Sunday, June 5, 2011

Ideas I've Outgrown

My mind is an odd place to be. Think about a super-speed radio set to scan with a TV on loudly in the background and three hundred people talking to you about different things. While all of this is happening, you are trying to do one of those double-sided puzzles in thirty seconds. Your house is also on fire and you are in charge of determining what to take and saving all fifty of your families hamsters. The hamsters are also on fire and you have to feed them handmade jellybeans to make them safe to handle. You are also on a unicycle during all of this. You are probably also on some sort of upper, and your heart is going a bajillion beats per minute and you can't focus because you're singing showtunes in your head.

Welcome to my mind. My mental adventures used to be so bad that I couldn't sleep at night. My parents tried to make me listen to "Sounds of the Sea: Soothing Selections Part 2" and "Harmony: the Music of Nature" to help me fall asleep. They tried giving me warm milk, cold milk, bananas, turkey, bribes and hugs, but nothing worked. My nine-year-old mind was going at the speed of light and they couldn't stop it. I was fairly convinced that I had ADD or some sort of brain tumor. When my viBRAINtions (see what I did thurr?) became so bad that I was confined to a couch and was only able to swallow two pieces of pasta before feeling ill, my parents knew that something was wrong. They started taking me to people to talk about my anxiety (so that's what it was! That's not such a scary word to say; please don't judge me for saying it. I have an anxiety problem and probably always have and will. That makes me no less badass. Just making sure you're aware.) problem. My doctor was a lady who let me play with chalk and markers. I liked her. After a while I was managing very well, playing soccer, hanging out with my friends and wasn't confined to the couch when the static became too hard to handle. We said goodbye to my doctor and hello to middle school. Yes, I was one of those mixed up kids shuttled from therapists to soccer in their mom's minivan.

Anyways, my anxiety waxed and waned but never truly went away. I spent my ninth grade in a constant state of unease. My tenth grade was a mess of social anxiety, my eleventh grade was full of a general buzzing in my head that led me to do stupid things, and my twelfth grade was spent in a state of insomnia.

I used to think that I could just pop a pill, talk to a dude with glasses and a clipboard and I would be alright. I just knew that one day there would be a switch that flipped in my head and I would be just like everybody else. My mind would be peaceful and I would finally be able to function normally and be happy without stress. (Just so you know, my mind is such that I can't ever truly relax.) I hoped that once I turned 16 I would be a normal teenager. When that failed, I longed for my seventeenth birthday switch into peace. Like waiting for your Hogwart's acceptance letter when you turn eleven, I was constantly disappointed like I was checking the mailbox every day to no avail.

After a few more years of having to constantly stay moving, always needing to have a book on me in case I was forced to sit and wait, and counting things by threes to stave of the impending boredom and buzzing when I was forced to sit still, I was completely resigned to the idea of ever getting "better."I still am completely resigned to this idea. I will probably never be "normal." I will never be able to sit still without jiggling my foot or becoming terrified of the noise in my head. I will definitely never be able to feed the jellybeans to the hamsters without falling off of my unicycle while the house burns down.

You know what?

I'm alright with this.

It may not be pleasant, but I've learned how to turn down the volume on my mental radio. Instead of obnoxious NYAN CAT!!! all the time at maximum volume, it's turned down to a Beatles song (Penny lane?) at around medium volume.

And while my mental radio might be too loud to allow me to get great grades in school or sit still for long enough to finish a project to my satisfaction without working at 234929587 miles per second, I have come to love my mental radio station. Even if it is staticky and frustrating at times, it makes me the way I am. Because of my buzzing I can work really fast. I can understand concepts easily (No idea how that one works), I can learn relatively quickly and I have an interesting mind-video going constantly. It's like a documentary about pictures you find in peoples' recycling bins and trying to recreate a story from them.

It may not be pleasant, but I've come to love it. It's like having a little scar that you come to appreciate. It gives me character and I guess that, while I may not have gotten my letter from Hogwarts, I'm okay with that.

Scratch that. I'm more than okay with that.

I'm off to feed some hamsters now.

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