuff out.
I guess it would be nice of me to come back here and continue with how it turned out. Here are some updates I did on another blog, my little journey through physical therapy for a dislocated jaw. Yes, THAT is why my ears were hurting so bad for so long.
4-20-22 magic
4-27-22 space case
5-5-22 just dance
6-3-22 back on moc
The main results are pain level being drastically lowered and finally being able to sleep with CPAP on again.
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If you are experiencing any of the following, you may be sick and not just "feeling rough".
- 1- crabby and resentful about everything in general, no matter what
- 2- sad and weepy about everything in general, no matter what
- 3- watching slow onset of anything sinus, ears, glands, headache
- 4- digestion is involved in any way, i.e. pain, severe heartburn, intense hunger
- 5- pain level spikes anywhere in spine require extra pain management with drugs and ice
- 6- level of mobility, flexibility, or stsamina decreases markedly, i.e. klutziness increases
- 7- feelings of mean, spiteful, hateful, or anything sarcastically cruel seem funny
- 8- sleep amounts sharply decrease over several days
- 9- anxiety increases, a need to "keep moving" drives you out of chairs and bed to keep 'escaping' the pain
- 10- forgetfulness increases, words during speaking get mixed up more frequently, misunderstandings during others speaking happens more frequently
If ALL these things are happening together, stay focused on needing a doctor appointment.
“I didn’t know that there was untreatable pain.”
Yes, there is such a thing as living in untreatable, intractable pain for decades. I've done it, and I am not alone. Hundreds of thousands of people across the nation live with continual unrelieved pain, and many of us understand the opioid crisis because opioids used to be the gold standard when all else failed.
That quote is from Tucker Carlson this week after an emergency back surgery. Tucker is the most watched news show in America and isn't prone to drugs and alcohol, according to this article.
What Carlson, who said he will never take opioids again if he can help it, found most interesting was what the drugs did to his spirit.
“I had this spirit of fear within me, which I don’t have,” he said. “I’m not bragging, I don’t have it. And I think you can feel it. I don’t have it, I think that’s why I’m successful, cause I’m just not afraid. I felt afraid just of like life or something. It’s interesting.
“It was super deep. And I just haven’t had those feelings since I was in a plane crash 20 years ago this month. I’ve never had those feelings. I’m always like ‘Yeah I’m gonna die, I don’t care.’ And I mean it. But last night I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ Fear—just like anxiety. People who have anxiety, that’s what I felt. And it was from those drugs. And they extinguish the spirit within you. And they make you feel like you’re running away. You’re hiding. It’s so fucking deep. I’m lying in bed filthy with dog toys on my pillow, and it doesn’t bother me. And I’m not that way. Like I am a fucking—in real life, I wash the sheets every day. I’m that guy. I shower every day.”
I've had doctors so inexperienced with real pain that they couldn't understand why I was still complaining with them tossing top of the line addictions at me like dealers, and I found no relief until I scraped together everything I had learned and rebuilt my healthcare team with my own set of goals and standards. I am now off all those meds, thanks to both a psychologist and a very excellent physical therapy team focused on psychoneuroimmunology. I have regained quite a lot of function and my pain levels are lower now without meds than they have been most of my adult life. Other crucial changes were finally getting a primary care doctor who didn't hesitate to fix previous doctor failures to diagnose diabetes and send me to specialists like an endocrinologist for my thyroid. If a doctor is stringing you along on medications and you feel like you are getting nowhere, step back and assess your situation and make some changes. Even in our worst situations, it is up to us to fight for our own health care priorities against Big Pharma dictating what doctors do to us. There are good doctors out there, sometimes you have to grind through humiliating visits as a new patient until you find one.
And then I scared myself silly reading articles on thyroid storm. 😳 I allowed a very fat endocrinologist to let me hover around <1 on my TSH for years, and when I got a new doctor last year she started suggesting backing down little by little. Well, she's changed dosage twice, last summer and last winter, and I still keep going hyper, like .29 kind of stuff. I never would have connected the thyroid dot if I hadn't seen that number. I was chalking it all up to IBS causing my palpitations for months. I didn't know thyroid, IBS, and heart issues are a red flag triad, which you'd think I'd be more aware of since I've been on a thyroid med since my late 20s.
I've apparently written way in the past somewhere about a monitored double hormone crash I went through in 2012, starting around Mother's Day and lasting into the summer, but I can't seem to find it so I'm going to write it out again. I had been on birth control pills for years, those raise blood pressure in general while blocking thyroid hormone, so I was on a big load of beta blocker and a pretty high dose of synthroid just to keep things steady for 2 decades. As I aged, I kept getting 'breakout' blood pressure spikes to the point where I was labeled a 'frequent flyer' in the ER and landed solid notes about hypertensive crises. One month got so bad after years of heavy estrogen monitoring to control female problems that a gynecologist suggested getting OFF the birth control, and the next year I had a uterine ablation to stop bleeding altogether. But in May of 2012, simply stopping birth control sent me wildly skidding through super hyperthyroidism, since it was no longer there blocking thyroid hormone, and that in turn super spiked my blood pressure surges, heart rate, and especially anxiety attacks. So, my endocrinologist monitored me also stopping my thyroid pill, and I went into the craziest freefall, monitored by my psychologist. He kept talking me through feeling crazy, through feeling like I had snapped hard into a nasty midlife crisis, because thyroid can affect everything about mood, emotion, and cognitive function. As my thyroid slowly ramped back into normal territory, my blood pressure spikes slowed down and finally mostly stopped. I was put back onto thyroid and blood pressure meds and monitored over the next few months to make sure I had stabilized.
That endocrinologist had me convinced that my TSH could go as low as whatever as long as I felt ok, so I learned to not even concern myself with it. Years of him ignoring my questions turned into my own complacency. Granted, he saved me from a previous doctor that kept allowing my TSH to soar completely off range in the other direction (she also failed to diagnose diabetes, opting instead to pile handfuls of pills into me and monitor me monthly for more antibiotics), but over time he kept adjusting my dose up until I was at the other extreme. Because of my years of learned complacency with him, I've been tolerating a couple of years of palpitations that have become a bit alarming, and now I've got the full range of symptoms of hyperthyroidism.
My newest doctor, been seeing her for about a year now, immediately checked me for vitamin D and found I was very deficient. She also added CoQ10 and has been monitoring several areas of improvement over the year. One of the biggies in my improvements list was being able to get completely off antihistamines after years of dependency. I'm currently getting through what some consider to be a particularly nasty ragweed season without much more than allergy eye drops and occasional nasal spray, not even every day. I'm not fighting snot or experiencing the usual raw throat or anything else.
So now I'm wondering about D and CoQ10 affecting thyroid health and running into articles about Hashimoto's being a curable inflammatory disease with genuinely proper (not govt directed) diet and proper (not FDA directed) nutrients. I'm literally watching my Hashimoto's either getting better or crashing into runaway hyperthyroid. If hyperthyroid symptoms abate by simply adjusting dosage on my synthroid down, I'll be leaning toward healing.
I've written a few times that I haven't had an autoimmune flare since 2014. I've documented across blogs that I made a plan in 2008 to create my own health team and learn how to be healthy. It's taken years to clean off prescriptions and change my diet and deal with getting some exercise in a body that was once granted full disability with many legal restrictions because immobility was so bad, and I've gained enough back to not only actually hold a grandbaby (I dropped everything for years), but to walk the floor holding a baby for a solid month. I have years of blog posts bringing up losing my hands and arms to nerve fail.
So watching my synthroid dosage being adjusted DOWN 3 times in one year is blowing my mind. I'm finding articles other people have written about being able to get completely off thyroid meds because they regain normal function as they cut inflammation down throughout their bodies.
