Pickles Taught Me the Art of Self-Preservation
I was not suspended in a timeless brine like my pickles. I was not a stoic javelin of cellulose waiting to strike a bored palette. My answers would not be in rigidity, in control.
I was not suspended in a timeless brine like my pickles. I was not a stoic javelin of cellulose waiting to strike a bored palette. My answers would not be in rigidity, in control.
Can I trust the sparse memories in my long-Covid brain? If I don’t record this, will my Frankenstein-ed memories escape, just like Grandma’s did?
When your brain is presented with a scenario, it makes a decision: Does it file this moment away as a unique event, or slot the information into an existing pattern?
What if we thought of emotional trauma the way we do physical: as a wide class of wounds whose healing is unpredictable, whose scars take different forms?
Shame alley-ooped my fear. I worked with children and I had a mental illness. They were antithetical.
In order for bread to rise, the dough must be strong.
The psychiatrist said that there were plenty of people whose brains did much the same thing mine was doing. He called it ‘anxiety.’
My dyscalculia turns counting a difficult task. So, to get to know them, I turned numbers into people.
Knowing and understanding that I’m autistic has given me the strength to experience the excess of empathy that comes from reliving my vivid, video-like memories.
The language of depression can be curiously maritime. It comes in waves; it drowns us; it’s the Mariner’s albatross around our necks.
“How do I teach her letting go, when my hands are still gnarled in the shape of everything I’ve ever lost?”
Try to give it to a stranger. Try to feed it to the dog. Marry it.
“Migraine is deceptive pain. It lies when it begins, and it lies about what it signifies. It signifies nothing.”
I’ve gotten incapacitating headaches since I was a kid.
On the gendered aspect of conversion disorder, how it might have historically manifest in nuns and mystics, and the strange comfort of being diagnosed.
If I collect Oma’s memories, if I truly remember my grandmother, I too can retain what is slipping away.
Keep a notebook of all the ways things could go wrong so as to curb expectations.
“It is a bewildering and lonely thing to be so attached to another human and also feel so adrift and so alone.”
Our communities lack fundamental solutions to the scars of complex trauma.