Dealing first with the title of this: Today an obvious riff on a quote from the current United States President, a transparent play for attention and readership, may not not be so obvious in the future. Even without that context, it is, I believe a relatively apt statement, as any reader of many of my prior word blobs would know, if such a creature were to exist. Whether to reiterate or initiate, I nonetheless explain that I believe I was born with the brain of a genius, somehow trapped within the brain of an idiot. More accurately, imagine a potentially genius brain afflicted with virtually every known, and probably some yet to be codified, learning disability. That is the fundamental dilemma of my existence. A gnawing hunger not just for knowledge, but for functionality, for coherent creativity, constantly tripping over myself, too thrashed by constant context switching to concentrate towards any achievement. Able to grasp logic, but unable to perform calculations. Able to hear the music but unable to write it down or play it. A thousand more ways of saying "almost, but not quite", which is the same as nothing.
Several weeks now into TMS (Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation) therapy, I have had mixed indications.
The most positive was when, about two weeks ago, I went out and did my favorite thing with some of my favorite people, a live karaoke band thing called Karaoke From Hell. I had a not terrible time. I sang two songs, carefully chosen as easy for me, and it was not terrible. Nearly a year earlier, I had attempted this same thing and it was very terrible.
Unfortunately, a few days ago I had every intention of repeating this experiment, with the added motivation that it was a celebration of a milestone birthday for one of the band members, and one of the few people with whom I have enough in-person history to dare to count as a friend in a more-than-Facebook sort of way. I didn't make it. I felt both physically and mentally exhausted and generally terrible. Even worse, I construed tidbits of information about the event as indications that I was not as welcome as I might have thought.
About once a week, they (the TMS people) have me fill out a simple form that is intended to measure how depressed I am. I remember just a few days before my above-mentioned disappointment, filling out this form and being surprised at the general positive impression my responses were creating. It seemed strange, even as I was doing it, but I also thought, at the time, that my answers were accurate. Within hours I felt entirely differently.
Today (technically, yesterday) was by far the most unusual and perilous experience I have had during TMS treatment. This is going to be difficult to contextualize properly since I have not been writing reports of my TMS treatment experiences to date. Essential facts are that I remain stationary for a little over 20 minutes with a helmet strapped to my head with a chin strap, receiving ~2 second bursts of 36 high-energy electromagnetic pulses every ~20 seconds. It sounds like a machine gun, feels like a woodpecker on my head, and causes involuntary facial spasms. This is with earplugs and without my glasses so interaction with the technician or perception of any distracting media is limited. All things considered, it is significantly less traumatic than this description might seem to indicate.
Back to today, shortly after my session began, someone opened the door to the room just a little and had a brief and seemingly furtive conversation with my technician, which I of course could not hear. I guess I should also as background mention that I have a history of anxiety symptoms which I describe not as "panic attacks" but as "spontaneous visualizations", where I suddenly and vividly see a worst-case outcome of the immediate circumstances play out in my mind, usually in traffic, usually on bridges, usually involving earthquakes. Something similar happened at this moment, but not a visual manifestation. Something new that is hard to categorize. I suddenly was vividly focused on the possibility that the conversation was about something terrible that happened to my wife, and that they decided not to tell me until after the session. Thus I spent the whole session imagining that my wife had been killed in some accident or random act of violence and all that would follow from that. It was like a waking nightmare. In that 20 minutes I mentally lived through days of grief and confusion in detail, including a scene where I interrupted a speaker at her funeral with my own extemporaneous rant about how none of them really knew her. I could go on for many hundreds of words describing this experience, as it was that detailed and intense. Fortunately, miraculously, in the real world she called me moments after they had removed the equipment from my head. I have no idea why this happened, other than the fact that untimely death and funerals were kind of the theme of the week, since my wife's former Dragon Boat coach, younger than us, had recently died of a stroke and she had gone to his funeral a couple of days ago.
Remember the "Fire in my Veins" post? If not, that title alone should suffice. My physical pain situation is different now, as it is less full-body and more centered on my legs, both muscles and joints, and at it's worst, focused more on my left leg and the left hip. Yet there are occasionally brief periods when I notice that I am not in a terrible amount of pain, but those are extremely rare, and again, almost completely unpredictable, other than tending to be more towards the end of my waking hours, and never at the beginning. To some extent pervasive pain has given way to pervasive weakness and tiredness. A dullness and sluggishness of both body and mind. A feeling each day upon waking that there is no fundamental advantage to being awake over being asleep. Getting out of bed only when physical pain has awakened sufficiently to prevent a return to sleep.
I tire of writing these reports as I am sure anyone who might read them would have long since grown weary of them. What is the point?
The point had been to document my experiences with my various malfunctions and my various treatments in some forlorn hope of gaining some insight or perspective or some damned thing that could be useful at some point going forward to optimize treatment and behavior towards preferred outcomes.
I am increasingly unconvinced that this very unscientific experiment is building towards anything of practical utility, except maybe one little epiphany.
What if I stop trying to fix what cannot be fixed? What if I learn to have as peaceful a relationship with the reality of my existence as possible? I was born with a profoundly flawed brain, and many of my life experiences have only served to make it worse. Why should I believe that there is some kind of a "fix" or "solution" to being what I am? It may happen, for someone in similar condition, someday, but that day is definitely not today. We cannot use our brains to fix our brains. Maybe someday, an advanced and unaccountably benevolent Artificial Intelligence will be able to understand the human brain well enough to undo everything that is wrong with someone like me. But now is now, and maybe my best path is that of acceptance, rather than resistance.
Without hope, there can be no disappointment.
One more point. I come to acceptance reluctantly as someone who has already abandoned about as much ego as is humanly possible. I no longer care that "fixing" me means killing me and bringing into being someone who might not even like me as I am. I already don't like me as I am. I welcome the idea of reading my own words and being unable to relate to such a miserable maladjusted malcontent as the person that I am right now. I would love to be the person who says "I'm sure glad I don't even remember being that person." I attach no pride to my humble state. I want to get to the middle of "Flowers for Algernon" and stay there. Even when I read the crap I wrote as a teenager, I recognize myself with shame. I may have gained some marginal skill with syntax, but the heart of what I was saying then is still the heart of what I am saying now. A sick and stupid heart, the same lonely and frightened and superstitious little boy that I have always been.