Being Alice: Breathing.

[brightlotusmoon]

Call me Courage.
It takes a lot of strength to talk about life like this.

So, I just "woke up" splayed uncomfortably in my comfortable leather task chair, head lolled to the right, mouth open and drooling, left side full of hemiplegic hypertonic hemiparesis, right side spasming in its own way, brain stuffed with cotton, voices inside me screaming "GET UP, GET UP, OPEN YOUR EYES, DO IT NOW. JOANNA! WAKE UP!" Voices I recognized as Alicia, Serena, Amara, and Amber - all four of my spirit guides, aka healthy multiplicity selves, aka characters I created long ago that took on lives of their own deep inside my damaged brain. I have never, ever heard them in chorus. I felt something like a massive SHOVE - very similar to a hypnic jerk, which is actually extremely common during testings for epilepsy. Hypnic jerks, also known as hypnogogic jerks, night starts, and sleep starts, are those weird sensations you get between deep sleep and waking when you suddenly feel as though you have fallen onto your own bed from high above.
There was no panic in those cries, simply intensity. They were all desperate to bring me around. See, Alicia is the one who guides me through the seizures and brings me to Serena, who guides me though the pain. If needed, Amara steps forth to ease the anxiety, panic, and fear. And although Amber has kept silent and hidden for decades, Amber is the one who soothes my entire soul and my entire consciousness with a blend of magics and quantum physics that I still cannot translate into common words. However, they have always been separate and individual. The only ones who have ever communicated in any way have been Alicia and Serena, if only to pass me between each other with nods and whispers.
And so I awoke, or came out of the seizure, twisted and deeply exhausted from cerebral palsy complexities, compounded by fibromyalgia, sensory processing disorder, synesthesia, and hypersensitivity. For several agonizing moments, I did not know where I was - and the only reason I knew my own self was because the Guides poured all my memories quickly into my mind, into the live, non-damaged bits of my brain. I know that doesn't make any real medical neurological sense, but I cannot explain it any other way. The only reason I am typing this up is because my hands are moving of their own accord. I have a silly feeling that Serena and Amber might be helping me. Keep in mind that these women are not "real" - they are fictional characters. And they know it. But they are parts of my mind and have always been. I am still wracked with deep anxiety, and Amara is wrapping me in the most comforting... things? Images and sensations of fabrics. Ideas of beautiful imagery? Tiny mewling soft kittens happy and adored and warm? Anything to keep me calm and happy and anything to keep me from breaking down in screaming tears. I can feel an episode of clinical major depression creeping up on me.
And I still do not know why any of this is happening. I have lost small memories of today. I do not mourn them too much. I just want to feel better.
Can someone tell me a story, please? Any kind of story?

Comments

[el-esteleth.livejournal.com]

So at the end of reading your post, where it asks for a story, for some reason I thought about my lizard, BB. He is one of my second-hand pets that I got because someone else didn't want him any more. He was originally wild, and his previous owner was a really young boy. His mom works where I work and she got tired of taking care of BB and her son got tired of having BB around. So, I inherited him. The first little while that I had BB, he wouldn't eat. This went on for months. But a few months ago, there seemed to be some kind of magical switch that flipped in BB's brain, and now he likes me. He's let me touch him, he eats regularly, he walks towards me when I come in the room where his cage is. And most recently, he's taken to eating directly off the tongs that I put his food in his cage with. He's such a fun little guy now that he's stopped his hunger strike. Soon, it'll be a year since I got him. :)

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

When I was between eight and thirteen, I rode my bike around the neighborhood every day. I had a route I traveled, designed to take me past the most interesting places within a one mile square area. I drove it once, and because of the back and forths and ins and outs, it measured about four miles round trip.

I knew every outdoor cat along that route. My favorite was a big flame-point shorthair boy kitty who lived in this really nice house on a corner lot. He was so, so beautiful. He had that close-lying Siamese fur, so you could see all his muscles, and he had huge crystal-blue eyes. He lived with a teeny tiny, very fluffy longhaired tabby girl with gorgeous green-gold eyes. I visited them almost every day -- if they were outside when I came by, I'd stop and love on them. I'd often sneak pouches of cat treats out of the house to share with them. They were good friends, and would come running when I called. I never caught the girl's name, but I called her Sheba. The boy was Goose, because that's what I thought his owners had said he was called, the couple of times I'd seen them and asked.

