Dear Gaia:

I didn’t understand the first line, but that’s okay. The brain is so creative, that your brain is original, as mine is, so the thought you wrote in your recent post, I didn’t have identical thoughts to  yours. What I will do  next, is quote from what you wrote and write to you of my own, personal past experience that comes up for me (I am not suggesting therefore that what comes up for me was or is true to you too):

* “I can’t think normal thoughts without imagining that I’m saying them to someone else and imagining myself from their point of view”- I remember a few years ago I was on a hike in a beautiful nature setting and I was talking to someone in my own head, telling them about what I was seeing. It  made me feel weird, asking myself: why am I talking to someone who is not there instead of just enjoying the view? It was as if there had to be someone else to see it before I could see. Makes me think of a child needing a figurative mirror aka the parent, to reflect back to the child what is real/ what is going on. In the relationship- isolation I grew up in (a mother that was there physically but was so occupied with her own distress, her own intense emotions, that she didn’t even see me, so no mirror for me), I made up a person watching me, talking to that made up person, so that I wasn’t alone after all. Yes, I was so alone that I made up a person to be with me.

* “Memories and images, ‘vibes’, that pop up but I can’t understand if it’s in my mind making them up or they come from reality”- makes me think of what still feels like it really happened: at night, I was lying in bed, a child, sleeping, but feeling a cat walking very slowly on top of my body, for a long, long time. I didn’t open my eyes because I was afraid. Because there was no cat in the apartment where I lived, never. To this day I am puzzled by how real and for how long that was happening, I still feel that cat walking slowly on top of me.

* “As I fall asleep, my mind can imagine me or a ‘sense of me’ that is physically distant from me”- when I was falling asleep,  child, or a teenager, I remember feeling like I was falling and falling into a pit of darkness. I was so scared at night when it was summer, so hot and humid, it made my tics  much worse, and I couldn’t fall asleep because I had to, was compelled, to contract every voluntary muscle imaginable a certain number of times (a combination of Tourette Syndrome and OCD, to be diagnosed decades later, in my twenties).

* “I definitely feel the detach between my inner self and my interacting/ real self… Always have showed off a self to my family & friends while my true self is something new and strange to them”- I remember as a child, teenager and later, not understanding how it can possibly be that people don’t see me as the crazy person I am, were they fooled? I didn’t understand. I suspected they all know, for sure, that I am crazy, and for some reason they let me live amongst them.  I was pretending, they were pretending that they didn’t see how crazy I am, but at any time, someone will confront me and say: you think we didn’t know? We’ve known all along!

* “Feel like what happens to me externally is a mix of my personal inner world. If I see something I fear it may return as an abstract or dreamy memory and so I fear I may no longer set apart reality from this muddle of stuff”- I believed that thoughts I had will make reality happen, that if I heard a word or thought it, it could cause someone to die. This was the basis for so many rituals (OCD compulsions) aimed at neutralizing my evil and dangerous thoughts.

* “I fear I may not be human and that I don’t have a life like Others”- I thought I was crazy, abnormal, weird, unacceptable, a freak of nature in a world where everyone else was sane, normal, acceptable.. I had no idea why I wasn’t perhaps isolated and studies for my freakiness, I think, how I was allowed to hang around the Normal world.

* “I feel confined in a state of confused and undefined boundaries”- yes, I was very much confused.

* “I fear I may not exist”- I remember wishing I did not exist. Existing was too painful. Early on in life I knew I will not bring a new child into this world to suffer.

* “What’s wrong with me, why am I like this? I fear there’s no remedy, not even Death, there’s something abnormal about my feelings I can’t trust them..”- I don’t remember as a child or a teenager thinking about my feelings. I remember drowning in what I may not had the word for, in my mind, overtaken by pain, agitated by fear day in and day out, every day, multiple times per day, often, multiple times per minute.

* “my high school crush… Imagining myself from his eyes (or how I imagined him seeing me)”- I am taking a break from recording my personal experience to comment on what I recently thought about you imagining that your crust sees you acting cool and such, I don’t remember the words, but what I thought was that you were imagining him liking you, simply liking  you. And I thought to myself that you didn’t get that liking from anyone, like your mother, you didn’t get her to look at you in an I like you! kind of a way.

* “I fear I only ever lived in my mind without contacts with the outside world”- I desperately wanted contact with the outside world. I remember as a teenager, every Friday and Sat night watching couples walking on the street toward the town center, hand in hand, talking, laughing, oh, how deprived I felt, and how frustrated, week after week… after week, year after year, watching the Others Living, while I was stuck in .. Nothing-going-on, alone, unwanted.

-Like I wrote early in this post: no one, past, present and future, had, has or will have your exact thoughts and images, there are simply too many combinations of words, ideas, and images possible, many more than there are people in the world.

anita