If someone told you it was possible in your older age to get back to normal health, would you believe it? On the one hand, you've got a carefully constructed medical system designed to dismiss actual curing to preferably control illness symptoms indefinitely, regulated by insurance companies that can kill noncompliant careers in medicine, all directed by big pharma, the FDA, and the CDC establishing what is 'good' for us and 'bad' for us and anyone coloring outside those lines is harshly belittled and sometimes (in the case of whistleblowing lab techs and doctors) 'disappeared' or 'suicided'. Once in awhile it's an obvious murder, but it gets buried pretty quickly in our daily (hourly) 'news' onslaught. On the other hand, you've got a few people trying to keep getting the word out that there are real cures, and they are cheap and easy and being withheld from us. Once you take a step back and really look at this situation, it looks really... suspicious. Makes a person wonder if govt control is really about taking care of people, or about something else, maybe. Like a lot of politicians and CEOs being millionaires. And possibly worse- like state control?... We know what state control is in other countries, but would we recognize it in our own?
I keep hearing there are real cures for cancer, too, that don't involve dangerous 'treatment' that costs you as much health as it purports to give back.
One more thing, for you prostate guys, bless your hearts. Have you ever heard of any other organ in your body needing to go through 12 core samples at a time through the most infectious area of your body in a nonsterile office setting? Imagine 12 holes punched into that little bitty organ, how bloody and shredded that would look from the organ's point of view. Imagine if someone did that to any other organ in your body under those circumstances under the guise of 'looking for cancer'. When you really dig, you find out the real numbers in the graphs, percentages of genuine lives saved vs % of men with no cancer at all who wind up incontinent and with ED for life as side effects. Add sepsis to that and I think any of you would be stupid crazy going through that. If a woman had to go through something like that detecting breast cancer, there would be a worldwide uprising, but men keep docilely letting the medical industry rudely shove bad science up their butts.
The word 'science' has been destroyed for me by consumerized medicine. I don't believe in 'medicine' any more. I believe many doctors genuinely care and want to help their patients, but I'm seeing a number of doctors rising up around the world pushing back against a variety of codified treatment options that squeeze out real healing. Do no harm, right? Well, the entire industry does plenty of harm.
Science is showing me that I had two different doctors letting me fall through the cracks. It's time we all started paying more attention to who needs to be taking responsibility for our health care. Basically, we the people.
I'm one of the lucky ones lately. I finally have a good doctor measuring the root cause of inflammation in my body as opposed to simply tossing prescriptions at me helping me to live indefinitely with it.
When you find out, after 30 years of that level of 'health care', that all of your suffering through the years could have been prevented, it's on you to not keep going back to that and allowing them to be the boss or your health. YOU are the boss of your body. If you want to learn how to heal and feel better and get well, start researching. Really look. Spend time reading, taking notes, comparing informations, and coming to your own conclusions. They've been keeping us helpless and blind, and although they turn it into 'courageous victories', they also put people through demonstrably outrageous amounts of suffering. When you find out the cancer cure patents being blocked by big pharma contain far less suffering, will you be outraged?
I'm obviously having that looking back moment where I can see now how controlled I was to the point of nearly complete immobility and sanctioned addictions for many years. A few years of physical therapy and a year of vitamin D have done so much for me that decades of medical compliance never did.
I don't know how else to shake other people awake, so I'm telling you my story. If you feel like life is hopeless, I have years of blog posts demonstrating that a person can go from the darkest depressing life of pain and misery to not only hope, but to real healing. I'm not selling anything, I'm not pushing anyone else's products, I have no agenda other than we all really need to wake up and realize what they are doing to us as a mass population. We are so easily controlled through pain and fear, and that part they really do have down to a science. If science seems questionable and lame, it's because the real science is about keeping us complacent and controlled. One could (and should!) ask why and keep digging.
Maybe this is part of a really good answer.
https://channelstore.roku.com/details/aa3de745ff08e379788fbc59ad31574a/plandemic-indoctornation
Originally published at Basically Clueless.
I learned during my sociology degree that we 'brain map' our social constructs so that we can retain context on all our relationships, personal, social, work, school, etc.
Part of my #brainfail through my life was being unable to retain this ability to remember my own timeline, much less map how I fit in with everyone in a continuous stream of change over time.
I've been working on this for decades, and I think I'm finding a way to piece it together in a working map. In my mind I'm constructing this map in a 4D kind of way, perhaps 5D, since it covers changes over time. In my mind it kind of looks like a cosmic event map in 3D but with an added timeline so that the map model can change by rolling forward or backward in time.
I didn't know most of my life that I'm a fragmented person. They used to call it multiple personality, now it's dissociate disorders of varying degrees. As I've been waking up to my 'selves' and learning to share info among my fragments, as opposed to feeling locked out of my own long and short term memories and confused and disoriented, I've been very slowly piecing together the points of impact or breakage, as it were. It wasn't at all clear, especially since most of the fragments are independent enough to take and absorb life hits on their own, but over time I've been using a free association technique that allows me to 'randomly' tiptoe through my head, and learning to stop and let my 'head' talk back to me. That's more simplistic than it really is. Learning to recognize reality sifting down through simulated materials aka the way we process and retain our memories and then tell our stories back to ourselves has been a meticulous and very sketchy process taking several years, as evidenced throughout my blog fleet.
Part of the challenge has been more than one of us learning to do this and leave trails for each other, sort of like leaving notes or tag tabs for other people in a big project. Imagine working on a very large project over a very long time and never seeing the other people coming and going, and every time you come back to the project, things have changed and you either get a shift change log with not the greatest notes or nothing at all, and you try to pick up where they left off, which requires quite a lot of redundancy. That is what trying to piece together a bigger picture of a fragmented person is like.
For the most part, I'm very stable nowadays, rarely switching back and forth. And I can tell nowadays when I do because of the headaches. When I get sharp stabby headaches out of the blue that dissipate just as quickly, sometimes with a sick dizzy feeling that also comes and goes just as rapidly, I am dealing 'on the fly'. For years I would fret that those feelings meant something horrible in my body, like illness or stroke or whatever, but now I know it's simply a high stress moment being taken over by another part of me that can better handle a situation. Sometimes I'm cognitive of sharing space and sometimes I'm not. Most times I retain most of those memories, but they can get a little blurry. It's like I'm there but sitting on the sideline taking a break.
"I" is not always the same person. I figured out awhile back that we take turns writing in blogs, sometimes paragraph to paragraph and even sentence to sentence. Even when I had no clue this was going on, we were all chipping in together. Writing seems to be the way I talk to myself, or share my head with me. Many times I've gone back through blogs and read things I don't remember writing, or sections that seem surprisingly 'other person' chiming in. Any of you who've read through a lot of the old stuff probably saw sudden continuity breaks and just thought that was poor writing, lol. Well, I'm not a poor writer. We just don't all agree on when to stop talking, apparently.
So this summer I have figured out more of the free associating feedback, and it feels like the others are becoming a little more open to being stalked 😂, so we all seem to be building a common map together that helps show us where we all fit with each other.
In my mind, I was explaining to a fictional figure in an ongoing alt life reality (some might call it a dreamscape or storyboard) that a few key mes were like epicenters during fragment events, and they became their own color families. I think that explains the pinkybluejacky thing, and why Jacky is stuck on which color of blue is the best, azure, cyan, royal, or sky. Lately we've noticed that soft mint and rustic orange together seem to strongly evoke memory fragments, as well, so however an event cracked that current local landscape at the time, they evidently got color mapped. I realized a couple of decades ago I am synesthete and seem to map many things in my life around hex charts, including blogs, and that each color family strongly attracts or repels other parts of me. We seem to be socially grouped. The blue/pink treaty involving Jacky and Pinky happened a long time before I became cognitively aware of the significance, and now I recognize it as a shaky alliance between the two strongest personalities who fought for control most of my life and finally settled into sharing enough space to stabilize. This settling happened with my second marriage to a very patient and forgiving man who doesn't make a big deal out of my weirdness (this is where men emotionally ignoring women can come in really handy), and now nearly 3 decades into this marriage, I'm finally getting a bigger picture mapped out.
