Trigger warning : body horror.
I just had a piece of tooth break off. Just snapped right off onto my tongue.
This happens to me now and then. It’s all part of my transformation into a cackling old hillbilly pervert that mutters things like “squeal like a pig” and “purty mouth” as he rocks away on a porch somewhere.
Seriously though, it’s because I never brush my teeth. (Visit yesterday’s blog entry for my various theories as to why that is,. )
The reason why it came loose is no mystery, give (grossness warning) that it was black over about 50 percent of its surface.
Ick, I know. It’s actually quite horrifying, both to see and to have happen., If it wasn’t for my excessively tight emotional self-control I would be freaking out over it.
As is, the panic hits the thick layer of numbness and death around my heart and dies.
That is, I suppose, its function. To prevent panic from spreading.
Doesn’t seem worth it, to be honest. Overall.
Anyhow, the weird thing about these occasional tooth losses is that there is never any pain. One would thing that losing a third to half a tooth would involve some pain somewhere along the line, but nope.
Which explains why I can be so blasé about it, I guess. If there was a large amount of blood and agony involved, I would be far more motivated to prevent it.
But apart from a vague ache where it used to be, there has been nothing. No blood, no pain, just one day there’s a piece of tooth on my tongue.
I didn’t even feel a click. And the gabapentin I just took will likely take care of that vague ache. So to be honest, in my flattened affect world, it’s barely even an event.
Which is tragic and bizarre, I know.
It’s that tme again
Therapy Thursday, that is.
Once more, I don’t recall the details of what we talked about too well. I think it’s because I am getting better at expressing my emotions in these sessions, and for some reason, that comes at the expense of biographical memory.
Which has never been a strong point of mine in the first place. I learn facts fast and remember jokes and anecdotes for decades, but ask me what I had for breakfast and I have to take a guess based on context clues.
It must have somethin in common with those other times of strange amnesia, the times I have been performing.
It’s like anything above a certain amount of emotional activation and my brain just stops writing anything down.
But it’s not like missing time. I feel no discontinuity. So in that sense it is not true amnesia at all.
It’s just that the memories are one long undifferentiated blur. I can no longer retrieve specific memories from it any more than you can take the eggs out of a cake.
And something deep inside me tells me that this is a good thing. That somehow this is a healthier way to be. That losing these specific memories is a small cost to pay for something in my mind putting those resources to far better use.
Like supporting my mood, for example.
Makes me wonder just how far that road could take me.
Only one way to find out.
More after the break.
The alien within
One thing I do remember mentioning to Doc Costin is that discovery I recently made that not only did I feel like this mighty mind of mind was something I had, not something I was, I was also pretty goddamned scared of it.
It feels like a part of me, but in the same sense that a prosthetic leg or cyborg arm would feel like a part of me. It’s something that I use all the time and for nearly everything, as if it was part of me, yet not truly part of me.
And that’s pretty damned weird.
And it’s got to end. I can’t permit this split in my mind to continue. There has to be a way for me to integrate my various parts into a coherent whole.
So how did this split come about?
I think the main force of it came from there simply bring nobody else like me. I had no role models to wrap my big IQ in, no examples of how someone deals with all this horsepower and firepower without losing one’s mind to depression, narcissism, or delusions of grandeur.
Sure, there are lots of smart people in media. And m family are no dummies either. But I have never come across someone I could truly identify with.
Instead, I’ve had to identify with bits and pieces of characters. Sherlock Holmes’ sharp mind. The EMH from ST : Voyager’s dry sarcasm. Doctor Rodney McKay (David Hewlett)’s intellectual arrogance. Data’s naïve insistence on logic.
The character who came closest is Walter (John Noble) on Fringe. Like me, he is an intellectual dreamer with a brilliant mind, questionable attachment to reality, poor social skills, and a seemingly paradoxical combination of mental might and a general bewildered and fragile state of mind. Walter and I know what it’s like to tread on the brink of madness from being so high above and detached from reality.
Difference is, he fell in. And there but from the grace of God go I.
Unlike me, his early childhood genius was recognized and valued and he was given everything he needed for his intellect to thrive.
I just got bored.
I’m more than a tad bitter about that.
If only someone had recognized my gifts and invested in me and told me this mental muscle of mine was a good and valuable thing and showed me to a place with other kids like me where I was no longer held back by the other students.
A gifted kids program, in other words.
I might even have been properly socialized there.
But nobody cared enough to find a place for me.
Story of my life. I am too much hassle to help.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.