Conversations

 

 

 

Talking.  Like Anne of Green Gables, I have been told too many times, too roughly, that I talk too much.  And I know I do.  I am a verbal processor to the extreme.  I hear, or think, or read the barest germ of a thought, and immediately have to talk it through WITH SOMEONE ELSE to start bringing it to life.  My husband is the total opposite.  He can dream something up, and plan every nuanced detail before he springs it on the world in all its glorious fruition.  Not me.

I have to exhaustively find person after person to talk phase one, phase two, phase three, phase forty, phase one hundred,, of a plan that might not ever happen.  My husband used to marvel at how I could expose myself like this.  But I simply had no choice:  it was the only way I could ever achieve anything.

My mind was always bubbling, always excited, always full of ideas.  And between children, church, and school, I had the perfect places to release all that energy.  It was a lovely laboratory of ideas and excitement building on ideas and excitement.  But the last few years it had reached a crisis point of stress, and I knew something had to give.  So I was enrolling in a Masters of Music Education to get a job at a university as a mentor to student teachers, which increasingly had become my passion.

And then…the accident.

Now I have been totally off Zoloft, my anti depressant, for several months.  I have been off my anti anxiety medication for a long time because that drug, along with a couple of my other medications, set off a terrible drug interaction which caused such severe dizziness it left me almost unable to walk or move.  So..

I’m feeling excitement again, my brain is sparking all the time, I’m excited about ideas.  Because I have dyslexia now, I can’t read books, but I can listen to podcasts and listen to audio books, and I can think about them.  And I love it.  And, along with that, I feel sadness.  And it’s my sadness.  And I love that too . I don’t want to lose that again.

But I’m deeply, terribly, afraid I might have to.  Right now I don’t have a neurologist, but my doctor has requested an appointment with one that I liked the sound of.  I really loved the previous one, but after only two visits, we received a letter saying he was joining a non-neurological practice and, in more polite terms, his patients would just have to fend for themselves.  So since them I haven’t had a neurologist.

I have almost nightly meltdowns now.  This is due to a lot of things, but a whole huge chunk of it is my desperate need to talk with people who I know, and who LIKE me!  I so miss that!  Writing is just not the same.  It’s not collaborative, not a team effort.  And talking is so hard now.  I get so confused, story lines are difficult, time lines are impossible, my speech is still slurred when I get excited.  I dread talking on the phone still, , and I  almost hate meeting new people and having to talk to them.

When my husband is home, he’s always working on something out in the yard where I can’t follow, or it involves equipment which makes sudden very loud noises.  Anyway, he carries such a huge load of guilt and worry about me all the time. He really only seems to truly come alive when he’s working out in the yard or remodeling our house.  He hates to sit and talk.  I used to  dislike it, too.  But that was before the accident. when I could walk and talk at the same time.

Friends have to come to me now.  We live in a pretty isolated area.  Everyone who used to come to our house would always exclaim “What lovely privacy!”  And that’s exactly how it is.  Very private.  How lovely…..except now, when I really kind of need more neighbors.

Maybe the doctor, on hearing this, will put me back on the Zoloft,  Maybe that’s for the best.  If I have no one to run all these exciting ideas by verbally, maybe it’s best if I just never think them.  Maybe.  Because this really is a kind of torture.  I keep telling myself to put on my big girl panties.  Stop being a whiner.  No one is mean to me at all.  So what if no one wants to hear my exciting ideas about _________ just this minute?  Is that really the end of the world?  And then I scream (silently, of course) yeah, to me, it kind of is.  It kind of is.

 

 

Ooof.  I wrote this whole thing last night in a total orgy of self pity, and then I went upstairs trying to flee from the whole world downstairs.  I put on the television to public television and there was a documentary about the history of some genres of folk music.  The particular segment that I settled on was set in West Virginia, and was narrated by a couple of men whose fathers had spent their entire adult lives working down in the coal mines.  I watched those terrible scenes before me, and immediately felt bathed in shame.

I thought I would just erase this whole thing today. But then I decided not.  I am not who I used to be.  I am not  nearly as clever or able to process things mentally well at all.  I get confused frequently, and I get angry.  That slows my thinking down to a virtual crawl.  This  frustrates me EXTREMELY.  I am  in some ways, vastly more selfish now.  But in other ways, I know and recognize suffering as I never did before.  I know I am  in no  way experiencing the limits of human suffering, or even anything close,  but at least now I can maybe catch a dim glimpse of desperation?  Maybe?    I have no idea.  I just know I couldn’t erase what I wrote last night, but I had to write an addendum.  Please forgive me for whining.