The actual traumas are incidental and fantastically boring to me by now, plus they've been written out all over my blogs, so I'm not going to reiterate anything. I do recognize that Janika is an epicenter that happened in the '80s, and that was so rough that I lost being able to map a continuous timeline for 11 years. I think all the really significant big stuff happened long before that last one, most of them during my childhood at various points over various very overwhelming events, but the key is realizing that two of the stronger personalities umbrella'd over and took control of successive fragment events. Jacky seems to be a parent figure for a few 'kids', and Pinky is the mom as recognized by other 'kids'. Claudia and Lydia respond and defer to Pinky making decisions and handling things, and since Pinky was universally recognized in my head as the interface with real world for several years, it was probably natural to become cognizant of those fragments sooner than others. Janika seems to be very rogue and is responsible for some of the 11 year messcapades, along with Yablo. From what I can tell, Yablo is a latent mostly nonverbal 'Loki' figure nearly completely disconnected from anything tangibly emotional to the rest, and probably saved our lives a few times during Janika's plunges into various miscreant behaviors. Not sure, but I think Yablo is the one who wakes up during surgeries and drove home during the heavy drinking. Yablo shares space easily enough, but without the emotional connections, the contexts are always sketchy. Yablo was around for a very long time before getting named by one of my sisters. Janika was named by my child when she was 4 years old.
Jacky and Pinky go way back to very early childhood with their own continuous timelines of memories. Janika doesn't have memories before the 80s, making me think that epicenter was from my friend being murdered and then the immediate dissociation for years. Personally, I think Yablo was already around and probably helped stabilize Janika from going over addiction cliffs, but just barely, certainly wasn't out of worry or caring, more like having a friend to pal around with. When I look into those two I can kind of see the switching off. Janika never passed out, ever. It was like Yablo could bypass all that and take over and drive. Those two easily shared space and have common memory trails, so as I've been learning to free associate back into my past, I've been able to pick up on that buddy system between a couple of ne'er-do-wells. At the root of that, Yablo is responsive to Jacky. Pinky and Yablo don't ever seem to cross streams, which may be the bigger cause for memory holes in Pinky than anything. Pinky is emotional, Yablo is simply unattached emotionally, so it's like they are mutually exclusive. Yablo also doesn't fight for dominance or control. Jacky, on the other hand, is very dominating and fought with Pinky for years over control, even though Jacky is flat effect. Jacky may be "the cat that walks by himself" (Kipling), but Jacky does care deeply that things not go off the rails and considers Pinky to be weak when situations get stressful. The only thing Pinky remains strongest over Jacky with is being the mom. Jacky isn't really mom material and probably lets things slide more than they should. Since my first husband and that whole mess came hot on the heels of my friend's murder, whoever was occupying and controlling head space at the time was clearly not being supported by Jacky until the epic control fight that saved my child from that marriage. I'm still not able to access that very well, even though memories come through clearly enough to know what was going on, so I can't help wondering if the 'kids' were muddling through that on their own with a dash of Pinky here and there. I just know my head was such a mess that I couldn't logically think through anything. That was before Janika started drinking, so it wasn't alcohol. It was more like still being in shock, nothing felt that real to me except having a baby. That was real. And the fear was very real once we realized we were very much in danger and that my kid was being so abused.
I can see how and why some people can't see reality around them when they are in bad situations. If they are already fragmented from abuses, the parts of them that recognize it just shut down out of some kind of weird psychological protection. It's hard to wake that up and then do something real about it, especially when danger gets overwhelming.
Anyway, my map looks like an undercurrent of babyhood that one of me calls Sasha for lack of better information, followed closely by a couple of epicenters that cracked Pinky and Jacky (and possibly others) into existence, and then a short few years later Lydia and possibly another, and then another few short years came Claudia. The ages look a bit like baby/toddler, 3 years old, 7 years old, and 10-11 years old. I'm only guessing, they just feel like that. Lydia is the one who started having the witch nightmares, calls them witch-cats, and she never talks out loud when she pops out, but she sees everything. Claudia is the crabby fighter personality who remembers how to kill things, rambunctious and argumentative. Not sure who the 'kid with the bike' is yet.
I have clear memories that go back to babyhood. The memories that we all share before fragmentation events are the strongest. I've been learning to go back in time to before those events occurred, finding the shared memories, and then sorting out the fractures as I slowly move forward. At each fracture event a new part of map emerges, and events with strong epicenters seem to reorganize the continuities into new behavior group patterns. Figuring out how each of my fragments relates to all the others has been a real puzzle, because over time they change, just like relationships do with real people around us.
One thing I've been learning is that just because a personality seems to be latent for a long time doesn't mean they are inactive. They are literally part of a real time brain, a whole, and it doesn't just shut off like a light switch. Even latent personalities can hear, see, filter, and incorporate information into themselves even if they are not sharing cognizant space with other fragments. They may be a little lost in time and confused in place when they do present, but they aren't stopped and started again like a dvd player. Each fragment is part of a real person, and it's rough feeling left out of the loop and suddenly having to deal in spite of a big gap of continuity missing, but that personality being out and active might be a crucial development in dealing with something. Whether we are cognizant of each other or not, each fragment is important to the overall stabilization of the whole person.
Part of mapping some of the fragments into relationships has depended heavily on our willingness to share feelings without self recrimination and even self harm. Jacky and Pinky intensely disliked each other for many years, to the point of sabotaging each other. If you have a disorder wherein you are self sabotaging, you might want to look into a duality playing out that is seeking common ground. You may not be fragmented as such, but you may need some kind of reconciliation therapy. It's ok to forgive yourself. That was a very important part of my own processing. Parts of me are OCD level perfectionists, other parts of me are life fail depressionists. That battle between two conflicting personalities only made things worse. Learning to share space with agreements not to inflict insulting judgements and guilts on each other was a huge step, and reaching a place of understanding that the root of that bitter fight all along was Jacky loves Pinky so much that Jacky would force Pinky into submission out of harm's way so Pinky wouldn't cry was utterly heartbreaking. That was a real thing, and reaching that place broke down a lot of barriers.
This is a repost from my PinkFeldspar blog. It's originally part of a movie review, but so much of this section is a reflection on what it's like living through what I call 'brain fail' and 'glitchy brain' that I think it needs to go on spaz blog where other medical posts are collected. If you get distracted and want to see more about this movie in general, you can find it among my #TomCavanaghWatch posts.
This is super random like a writing prompt and not intended to be part of the review, and is especially super spoilery if you haven't seen the movie yet, so go watch it first before you wander back.
I've blogged before about movies / TV shows and characters being how we emotionally connect into stories that we personalize while we deal with or process our own life journeys. The movie Sublime that I have reviewed recently has been one of those uncanny connects for me.
I spent years publicly blogging my own 'mess' of 'glitchy brain' fail that began, in part, in 2004 with what my doctors assumed to be a viral infection on top of years of autoimmune challenges. That is one of the layers I've been processing through. When this happens to an already fractured mind from childhood trauma and a lifetime of PTSD, I'm here to say it can be pretty devastating but survivable.
I'll jump right in. When George asks to be taken on a tour of the broken East Ward presumably under construction, he doesn't realize he's surveying his own brain fail. I've had numerous dreams like this over several years, it really does work like this when you are trying to figure out the problems that you can't see and your brain starts helping you consciously assess internal damage from the point of view of an entity that isn't human like you are, because it's existence is lived as an organ that processes data. Oddly, brains can't just type us notes, so they 'simulate' scenarios. If we break it on down, a brain as an organized entity is itself made up of numerous selves that continually work on construction and vital systems management protocols, like securing and shipping energy and oxygen. When shipping and/or nutrients are interrupted, the entire system can plunge into massive fail.
A brain is a living thing that wants to work properly. Like a machine, it runs automatically without our cognition, but like an AI, it connects to us and talks to us in dreamscapes, riddles, visuals, experiences. Our brains can interact with us as a separate entity from us, yet still be one with us. Consciousness, arguably, is not completely dependent on the brain, although the brain is how our consciousness is able to interact in this world reality we see around us with other people in it.
