The brain fog.

Tape dispensing machine. I love those pretty buttons :)

I am in such a brain fog right now. Yesterday was super windy here in my fair city, and our cherry tree broke in half. I heard something fall against my window, and walked outside to see what it was. By the time I made it to the front door, I'd forgotten why I was there. I didn't see the tree until someone pointed it out to me later. I went to yoga soon after, hoping that some static poses would do well for my static-filled brain.

Being out of school does not bother me. I can fill time like no one's business. But my brain is not my friend. I forget things. I can't think. I spend whole minutes staring at the ceiling. I used to do that because I was depressed. Now it feels like I'm resting my brain, but I haven't done anything to rest from. A friend, who also just graduated from a masters program, told me that her blood pressure was suddenly hovering at a ridiculously low level. I think that this is what biofeedback is all about. Our bodies are telling us that they need to rest, and even though it feels like a complete turn-about from where we've just been, it is a necessary part of the recovery process.

I was in school for the better part of five years, and I got pressed to limits I didn't know I had. So now, I'm just going to stare at the ceiling for a while, because I forgot what this paragraph was going to be about.

Peace out mofos.

I am not an alien.

 

When I was seven or eight (or nine?), at Sunday School, we were asked to draw what our life would look like when we were 26. I wrote that I would be a professional ballerina. That was what I wanted to be; I worked like a maniac to be that person, and it didn't work out. My body didn't have what I needed to go as far with dancing as I wanted to go. Then the same thing happened with swimming. My body didn't have what it took.

So now my life is different that I thought it would be. The faces are different from the old faces. The people who were in my life at ages seven, eight, and nine, are no longer in my everyday life. Not a one. And that is strange. I don't have all the markers people commonly have that remind them who they were, and how they became who they are. That disconnect is jarring sometimes. It's normal for a person in my situation, but it's still jarring.

I talk about this stuff a lot, because it's central to my everyday functioning. Sometimes I have to remind myself daily that I'm still real, that I'm a person. I am not an alien. I am not invisible.

The forgetting

So last night, I watched The Forgotten (2004). It's been on my "want to watch" list since it came out, but I was never feeling in the right mood. It's not worth trying to find a synopsis, or read the reviews. This is an experience film, a thinking film.

This is what I got out of it: We, as humans, live our lives to survive, and sometimes survival means forgetting the suffering and pain that we have experienced. We do this because it's easier. We do this because pain is painful.

But to truly be human, to accept our humanness, is to accept the pain, and not wish it away. It is to feel the full depth of our emotions and feel the horror of waking up each day with the same loss we went to sleep with.

Being human is a painful thing. There is constant loss, and the easiest way to survive is to forget and move on. We forget with alcohol, with drugs, with sex, disassociation, and a myriad of other things. Forgetting is ideal. We pray to forget. There was a time in the past few months when I considered forgetting, when I was encouraged by loved ones to forget. But each time I thought about that prayer, I said [to God], "I'd rather feel the pain, than ever forget the beauty."

I have been told that my "recycling ethic" is about more than surfacey stuff, that in addition to bottles and cans and old clothes, I also refuse to throw away my past. I refuse to stop acknowledging that my past happened, that my life has happened exactly as it has. It isn't pretty, but it's real; and I would rather feel it than ever give it up, because in the giving-up, I throw away parts of myself. And some of these parts are inextricably linked to beauty.

So I choose to not forget, even when it hurts. Because I don't ever want to be without the things that made me, me, no matter how ugly some of them are.