One of the annoying things about having a BentBrain, is getting an idea or a thought or a poem or a song lyric make its merry-go-round track in my synapses over and over and over until I want to physically reach in and pluck it out.
Last night, the earworrm was the song "Mandy" by Barry Manilow. Today it is the Robert Burns poem "Comin Thro the Rye." These things do not connect, at least in any way consciously, and I find my brain latching on to this newest phrase like a life saver. I do not hear a quiet passive refrain; I experience a pounding repetition of sound and images.
With it, a melancholy shade descends.
My personal BentBrain takes the form of a panic disorder, an anxiety so deeply encoded in my blood that I do not remember a time when I felt completely carefree. Because the term "panic disorder" is clinical and feels rather foreign to my experience, I have named the demon, The Voice of Doom. The VOD comes in the form of a generalized anxiety that wakes me up in the middle of the night whispering every evil despairing thing I could imagine, but it also comes in the Super Charged edition where the room tilts on its side, and all the air in the world is sucked into a black universe, and the real, external world feels distant and untouchable. There is no space for good things and the only way to survive is to hold on and hope it passes. When the VOD On Steroids descends, I neither flee nor fight, but freeze to the core. I lay down mute and alone, because my bentbrain seems to believe that if it stays very, very still, the invisible horrors will pass by and stalk another body in the rye.
When I search through the fragments of memory, I can point to lots of different factors that created my own VOD concoction. My dad is an alcoholic and a drug addict. I grew up in a culture of rape and violence. My earliest memories are pockmarked with images of divine vengeance and a moral sledgehammer. I took a nuero-toxic malaria medication in Zambia for ten months and was then run over by a large F150 truck. I had a traumatic three week experience in a South African hospital. I loved deeply abusive people and left them.
These things are all true; however, the VOD likes to blame. I stand in the rye, alone, and the shadows of death point a gnarled finger back to my fatal flaws. If I were really strong, lovable, kind, good, etc., I would never experience the VOD. Really, in order to be the put-together professional woman, friend, family member, etc. I aspire to be, I would never admit the VOD existed, but instead, forge on.
Keep calm. Carry on.
It really is dreadful.
Fortunately, I have developed some strategies of self care that help resist the power of the VOD tiny bit by bit- diet, exercise, vitamins, water, meditation-- but the improvements are so slow and so infinitesimal that progress is nearly invisible. I also backslide frequently. But I suppose I can call it progress that I mostly stay out of the ER and accept the VOD, with a glass of wine and a fuck you, when it inevitably comes gliding through the fields of my mind. We have volatile relationship.
I didn't mean to write about the VOD today. I thought I would write about the snafus with my new job and new life, but apparently, I needed to work on my vulnerability here in this (mostly) anonymous space.
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