During this tour of the East Ward, George chances upon a room full of files, a sort of archive of information. It is organized but the version is outdated, a hard copy backup of a digital system. He finds his own file with his name on it, and in the very thick file he sees hard copy of many organ and tissue assessments. This is literally what the brain does, in one sense. Our brains know everything conceivable about what goes on in our bodies, that is their job. When there is brain disconnect, or fail, that information can stop being updated, or even be lost, and the brain automatically fills it back in with real time information gathered from what we'd think of as diagnostics. I went through this when I went through central nerve fail and memory glitching. I could feel this happening. Sometimes it was painful, most of it was maddening from a conscious aspect. I didn't know what was happening, but over time, with very patient inner communication, I was able to consciously piece together my own archive of thoughts and reflections about what I was experiencing as my brain was working on healing.
Let's talk movie clues.
When George is arguing with the care team (in his mind, since the IV bag fluid is milky white), the date on the file he found, according to the medical lawyer (a brain perspective trying to share information to his consciousness), was Feb. 29, 1947. That was not a leap year. (That had also changed from what he saw originally.) But there is also a name connected to that file that George thought was his, that actually of George Spelvin, if I heard that correctly (I could be wrong, I suck at transcription). If this is the case, then the pseudonym and nondate are key clues, along with the unidentified bandaged man that George thought he saw murdered, are really himself as an empty slot. The file contents are his own brain content being interpreted, the file identification shifts between the time he discovers it and later argues with the medical lawyer. His 'evidence' is slippery, and his brain is filling in the lawyer's words with substitute answers. Is his brain updating in progress, indicating more loss? Or is this like a dreamscape where hope plays tricks and information is slippery anyway? In any case, his brain itself is aware of loss, but communicating that into his consciousness isn't easy. George is in full fight or flight mode by the time he seizes out during his brain slamming another fail simulation at him, his necrotic leg. That scene is a giveaway since necrosis to that extent takes time. The brain is screaming that it cannot find his leg, it cannot connect and assess, but in George's consciousness (in his vegetative state), it becomes interpreted as a diseased and then missing leg.
The mystery of problem solving inside a broken brain can send a person hurtling around an emotional rollercoaster. It's hard. I was very struck by the opening theme by Bird York, Have No Fear. It's nearly impossible not to have fear when your nervous system is part of the breakage. It's like living inside downed wires and massive grid damage when you can't move around correctly or easily speak what you mean. It's like feeling trapped in a maze of confusion, so much fail going on and no way to share the fear in a way that nets back badly needed emotional support. And sometimes that support is so misunderstood in all the confusion that one can only recoil back into solitude. I have thankfully never experienced a vegetative state, but at one point I made the decision to wrap my mind around preparing for the what ifs of a complete communication sever. The intuitive response is to fight, that can translate into combative patient and poor treatment, and I chose to bend my will toward remaining calm, accepting, and pleasant, trusting what I could not trust. That is very hard. (The key to accomplishing this is to, as George found, wrestle one's demons, face the truths inside that we refused to see, and acknowledge our life fail of allowing bad things to happen, very much like a life review.)
Add to all the confusing emotional rollercoaster the jumble of real life still coming at you, the torments and persecutions of judgments from people all around you, whether those are perceived correctly or not. George reliving memories of his birthday party, assuming he was even remembering correctly, was part of the big puzzle, many pieces that needed reassembling before he could cognitively understand how to take action months after a medical accident. To recognize that he had this power to make a decision was a giant lightbulb after so much misery.
One thing this kind of life challenge wakes you up to is information. Information in general from everywhere, everywhen. Time has no meaning when one is compiling information trying to restructure. Sorting things like timestamps comes later. I personally developed an obsession with timestamps because I lost my sense of time. What I discovered was compiled information.
Using twitter as an example, I am unable to keep up with real time linear interaction flow. For a long time I couldn't keep users straight, much less their personal information that made them unique. I learned to use the twitter search bar with keywords and hashtags to pull up a time order for users and particular thoughts, and I was able to remember the timestamps for some reason. I noticed that a person might say 12 different times over 4 years how terribly sick they were, and then at other times say they never get sick. In their linear experience, they might not remember, while they are in a vital healthy phase, regularly picking up seasonal colds that last a week. I could easily pull up their histories and see that while we are in linear experience mode, we are in the moment and don't pull up all the files. Once we step out of linear experience mode, we can see all the files more easily. Well, I crashed out of linear experience mode early in life when I started dissociating, and parts of me are 'research hounds', obsessed with finding and knowing information for various reasons. Add a 'brain crash' to that and I felt like I simply dropped out of humanity synch with world time. I used social medias like twitter to see the rhythm and try to slide back into it (like jumping into an ongoing jumprope game, perhaps). I'm still not very good at that and eventually let go of trying to keep up in real time. I live in my own real time now.
We cannot explore all the files this way until we step back from in the moment reacting. George tries to react in the movie, but he's lost his moment and can't find the way back to that moment. He's stuck on a moment unaware that months of time have been passing, trying to problem solve what went wrong with very minimal access to information. He can see the broken parts, and he can see the diagnostics, but he can't see how he himself fits into that.
What he didn't expect to see were the jagged details of collected memories exposed in the brokenness, his demons, if you will. Evidently, George was very aware of the political divergence going on around the world that supported his real life success. He was aware of the human abuses going on that supported capital gains in his world. He chose not to 'see' them while he was in the moment. He believed he deserved his success because he had earned it himself. Likewise, he had chosen not to really 'see' or be cognizant of how his wife was feeling. The simulations are valid communications about his fears and feelings and situations, but since he cannot translate them logically, they create panic. His fear grips him and then all he can think about is feeling trapped and wanting to escape.
I can say that level of vividness is very real with 'broken brain' stuff. It's catastrophic to realize we are stuffed full of information that we don't even know we have. All our brains are absorbing all the things all day long. Good things, bad things, all the things. We might consciously choose to focus on our own interests as the days go by, but that doesn't mean all this other information collecting going on constantly is being deleted as overage. It's all still there, and it's all important. Why are things we ignore important? Good question, especially since humans seem to universally experience compelling life review phenomena.
When I see George really noticing these political atrocities among his jagged broken East Ward, I see him realizing the reality of what hadn't been real to him, real people, real lives affected in the kind of life he had been constructing for himself. Whether they were actually fallout from his own financial decision making is probably beside the point, because who could know that. In general, however, there was a connection, he knew it was all connected, and he chose in his linear in the moment life to not see those connections. He turned away from taking responsibility. That this is affecting him so much in the dreamscape simulations is a very strong hint that he went out of his way to stifle these feelings in his everyday life. He stayed busy making money, probably nightcapping his way through his marriage after long days of wheeling and dealing. I can't judge since I don't know, but it's looking like the rude awakening after the brain fail was a seething pile of guilt he managed to lock away for years.
How one heals from a broken brain, assuming one has that option (like me), can involve a very deep dive into cleaning out one's soul. Pulling everything out of the closets of the mind, sorting through it all, repacking and organizing- this is all inherently part of healing when a mind scatters into pieces after the structure crumbles. Restructuring is rebuilding. I think at one point I compared it to reassembling a building piece by piece out of the original materials without a blueprint after it had been blown apart. That was so many years ago I can't find which blog I wrote that on.
:edit: Found it. "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." Dec. 27, 2012
Having our consciousness interrupted from illness or injury is a terrible thing. I compared losing my intellectual capability to beautiful people losing their good looks to some calamity, which we all know can be very devastating. I became very dumb and spent years crawling back from that. I consciously could not logically piece together my own history. I've had to wait while my brain heals bit by slow bit.
