memories

Day 151: The Quiet Room

| Aspergers Girls

After yesterday’s post I feel like my panties are dangling down around my ankles. Feeling fully exposed here. I’m not embarrassed or ashamed of what I shared. Long past those emotions. I am human and have had hard times, like us all. But I feel a bit naked in my exposure of self, having had shared such a vital part of my life without much explanation.

I think it is important to understand that at the time of my nervous breakdown I had been on a low dose anti-depressant to control my chronic muscle pain. The medication entirely numbed me emotionally for years. I lived very much like a robot. I couldn’t cry even when I was sad. And I couldn’t feel the depths of my experience. I was in less pain, but had no emotions. I was numb in all aspects.

Being numb to myself had major drawbacks. I didn’t have an off button, or anything to balance my actions. Feeling nothing, I had no way of checking in with myself. I no longer knew exhaustion. I gradually became an over-achieving, control freak. Eventually, I started to despise more and more of who I was, and recognized the real me was covered and masked underneath. I decided, without consulting anyone and without being aware of the dangers, to stop my anti-depressant. In my eyes the drug was serving as a painkiller and little more. I didn’t understand that in stopping the prescription that my brain chemistry would go all haywire.

Within days of stopping, my appetite came back so strongly that I couldn’t stop eating. I gained five pounds in two days. And much worse, my serotonin levels plummeted making everything look bleak. And my emotions, they returned in a mad rush. I felt like I was opening a  storm door of emotions that had all been hidden in an expansive closet for half a decade.

After several weeks, I couldn’t stand the intensity of emotions and my huge appetite—I could actually taste life and food again but was out of control—so I started back on the medication. Reintroducing the anti-depressant into my system led to suicidal thoughts. This is when I ended up in the admissions to the psychiatry ward. I’m not saying the medication caused my breakdown but it definitely altered my brain chemistry enough to push me over the edge.

The Quiet Room

After two colored pills, I entered the last room at the end of the hall. Muffled snores, bleach, staleness—each welcomed me.

I found my bed.  I pulled off my sweatshirt and spread it across the pillow.

Darkness.

I stared up at the shadowed ceiling.

There was no sleeping.

As midnight approached, I stepped through the vacant corridor, light and clumsy, like a puppet pulled by a master puppeteer.  “I can’t sleep in there,” I mumbled, looking at the nurse’s wide forehead.  “I can’t sleep with a stranger in my room.”  I lowered my eyes to her white shoes, long laces, scuffed toes.

The nurse looked me over with a cynical smile.  “What are you afraid of?”

I felt a punch to my stomach.  “I just can’t sleep in there,” I answered.

Huffing, the nurse pulled down her glasses. “Fine, come with me, then.”

I padded down the hall, thinking I might fall down, hoping I would wake up, knowing this was surely hell.  The tall nurse stopped.  She edged her eyes around me, trying to see inside.  “You can stay in the Quiet Room for the night.  But it’s not where you are supposed to be.”

Chastised, I didn’t move.  I knew this wasn’t where I was supposed to be.  None of this place was where I was supposed to be.  She didn’t know me…

The rest of this story can be found in the book Everyday Aspergers.

 

Day 150: The Faded Sun

| Aspergers Girls

The Faded Sun

“Was it your voice or another voice that told you to kill yourself?” the stranger asked.

“My own voice,” I whispered from a mouth I could no longer feel.

I brought myself forward in a chair, a purposeful push, only to prove to myself I could move, that my brain synapses fired.  I nodded solemnly in the direction of a blank white space.  There was a stain in the high corner.  I was unable to focus, unable for the first time to pretend.  I had always been able to follow someone, to take the cue from the people around me.  Here I could not.  Here, though I was clothed, I was stripped naked, paralyzed with the thought that there were no answers…

 

The rest of this story can be found in the book Everyday Aspergers

 

Maui 2012

 

Day 130: The Two Cups

| Aspergers Girls

I recognize this as a very odd post. This second chakra awakening, passion, or transition—whatever words are chosen to attempt to decipher what is occurring for me at a soul and cellular level, is directly related to reclaiming the spirit in me that was lost in my youth. My sensitive nature, depth of soul, and ability to take in extreme amounts, coupled with the circumstances of my childhood, led me to lock a large portion of my self away.

This portion locked away, was largely the part which knew I was beautifull, knew I was worthy, and knew I was desirable. When very young, I learned how not to live, how not to show joy, how to in effect dislike myself and my body in order to survive.

