You hear the murmurs. A significant uptick in ADHD. More youngsters diagnosed with Autism Spectrum (I prefer Sphere) Disorder (I prefer Discovery). Highly Sensitive Persons. And why shouldn’t there be? Haven’t we created a world where one particular type of person can succeed and win by rules they write and share in tiny print with a box to check at the end the instant before you click? Soon you’re finding charges for $158.88 for a subscription to something you used once, and when you pick up the phone to dispute it you’re lost in the labyrinth. It’s the same labyrinth for all the things. Whereas Theseus uncoiled string the deeper we went to kill the Minotaur, now he wanders stringless shouting REPRESENTATIVE into a small device that somehow holds all the world yet not a single human being who can help him answers.
It’s time to morph back into our early survival: to feel.
I come from a strange world. My social security number appeared on my Rollins College Class of 1991 Student I.D. , out there for the world to see by any of the food service staff, library work-study nerd, and student bookstore manager who sold me my first 10,000 Maniacs Cassette. I only knew of Password as a kind of board game. A code was a make-believe alphabet my friends used to write notes no boy could read. My parents carried cash. My grandfather recorded every single purchase in a 12 x 5 three-ring with the words IMPORTANT PAPER FILE embossed in leather-looking cardboard. Everything. Gas and mileage. Groceries. Payphone dimes. How else would a schoolteacher own eight homes by retirement, four of them on the water— lake, river, and sea? He called us one night from somewhere between Niagara Falls and Siesta Key when their car broke down.
“Do you have the credit card I sent you?” my mom asked.
“But that was for an emergency,” he said.
I had long-distance boyfriends to whom I’d mail 35-page handwritten letters I slyly composed throughout a school week, mail, then wait two or three weeks for the 45-page reply. I backpacked in Europe for two months on $500 remembering to cash a traveler’s cheque before banks closed or sleep on the train. Watching a movie required plans and orchestrations we mastered as teenagers. If you missed an episode on TV, there was a very real chance you would never see it, and you dealt with it because so much else was always going on that it did not matter. Celebrities lived without us knowing anything about them, and while I admit I swooned for a moment when Shaun Cassidy followed me on Twitter (both he and Barack Obama though I will never know why), as time moved along, I kind of wished he’d remained that out-of-reach Teen Beat boy on my childhood wall. Da do ron ron.
Social Darwinism emerged out of science the way Lucky Charms emerged out of Irish History. In the same way that you can now purchase a bag with just the marshmallows (best when stale) in the shapes of (say it with me now) red hearts, yellow stars, green clovers, and yes I googled and resisted that rabbit hole wherein Cosmopolitan magazine for some reason reported on General Mills’ retirement of the hourglass, the longest run of any of the Lucky Charm marshmallows that were formulated “more as candy” using little water to give them a “shelf life of more than a year.” All that. From ten seconds on Google, Social Darwinism doesn’t even get said anymore while everywhere around us we are either hunter or prey, and this changes by the minute in this dystopic realm where we are each other’s content.
Got a dispute with Amex? Meta? X? Hope you’ve got Ghostbusters on the line because you sure as hell can’t call them. Or you can, but the decision won’t be made by the nice person you talk to. There was a Fantasy Island episode about a couple who dream of owning a home but a computer makes the decision, so they board a freaking seaplane and arrive at a place, the only place, A.I. has not shoplifted from the human psyche. As the fire-escape map on the back of my two-star hotel room door in Beijing, just beside the ROOM RULES that included (not kidding) “no gangfighting in hall” and (my fave) “no swords:”
Where You Are.
Since I sustained a traumatic brain injury while feeding dogs in my kitchen on November 2, 2022, I’ve become aware of several changes. I remember the fall, but more so I remember the flight that came before it. It’s remarkable how much thinking I can do in the moments that most would call a danger or a tragedy—falling through a rotted bridge into a glacial river in Switzerland I had enough time mid-flight to reenact a scene in Sound of Music, “She’s just not an asset to the abbey.” As I paused three feet in the air to consider my situation, kibble similarly suspended like the glob planets in Space Mountain, I could piece together what was going down right along with me. I thought, “This is going to be big.” Not bad. Just big. Then, as I lay on the slate floor with zero knowledge who I was or what had happened, I noticed the six dogs licking my face and hair and surveilling my body, I thought for an instant, with care, but all they wanted was the kibble. Even in my amnesiatic frame of mind, I thought of Catwoman whose near-death experience was attended by cats. I thought of Batman who, in his respective version of transformation, was attended by bats. Me? I was attended to by dogs, and I could think in a different way from how I would have thought before the fall, “I’m going to be a dog after this.” I knew then that everything will change.
