A Mind of My Own

My recovery over the summer in Virginia continued, and I gradually acquired a sense of what I had lost. I began to feel compromised, and experienced an increasing sense of isolation. Not the serene kind of isolation, but one in which I knew I was alone. Utterly alone. With not even myself to guide me.

After all, who knew exactly who me myself was? Certainly not I.

As a result, I was required to reinvent myself. And unlike most contemporary recovery processes (12-step, the child within, etc.), my recovery was not by choice, but by necessity, as I had been (somewhat? completely?) dismantled by a chance occurrence.

In much the say way as the getting acquainted process when meeting someone new, I was getting reacquainted with myself, and thereby, with my previous life.

And I was not just some old wine being poured into a new bottle. Rather, I was given a chance at a new existence, since I now felt so totally solitary, isolated and unattached.

Leaving Hell, Dante said he saw the stars again. By comparison, I regularly saw a mass of puzzling stars, but without much (if any) memory of what Hell had been like, much less any wisdom as to how to make sense of the stars.

I lived in a fragmented world in which everything felt static. I never became fully aware of things, any more than when you turn around to see something you hadn’t seen before you turned. That moment isn’t really an increase in your awareness, since you knew the object was there before you turned, only you couldn’t see it before. And you don’t actually think about it when you turn around and see it for the first time. You just see it, head-on. Then you turn back around and see it no longer.

Such was my life at this point.

Now I tend to be a rather patient and tolerant person by disposition, and a month of mostly lying on my back staring at the ceiling, followed by another month of relearning how to talk, walk, read and write, accentuated those characteristics over which I had little control, and which luckily perfectly suited to my recovery. And I did always seem to keep getting better. So while my recuperation proceeded, I attempted to simply exist and wait. 

Fortunately, I was unable to remain that inactive, since I was urged, prodded and questioned by my family. Daily.

 “So, Annie, what are you going to do today?”

To please them I had to produce a response, which was not that difficult, since they required only the bare minimum of an answer. Rather, our proceeding through the question and answer process was much more important than the activities themselves. Any activity on my part was preferable to my inaction.

Contemplating it now in retrospect, my family often seemed absolutely fascinated by my answer. Perhaps because they were never really sure exactly whom, at that point, they were addressing? Though I appeared the same, my guess is that they were being faced with a rather unknown person most of the time, someone quite distinct from the Annie I had been.

How would she reply? It never occurred to me not to attempt to answer every question. After all, that was how my recovery process had begun, with doctor after doctor asking me question after question. In time, I''m sure I made a connection between answering questions and feeling less pain.