In knowing this now, with a profound awakening on multiple levels, I am holding a cup in either hand. To the right of me is the hope of this now found passion. To the left, balancing my position, are the memories. I am seeing how each feeds the other. The erupting passion on one side, the imploding self on the other. The flame and the joust.

Here I place the cups before you. Experience as you’d like. For we each stand with two cups. All equally balanced in beauty.

Embracing Me

One of the reasons I am taking photos of myself lately is to embrace the beauty that is me. I never have seen me before. Seen how very lovely inside and out I am. This is part of my growth process. My hair is usually unbrushed and I wear no makeup, say lip gloss. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s fresh. I love it. 

Breaking Free
Maui 2012

Flame

Naked

He beckons

The depths of me

Fingers dripped in sweet

Honey-suckle nectar

Lips moist

Dew upon the fields of sunrise

Strawberry mist

Pours through

A damp fire of longing

Reclaims pleasure

Lighting the avenue of discontent

With fierce flames of gentle dragon

Until

Devoured by desire

I taste

The phantom of celestial union

Kissing ghosts

Where we once breathed

Beauty
Maui 2012

Switching the MOOD back to LOVE here. One of my FAVORITES…. This video WILL make you smile. I promise…and this is where I am today…in this state of mind. 🙂

Day 129: How to Love

| Aspergers Girls
Me and my nano

How to Love

There wasn’t any reason to hide, at least not at first.  But I crawled inside my tiny closet anyhow, me and my red plastic piggybank.  Inside the squared-space that was layered in frilly dresses and the smell of cedar sticks, I would hold tight to my piggy and pretend.

At first I could imagine Father was back; and not just once or twice, but all the time.  In my thoughts he’d hold me tight, bounce me up and down on his knee; and  then he’d stand up, grab hold of my hands, and twirl me so fast I’d fly up off my feet.  And we’d laugh, giggle so hard the tears would pearl at the corner of our matching oval eyes, his with the amber light, mine with the deep ebony.

Inside the dark of the cramped space, I’d travel back to my silver-haired nana’s adobe-style house, the one with the red-clay roof tiles and the white stucco face, that sat on a steep hill on Washington Street, a one mile hike up from the barking sea lions basking on the rocks at Fisherman’s Warf in Monterey.  I’d breathe in and remember a time before, a time before I understood how homes, and heads, and hearts could break.

There in my memories, my petite nana scooped me up effortlessly and dotted me in tangerine-orange kisses, while my smiling Aunt Rose Marie squished and rearranged my cheeks.  And stout Nano, after leaning over and flashing his bald spot, winked and pulled on my earlobe, offering out a kindly, “We love you, Little Sam.”

Father was there, too, moving in his own cautious way, inching forward and offering everyone his one-arm embrace.  I’d tried to make him different in pretending, make him hug me tight and kiss my cheeks, but the truth always had a way of winning out.

I’d see us all napkin-bibbed at our seafood feast, so that it seemed with the salty air we were all fisherman sailing the ocean waves.  As we cracked open crab legs and peeled tiger-shrimp, Nano stitched together grand fisherman tales in an Italian accent as thick and refreshing as homespun ice-cream. Afterwards, with bellies filled, we all helped with the dishes, me with my very own floral dishtowel, and my wide smile still swathed in pizza sauce.

Nano took his leave soon, snuck out to the back porch with a big platter of scraps.  Two minutes later, when Nano reentered the house with a lick-cleaned plate, looking more satisfied than he let on, he muttered, “Damn cats.  I hate cats,” and then held onto his belly, gave me a wink, and chuckled.

Sometime after seven, when all the plates were stacked neatly back in cupboards, the plastic tablecloth wiped clean, and the eight-track tape of Italian music drifting through the room, we gathered round the table for a game of penny poker.  Holding the cards proved somewhat cumbersome, but somehow I managed to win every single hand, and in doing so compiled a stack of pennies:  ten-high and ten-long.

“One hundred pennies; look how great you did,” Aunt Rose Marie would laugh.

I smiled with eyes of pride, and then reached down and yanked at my stockings. It was possible, I found out, to stack the pennies the height of my mug of hot chocolate before they tumbled down.  Nana leaned over and braced herself against the edge of the table, saying softly to my father, “You need to bring her more often.  We miss her.  And we miss you.”  Then she looked over at me.  “We have a surprise.”