In George's case, there was no more healing. Nothing more could be done to cross back into the 'real' world of linear in the moment with his family. He had healed just enough to become minimally aware that he had a choice whether to stay or leave. Whether he was truly cognitive of his family around him is unclear, and as messed up as his awareness was anyway, we'd still only be guessing at what he truly was aware of at the end. However, he did seem, inside his head, to be aware enough of himself to reject remaining in that state. Even on life support he managed to 'escape'. There would be no way to measure if he truly did that or if his brain just stopped working, since he was considered to be effectively medically unable to ever respond again.
I could be like Fangoria and talk about Sublime's "health scare plan", but I'm not going there. I do think it's valid, though. Click to go check out issue 261 published on 9-28-19.
This is a very long post, but it's a huge truth reveal in several parts. This is not the first time I've written about these things, which can be corroborated with other timestamps elsewhere, so if you see this published anywhere else without my name on it, it's not with my permission.
Since so much is coming to light with underground anons and odd news items starting to break the surface in mainstream medias about how prolific sexual abuse is across politics and entertainment, which seems far away to many of us and therefore not really 'real', I've been thinking about bringing the focus closer to home in the way of personal experiences.
This is a mental health issue. For the nation, for every state, for every city and town, for nearly every household. Definitely for the world. The statistic when I was working on my masters degree in college was three of every 4 people are sexually abused by the time they reach adulthood.
I was personally not traumatized sexually as a child (that I know of or remember, backed up by how ridiculously naive I was about sex right up to adulthood), but I'm surrounded by people in my own household who were. What I'm sharing here is an example of how closely this touches us all, how blind we can be to this being all around us. This is important to grasp because, as a nation hanging on to the 'news', we might find ourselves feeling pretty rattled over the next 6 months as dark information comes to light. This is nothing to be ashamed of. We have all been trained en masse to cover up secrets. Society protects its own, and unfortunately, high ranking society isn't immune from some very dark secrets.
Part 1
I was a virgin when I married a pedophile. I had no idea what that even was. I was in a bad place emotionally after my best friend was murdered and I managed to move forward in very narrow tunnel vision. I was not aware during my 4 years of marriage to this pedo that his nieces and nephews had been accosted, that incest was rampant in that family. There were hints and the usual red flags that never quite came out saying THIS HAPPENED, and I was very normal looking past those because I didn't understand them due to my lack of experience.
My first hint was an old doctor, who was doing my first ever pelvic exam, literally pulling my husband into the exam room while I was still in stirrups to show him I was still a virgin several months into our marriage. I had been feeling pretty sick and apparently was riddled with STDs. In spite of this obvious evidence, that old doctor practically spat me out the door insinuating I was the bad guy, and I went home crying. My husband was completely off the hook while I was completely lost in what just happened.
I gave birth at a local hospital when I was 21. A patient being wheeled down the hallway, who apparently knew my husband, lost his temper and nearly jumped out of his wheelchair threatening to beat him up, alleging that it wasn't cool to knock up 15 year olds. I confirmed I was 21 and married to him. I was too naive to realize back then what that could possibly mean about my husband's reputation. He was a handful of years older than me, and for some reason I've always looked much younger than I really am. I guess I made an unwitting cover for him...
When our kiddo was around maybe 8 months old, I often found her hiding in odd places being very quiet and still, like by the water heater. Sometimes I wondered how she even got in there. About that time, several other things happened. I got my first taste of spouse abuse to the point of permanently damaging a nerve near my left rotor cuff. (Much later, years of physical therapy finally gave me relief from unremitting pain my entire adult life.) Our daughter also went through a spell of severe constipation. One evening after the initial attack on my arm, during my dissociating pain shock, I heard her screaming in the bedroom and wasn't able to respond. I knew my husband was back there and would take care of her so I didn't worry. It never entered my mind that anyone would purposely make a child cry like that. A couple of weeks later I stumbled across a locked trunk he'd always dismissed as junk from his deceased father, picked the lock, and discovered a wealth of the nastiest porn like nothing you ever saw on retail shelves anywhere, including kids. He was so angry with me when he found me looking through it that I became afraid of him. Within another week I had moved us back in with my parents. I was too rattled to tell anyone.
As my husband started establishing with the county health department that he was unable to work (the scheduled visits all returned negative confirmations of his list of problems, which were obviously psychotically based on TV shows and other people's stories of having a metal plate in his head, a rod in his spine, plastic kneecaps, etc.), I got work and we moved back out again. He watched our kiddo while I walked down the street to a drive-through fast food franchise. A couple of months went by before I found out he was driving all over the county with our 2 year old and a friend of his while I was at work. She confirmed years later that he'd been trafficking her to his brothers and other acquaintances, which explains the weird strangers walking up to my daughter and I during grocery shopping and going on and on about what a doll she was and they'd like to take her home. I didn't have a clue what they were talking about, but it felt over the top and creepy.
During this time, the longer we were away from my parents, my husband became more and more hostile to me at home, he and his friend humiliating me whenever I was off work, kicking my butt with their boots and laughing, which hurt. I was afraid to say much because he always had a black powder pistol on him, within reach, or beneath his pillow at night. He took to watching out the window on nights he couldn't sleep, gun in hand like he was waiting to be raided, and maybe he was. He had also started bringing home other people's guns to take apart and blue, hanging them from the shower rod, so I had to skip showers before work. Eventually a coworker approached me about him stealing their gun and I simply said go talk to him, not my stuff.
As our marriage weirdly transitioned into something out of a TV show, our little girl started stumbling a lot. I started paying more attention, worried that she might have a developmental issue, and caught him tripping her, pushing her, even slamming her fingertips in a door. When he thought I wasn't looking he'd giggle or stomp away mad each time. I grew more fearful because his behavior was so strange. One day I walked in from work and he was peacefully sitting on the couch watching TV while our little girl screamed in the bedroom. He seemed completely unphased. I went back and found her turning colors from screaming so hard, her diaper was soaked through, and when I pulled it open I was extremely shocked to find a long pubic hair in her diaper and she looked a little swollen. With a terrified rush, I realized I had confirmation of everything wrong and quickly changed her before he could see that I saw, because I knew in that moment he was not above killing me. He had accidentally killed before during a hunting trip, according to one of his crazy stories everyone blew off. No one ever really believed that, in spite of his expert marksmanship and obsession with guns. I quickly arranged a babysitter while I was at work and demanded the one car we had, saying I'd lose my job if I were late walking again. I made sure only I could access her and pick her up, all without really confronting him, using excuses and acting dumb. I knew we were both in danger.
I wasn't sure what else to do so I went to a neighbor for help, the wife of an officer in our church. She suggested I stop watching so much TV. I was so crushed that I went home dying inside, not daring to cry openly where my husband could see. I tried to hold everything together for about a month until one of my husband's sisters showed up at the door demanding to know if I was a whore or just stupid, and she was really angry. I knew in that split second I had an ally, even though we weren't friends at all, and told her I guess I'm stupid and I don't know who to trust. She sat with me at a clinic to check my little girl out for abuse, but by then she was healed up and no one was able to confirm. I look back and wonder if she showed up because, with my child being more protected out of my husband's reach while I was at work, maybe her children were more at risk from their uncle.
One of my big unmistakable clues that the danger was rising was when he walked in one night, held a stolen rifle to my head out of the blue without saying anything, and didn't move at all until I rolled my eyes and turned around and ignored him. He held that position about ten seconds longer and then lowered the rifle and stomped away down the hallway without saying a word. My heart was thumping really hard but I didn't cry or act freaked out or anything from that moment onward through the rest of our marriage. I knew his crazy head meant it and somehow I called his bluff. If I had reacted at all, I have no doubt I would have died that day. I think he was really pissed because he hadn't had access to our daughter.
