Brains on Fire

My partner came home from a workshop recently and blew my mind. She'd gone to a talk by a very well-respected psychologist give in which she described herself. As me.  Obsessive, anxious, a semi-secret smoker who writes on spirituality and the mind-body connection, who uses her noisy brain as a vehicle to offer her personal struggles transformed into compassion and hope.

Okay... I haven’t actually read her work, but I'm familiar with it.  I'm embarrassed that I haven't gotten around to reading it, because I would count myself as a fan, I have a sense of the depth and importance of what she does. Pause for self-flagellation.

Here's the part freaking me out the most:  She even used my word.  "Snarky." Such a beautifully descriptive word, a word you don't hear so much as feel.  Outside of me working my word into every conversation (it says so many things,) I have never heard it used by another human being.  She probably uses my other word too- swanky. When I swallowed my pride and got a mini-van, I got the swankiest one available.  And I love it. I do. Minivans make everything so convenient.  But I digress.  On this driving epiphany (why didn't I do this sooner?), I have a personalized plate, "SWNKTNK". Swank tank- for those of you like me, who can never figure out what personalized plate is trying to say. Much to my surprise and disappointment, when I went to sign up for "swanky," it was already in use. "Swank" too.  Sometimes I think I should have named her " SNRKKRT"(snark kart, friends), but that was probably also already taken. Who are these people?

But here is this woman I don't even know, describing my narrative.  It's my relentless drone- she has my schtick.  I need to process this so badly that that I'm pecking it out on an I-pad while my new computer is loading something (it's been loading something, and thus unusable, for the two days I've had it. Design flaw? I am open to contact from Apple). I treated myself to this extravagant luxury, a brand new laptop, because I've been playing with the idea of being a writer.  It’s true that I've always written; volumes and volumes.  This is different because I've always written as an exercise in navel-gazing.  For the last few months my writing has felt different.  Like I'm talking to somebody.  Like my words might be valuable to some kindred souls outside my head. Then I learned that my inchoate identity might be already out there, being spoken by a woman far wiser, more grounded, more impressive than me. Who gives a rat's ass what tiny, anonymous me has to say?

I am intentionally writing this down before I go online and find out about her.  I have an irrational fear that our voices could get tangled up, if she's as similar as I hear, from the person who knows me best in the world.  But then I had an moment of relief--even if we do have the same things to say, a shared narrative, I have something that sets me apart (aside from being far poorer, less articulate, and very un-famous.) I have wheels.  My narrative spins around it's own orbit:  the weirdness of how this bodily incarnation turned out. Not happily; with Zen- like detachment.  Not, unfortunately, proudly (clearly I have a few issues about it), but my disability status (belck) has changed the color of everything.  Maybe I still have something unique to offer the world: A brain on fire, a body on wheels, a noisy mind that takes three simultaneous perspectives on every single thought (“patient,” psychologist, and observer of the conflict negotiations between the first two). With the compulsion to write it all down; to try to weave it in to who I think I am in a permanent way, in ink.

I cannot get lost in someone's narrative, as similar as it may be to mine.  The third perspective, the observer, wants to share what she is seeing. This long identity transformation (I like to think of it as my "wheevolution") is mine exclusively. But, maybe there are more of us out there. In bodies that are erratic and misbehaving with minds that are spinning out, trying to make sense of it. Others who love funky words that have fallen out of use. Others who think that any of this makes any difference at all.  There are three authors I read or listen to because I often think when I run into a really meaningful metaphor or description: ME TOO! Somebody else has the same head-cocked, subconscious-on-alert narrative as me. I love these artists and authors because they offer back my own experiences, translated into language that offers a unique perspective on all I cannot say. Were I to share parts of my narrative with Joan Borysenko, hers would still be different. It would be more Joan-Borysenko-on-Wheels. Or just me, waving my lamp in the darkness, wondering if anyone will see it.  Wondering if my lamp exists at all.