A kid gave me this gem the other day, complete with a dramatic re-enactment:, "Sometimes, I'm saying something and my brain goes zoooooooooooooooop! And I'm like woooooooooooooooh! And then I'm all like... 'what?'"
I don't have ADHD, but this is my brain this evening.
Tuesdays are bad-long days. Thursdays are good-long days. But I'm tired tonight. I was doing just fine, but on the way home from choir practice had a sudden moment that made it weird. Basically, I was just driving along thinking, and then my brain went zoooooooooooooop! And I was like wooooooooooooooooooah! And now I'm all like ... what?
Then that got me thinking. This is actually a thought I have had off and on...generally more off than on, luckily, but it always weirds me out a little bit.
Sometimes, things happen in my body and my brain that I don't understand. Like, I don't understand why I get migraines. I don't understand what the triggers are, and lots of times, I think I ignore them just because I'm not really in-tune enough with my body to "get" it. Sometimes, I'm doing just fine, but then I get overtired, or anxious about something I can't fully name, or I just get panicky for some reason, and I freak out. I don't know why. It just happens. It's all zoop, woah, what? and I'm in panic-land before I know it. Sometimes,I'm goin' along and then I'm cold and can't get warm, and all my muscles get tight, and there is just this profound sense of don't get comfortable or you're not safe that encapsulates me. And then there are times that my body is mad about something I ate, but I can't figure out what, and we argue about it until it calms down. And there are times when my body just doesn't feel right. It's just not right. Everything feels uncomfortable and wrong.
There are times when I'm really in-tune with my body - when I have worked to center and focus and attune myself to myself, it seems, and things are good. All the train tracks run parallel, and life is hunky-dory. Sometimes, though. the train tracks aren't running parallel. One side gets cockeyed and things start derailing before I even know what's happening, and then I get frustrated: maybe I don't know myself and my body as well as I think I do, I think.
And for some reason, that freaks me out.
There are times when that doesn't freak me out. There are times when I think, "isn't it amazing that I've lived in this body for 28 years, and I still don't know everything it can do? Everything it can't do? All of its likes and dislikes and the ways it works? Isn't it so cool that I can forever be discovering and rediscovering and rediscovering myself?"
There are other times, though, that I'm like "I JUST WANT TO HAVE THE ANSWERS! I just want to be able to know why I'm freaking out, or what's going on, or predict what's happening or what might happen next." I like to have that control. It makes me feel more sane.
But life doesn't tend to go that way, does it? Our bodies and minds are intended to forever be mysteries to us, I think. We can get to know them as well as we can while we reside in such proximity with it, but what do we ever know for sure?
The question that is burning me tonight I don't fully understand. I want not to write it, because I don't understand it, and I don't want to go there with it...but my muse is jabbing me HARD with this question, and I have to appease her or I will never sleep. The question is this: is my body really mine?
I could launch into a lengthy political commentary, or long stories about any number of topics, but I won't. Here, instead, I'm going to post this poem:
Our relationships with our bodies are complicated.
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