On Broken Brains
These past 2 - 2 1/2 years have been brutal for me, interpersonally. I have lost several friends with several more heading out. I have watched as many of my closest relationships have deteriorated, and several potential relationships with new people have been poisoned before they even started.
One of the frustrating parts to me is the timing of it all - right when Prop 8 hits, I start to spiral down in several ugly ways. Prop 8 was a wedge between me and others to begin with, but my personal issues suddenly took off right at the same time, making everything terribly worse.
Even in college, all my friends had what they called "Ian stories", events where Ian did something stupid, dense, clueless, or just plain crazy. While I have gotten better in some ways over the years, in other ways, I have gotten much worse. Imagine a robot who does not not get the deeper aspects of sociality, but has to learn what to do in certain individual events through hard experience. This robot cannot generalize its experiences, but has to learn specifically in each individual moment what to do.
I have learned through hard experience what to do and not do in individual situations, but while my ability to generalize is not completely absent like the robot, it is severely hampered. Add the emotional trauma of understanding that I cannot seem to open my mouth without warping every relationship I am in, and everything starts to shut down. I stop talking to people because I already know there is something fundamentally off about me and how I see/say things, and why try to be friends with someone when you know that you will screw it up the moment you start talking? It really sucks.
The good news is that I have recently begun changing the basic problem. A few months ago, I was talking to my mom about my work situation (not enough clients to support the family and can't find a day job), and she said, "Ian, why don't you write more? You're a good writer."
I replied with, "Mom, when I try to write, it feels as though I'm taking a screwdriver, plunging it through my temple, and twisting it in my brain. Putting words on paper (or monitor) is excruciatingly painful. I want to write, but it is beyond me."
After just a moment of silence, she said, "Ian, that sounds like a disability." I was stunned - I had never thought that there might be something wrong physically with my head, I always thought it was just emotional stuff.
Well, we talked to her brother, my Uncle Charlie, who is a physical therapist, working with handicapped kids. He tested me and told me that I am so right-brained that the integration between the right and left halves is really awful. The upshot is - I am super creative, I can teach and have emotions, even understand them, but the left brain, which allows me to take those creative impulses and thoughts and insert them into the concrete world, is almost not present at all.
In social situations, I am running off my right brain, but it is the left brain that allows us to be connected to the concrete situation around us and respond accordingly. The two halves need to be able to talk to each other to come up with appropriate responses. It is also the left brain that allows the creative stories and ideas I have to flow through my hands into actual words. Imagine being trapped in a rich internal world with very limited ability to communicate those words well, and when you do, it hurts so bad that you cannot keep it up for very long, even with things you are passionate about.
Uncle Charlie gave me some exercises to do to help my brain integrate. (As a side note, brain integration occurs when babies learn how to crawl. If the baby doesn't crawl, then integration is very poor. Parents who encourage their children to crawl for as long as possible before walking can help solve this problem. I didn't crawl at all - I pulled myself forward with my arms without moving my legs - called commando crawling - then went straight to walking.) I've been doing them for months, and I am slooowly starting to connect to concrete things better. Writing is coming a little easier to me. I am grasping the deeper social connections better, but the hard part is now I am much more conscious of when I screw up and warp a conversation.
It's like Flowers For Algernon in slo-mo, and hopefully without slipping back again.
For the first time in a long time, I am starting to see a real light at the end of the tunnel because I *finally* understand what has been wrong with me and why. There's still a lot of challenge because the removal of the physiological part of the problem does not remove the emotional trauma nor the deeply grooved habits and thought patterns I have developed after 36 years of living with this problem without knowing why. But with the ability to integrate both halves of my brain is also coming an increased ability to heal the emotional issues that came with it.
Some of my broken relationships are beyond repair, but some of them may not be. I am hoping as I slowly crawl out of my hole and start to be healthy in my relationships that my life will be different moving forward.
One of the frustrating parts to me is the timing of it all - right when Prop 8 hits, I start to spiral down in several ugly ways. Prop 8 was a wedge between me and others to begin with, but my personal issues suddenly took off right at the same time, making everything terribly worse.
Even in college, all my friends had what they called "Ian stories", events where Ian did something stupid, dense, clueless, or just plain crazy. While I have gotten better in some ways over the years, in other ways, I have gotten much worse. Imagine a robot who does not not get the deeper aspects of sociality, but has to learn what to do in certain individual events through hard experience. This robot cannot generalize its experiences, but has to learn specifically in each individual moment what to do.
I have learned through hard experience what to do and not do in individual situations, but while my ability to generalize is not completely absent like the robot, it is severely hampered. Add the emotional trauma of understanding that I cannot seem to open my mouth without warping every relationship I am in, and everything starts to shut down. I stop talking to people because I already know there is something fundamentally off about me and how I see/say things, and why try to be friends with someone when you know that you will screw it up the moment you start talking? It really sucks.
The good news is that I have recently begun changing the basic problem. A few months ago, I was talking to my mom about my work situation (not enough clients to support the family and can't find a day job), and she said, "Ian, why don't you write more? You're a good writer."
I replied with, "Mom, when I try to write, it feels as though I'm taking a screwdriver, plunging it through my temple, and twisting it in my brain. Putting words on paper (or monitor) is excruciatingly painful. I want to write, but it is beyond me."
After just a moment of silence, she said, "Ian, that sounds like a disability." I was stunned - I had never thought that there might be something wrong physically with my head, I always thought it was just emotional stuff.
Well, we talked to her brother, my Uncle Charlie, who is a physical therapist, working with handicapped kids. He tested me and told me that I am so right-brained that the integration between the right and left halves is really awful. The upshot is - I am super creative, I can teach and have emotions, even understand them, but the left brain, which allows me to take those creative impulses and thoughts and insert them into the concrete world, is almost not present at all.
In social situations, I am running off my right brain, but it is the left brain that allows us to be connected to the concrete situation around us and respond accordingly. The two halves need to be able to talk to each other to come up with appropriate responses. It is also the left brain that allows the creative stories and ideas I have to flow through my hands into actual words. Imagine being trapped in a rich internal world with very limited ability to communicate those words well, and when you do, it hurts so bad that you cannot keep it up for very long, even with things you are passionate about.
Uncle Charlie gave me some exercises to do to help my brain integrate. (As a side note, brain integration occurs when babies learn how to crawl. If the baby doesn't crawl, then integration is very poor. Parents who encourage their children to crawl for as long as possible before walking can help solve this problem. I didn't crawl at all - I pulled myself forward with my arms without moving my legs - called commando crawling - then went straight to walking.) I've been doing them for months, and I am slooowly starting to connect to concrete things better. Writing is coming a little easier to me. I am grasping the deeper social connections better, but the hard part is now I am much more conscious of when I screw up and warp a conversation.
It's like Flowers For Algernon in slo-mo, and hopefully without slipping back again.
For the first time in a long time, I am starting to see a real light at the end of the tunnel because I *finally* understand what has been wrong with me and why. There's still a lot of challenge because the removal of the physiological part of the problem does not remove the emotional trauma nor the deeply grooved habits and thought patterns I have developed after 36 years of living with this problem without knowing why. But with the ability to integrate both halves of my brain is also coming an increased ability to heal the emotional issues that came with it.
Some of my broken relationships are beyond repair, but some of them may not be. I am hoping as I slowly crawl out of my hole and start to be healthy in my relationships that my life will be different moving forward.