Sensory Overload

I didn't realize to what extent I compensated for my own shortcomings until recently.

As a child, I was susceptible to meltdowns. If my brother wasn't triggering me, something else was. I remember going a whole winter in short sleeve school blouses because sleeves tormented my dry skin. Spaghetti and tomato sauce burned my face, but I had to eat them. Super 8 footage of my early Christmases show me squinting and squirming under the hot lights.

I remember reading a page in my mom's journal, where she wrote I "fought with everyone."

Actually, it was only my brother, and no one wanted to be on his bad side.

That's still true.

I can't sort through the emotional laundry without addressing the physical, because it was all of a piece. Is. Still all of a piece. And all of these memories are hard-wired to the point where I passed them down to my elder son, who suffers, but doesn't know why. It's physical, and the physical has emotional manifestations and repercussions.

I am reduced to asking the question:  Would it kill me to....? Some things might. Others might make me stronger. I'm running down the clock on the lifespans of some, so kindnesses sent that way may comfort--not so much the knowledge that when that person ends, so do my obligations.

But they won't care, and I won't, either.

I continue my hegira with David Foster Wallace, and he's reminding me of things I've known all along, but putting names to things that I couldn't name because trauma and trauma-induced speechlessness. I'm course-correcting for all the whimsy and fickleness and fecklessness; keeping space between myself and everyone else helps me navigate.  I feel my aloneness, but I am not lonely, not really.

My boys come to me eagerly between their own adventures, wanting to share things they notice, smiling, eyes sparkling as when they were toddlers. Now they are both nearly grown, and things still spark joy, and I hope they will always find joy, and know it when they find it.

Sometimes, joy is the absence of everything else.