This went on for a good couple of years, during the summers and on weekends, until one summer I realized I hadn't seen either of them for several days. Their people hadn't moved. I got really worried. I saw Sheba the next week, but no Goose. I got REALLY worried. So one day, when nobody was home, I walked around the outside of their yard and called and called, not knowing what good it would do. But I saw the curtains move on the big glass door in back, and there he was! He had a GIANT CAST on his back leg! He had hobbled over and was pawing at the door and crying to get out, because he wanted to see me! I was so glad he was okay!

So I rode home and grabbed a bunch of bags of kitty treats and picked every flower I could find in the back yard (dandelions and clover, mostly) and rode back and left it on the porch with a little card that said "Get well soon, Goose! (These are his favorite treats, please share them with him for me!)"

I went by AGAIN a few days later, and the woman was in the front yard, weeding, and I pulled up on my bike and jogged over, waving. Without a hitch, she asked if I was the one who had left the note and the cat treats. I said I was, and said I'd seen Goose through the back door, and asked when he would be coming out again. She laughed so hard, and then said that his name was "Deuce", like the devil, because he was A LOT OF TROUBLE. As in, he got his stupid ass hit by a car, and he was lucky not to be dead. And we had a good laugh over the name thing, and she went and got him and brought him out. He'd just gotten the cast off a day or two before and was still getting his strength back. His fur was all short and there were stitches near his knee. He was SO HAPPY to see me, he just let me hold him and pinch his pawpads and he kissed my face, and the woman, who had seen me pet him sometimes, but had never actually really seen us snorgle, was kind of gobsmacked. I think I was ten? She thought it was adorable. (Because, frankly, it really was.) He came back out for good just like usual a few days later, and resumed his place in the shady spot near the sidewalk.

They moved a year later, but that house is still Goose and Sheba's house. I never did get the hang of calling him Deuce. And I never made another friend that was QUITE as good. He was an awesome cat.

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

It was on these bike rides that I perfected my cat mojo. It's worn off, some, from lack of practice. I still do REALLY well with cats, but it used to be shocking. I could approach and pick up cats that wouldn't let anyone else come near them. I could sit and pet any cat and it would let me pick fleas off it for hours if I wanted to (and if it had fleas). (My parents never once had to pay to have a cat flea-treated. I flea-picked them too expertly.) Cats that were afraid of people would come to me and sit in my lap, and I could lure kittens in just by THINKING about it, practically. When my sister rescued a cat from some asshole children who had been tormenting him, and the cat was SERIOUSLY mentally fucked up from the trauma, she brought him to ME and said "Fix this cat, he is losing his shit." So I sat with him in bed for most of the afternoon until he felt safer, and was willing to come out and be fed and cleaned up. (He was never a well-adjusted cat, he was kind of unpredictable and mean, but he was nice to me.) (This same cat appeared to me after his death, and that's the only time I've ever seen a ghost. It was actually a really, really scary experience, which I will tell you about if you want to hear it.)

I still get on well with cats, but it's not like it was. Some weird childlike zen thing. I literally used to be able to walk through just about any neighborhood, and get an armful of cat. Sometimes without trying. (Like, that actually happened in my sister's neighborhood. I turned around one day and a huge orange longhaired tabby was barreling down on me, so I knelt and held my arms out and he just jumped up on me. BWOOP!) I literally never met a house-pet that didn't like me until I was well into my 20s. Ferals, yeah, sometimes they would just disappear, but housecats, they were always friendly.

I miss it a LOT. It wasn't anything special to me at the time, but in retrospect, it was extraordinary.

I had the same mojo with snakes, too, when I was working with them a lot. I once reached into a cage full of six- to eight-foot yellow anacondas and invited one to come sit on me, and it just climbed right up and started snuggling. I turned and looked at the shop owner, Barry, who was a friend of ours, and he was staring like I'd turned inside out. Turns out they had been wild-caught less than a week before and were destined for a breeder, but they had not been acclimated to humans, and they'd been really horrible to everyone who handled them (they are not known for being nice snakes, even captive-bred). One had almost bitten a store assistant in the face, and another actually HAD tagged Barry on the arm, which looked pretty nasty. I was like, "Oh, well, whatever. They're nice." I handed Barry the snake to put back in the cage.

It bit his shirt. XD

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, dude that is AWESOME.

I adore your stories!