recovery
Your illness does not define you. It's your resolve to recover that does.
Unconscious Adventure
The wind blowing above the tippy treetop, shaking the leaves, allowing flecks of sun like confetti to move and remain in place. Baby green leaves, sprouts of life and complimentary smells of manure are all sure signs of spring. A sultry 86 degrees makes my blood push hot through my veins into my heart and then the extremities and back to center, always back to center, circumventing all of my internals, signaling perspiration to collect on my forehead, my breast and the back of my neck, and then the wind is caught briefly twirling in another direction over the grass, like seaweed on the floor of the ocean dancing with affectation, giving into the pressure of the water passing over, like a good dance partner. Here, in this field there is no water, only wind and yet I can’t help noticing the effect is precisely similar from a gust on the tall grass, to the edge where the farmers alfalfa meets a lazily manicured lawn. The in-between where the grass has not been cut, and the alfalfa ceases to grow, this small line of land on maps recorded at the country clerk is so clearly marked but realistically, it is a thin strip of unknown; one foot trespasses, the other safely at home. I straddle the unknown, and this is the place that I dig my hole.
By Whitney Carman5 years ago in Psyche
Thinking in Movies
There was a lot I'd assumed throughout life. It became one of the neater aspects of my diagnosis. I'd been describing myself as mildly autistic, I just didn't know it. I described myself as a "weird boy" and later as "Mildly to Moderately Spicy". "Only 'weird boys' think those sorts of things," or "I've heard about 'weird boys' that squeeze things they love too hard and kill them,".
By The Passionate Autistic5 years ago in Psyche
Becoming Fiercely Vulnerable
Mulch: the shit that makes us grow I am passionate about the shit that makes me grow. A little over a year ago I started a project called Mulch. Mulch started as a place I could be honest and tell my fiercely vulnerable stories about codependency, alcoholism and self-development. Instead of looking at my childhood experiences and my failed relationships as a hindrance, I wanted to look at them as something meant to nourish me, and support my growth. Something like mulch.
By Jessica Jones5 years ago in Psyche
Now
Now, I can’t be around people without completely going somewhere else. I can’t relate and just feel natural and enjoy the flow of being together. I can only think, terrified, about keeping them at ease and trying to appear acceptable and appropriate to them: laughing and scrunching my face up, nearly closing my eyes in a contortion to create the look of a smile, no matter if something is funny or not. When this is going on, every moment is a little humiliation. “I am SO fucked up.” But they will never know what I am thinking. My internal experience is grotesque. Almost every time after I have made another effort to be with people and give it a good effort on the bright side, I feel beaten completely down, drained. I have to just completely escape and medicate to soothe myself from a whole traumatic experience, that I have apparently done to myself, but I have no idea how to not do. I have to eat a tub of ice cream or spend over $10 on a heavy bag from McDonald’s. I have to completely. Drown. It out.
By Emaw Langden5 years ago in Psyche
