February 15th 2017
I started out with something like “Hello! My name is Johnny Lee Glassburn Smith and I was born in San Luis Obispo, California.” And after a little more than that, I was able to sleep. Or try to sleep. I really don’t remember. I felt good and I felt insane for feeling good, if that makes sense. I was still not being that good to myself, keeping myself down, I suppose. I still didn’t necessarily believe I was entitled or allowed to feel good, maybe. But, I was feeling good. Couldn’t help it. My brain did… something.
Maybe three hours later my Grandma got up. I went out into the kitchen to join her, and that’s when I noticed I was cold all over. Like, something had seriously happened. In bed I was feeling fine. Out of bed I was cold all over. Like, chattering, twitching cold. Yeah, it was weird. But fortunately we had an old heater and it worked great and my dog, Ladybird, and I were able to stay in front of the heater as it blasted us with warm air.
I talked with Grandma that morning and believed I had to be very careful with what I was going to say. There’s a history of mental illness in my family. My mother was a… victim of it. And I learned more of my family had similar issues. So having something happen in my head was a scary thing, even if it was a thing where I started to think “positively” again. I’m trying to say that there was still an incredible amount of fear on my part. I was still very, very afraid. I felt good and I was afraid of why and what that meant. This sounds however it sounds, but it’s true. I don’t remember if I was cold for hours or for days or what. But warmth was a great thing.
I don’t remember how I talked with Grandma either. By that I mean how I approached writing a book. Being supportive, being taken seriously, I don’t remember. I had to write. I had to get this story out to the world. I guess I made some unconscious determination that the story that I had heard from my family told to myself and to other people had to be true. And since that was true, that meant stuff had happened. And since stuff had happened to them, that meant that stuff had happened to everyone. And if we could see that we were all going through our personal versions of stuff we would see that going through stuff was a thing that binds us, so we could then make less stuff to go through and that would make going through stuff different, possibly not as much. As in, people would be going through less stuff. A lifting or easing of pain or burden.
My mind was racing like a motherfucker. It also wasn’t. I was able to focus, but what I focused on I couldn’t really see clearly. Until I began writing. My brain would then focus on the subject and things I had heard and learned would be recalled. Neat. And then I needed to move past those things and then look for where the truth was. Because there would be what people said and there would be what I heard and there would be what happened. And I didn’t know that that was the direction I was going. I was still playing stupid with myself.
For days afterwards I wrote in wonderful spurts of motivation and inspiration and woke up every morning chilled to my core, needing to be reheated. It was dang interesting. In those days I reached out and contacted people, people I had lost touch with. I used the good old social media. And I got some really interesting reactions. Acquaintances remembered who I was. That was a nice thing. Having a meaningful conversation was something different. But it did happen. And I ended up having a very open and honest relationship with a person from the past. It was truly incredible. It burned hot and bright and out by July of the same year. I also stopped writing at the same time. I had gotten overly concerned about crossing some imagined boundary. Don’t get this wrong, imagined boundaries are real, and perhaps they shouldn’t be crossed. Maybe more accurately, you can know what they are and where they are and when they are and why they are and what they mean.
This could also be looked at as having a midlife crisis experience too, from what I understand. By that I mean maybe everyone’s brain does a thing at a point in their lives, the middle point, and it does something to the person that changes their thinking and/or behavior for a period of time. This thing here, the 2/15/17 experience could have been something as average and as mundane as that. But then again, something we’ve decided to call a “crisis” shouldn’t really be taken with a pinch of salt. Also, who knows if it happens to everyone?