After that, I knew I needed outside help as soon as possible. I went to the health department and asked for a referal to a specialist for my child under the guise of developmental issues. I was still so naive that I didn't understand when, instead, they suddenly confronted me about the faint bruises that were nearly healed on her arms actually being cigarette burns (I'd grown up in a nonsmoking household and had no idea cigarette burns could look like that and argued that my husband just gripped her too tightly) and they said they were going to take her away immediately. I negotiated hard and fast, saying I'd have my husband out of the house within a week. I was so fortunate they were slack enough to allow me to leave the building with her. I quit my job that very day and asked for help from a lawyer who went to my church. He helped me map out a legal plan to get my husband out of our lives without rocking the danger boat. First he helped me file for legal separation on the spot, the rest would be waiting a few months for that to pass through court uncontested, and then hopefully proceed to divorce without visitation, and a big part of that sliding through successfully would hinge on not pursuing child support. It would be tricky, a long game, but he defined the goals and coached me how to behave to reach those goals.
After that visit with the lawyer (quite a lot in one day!) I picked my daughter up from daycare for the last time, telling them I quit my job, then went home the rest of the day. I was so glad my husband wasn't home when I first got there so I could set up a play area and get ready to face him. He walked in about an hour later after his friend dropped him off and was very surprised to find my daughter and I both home instead of at work and daycare. I explained to him that I had taken our daughter to the health department for stumbling so much and they were going to take her away on the spot, and here's where being brave gets really hard, and since I've lived it, I believe it when other people say how hard it is to get out of bad situations. I had to lie straight faced and act convincingly naive to a man who was already abusing me and had showed ample evidence he might hurt me very badly or even kill me. I babbled on how I couldn't understand what they were talking about, but I said ok and quit work and said I'd be staying home with our daughter myself and they'd come check on us in a few days, and within a few minutes he was packing, saying he needed a break. I never found out if he thought he might be caught for child rape, but I played stupid and nice and signed the car title over and told him come back when he got his stuff figured out. Once he was out of the house, I started packing myself and moved back with my parents. After that, it was a game of legally baiting him to out himself as a psycho while he signed away custody. He wanted visitation, and on the advice of my lawyer I insisted on a psychological assessment with the condition that he must sign a release for me to visit with the psychologist afterward before he could see her.
While I waited for that to roll out, I did take kiddo to see her daddy one time after he got a place in town, mostly so I could confirm how he was doing. He took me on a tour of the backyard and the house while she played, and didn't seem at all phased to walk me right by an unmade bed with a big pool of not quite dried blood across the sheets. There was no way that was someone's period. I nearly had a panic attack at how blatant that was, how unaware he seemed to be about that affecting anyone. I told him he got lucky, it was a nice house, and he seemed proud of himself. Once we got back to the livingroom with kiddo, he almost started slavering, insisting I go shopping and he could babysit. I laughed and said no, I'm not shopping today, but I brought you the rest of your things, which he seemed happy to see (they were really more of my own things, including his favorite record albums), but then started pressuring again for me to leave for awhile. I rattled on while I ushered our daughter out the door, down the little lane, through the gate, and by the time we made it into the car he was hostile. I don't know how he refrained from putting hands on me, maybe because we were so visible while we were outside of his house. I just kept playing really stupid and got away.
He complied with the request to talk to a doctor at a mental health center, and I was able to visit with that doctor in private another day. From all accounts, that doctor believed everything my husband said, but I had come prepared. I expected that because everyone believed him about everything except when it was something 'ridiculous' like accidentally killing someone, which he didn't bring up with that doctor. Everyone really believed he had suffered through terrible things and horrible surgeries and had a metal plate in his head, a rod in his spine, and plastic kneecaps, including this doctor. The doctor even felt sorry for him, telling me it was a pity that he was unable to work. He was very surprised when I pulled a stack of papers out of my purse, and I started asking questions. Did he tell you when we got married? Yes, he did, and the doctor read the date from his meticulous notes. I laid our marriage certificate on the desk so he could see the date was wrong. Did he tell you our daughter's birthday? Yes, he did... I laid the birth certificate down. I asked question after question and laid down paper after paper. Every single fact my husband had told that doctor was wrong. I made sure that doctor became aware of the health department referral findings about there being nothing physically wrong with him. And when I reached the end of that stack of papers, I put them all back into my purse and said Thank you, that is all I needed to know, and smiled, standing up to leave. The doctor had looked more and more worried through the visit and suddenly seemed very anxious, asking Can you get him back here? He really did look worried, and I hadn't even told him about the guns. And I said, Sorry, I really can't, and I walked out. This is proof that you cannot talk to someone during assessment and know the truth about them, no matter how many professional years a person might have under their belt. This is also proof that my family and neighbors believing my husband's words over my own only shows how naive and gullible people everywhere really are in the presence of a mentally ill person. Society as a whole, in my opinion, is far too trusting. We should all be more aware of our neighbors than saying they seemed so nice and you can't believe they did something that bad when the police come for them.
So, obviously, I was married to a quackadoodle who compulsively made things up continually, confirmed by a number of doctors, and after that I screamed at him that he would never see his daughter again, and he hasn't. All the same, I had to remain very stringent for years watching out for possible kidnap, especially after a niece of his warned me in a phone call that he'd found her school, and she told me a man was watching her on the playground.
None of that helped anyone else believe me about the sexual abuse. Even my own mother called me a liar. So that's a real thing, unless people have literally been through something traumatic or know someone who has, they cannot process it as 'real'. I was alone for years unable to talk to anyone, and ostracized by my church as a divorced woman.
Anyone can be a bad guy and you'd never know it. If someone comes to you asking for help, don't blow them off like they're lying and making up fictions. Never trust anyone with your kids no matter how nice you might think they are, because you. don't. know.
Part 2
You know what, I'm going to put parts 2 and 3 in a follow up post.
A person I know on twitter posts these numbers every single day. I think these are U.S. numbers.
You matter. 24/7 Suicide 800-273-8255 Sexual Assault 800-656-4673 Domestic Violence 800-799-7233 Child Abuse 800-252-2873 Drugs/Alcohol 800-662-4357 Veterans Text 838255 for VA help Trans 877-565-8860 TTY 800-799-4889 Crisis Text START to 741741 for trained volunteers
I also made these links one year on a blog post. They should click out.
If you need someone to talk to right now- *click*
international suicide hotlines
national domestic violence hotline (U.S.)
veterans crisis hotline
24 hour crisis hotline (depression)
If you feel alone and trapped, find ways to let someone know you need help.
Article- Can a black dot on a victim's hand help tackle domestic violence?
Got another one of those random calls from yet another publishing company today, didn't bother picking up, but I looked them up. That snip clicks out if you need to see the screenshots. 😂
I think at this point I've shared so much stuff for free that I may as well share the rest for free, maybe slap a book together another year (or ten lmao).
Years ago, when I first started blogging publicly as an aspienado, I wrote aspie lovin' (recopied here for mobile viewing), which got way more hits than it should have. I mean way more. Back then, xanga had internal tracking available and I was able to see it. I'm not going to copy/paste it here, but it's a cute story if you want to check it out, how crazy mixed up I get with social interaction in a relationship and why the word 'cupcake' still cracks me up.
A few months later I wrote self stim (recopied here for mobile and later shared on Autisable). I'm not going to recopy that here, either. In the comments section in that middle link in the previous sentence, someone commented that they thought they were the only person in the world to have this problem, and I left a lengthy reply with a history of how I 'came out' about my sexuality with link backs, so if you are one of those weirdo full blown synesthetes on autism spectrum and other complications, hi, me too.
So to quickly recap, I was born a mess and it may have affected my brain a little bit but not so's you'd notice that much on an MRI or cognitive testing, right? Except for empty sella and the headaches I've had all my life, everything problematic I've ever gone through growing up boiled down to either me being 'different' (not a compliment back then), or being a weirdo. On the other end of life now, I have some solid research backing up some of the things that have sexually haunted me my entire life. I can't definitively say what caused what, what exactly are symptoms of which thing, but I've got pretty good ideas how to sort it all out now.
So the big problem behind everything that I rarely talk about is spontaneous orgasms and persistent genital arousal disorder, which is hilarious given that I'm super asexual by nature. This is a very tangled up thing that I tried bringing up in therapy, but the push to have to define myself was so odious that I had to drop it. I'm not against defining and sharing, I'm just not that verbal all the time (thank you, autism spectrum), and when I am, I wind up talking too fast (thank you, euphoric episodes). Throw in another person processing the convo and it's really not long till we're off in crazy land arguing about what I'm really going through.
