(no subject)
Sep. 2nd, 2009 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonionayI think I figured out an apt metaphor for my seizures.
Imagine you're an airplane, flying over a vast, cloudy landscape. The airplane is your conscious mind, and/or your body. The landscape is the personal and/or collective unconscious (depending on how Jungian you feel). The pilot's the Ego, the passengers are probably other relevant factors--emotions, rationality, anima/us, Ruach, whatever. Possibly some of the passengers are in a closed compartment. Possibly they've stowed away and have locked themselves in the bathroom.
The brain wires itself in strange ways. for instance, on this interminable print job I'm running right now, every time I unload the output tray, (which involves a very specific set of body positions and movements. It puts some annoying strain on my back.) I think of the henchmen from the Venture Brothers. Don't know why. Maybe I was thinking about them the first time I did it. Eventually this association becomes self-reinforcing. I'll go to the output tray and think, "hey, whenever I do this, I think of the henchmen from The Venture Brothers." And what do you suppose I think of?
If we take every element of me unloading the output tray--the series of movements and relationships of objects to my body, the emotions (gee, this job's easy but annoying), the state of my body (I'm a little hungry and coming down with something, but feeling mostly satisfied with my recent diet) my overall level of stress and excitement (economy, money, writing, friends, etc.) and my ambient thoughts--we get a huge series of nodes. The act of unloading the output tray ties a bunch of potentially disparate things together. This is what is known as a complex. This one's small and mundane, but it may well be tied into a larger complex. (Probably something work-related. I don't know, call it an Athena Complex or something.)
For now, they're in my conscious mind. But even after they leave, those nodes will still be tied together. No matter how thin that line is, there will always be an association between longing for the half of a chocolate muffin sitting on my desk, and two guys in yellow butterfly costumes.
Getting back to the airplane metaphor, those masses of nodes and networks are down in those clouds. My seizures happen when there's an electrical problem with the plane, or maybe one of the passengers is busy banging on the walls for some reason. Maybe the freak in the bathroom's decided the time is right to jump out and hijack the plane, (or maybe they'll just try to use the time of the seizure itself to do that.)
So the plane's gone haywire, and is swooping down into the clouds. The passengers get a good or glancing look at what's down there, possibly whatever complex is closest. At least, part of a complex.
Passengers are jostled around. Things are vertiginous and nausous, both in the passengers and real-life me. Deja vu reigns (because I of course have seen the stuff in the clouds before) and sometimes both passengers and my whole self barf.
And that's roughly what it's like when I have a seizure. Medicine won't help. When I took it, it only got rid of the actual blackouts, which I don't have anymore. The aura stays no matter what. Sometimes, it's annoying, sometimes, it's fun.
It's easy to see why so many ancient epileptics were considered oracles. Not me. My young brain was stuffed with too much pop culture. I hear Popeye and Willy Wonka cackling in my ears instead of the gods.
Imagine you're an airplane, flying over a vast, cloudy landscape. The airplane is your conscious mind, and/or your body. The landscape is the personal and/or collective unconscious (depending on how Jungian you feel). The pilot's the Ego, the passengers are probably other relevant factors--emotions, rationality, anima/us, Ruach, whatever. Possibly some of the passengers are in a closed compartment. Possibly they've stowed away and have locked themselves in the bathroom.
The brain wires itself in strange ways. for instance, on this interminable print job I'm running right now, every time I unload the output tray, (which involves a very specific set of body positions and movements. It puts some annoying strain on my back.) I think of the henchmen from the Venture Brothers. Don't know why. Maybe I was thinking about them the first time I did it. Eventually this association becomes self-reinforcing. I'll go to the output tray and think, "hey, whenever I do this, I think of the henchmen from The Venture Brothers." And what do you suppose I think of?
If we take every element of me unloading the output tray--the series of movements and relationships of objects to my body, the emotions (gee, this job's easy but annoying), the state of my body (I'm a little hungry and coming down with something, but feeling mostly satisfied with my recent diet) my overall level of stress and excitement (economy, money, writing, friends, etc.) and my ambient thoughts--we get a huge series of nodes. The act of unloading the output tray ties a bunch of potentially disparate things together. This is what is known as a complex. This one's small and mundane, but it may well be tied into a larger complex. (Probably something work-related. I don't know, call it an Athena Complex or something.)
For now, they're in my conscious mind. But even after they leave, those nodes will still be tied together. No matter how thin that line is, there will always be an association between longing for the half of a chocolate muffin sitting on my desk, and two guys in yellow butterfly costumes.
Getting back to the airplane metaphor, those masses of nodes and networks are down in those clouds. My seizures happen when there's an electrical problem with the plane, or maybe one of the passengers is busy banging on the walls for some reason. Maybe the freak in the bathroom's decided the time is right to jump out and hijack the plane, (or maybe they'll just try to use the time of the seizure itself to do that.)
So the plane's gone haywire, and is swooping down into the clouds. The passengers get a good or glancing look at what's down there, possibly whatever complex is closest. At least, part of a complex.
Passengers are jostled around. Things are vertiginous and nausous, both in the passengers and real-life me. Deja vu reigns (because I of course have seen the stuff in the clouds before) and sometimes both passengers and my whole self barf.
And that's roughly what it's like when I have a seizure. Medicine won't help. When I took it, it only got rid of the actual blackouts, which I don't have anymore. The aura stays no matter what. Sometimes, it's annoying, sometimes, it's fun.
It's easy to see why so many ancient epileptics were considered oracles. Not me. My young brain was stuffed with too much pop culture. I hear Popeye and Willy Wonka cackling in my ears instead of the gods.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 10:59 pm (UTC)I read about epilepsy when I had to write a protagonist who experienced seizures. It was hard to find good resources for what a seizure felt like for the person having it.
I hope that you're able to manage them well enough that they don't interfere a lot with your life.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 11:49 pm (UTC)Unlike my mom's, mine are from ten seconds to a minute in length, which, when I blacked out, was scary because I'd keep walking, without knowing where I was going. I started having petit mals when I was eight, after a high fever during the chicken pox. In ninth grade, I got on medication, and the black outs went away. I thought the epilepsy was gone for good, and I stopped taking the medicine. It's only been in the last year (while researching my current book, actually) that I poked around online to see that other people have similar symptoms to mine, and that these weird spells of mine are the old epilepsy.
Now that I don't have the blackouts, they don't really interfere with my life, and are actually a good indicator that there's something else wrong (I'm pretty sure I'm coming down with something right now, and the seizures are a side effect.)