Day 25: Understanding

What’s one thing you wish non-borderlines could understand?

Intensity. One word sums it up better than a scroll of words a mile long. I wish people could feel, just for one second how deeply the emotions sink in, the fear, the anger, the pain, and on a good day, the love. Sometimes things affect me so intensely it seems like I can’t survive it, or don’t want to. I’ve written at length about the waves of emotion, highly charged and changeable like the tide. One small gust of wind and everything moves in a different direction, powerful enough to suck you and anyone nearby under. 

To the outside, nothing may have happened, nothing discernible anyway, but we will have registered a ton of information and triggers that cause avalanche to break inside us. Not seeing the ton of data that we see coming in must look rather like watching someone walk down the street making wild hand gestures and facial expressions only to realize later that they have a bluetooth ear bud in. They look crazy and overly dramatic, but that’s because you can’t see that there’s something else they’re hearing or seeing that you can’t. Like I’ve said before, it’s no superpower and a lot of what registers is wrong or misinterpreted. I know my satellite dish needs a good cleaning, or at least a change in the filter.

This one’s short and sweet because I’ve said it all before, but it truly is the most important point I wish was obvious. The emotions  run deep and beyond intense. If I overreact, well, it’s because I’m reacting to how big it feels to me. It’s a hard one to understand if you haven’t been there. I can be content being considered a drama queen. Everything is dramatic to me but that’s not all bad. As much as there is, it’s wonderful to feel. You know you’re alive and that’s deserving of big!

Day 22: Realization

Pick a random story from your childhood.

The reason I’m picking something not so nice is because a) I tend not to remember the nice things, which is sad, and b) I managed in one fail swoop to accidentally traumatize my son yesterday. I’m not terribly good at sneaking around and he saw a truth that I wish he hadn’t. On the bright side, through his tears he managed to tell me he wouldn’t be needing therapy. I felt bad but it was only a matter of time.

As for me, I have many a traumatic story from my childhood but I’m going for the one that isn’t really that bad. It’s a similar kind of thing.

I don’t remember how old I was, but I imagine I was close to my son’s age. It was Christmas eve and my parents made me go to bed ridiculously early. It was a long time to lay there in the dark thinking.

At some point I remembered that we didn’t leave cookies out for Santa. I heard everyone downstairs playing music and whatnot so I knew Santa hadn’t come yet. I wanted to remind them all before it was too late.

I remembered running down the stairs  past my grandmother in the den who yelled at me not to go into the living room. Adjacent to the living room was the dining room and as I ran to see my grandfather sitting in his chair next to the fireplace, out of the corner of my eye I saw that my parents were hard at work putting together a tall, pink, Barbie dream house.

Instinctively I put my hands over my eyes while frantically trying to tell my grandpa that we needed to put out the cookies.  He assured me that it would be done and to go back to bed. It’s funny but I knew. I knew before I saw it but I pretended that I didn’t and let my mom walk me back up to my bedroom while they finished their stuff.

She tried to grill me on what I’d seen, but I just replied that I saw nothing and kept asking about the cookies and the fireplace. I remember feeling like it was my fault everyone was so unhappy, like my son did last night. He kept asking if it was his fault, like somehow seeing the truth was a bad thing. Did I ruin it? Is it my fault?

I know somehow that no amount of explaining will make a difference except to make sure he knows that it isn’t his fault. He didn’t ruin anything. He’s a little upset today but I’m going to make sure to be as open a possible so he knows it is always ok to seek out the truth and to not feel responsible for ruining anything by doing what he needs to do.

Nothing really changed for me on that night other than I remember it. I’d known, I just hadn’t seen. I think my son is the same. I just hope he feels ok about it eventually.

Day 26 – Misty

Name a song that makes you cry every time you hear it and why? Ok, the title is a fake out. I actually can’t stand Misty as a song, maybe because I equate it with knife wielding crazy girlfriends and Clint Eastwood. Neither of those things make me tear up on a regular basis unless it involves talking to empty chairs.

I’ve had several songs over the years turn me into a mush pile. As I’ve said before, I’m sentimental and tear up at the drop of a hat, but there’s one that never fails to turn me into a mess. My grandmother loved Nat King Cole. She used to listen to him every holiday season and sometimes in between. Hearing him sing usually brings back memories of her in our old house while I was growing up and sends me to missing her. The one particular song that gets me though, and it can only be sung by him, is Stardust.

I don’t know what it is. It feels like the saddest song that ever was. It’s romantic and tragic and beautiful, but if I listen to it in the car I have to pull over. If it comes on in the market, I stop dead with the shopping cart in the middle of the aisle. There’s a forlorn quality to his voice and to the arrangement that, despite hearing it more times than can be counted, still brings on instant melancholy. Perhaps it’s the feeling of loss that’s so pervasive, of love,  of someone I miss, of happiness long gone.

I’ve gone and put it on and sure enough, the tears are welling up. It’s a gorgeous song and an unforgettable one for the memories it brings.