I started out born with deficits. I am socially deficit (whole cheer section in the back just shouted out at me, we all know I suck), prosopagnosia (face blindness) didn't help with building relationships at all anywhere any time in my life, autism lending to self stim (totally normal for auties as, I argue, a compulsive need for tension relief that isn't perceived as sexual by tiny children), and on top of all that, I have some weirdly brain wired synesthesia. I mix sex up with everything.
You cannot orgasm without a specific brain chemical, and once you orgasm, another brain chemical is released. The whole process usually follows a physically logical sequence of events. You fantasize, you touch someone, you enjoy them, you climax.
Not me.
As a child, all it took was someone angrily yelling and my anxiety would pop like a cork and there I'd be grinding on the floor trying to escape. I could vanish in my mind. I was gone. I didn't know for many years that I was dissociating, and that was the fastest way I was able to cope without melting down and winding up being punished for the extra chaotic noise I'd be adding to theirs. That was a coping mechanism to avoid pain that didn't make any sense to me. I didn't connect cause and consequence for years, so I didn't learn how to deal with the environment around me like I should have.
Let's throw in a monkey wrench. At some point, I must have had a back injury, who knows when or how. I skipped crawling. I dragged myself across the floor with my arms, they called it scooting. I have no idea why I didn't use my knees. When I decided I was ready to walk, I just stood up and walked. This back injury has showed up a number of times throughout my life, and each time I have been unable to walk. This is a consistent story in my life. It happened when I was a preteen, I think, all it took was a high jump off something to paralyze me in screaming pain. A chiropractor relieved the pressure on the nerve and I walked out after being carried in. That happened again three more times as an adult, with extensive physical therapy the last time it happened.
That pinched nerve area can be seen in this article. 👈 I've been through years of complications with that nerve, including such rough lower abdominal pain that I ran in to check for bladder infections sometimes monthly. I always turned out fine. I had severe groin pain off and on throughout my life, feeling like I fell hard in a bike accident or something. I never talked about it because anything involving genitals was so taboo back then, especially in our house, that I would have felt like a sinner just bringing it up.
Between tension in kindergarten and elementary school and that compressed nerve, I almost pathologically aimed for swingset poles on the playground. Just gripping my legs around them and pulling myself up to the top was nirvana in my poor brain, and I'd be so 'gone' that staff would have to come get me and pull me back into class crying in full meltdown. Any time I'm asked about excessive masturbation as a child, I feel so pissy that I can barely talk. That wasn't masturbating. That wasn't sex. That was a very small child with no coping skills desperately needing pain and stress relief. If we remember me talking about being born addicted to darvocet and having to live on donnatal (one of the ingredients is a barbituate) just to hold food down as a baby, it starts to make more sense that my brain was hard wired to overfeel everything as pain.
I'm not sure how I made it through puberty, but I severely lacked cognizance of any kind of sexual attraction all the way up through high school and beyond, which would have been very surprising if anyone knew how ridiculously my life was run by spontaneous orgasms the whole time. I saw it all around me, kids schmoozy and dopey all over each other, and I just sat there hiding continual orgasms out of the blue making it hard to think, although I amazed my gym teacher in high school when I shimmied up a rope right into the rafters one day, and jump pressed 800 pounds another day. I was exremely strong from all that private exercise. I would have died if anyone had ever found out. I wasn't shy, but I was brought up to be mortified over anything untoward, as the prudent might say. I had enough stim practice to outlast a nymphotic slut, and just no one ever knew.
I've brought this up before, but I was in my 20's before I realized I'd never visualized kissing anyone. This didn't stop me getting married, which was surreal. Never get married to escape your parents, that's dumb, and it backfired horribly. I was so inexperienced with sex that I didn't realize for years I'd married a pedophile. That's a scrapbook for the ol' burn pile, right?
I didn't consciously realize until my 30s that I was literally being sexually triggered by weather, colors, smells, architecture... It was highly embarrassing to be flipping through a home magazine in a doctor's waiting room and suddenly freeze into hiding orgasms because I saw a certain rock wall in a picture that was a certain splatter of grays and random patterns. That magazine was so spellbinding I almost brought it home. I kept sneaking peeks back at that page. Seriously? Yes, very seriously.
After I noticed that's all it took, I started keeping track of areas inside and outside of buildings that caught my attention. For some reason, certain colors and patterns in architecture (not all the same) set me off without warning, and it's so pleasurable just being in or near that building looking at the colors and patterns that an hour could slip by and I wouldn't notice. Guess what. There's an article.
What Is Sex Like for Someone with Synesthesia?
Given how long ago that was written, I'm surprised I didn't find it sooner. I guess I never thought to look it up, lol. I'm just disappointed that they confine the question to actual sex and not unrelated stimulus.
So you get a person with a pinched nerve, wonky brain wiring, social deficits, and a life fraught with tension and anxiety, and life is one long frustrating orgasm. 😂 I'm sure there are people out there who would pay good money to have this problem. And now I'm looking back on my life processing all the things I went through and realizing the impact this had on all my relationships...
Most of what I did socially for a long time was mimicry, because I don't seem to have a natural instinct for empathy. I'm clueless, so I sit there listening when people yap on about whatever, and I've been told I'm the best listener. Sadly, I started drinking heavily after I divorced the pedophile and wound up in some really stupid places with not very good people. I was still so unaware of myself socially that I didn't recognize red flags that should have been popping up, so I wound up raped a few times and nearly raped even more times. I got smart enough to see it coming and split the scene, but it took awhile to connect all that poor behavior around me to cause and consequence while I floated over it like bubbles on the tide. Because of this, I've walked through some dangerous places nearly unscathed, oblivious. I can't help but be very thankful looking back that I was so asexual that I never hooked up or bonded with anyone else who would have dragged my life down like my first husband. The only real exception was an affair I pursued more out of loneliness than anything, but the fallout blackened my heart so badly that I called quits on trying to have another boyfriend of any kind.
My second husband came from an arranged meeting and friends/coworkers pushing us to go out, and the deepest thought I had on that was surely they would at least have some sense of what would work out for us, because he was kind of like me, socially distant without much of a clue how to go forward after his own divorce. Not exactly a match made in heaven, but fast firm friends. It's been 30 years now since we first met.
We are not an average couple. At all. We rarely talk about sex, neither one of us can smoothly initiate, we're both kind of klutzy with anything in the aura of romance, and we're both too naturally honest to pretend feelings about anything. He can't lie to save his life, I always know. I think our biggest challenge, besides coming into another marriage each having a premade kid and all the ways we've been affected by extended family, is that we laugh too easily. Especially me. Everything is funny to me, because it's so cartoony. I'm sorry, but sex is hilarious. Everything about it is so dumb, like living memes or something. I cannot to this day get past the word 'frog' if it comes up in my mind for any reason whatsoever during sex without completely destroying the mood with laughing fits. After a few years of that, Scott told me it takes a brave man to continue in spite of a woman laughing in his face the entire time. Just writing that has me stifling giggles, I can't help it. He's right, he's a very brave man with superior focus.
Sooner or later, everyone on the planet experiences a glitch or problem in the 'plumbing', as it were. Some are born wonky, some develop wonky, some age wonky. Then if you have a sex partner of any kind, they may or may not have their own kind of wonky, and then you top it all off with whatever physical and mental/cognitive challenges we have that either twist things up or just flat get in the way of dealing with wonky.
Dysfunctions are part of life, same as heartburn and headaches. It's not a big deal unless you have attached a big deal to it to begin with. If you are using sex to express love and fail to express love any other way, you're going to have a really hard time when things go wonky. If you use sex as your entertainment and don't have any other diversions for pleasure, you're going to have a really hard time when things go wonky. You can do this all day and fill in the blanks
My life should have come with a warning label, since everything I got through is inside out and backward. I can't even imagine having to be married to me. But conversely, same with my husband. He came with his own baggage, as well. We'd both had previous messed up relationships, and we both had deep secrets about our childhoods involving trauma and abuse. It wasn't sexualized abuse for either of us, but it was every bit as traumatizing, so there were parts of us already closed off to sharing long before we met.
