Tomorrow is my first day back with psyche guy. How synchronous was it that I ran into some old photos in a drawer this weekend as I was making a new place for Bunny's books and activity supplies. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Not these. These are the kinds of pictures that inspire questions. @bonenado saw one and wanted to know who that kid was. Nothing terrible, just a pic of someone's little brother whose underage sister I ran around with for awhile during one of my darker years.
Then there are the words with no pictures at all. No one even knows to ask because there's no available prompt. No one knows how many lines I crossed, and how far I crossed them.
I spent 6-7 years on a little room with a man who still doesn't know all those things about me. I frustrated his time with what I call defensive misdirective chess playing. It's kind of like playing drunk pool, people assume you're crap because you can't hit a straight shot sober, but you clean up when you get a little wasted. I also used to dazzle a few really drunk friends standing with a basketball at half court with my back to the net, and after a few practice tosses up in the air to get my feel for the weight of the ball and what I'd need from my arms given the trajectory I could see in my head, I'd send a clean shot through the hoop without ever even looking at it. But I had to be drunk to do it. I'm a born klutz deluxe. It's like I don't have access to what I need in my head unless I can bypass some sort of conscious effort. The more spaced out I get, the brainier I get, the more magical I get. It's like having super powers. But that was a long time ago, and even aspienado hits the wall getting older.
Last spring aspienado gloriously crashed through a particular wall right here on Pinky blog and all the wrong words started coming out. They weren't supposed to come out, but I couldn't stop them, and over several months they started painting a big beautiful picture of my head, and for the first time in my whole life I finally saw all the stuff in there the way I'm supposed to see it. The way I will be able to share it now with psyche guy.
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I'd like to say I'm a little terrified. I'll be sharing things that could have put me in jail, things that could even get me killed. I'm not making it up. I'll be sharing things that shut me down so hard that ten years of my life turned into a confusing soup of elusive memories, and that was before the brain fail. No, I'm not terrified. I'm excited. I will be saying things for the first time to him that I've never said to anyone else, partly because of the Aspergers and I never thought to, partly because I didn't know how to sift out what was important because I never really talked about personal feelings with anyone, and partly because there's so much sad mixed in with all that glitchy memory stuff that it felt like too much work to do it.
Pinky blog broke me open, a sparkling mess of me scattered out like gems over the weeks and months, and without warning memories left and right started clicking into place. If it all makes sense now, why do I need psyche guy? Because I've still never said so many of these things aloud, even if I have vaguely written them down somewhere. I've spilled to a couple people, yes, but not enough to matter that much. I casually toss out bits of shock like someone tosses socks into a hamper and keep walking to the next convo about dinner and the mail.
It's funny to reflect on the question of Why are we here? and the meaning of suffering when we know deep inside the incongruity of all the secrets we keep. Maybe we are here to learn how to stop keeping secrets, learn how to stop forcing others to keep secrets, learn how to recognize how all the pain on the planet begins with secrets- everything from governments to people sitting alone in the dark because deep down, we all know secrets get buried, and more secrets get buried if we tell secrets. Secrets are the Vashta Nerada of this world, eating us up.
Every old photo holds secrets. Maybe pictures tell a thousand words, but they never tell the ten thousand more that lurk behind them.
