i compensate

*Instead of my workshop re-write this morning, I wrote this.

I hate my brain.

My spirit, I'm good with my spirit. Myself, me, whoever, whatever it is stuck inside all of this. I'm good with her, too. I like her.

But, my brain. I fucking hate my brain.

A wise woman once told me that twice exceptional means smart enough to know how fucked-up you are. Yeah, well. Plllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. If I could choose, give me some physical impairment. Take my hearing. God, how peaceful it would be to have quiet. To not have to hear everything all at once, all the time. And need respond simultainiously to all of it? Take my hearing, please.

My brain hates repetition.
But, guess what?
Every time you eat, there are dishes. Dishes all day long. They never stop.
Wear clothes? There's always laundry. Even as you pull six clean loads from three industrial dryers, the clothes on your body are getting dirty. It never, never stops.

Eat food? Back to the grocery store. Eat the food. More dishes. The food is gone. The dishes are dirty again. More grocery store. On and on and on and on. It never fucking stops. Life in my head.

There is no break from life and the things it takes to power through it? All repetitive.

Specialist after specialist explains it to me, I'm not stupid. Thanks. Well, you know what? You can have twice exceptional. If I have to have a gigantic deficit in half of my brain, I'd rather just be plain old dumb. Some days.

Thirty-years of specialists. And nothing they tell me makes this muscle run more smoothly. Nothing. So, I smile. They all say the same things.

I'm 7-years-old when they tell my parents there is no logical explanation for the way my over the top verbal compensates for my retarded visual. Can I just say retarded? Because I'm tired of semantics. Typical? How is that different from normal? And why does it matter?

Compensate? Um, it's called survival. Surviving. Of course. Of course I can get by on what I have. Of course you can too. That's what life is, surviving on what you have. It's ALL compensation.

It's the trees along the coast. The ones that grow through impossible circumstance - slowly from the rocks, twisting beautifully to compensate for the wind. Gorgeous torment. Where there is no soil the roots grab rock, bare rock, and cling with every thread to keep growing. Beauty from the most impossible circumstance, because the circumstance is so impossible.

That's the rub, isn't it? Hardship grows beauty and hard is life and life is irrepressible. Build a city in the jungle, leave it unattended and the earth reclaims it in a moment. Grows through it, over it, buries it in green tangles of truth. We sit on the limestone tops of man made remains wondering at the nothing surrounds it.

It's all a breath and you can't stop breathing. Concentrate on it. Meditate on this. Hold your breath. But the air just keeps flowing in and out. Life is bigger than we are. And we are life. And it just keeps coming.

So, I go my friends' house last night. I can't go home to the dishes in the sink and the toys on the floor. Always with the toys and dishes. Never stops.

So I go to my friends house and attack my brain with everything I can, to anesthesize it. Make it numb. Shut it up. Ah, the quiet.

It doesn't matter that I hate my brain.

So I Compensate.