"Maybe it's not just me who's weird....Maybe we're all weird in different ways." - from Nightbooks, by J.A. White It sure has been a hot minute, hasn't it? I stopped posting because I was scared into silence. Barely hours after I posted part two of my "origin story," as it were, I was denied for a promotion at work for the third time. Coincidental timing? Perhaps. Was that a risk I was willing to take? Not at all. So I stopped posting, just in case. A few months later, I was able to move forward with my career in a different location, still silent and wary and wondering.
In the past two years, mental health and neurological disability awareness has grown in leaps and bounds ("Can't imagine why," she lied), and life, as it so often does, decided to see how much it could throw at me. There were mistakes, upheavals, lots of stress, and even a near-death experience, but there was a whole lot of good mixed in, too. Those are the moments I try to keep fresh and bright in my memory. Then came March 2020: the month the entire world went to s#!t. ...You know what? Everyone reading this is probably old enough to know what profanity is, so I'm gonna go ahead and stop censoring it. The entire world went to shit. Now, a month on, everyone's mental health - my own included - is fraying at the edges. I mentioned in my backstory posts that the game American McGee's Alice holds a lot of significance for me. There's a little more to it than that. On the absolute worst of the worst days, when my brain was all over the place and I wasn't sure I could handle it anymore, I played that game. Because to my badly-wired brain, the chaos of dark Wonderland made sense in a way that the real world didn't. Playing Alice, to me, was meeting chaos with chaos to reestablish order. Alice kept me steady when I couldn't keep myself steady. It was escapism, but not quite, because it felt more like I was traversing my mind rather than escaping/ignoring it. It's not an exaggeration to say that Alice played a huge role in saving my life (the other key player was the music of Evanescence, which will be its own post at some point). I found myself at breaking point today. I was at work listening to my catharsis playlist, but it wasn't doing its job. I was stressed and fraying and feeling like at any minute my brain was going to go off the rails in ways it hadn't in nearly a decade. Then a track from Chris Vrenna's soundtrack for Alice came on: "Time to Die." I immediately calmed. It was like someone had flipped a switch in my head, dampening the noise from a shriek to a murmur. I could breathe again, and time was flowing normally. And I almost chided myself for forgetting my brain-stabilizing resources, but it's been so long since my brain was that dangerously chaotic. I've been listening to a combination of the Alice soundtrack and Evanescence for the whole day. The soundtrack is playing as I type this now ("Late to the Jabberwocky"). (As a side note, if you want some idea as to how truly faulty the wiring of my brain is, I used to listen to the Alice soundtrack to fall asleep. If you've ever had a listen, you know that it is very much not sleepy music.) Why am I telling you all of this? Because now more than ever, I need to map the road not taken. Everyone around the world is struggling right now. Most everyone is trying to stay positive, but it's not easy, and we're not always succeeding (yours truly included). But this darkness that everyone's feeling? I've lived it and navigated it and come out the other side with ways to cope and ways to hold on. And if my stories and coping tricks can help even one person get through this, then I'm going to tell them. I don't know how often I'll be able to post, or it what order I'll be offering tips, so I'll end this post with another quote to hang onto. "Hope can be bruised and battered. It can be forced underground and even rendered unconscious, but hope cannot be killed." - from UnSouled, by Neal Shusterman. The pandemic will define history, but that doesn't mean we have to let it define us. Hang in there.
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AuthorA strange little girl who's great with typing but not with speaking. Archives
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