Somebody Somewhere (17 page)

“Speak to me through
my
words,” I asked Dr. Marek. I wanted to cut down the struggle in putting mental pictures to words. “Can you take the dancing out of your voice [intonation] and not pull faces [facial expression] so you don't distract me from what you're saying?” Perhaps the request was unreasonable but I felt it was worth the cost. I told him to speak evenly and tried to listen with meaning more than ever before in my life.

“Tell me about myself,” Carol demanded from Robyn for the fifth time that day. We were fourteen and this was conversation between best friends. “Well, you're short and have curly hair and blue eyes and freckles and a funny smile and you're a nut
…”
she went on giving the standard answers to Carol's standard question. “Compliment me,” Carol demanded. “You are a nice person,” she said, “I like your nose.” “Your nose is crooked,” Carol replied. “How are you?” Carol asked. “I'm good. How are you?” Robyn replied. “I'm good. How are you?” Carol answered again. “I'm good. How are you?” Robyn came back. “Good. How are you, how are you, how are you, how are you?!” Carol said to herself, hardly noticing that she'd cut out her conversation partner. “Tell me about myself,” she demanded again. “What do you want to know?” asked Robyn. “Hmph. Just tell me about myself!” Carol insisted. “Tell me what sort of person I am.” “Let's sing,” said Robyn, “think of a song.” “Ben, the two of us need look no more
…”
Carol began, and Robyn joined in. The song finished. “Another one,” Carol demanded, as though her friend was a jukebox with whom she sang along.

I brought Dr. Marek my topics on paper and asked for lists, definitions, and specific answers to specific questions. Dr. Marek rambled off into lengthy introductions. “State the facts and leave out the garble,” I said in frustration. “I'm just giving you the context,” he replied. It soon became apparent that context through spoken words just wasn't even a concept for me and definitely not a tool I used for comprehension.

My eyes were glazing over in response to Dr. Marek's words and he noticed sometimes. I told him to check with me to see if I had understood and not to assume so.

I learned to tell him when the meaning had dropped out. I could even say at what sentence or at which word. I wished I had understood these things growing up but how does someone know they are meaning-deaf? “The world” didn't even have the concept.

After a session I would go home and let my mind replay Theo Marek's discussions. Like wispy clouds they floated about just beyond my consciousness. They were like songs I was trying to remember. Like a computer working on a program, I could “hear” it working but my mind wouldn't let me have a preview until it had finished with it.

As I slept, I didn't dream, I just relived, like a telephone answering machine on replay. When I awoke, it was with the insight and understanding gained from the discussion, which had taken anything from hours to days and even weeks to make sense of. Knowledge climbed the ladder of subconscious to preconscious to conscious. My subconscious mind was a storeroom. I didn't have to miss out on life even if I had to experience all of it removed from the proper context. It was no wonder that I had no concept for the usefulness of anything but the physical, observable context, such as the room a discussion took place in or whether it was night or day. Who was related to whom, how you came to know them, or what their life story was, was of no use whatsoever to a filing cabinet using its own system.

My hearing with meaning began to improve more in a year than it had since I was about ten years old. With it, my security around people, my sense of empowerment, and my confidence soared. In the space of three months my comprehension of direct speaking without mental echoing went from about ten percent to thirty percent. By the end of the year, I was able to hear directly with meaning about fifty percent of the time, and seventy percent on a very good day (given a one-to-one conversation, a familiar voice, and familiar surroundings). I began to experience “self” and “other” equally at the same time, without fading out, channel switching, or background-foreground effect. I began to understand why people enjoyed conversing and saw a glimpse of what I had been missing. I was in love with my own aliveness and completeness. I was alive
with the vision of light at the end of the tunnel of inner darkness and inner silence, a tunnel of meaning-deafness, meaning-blindness, and the inability to feel for one's own experiences. All that mattered was to know I could see the end in sight, the birth of hope in the void of hopelessness. I bounced around everywhere, smiling. I had the keys to the door of “the world.”

June 1991

Dr. Marek,

…Speech is changing too and this is scary. Before, I used to say everything people said back to myself and therefore got no closeness through language (and my feelings weren't so scared speaking back in some way because I was, by my perspective, answering myself).

Now I am hearing people directly most of the time, but unfortunately I am often unable to get specific meaning out of what they say; I am getting the key words and imposing my own system of meaning on it (before, I imposed my own everything, right down to the phonics, on it). As a result I am learning to feel like a part of things (as opposed to merely working on appearing to be) and can really understand why people communicate; but although my ability to speak is great, my ability to converse is still not good.

In another sense though, it is better than before. I feel the other person is there now. I feel they are more than a thing and I
am listening
and not just responding automatically (I am trying to listen; I often don't get the right track or right line of argument though).

It is hard in class. I interrupt with questions a lot so I can feel I am staying on track. I don't want to but it helps me follow them. But they say I drag them off the track (the opposite of my intention).

Also, language is not a weapon like before. It is not a tool to hide behind or attack with. It is also not just for information (most of which I used to add to my arsenal). It is to help people communicate like equals.

I think a lot has really begun to change in a way that I should feel good about but the foreignness of it is scaring me. What I need
from you is to talk to me about these changes and tell me what I can see from writing this down—not to listen to the fear. I have a big force telling me to hold on to what I feel safe with and what I know (“my world”), yet I think these communication things are the things that were missing that I've been trying to find…

Regards,

      Donna.

