Imagine

My brain is very critical.

It can't help it. It's always been this way. It is endlessly frantically tinkering away, taking things apart, trying to figure out how they work.

Or how they don't.

I have vivid memories of myself as a toddler, of watching my hand move my fingers and trying to understand how that worked. How my mind could make that happen, how my fingers could move before I had time to THINK at them to do it.

(Yes, of course I spent my childhood getting violently beaten for being weird. Like I'm giving you new shocking info here.)

By the time I was maybe six or so, I had read books on nerves, circulation, neurons--all the chemistry and physical reactions that make our bodies work.

And I would lie awake in the dark, watching my fingers move, trying to visualise it. Because it was just...amazing.

And we still don't understand it yet. Our bodies are so complicated, and mutated, we probably never will. It's too big, too MUCH.

But it won't stop my brain from trying.

And that bitch is like that with everything.

It LOVES critical essays. It breaks down stories, opinions, machines--ANYTHING--with equal passion. Whether it agrees, disagrees, or even comprehends. It WANTS TO. It has to get in there and sense it, figure it, weigh its worth. Endlessly evolving as new info comes in.

My specialist considers this a symptom of my disease, one to get rid of. That horrifies me. People who don't think? They just confuse, frustrate, enrage...and flat out scare the shit out of me.

I'm on Team Treat My Disease--yes please--But Keep Me.

Like gym class, I find myself alone, endlessly scorned and abandoned as the sole champion of Team Weird.

(True Trivia: I spent three years watching gym class. The teacher decided since no one ever wanted me on their team, the obvious solution was to ban me from participation, period. I was cool with this. Oh, I thought it was unfair and moronic, but it was infinitely better than getting an extra beating when, by chance, the team I was on happened to lose.)

But there's a problem with a brain that NEEDS to reason, is COMPELLED to rationalise. Nah, not the world. It has been thwarted enough to accept that the world, especially humans, don't make sense. Mostly. Sometimes it still shudders and flings about in frantic panic when they do something unusually...wrong. But lo, WTAF is just part of universe. And not always a bad part.

The problem is nightmares.

I can't sleep. And I don't want to, no matter how broken or exhausted I am. I'm blogging, even though it hurts, and hurts worse, because I'm afraid to go back to sleep. Because there will be another nightmare.

I still can't write. I've come through anguish and confusion and grief to admit, with great pain, that my diseases have killed that. It's a loss I never expected. My mind has given me stories, probably longer than it even had words. It sees the world as stories. And there was always two busy and joyful and fully compatible parts of my mind. The one that tore odd things apart, and the one that pulled random things together.

With both gone, I can't imagine what me would be left. I wouldn't be able to. Literally. And I can't be convinced of the point of saving my body, if I'm not in it anymore...

But I've wandered off. I think my mind did it on purpose, managing to cleverly compel me to say things I've been, mostly, avoiding saying while employing stealthy ninja aversion from the thing it wanted to avoid more.

Nightmares.

I discovered, especially while bedridden in pure agony, waiting for my surgeries and then recovering from them, my brain still desperately needs to make sense, to rip random into reason, force form on the formless...

When I'm sleeping.

It NEEDS to make sense of the pain. And the ONLY rational explanation it could come up with was this: I was being murdered.

So whenever I COULD sleep, in whatever broken little slip I grabbed, or jerking nod I feel into, it was the same. I had very vivid nightmares, exquisitely detailed and different every time, except in theme. Someone was trying to kill me, and I was losing. Badly.

The pain was perfect, exactly matching what the growths were doing to my insides. Other than murder, that was the only part that was identical every time.

I'm getting nightmares again. It makes sense. The tennis ball is technically a different disease, but it's fucking eerie. It's in nearly the same place as the biggest and nastiest of the growths they cut out of me before. It's actually BIGGER, and well, let's not get into all the utter grim and have you all flee, but it's shoving on the same things and causing the same pain and symptoms as before. The ones I spent three years with, so I know them rather fucking well. Too well.

This hasn't been good for my WAKING mental state, ending up exactly where I was, as if I never fought so fucking hard to find some way out at all. All those fucking arguments and indifferent specialists and excruciating tests and horrific treatments and brutal surgeries for nothing. NOTHING. Because I never recovered; I couldn't. I still have the progressive disease that gave me the growths in the first place. The growths that can still come back, anytime, and they might as well have. For all I know, the disease gave me this too. But..here we are. Trapped. Back in the same agony, back in the same bed, back with no hope, no options, no idea how or when this will end...

Awake or asleep, I'm already back in the same nightmare, the variations only make it worse...