Relentless Drone

Things have been unusually quiet around here. And by here, I mean my head. Since my decision of a few weeks back to put down the world and stop improving, I’ve enjoyed a rare stretch of peace. I didn’t even realize how much my brain chatters at me until it got quiet. The noise, the pressure, the imperatives…gone. The trials, the legal teams, the judgments, the convictions…all gone. It was quiet at last, and I could hear myself living my life, instead of deconstructing it in the relentless monologue.

Ahhh… The good old days. I had a couple of hard falls last week (is that voice the physical therapist who lives in my head, chiding me for no brace, cane, or wheels to keep me safe?) My graduation objective when I last did time in PT was one month without falls. Being younger than 100, I inwardly mocked their low-bar goal. Then it took me a good 8 months to achieve success by staying upright for 30 straight-days.  Initially I eschewed balance exercises (Really? Standing without the wall’s assistance for 30 consecutive seconds was beyond my current scope? Really.)

So I did my time and became wildly successful at not falling down, at least not all the way, at least not without a reason. But the last weeks have been a challenge to my Olympiad identity. As a result of being lazy, or headstrong, or in denial that I was no longer a soccer super-star, I got a little banged up. I am actually a little proud of the bruises and scabs- I feel athletic. But the less fortunate side of any bang-up with MS is nerves that over-react and muscles that forget how to bend. 

I slept badly last night, and woke up aware that I had just spent 7 hours worrying. The content wasn’t retrievable, and wasn’t important. Except that I do remember a dream where I was in what should have been a small car accident only my wheelchair was knocked off the back and killed the woman in the car behind me.  The woman was late 30-ish, driving a mini-van, a busy professional mom type. It was a few hours later that it came to me: A new essay, “The wheelchair that killed me.”  Then idea that what should have been a bump in the road, a small accident, had killed me.  Very obtuse. Sometimes my subconscious thinks she has to spell it out for me.

I woke up with the noisy brain back in charge: Do this, don’t do that, did you follow up on x, have you written the notes for y? Hey Fatty- don’t forget to pay the bills, study Spanish, and exercise. In the next 60 minutes.  I meditated, twice, but my head wouldn’t shut up. I medicated, and the rant was slower but still urgent: Don’t forget to worry about all those things you can’t even remember right now!

Just like that, in the span of 5 to 6 AM, my quiet evaporated. Noisy brain was back, and making up for lost time. So I managed to complete 50% of my morning drill and got to work early, grumpy and exhausted.

Tonight I went out with friends to celebrate Sandra and friendship, and made quite a scene. We had pulled up beside an outdoor seating area at a restaurant, trying to assess how Me-on-Wheels could enter when the friendly staff noticed us and demanded that we come in and join the patio diners. I was willing a sink hole to open up and swallow me into the earth. No, the friendly people said, come in! They started moving tables and chairs, actually unplugged the singer, mid-song, moved the speakers and audio equipment and a heavy potted plant, made a big fuss to be “accessible.” We filed in, performing amazing feats of spatial relations, re-arranged the furniture and settled in. It was a great conversation, yummy food, and when I had to use Sandra as a human cane when I needed to use the restroom, I didn’t really care. It seemed even a little funny,

At one point I was trying to leave the patio and Me-on-Wheels got stuck between a couple falling in love and an exposed pole on the wall.  It was so ludicrous I forgot to be embarrassed. “Hi,” I said, “what are we talking about?” The couple smiled nervously.

“Just kidding. I’m just a little stuck, but I’ve made it through here before. Please don’t let me interrupt your intimate conversation.” We all laughed. It was funny. I was stuck, right on top of, a stranger on a date. We laughed and I eventually made it through. I sat in the parking lot contemplating, its miraculous really, that when you roll through your worst fear, people having to notice me, accommodate me, it’s really just kind of funny.

The others eventually made it out, albeit probably with less dramatic flair, and I thought about the friend we had dinner with. A woman who thinks much like me but has a totally different drone. Her internal monologue is around housekeeping and being at home with her kids. When I was talking about the brief precious time that my inner nag got quiet, my friend looked at me with tentative eyes, and asked “Doesn’t every one have that relentless drone, the conditions that have to be met for worthiness? Doesn’t everyone have it?!”  I completely related, so it was a relief to me too when our three companions each offered that no, they don’t have the relentless drone. It was a revelation verified. Then she told us she might be chucking all of her carefully crafted entrepreneurial plans to become a bikram yoga instructor. She would be gone for 9 weeks and it would empty their savings. By the end of the evening we had gotten to she “would be going away for this training” because she had found her thing, and it wasn’t at all what she expected. She had found her passion, or it has found her, and she’s braving a new path. The way opened. The woo made a path. This was her now.

This is me now. Rolling out to great connections with good friends. Breaking and entering into an intimate moment between strangers, having half a restaurant staff dissemble their patio so that I could join them. Laughing with strangers I’d have been mortified in front of a few short weeks ago. I learned tonight that samsara, our journey, might be a little less suffocating if we stop gagging ourselves with the droning. And mine had some time off tonight. The drone was on a smoke break while the situations that would horrify me kept creeping up and materializing. Me- Now really truly finds the humor.

The drone is quiet tonight. She is surrendering, for now. I know she’s devising ways to infiltrate, and she will. But Me-Now is having a good time, enjoying the silence.

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.