A feeling kept washing over me. It began with the feeling one gets from eating lemons. It was like a tingle that ran up my neck and then spread out into every thread and fiber of my body like the emergence of cracks in an earthquake. I knew this monster. It was the Big Black Nothingness and it felt like death coming to get me.

The walls went up and my ears hurt. I had to get out. I had to get out—out of the room, out of this thing stuck upon me, suffocating me inside a shell of flesh. A scream rose in my throat. My four-year-old legs ran from one side of the room to the other moving ever and ever faster, my body hitting the wall like a sparrow flying at a window. My body was shaking. Here it was. Death was here. Don't want to die, don't want to die, don't want to die, don't want to die—the repetition of the words blended into a pattern with only one word still standing out: the word “die.” My knees went to the floor. My hand ran down the mirror. My eyes frantically searched the eyes looking back, looking for some meaning, for something to connect. No one, nothing, nowhere. Silent screaming rose in my throat. My head seemed to explode. My chest heaved with each final breath at the gates of death. Dizziness and exhaustion began to overtake terror. It was amazing how many times a day I could be “dying” and still be alive.

“Stop it,” came the desperate voice. “Stop it or I'll fucking kill you,” it screamed with frustration.

Something made an impact. There was feedback from the world beyond my body. There was feedback over which I had no control. There was a world out there. Everything stopped dead. I was in a state of suspended animation.

Only the “dying” was terrifying. Death was much easier to live with.

When I was younger the Big Black Nothingness came to take me again and again and again. It would catch me like a spider in its web and suffocate me in a void. In the void there was no thought.

Thought was needed to interpret this mongrel thing that had a grip upon me. This mongrel thing must have been the cause of the feeling of suffocation. I had to get this bastard thing off me. I gripped it and pulled at it and bit it. It was my body. It had been tied to the ends of the bed eventually. That was called abuse. Looking back I am not so sure. Faced with the same thing, with no understanding of it, no offer of help, and nothing seeming to work, perhaps such desperate moves have a logic of their own.

The Big Black Nothingness had come and taken me several times a day. The silent screaming always exploded in my head and poured out into the room until I finally learned this would mean the death of me. That had been a hard lesson to learn. In the void there are no connections. The screaming voice doesn't even belong to you because there is no you and there is no voice. There are only eyes that register nothing in a mental darkness and ears that hear sounds so distant and unreachable as to be on the other side of the earth. In the nothingness there is no body to be comforted and touch only confirms the already painful sense of this thing stuck on the outside of you from which you must escape. You must escape because you hear the roar of “tidal waves”—big, dark “tidal waves.” (It is the sound of blood rushing through the contracting muscles of your own ears.) You respond to the impending sense of the “waves” approaching. The “waves” are death. In the void they will get you.

I sat with my arms around me on my red carpet and waited for the impact. After twenty-six years I had learned that this was not death coming but emotions.

Which one, which one? screamed the wordless impulse within me. If I could only name these monsters and harness them, link them to the places and faces and times they had come from, I would be free.

Willie and Carol had saved me from the Big Black Nothingness. With the characters, emotion had been done away with and visits to the Nothingness were usually channeled into attacks of pure wild
mania or sharply focused obsession. The Nothingness still got what I knew as Donna but the episodes were more like quarterly excursions, not daily visits.

The monster was now back. Give me Freddy Krueger anytime. Sometimes it would get me several times a day and then not at all for a week. Sometimes it would be gone for a few weeks and then hit so badly I almost would have killed myself to be sure I would never have to go through it again.

Each time felt like forever, a one-way ticket to hell. There were no thoughts to remember that you always come back.

I felt the tingles start to crawl and got crayon and paper. Before it overtook me I wrote, “It's okay, I'm coming back. It's okay, I'm coming back. It's okay….”

My body trembled like a building in an earthquake, my teeth hit together with the sound of a fast typist attacking the keys of a typewriter. Every muscle tensed as though it would squeeze the life out of me and relaxed just long enough to be hit and hit and hit again by “tidal waves.” A scream came to my throat but was strangled and exploded in an inner silent screaming. Breathe, came a thought in the pauses. I breathed deeply, tuning in to the rhythm. I was outrunning it.

The “tidal wave” was upon me and took me again. I could stop and start these fits but never outrun them altogether. I could break them up by climbing out just long enough to get some deep breathing going. Another calm before the next wave. Breathe, came the thought and the pause was longer this time. I broke into a hum. There was sound in the piercing silence. The next wave hit, though it was smaller. My teeth stopped chattering, the tremors turned to shivers.

I felt the bastard start up again. Knocked down the ladder, rung by rung toward an inner darkness, each time, a lower rung getting closer to the pit below. I had a choice. I could be knocked off by the waves or dive. I relaxed back into the Nothingness and let it take me again so we could get this over with. I dove.

This was my emotional dirty laundry that had been stored up to the point of overflow. Too busy just keeping up with things, like a computer working to full capacity, there had been no time for emotions to register at the time I heard or saw or was touched by things. The feelings just piled up in the laundry room to be ironed out later. But life was too convenient without emotions and I kept leaving them in the room and the door would eventually burst open when the room overflowed. “Your computer disk is over capacity, we cannot close the file. Delete?”

The tidal waves were my own delayed, out-of-context reactions. These terrified wailing bouts of Big Black Nothingness were emotional overload triggered by anything from happy to angry and everything in between.