As I explored in the previous excursion here in the Doctrine of Creative Imagination, I was not wrong. Even before the injury this was the direction in which I was headed. I mentioned in another excursion that I experience events that extend causally in more than one direction in time. All bets are off here, friends. I’m the Santa Ana winds and a thousand kites to fly in them. I’m off social media so I can fully unmask, as I told my Improv for Gifted Adults group, my neurodivergent League of Justice. The way I see it, there’s only one full-on way to transform, as we must following a life event, is to be off alone in a corner of the world, or even just a little bit off of our out of the world. This is a place where I have always been very comfortable. I like the urgency of solitude, how it protects itself, how I greed for its nothingness, how I feel the shifts and hours melt over me like clocks by Dali. The Hallucinogenic Toreador has got to be about this, for it takes the posture of a matador to stand open to the toro of one’s entire imagination. The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, was my go-to when I didn’t want anybody to know where I was. Possibly the only thing more surreal than his paintings was the presence of this largest collection of his work outside of Spain on the Gulf of Mexico, one hour from my home in my sister’s white Camaro. Solitude isn’t scary because of loneliness. It’s frightening because we run wild in it. We discover we remain untamed, and when you know that about yourself, well, in the words of Aimee Mann, “How will you get me back on the farm? If I wanted to heal, I would have to break off from the expectations of a self I no longer deliver. The unmasking occurs daily. I catch myself having these Black Swan moments plucking the sharp part of a feather from my shoulder blade.
While I didn’t expect this Doctrine to become a journal of a brain injury, that’s probably the greatest evidence that writing heals us. It doesn’t heal us head-on, every Emily Dickinson knows. It lets you feel like you stand a chance at controlling even this. Here’s the next new accomplishment my ego can claim, then as months drift by, one Wednesday night you realize it’s been a mirror trick all along—because that is all we ever see whether it’s on the page or writ immense across the full scrim of our existence. A reflection our perception of which takes a whole imagination lifetime to recognize. Then it’s there, staring you back in the face, your face. For this, every time, reality waits for our surprise.
Healing is an animal game. It moves differently. It moans and stretches. It’s eyes shine with the scantest source of light. It yawns us and growls us. It closes its jowls around our tender throats and carries us across the plain. We surrender to its scent. We roll in it. We want to be owned. We want to belong to the same power that is healing the earth, healing the story, healing the world by ramming our faces straight into history’s blinding flame. See? it demands. See how after all of this, you have destroyed it and yourself yet again. Lying on my kitchen floor believing all the dogs in the world loved me, I understood— without even having a concept of who this “I” is. I’d been called to stop. We know when it’s time. And believe me, once you’ve been nothing, there’s no going back.
Emotion is the maladaptive mask of instinct. It is what’s become of us in an epoch of misery and disfigurement in favor of something none of us can ever attain even the ones who do. Just because the brain can think never meant we had to follow it on its sterile, abstract and suicidal trajectory. We were never meant to make sense, only to connect. Consciousness was enough with all of life swirled up in it—a lived dream that was the only thing worth waking for, walking in, the story of the soil of which and in whose image we’re made over, ever to return, ever to love in the way love dwells on the other side of being, love like the coming season, love like the lasting bloom of the sky. It was to feel ordered while gazing into the wind’s chaos, to whisper into it then to become it—to say and at once be the word. It was profound as silence, and in its canyon, we dropped the petal—and still, we await the echo.
I teach writing as medicine. There are many teachers teaching it as craft, and I teach the craft as well. But as science amasses data dis-covering this thing it never stopped to ask, “What are you?” writing unfolds its full power from the click of a Bic pen that has held it. “I am you,” it whispers, swallowing the world.
What I never tell my students: we heal back into our nothingness—then never add, it’s the only place from which we ever create.
Oh Amy, what a tale you tell! Right? Like it's amazing we survive have grown up on a different planet. I found my old college student ID recently and was just cracking up (like I am now!) considering how dangerous that. And we all did it. The brain injury was a blessing in how it allowed me to go analog for half a year. I'm still searching for ways to re-analog my life. One phone per household with no voicemail or call waiting. Just time and temperature. Just time and temperature. Thank you so much for reading these. I am appreciating this quiet space to unfold in. Thank you.
I so completely relate to this. About thirty years ago, my father who managed farms for members of my mother's family, sold an Ohio farm for a relative in Massachusetts. He put the check in a regular white envelope with nothing around it and mailed it with a 22 cent stamp. This relative was beside herself, because my father wasn't concerned in the least about it getting to her, and may not have even been aware of a more secure way to mail things. The check arrived, today it would likely not. It was for three hundred thousand dollars. Like you, I come from a different world, raised in rural America where no one locked their doors (until a Chicago gang broke in through the roof of the one and only local grocery store.) While I no longer live in that dying small town, I am still gobsmacked by th e changes of the world and thankful every day that I am retired from most of it (and do my battles with the local healthcare system.) Don't get me started on that. Your writing is wonderful; a friend introduced me to your work a couple of weeks ago and now I don't miss a piece.