Nightmares

I woke up from a nightmare about my childhood, one of those dreams that leaves you confused and displaced, thinking about the past. I don't often feel my past: even when I feel at all, it's brief, it has no staying power. Unpacking my past can bring up echos, remembering what it was like to feel that way, but that's a lot of hard mental work, and it doesn't always happen. Dreams, though, dreams are immediate: dreams make you nine years old again.

Mine was rambling and discordant, the kind of dream you try to piece together afterwards and find that parts have been fogged over or removed altogether (thanks, brain), but a few images stood out to me. The emotion stood out to me. Being a child again, sitting next to a corkboard with my picture on it and marker scrawled around my face: Katie, the familiar nickname I never liked my teacher using, voices?, spoiled brat, parts of myself on display.

Personal reality check: I am a profoundly lucky woman. I was born in the time in human history where I haven't been stoned to death for defiance or weirdness or witchcraft. Medication is readily available. There are no Vikings out invading Massachusetts and disrupting my commute. Bookstores and libraries both exist. I have a collection of little guinea pigs who smell like love. All of these are good things.

But the nightmare brought up that old half-remembered what if?, that feeling of being on display 24/7 for all of my normal classmates to look at and talk about, that feeling of wandering back into the Real World after trying both to recover from catastrophic overstimulation and to somehow look kind of normal, that feeling of please take me to a doctor so I can figure out what's going on.

My husband and I are taking me to a specialist in autism spectrum disorder later this or next month, should all things work out. I've been with the Massachusetts Mental Health Center for major depressive disorder and schizotypal personality disorder for more than a year now. And there's a part of me that wonders how my life may have been different, how high school and college may have been different, how everything may have been different, if I had gone to see these people when I was little. If I had gone to a special school for people like me, should one have magically existed. If I had had the support of Wellesley's department of disability support, not just for the last few train wrecks, but for my entire tenure there. If I could have done better, if I could have had more friends, if I could have graduated on time.

If, if, if, if, if, if.

You can't live your life in ifs, and you can't spend your present fixing your past. And I don't blame my parents or my grandparents or anyone, really. I think that kids like me don't get the help we need because of a general lack of knowledge and understanding, because parents aren't given the tools they need to handle When Your Child Is A Weirdo, because politicians still erroneously blame mentally ill people for mass shootings but fall conspicuously quiet when it comes to actually helping mentally ill people survive.

The dream reminded me of what my childhood and adolescence felt like, and that feeling has left me still in bed almost at noon with this kind of empty, colder slice down the front of my ribcage, this sense of wastedness.

I'm going to get a cup of coffee, and, knowing myself, I know that my brain will soon lose its grasp on this feeling, that the emotion will fade, that I'll re-read this article in a day or two and be unable to bring it back into focus. That life will go on.

Now is a good time for that cup.

#mentalhealth #mentalillness