Everything we hear about marriage (and you can apply this to any sexual parnership) is about trust and honesty. You can have surface trust and honesty and still have none inside of you. Since a sexual partnership involves such interaction as allowing a person to learn how not to hurt you both physically and emotionally, it's easy to come into that already behind a fortress of safety. Some of us must operate that way because that is how we survived earlier grievances, but that doesn't mean we can't be kind and mindful of each other, even when we can't seem to share what we really need or prefer or like. Anyone who has been through emotional and physical abuses instantly understands what I am saying if they have consciously addressed processing their past. If you haven't dealt with that yet and shrug it off behind a firmly shut door, you cannot understand any of this because you are too closed off. When you are like that, you are using the other person, not sharing yourself. There's a fine line. You can love someone with your whole soul and still be using them because you have a demand that lines are not crossed, and you may not have even consciously addressed those lines. I think more of us are like this than we are willing to admit. Life on this earth kinda sucks and by the time we finally reach a place where we really long for soul-deep love, we are so closed off we cannot figure it out.
That was the kind of wall my husband and I ran into in our 30s, early on in our remarriage with previous kids, family all around inputting their negative opinions, challenges galore, and me dealing with my health issues while fronting that I could keep up. Which I couldn't, so there was a hurt pride thing going along with judgment from negative outsiders and my husband caught between all that. It was natural at that time that he'd fall back into old behavior patterns. Sex was about the only time we could seem to set some of that aside and just touch each other, so bringing up any more problems in that light was tantamount to taboo at that point, because it wouldn't have taken much more to completely break our marriage. That was our last option for managing to stick through the other challenges we were going through, and even though neither one of us could think wisely on it back then, I see now that our kindness of simply not beating each other up too much over sex fails was part of what saved us. The rest was sheer stubbornness, I think. 😄
But for real, first it was me, then it was him, then me again, and the times where sex was easy and good were rare. I had that back injury flaring up here and there on top of arthritic and other pain and some really monumental headache spells, and he developed a weird ongoing erectile dysfunction that could have gone back to injuries as a kid, and when we both overlapped these problems, sex was rough. His doctor told him the best way to treat his problem was to keep having sex, but there was no more information forthcoming from either the doctor or even my husband. We stopped even talking about it, just did it. It was up to me to establish what the lines were for my own pain, which became so excruciating at times that the only way I could orgasm at all (even on my own) was to grit my teeth and own it. Searing nerve pain ripping up your nervous system right at climax is a pretty big challenge, but there was no other way for 2-3 years. I was at a place where that pinched nerve was so bad that I had to drag in to years of chiropractor and then physical therapy just to keep walking, and that entire time I went through complications that felt like an arrow had been shot through the top of my left foot whenever I simply sat down, horrible sciatic flares, bearing down pains around my pelvic floor, groin pain like I'd been spiked, bladder and uterine pain that had no other cause or malady, just lots of pain. Sex was hard because any kind of new pressure in any direction anywhere increased the pain spikes, and then for some reason, orgasm itself was a fresh hell all on its own.
In reality, sex wasn't causing me any actual harm. The logic of sex, actually, was that I needed the extra strength conditioning to deal with that level of pain. That was before much could be found on internet, before we knew how to state our needs simply to doctors (my husband rarely saw doctors anyway, so we were on our own), and before we both made emotional breakthroughs about our pasts. The most logical thing I could think of to get through it was 1- kindness, and 2- patience, both of which I'm not naturally good at. I focused on problem solving, because that is what I was born for in this brain, and I became a sort of director- move this way, try that, slow down, wait a second while I, and sex became a clumsy couples physical therapy session with a very simple goal of either one of us just making it to climax. I wimped out sometimes, couldn't face my own pain, but I made sure he made it. No more laughing over frogs popping in my head. No more distractions. We literally went through undiscussed sexual workouts with each other for at least two years. Over time his erectile dysfunction worked itself out and he's fine, and over time my back grew stronger and healed from the pinched nerve and I'm fine.
That is what life partners DO.
As more time has passed and we've made individual emotional breakthroughs about our pasts, it's easier all the time to hang out and just be friends. As I've gone post menopausal and he's gone more diabetic, we've both become uninterested in sex together, which is actually pretty normal if you look around, but as far as I can tell, we're still fine. I take care of me, I assume he takes care of himself if he needs to, and we don't fret with each other over it. This house is our sanctuary and I like that we respect each other's space.
So now I'm learning about coconut oil and estradiol, because being post menopausal sucks for complications coming with dryness. It's interesting how treating dryness is affecting the arousal disorder, and that in turn is affecting depression and euphoric spells, pretty sure all these are linked through brain chemical processes. Got my little roller coaster going, but I seem to be doing ok with it.
Beyond that, everything in my head now feels like review. I feel like I'm coming up on the 'final', like when you're in college and the end of semester test consumes you. I feel like it's time to go back over everything I've learned and assess how I did with it, and then come to a conclusion about 'my stuff'.
After sticking through a major commitment to a relationship, I can honestly say I'm glad I stuck through it. Aside from feeling like we accomplished our goals getting the kids raised up right, I feel satisfied that I did my human duty learning how to apply what I learned about becoming a more kind person to the one person I committed my life to. That's not an easy thing. We went through years of wanting to call it quits, long spells of barely speaking to one another, things like that, but as water flows under the bridge, time cycled around and we can look back on that now with a few jokes. I can't imagine it having been better to split up, given all the problems we had that we'd have had to face all over again with new partners. I have to say I've been very lucky because I wasn't stuck through all this with someone abusing drugs or alcohol, he never got snotty hateful with me, never struck or pushed me around. We did have a bad day here or there where I'd be told what a drag I was on his life, and I'm not saying that was a good thing, but it was a real wakeup call for me because I really was a jerk sometimes. He didn't need me being a jerk on top of all the stuff we were trying to get through.
For whatever reason the world has become like it is, we have, as a society, been strongly brainwashed into believing that our sex lives are the measure of our happiness, and that we deserve to sex up ourselves any way we wish for fulfillment. I'm here to say that idea of sex is a drug. It's an addiction. I know what sex addiction is, I've lived it. Thanks to my crazy brain, I never turned that into anything selfish, like many people do. There are loads of people out there whose driving force in life is their next sexcapade, in or out of relationships, and some turn that into money making schemes. They model glitzy lifestyles like sex is all that and a bag of chips so they can make money off others, and boy do they get rich. Many of us fall for the glam of it, even if we don't fall into that abyss itself, and bring that home to apply to our own partner judgments and fails, and that isn't fair.
Sex is the most honest doorway in to your soul. If you are honest with yourself, you can see exactly what kind of person you are, could be, choose to be or not be when you use sex to rummage around in your mind and dig up your past. Why? Because sex is the fastest way our trust and honesty can be destroyed. Even if we are never sexually abused as children, the way we are taught to behave sexually can be very mind numbing to how we really feel in our souls later in life. Because I have this weird sense of self in a weird brain, I can see all this clearly. I can see the rubble strewn path others have to pick their way around just to meet me in the middle and talk about these things.
Kindness is logical no matter where you are in your own path. Kindness to yourself, kindness to others. Failure to be kind is our first mistake in any situation.
(Since 'peaceful protests' are messing up our minds, I'm going to insert that kindness also means protecting your loved ones when others will hurt them. It's that simple when we get down to the minute and second of that possible last breath of life, for those of you still freezing up over making decisions like that based on fear of reprisal.)
I bet you guys thought this post was going to be about all my really weird sex stuff, like object fetishes. 😂😂😂
If you were digging the soul stuff, this vid is pretty awesome.