My dark-haired aunt came forward carrying a plastic piggybank loaded with coins.  Though it was only a smidgen bigger than the palm of my little hand, I was amazed.  For the next several minutes everyone watched, as I cradled the plastic piggy.

“Now you save that.  It’s not to open.  Put it in a special spot.”  Nana turned from me, pulled down her silver-framed glasses, and eyed her son.  “You’ll bring her again soon, won’t you?”

Father nodded and stood up to retrieve my small wool coat from the back of my chair. “Yes,  I’ll bring her soon,” he answered, as I slid into my coat, holding my piggy tighter.

Mother would arrive long after supper, all done up—the fair Audrey Hepburn—her curves hugged by a linen suit of strawberry-milkshake. “Hello, Beautiful,” she would say, fussing over my blue-silk hair ribbons.  I would gaze up at Mother, then, with my deep brown eyes and tug on my braid.  I savored the word beautiful much like I did Nana’s hard taffy candies which left my tongue all purple and sweet.

 

Nana and Nano

Day 113: Goodbye Dead Man’s Beach

| Aspergers Girls

Goodbye Dead Man’s Beach

In the late spring of a bitter windy day, I wiped the grits of sand from my face and stared down below to the foggy beach. This would be the first time I’d see flaccid bodies all lined up in a row, bloated and an almost-blue.  I hadn’t wanted to watch or even glance a little.  I’d wished to run away or at least close my eyes, but I had to see.  This was another coming of a dream.  Some seven days had passed, seven long days of waiting and wondering who would drown.  I knew enough from my past and the way my dreams played out to realize death would be arriving on a Saturday—on a cold, cold Saturday.

I wondered as the workers desperately pressed and pumped on the already dying flesh, why life, or God, or whatever essence gave me these glimpses of future events, wouldn’t also go one step further and allow me to serve some purpose and exist as more than a detached helpless onlooker.   Had I had a magic button to stop the dreams, I thought at the time I would have.  But then I thought I would have missed the dreams in the way I would have missed my arm, or leg, or eye; the dreams were so much a part of me, a needed part, something I’d been born with which had served me in some sense; even though I couldn’t comprehend the reason, even though I cursed the visions and the following reality, I knew enough, innately or perhaps spiritually, to know the dreams were necessary.

The dreams would serve a higher purpose someday, I was told.  Not directly, but in whispers, gentle reminders to be patient, to be watchful, and to wait.  I would cry then, in my teens, in the same way I cry now, when the weight of the world is so heavy upon my shoulders that I wish for nothing but silence and the unknowing, to be like the mother across the street satisfied with her scrapbooking and classroom volunteering, and yearning for nothing more than the simple.

That’s what I longed for:  the sweet simple.

Those dead bodies below on the beach had been a family, the emptied vessels now covered in black bags on the sands below had been minutes before living tourists who hadn’t heeded the warnings posted at Dead Man’s Beach about the dangers of the ocean currents and under-tow.  One boy had fallen in off the rocks, and in response, each family member had leapt to their own death.

I have been terrified of the ocean, ever since the tragedy at Dead Man’s Beach. Add this to the horrific flesh-eating fish dreams I’ve had since I was three, and the time my mother’s boyfriend saw a shark take a chunk out of his best friend. (His friend died.) And I’ve been able to justify not going in the ocean for about twenty-five years.

Yesterday, I overcame my great fear of the sea. As I paddled out into the ocean on my surfboard, I was terrified. I trembled. I almost cried. I almost turned back. But I paddled onward.

I wasn’t planning on surfing at all while visiting Maui. But there I was, regardless of all my fears and misgivings, flat on my belly, in a borrowed, rather-stinky surf shirt, paddling over the waves. And I got up on my surfboard, not once, but at least five times and rode the waves.

They may have looked like little waves to the observer. But to me they were the biggest darn waves of my life.

I’ve realized I have spent much of my forty-some years living on my own Dead Man’s Beach. I’ve been counting my days. Worrying about lurking dangers. Terrified to be happy.

This evening, as I sat in a local bar having yet another fruity rum drink (a new thing for me), the musician played Here Comes the Sun, and I was brought back to a summer day in Oregon, when at the age of nine I was riding in the back of a pickup truck listening to that song. I remember at that age I had an intense feeling of happiness and freedom. It was one of the last times I remember feeling so elated.

Yesterday, when I rode the waves, I returned to that sunny day in the back of the truck. I walked off of Dead Man’s Beach and I found my sun again.

A wise man once told me that he asks everyday: “How can life get any better?”