This poem was written by one of my mother’s ancestors. The surnames I know from her family are Godwin, Easton, Falconer and Button. It was written by a woman. That is all I remember.
I don’t want this poem forgotten, so I publish it here.
Twelve
When I was twelve, my sister was sick.
So I made a cross of two straight sticks,
And I made an altar under a tree,
Hidden by brambles so no one could see.
She was so sick – I prayed inside,
“God, make her well” – and my sister died.
After several days of fluctuating moods and anxiety, I thought I would write a blog called “What Is Right and What Is Wrong.” But as soon as I started thinking of things that are “right” about me at this moment, they were all “nots.” Things like:
As you see, my mind immediately picked “right” things that were negative wrongs.
I can’t say:
Instead, the initial “rights” all have a “wrong” associated with them:
It’s really easy to think of “wrongs”:
It’s very hard to think of “rights” that aren’t negatives:
Things that are right about a person should be better than just “not wrong.” And while a little more thinking does yield things that are really right, like “I love my children and they love me,” what springs to mind first is always the most revealing.
Tomorrow my mood may be worse. Or better. I’ve been cycling every day or two. Depending on the day’s mood, my responses to this exercise might be different. It’s scary to think that they might be the same.
Anxiety Resource:
Why Bird Music is Great for Relaxation, Stress and Anxiety
From the article: “Bird sounds enforce a human’s innate connection with nature; when birds sing, we know we are safe – when they quiet down, we panic.
“This instinctive familiarity with bird songs plays a subconscious role in our stress recovery.”
Here’s why I believe this:
I have a vivid memory of hearing, on a morning when I was in high school, a sound that sent a lovely picture cascading through my head. It was simply the cawing of a crow somewhere outside my window. It transported me to a cabin in the woods by a lake, awakened the scent of the breakfast my mother was cooking, and woke in me the eager anticipation of taking the boat out onto the lake with my dad and brother to go fishing.
On a slushy March morning, the call of one crow took me back to a summer vacation when I was eight years old and utterly happy. And it wasn’t even a songbird.
Updated blog, originally published January 21, 2016.
Could Asperger’s Syndrome explain a great deal about my unhappy childhood?
Recently I read what was, to me, a startling article reporting on a study that showed a connection between depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism and autism, including Asperger’s Syndrome or High Functioning Autism. Apparently this is not such a new finding as I had thought when I first read the article. That’s not surprising, since I’ve been out of the research loop for almost 3 years now. Still, for me it was one of those “OY!” moments. Autism? I’d heard about connections between all the others – but not that. And as it turned out, this study did break new ground.
The connection was found through gene expression. This, according to Leigh Hopper, who wrote about the study for UCLA Newsroom, “… is the process by which instructions in DNA are converted into a product, such as a protein.” A significant overlap was found between molecular pathways in the brain for these five mental disorders. (Do I understand this? Not entirely, so don’t feel bad if you don’t. The important thing for this discussion is that the connection was found.)
Here I must again state that I am not a medical professional, researcher, psychologist, therapist or even a trained counselor. I am a patient who has done a great deal of study about bipolar disorder¹. In this case, I was fascinated by the study, published in Science, because it suggested new possibilities for understanding myself. It may also help you understand yourself or the person you know or love who has bipolar disorder. You may get insights about people with other mental disorders – or none. Some friends of mine have also found enlightenment about themselves by looking at the symptoms of Asperger’s. Continue reading