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Last Night
Written by Chloe on Friday, October 23, 2009
Once in a while one gets out of bed feeling a little different from the night before. It was like that this morning. I’ll just describe the night as is, without attempting too much in the way of interpretation:
It started with the muscle spasms in my left thigh. I’ve learnt that they are not completely random, and that they are triggered by certain things. One of them is simply lying down in bed. I take clonazepam before I go to bed. It helps me go to sleep in two different ways. Firstly there’s those pesky anxiety disorders. Secondly it quiets down the muscle spasms. Last night the spasms kept on going for quite a long time and prevented me from going to sleep. I have no idea why they were longer and stronger than usual.
I woke up in the middle of the night with a lot of (fibromyalgia) pain in my left arm. It was one of those instances where I fantasised about having a shoulder disarticulation because it would make the pain go away. I thought about getting out of bed and taking some pain medication, but I didn’t. After a long time I got back to sleep.
The dream was very long. It was one of those flying dreams. There were no wheelchairs at all. Usually I fly in an upright position, but this time I was horizontal, face down, using my hands partly for lift and partly for turning. As always it was a huge mental effort to overcome gravity, and I couldn’t fly very high or very fast. The reason I was flying was to try to escape from people who were trying to kill me. The reason they were trying to kill me was that my gender was ambiguous. I had very small breasts and short hair. It wasn’t just me; they were trying to kill everyone with gender ambiguity.
It sounds like a nightmare, but I had a couple of things going for me. Firstly I had friends who were willing to die for me in order to protect me. Secondly I was wearing my left leg brace. It neither helped nor hindered with the flying. However, I knew that it would help keep me safe and protect me from harm.
At some point I was flying low over a ventriloquist, who was pulling his dummy out of its box for a performance. I noticed that the dummy had leg braces; two KAFOs. I started wondering why it is always the case that ventriloquists’ dummies have leg braces.
I felt scared when I woke up, so I snuggled over to Alicia for comfort. She put her hand on my left thigh. She knows that I find this particularly comforting because of the anomalous sensations. Depending on exactly where my thigh is touched the sensation can be zero, translocated, diffused, or simply diminished. She put her hand just above my knee, on the outside. The sensation there is diminished. It was comforting. I fell back to sleep.
In the next dream I went back in time to see the teacher who called me stupid when I was seven. I was me now as an adult, and I was able bodied. We embraced tightly and started crying. I was filled with forgiveness and compassion for her.
I woke up, Alicia’s hand still on my thigh, and realised that this was more than a dream. I truly did feel forgiveness and compassion for that teacher. I have carried this burden for a long time; I cry as I write. At seven I felt like a stupid worthless piece of crap. It has been hard to get rid of this, and I used to be angry at that teacher for f**king with my life. No more; now I am feeling gratitude…
Yes; gratitude. I’m still trying to bend my mind around this, but an important part of it has to do with BIID. I knew that I wanted to be paralysed since I was four. However, I simply had a passive expectation that it would happen. Things changed when I was seven. I started to think actively about how to become paralysed, and started deliberately doing dangerous things. I have explained elsewhere the link between being called stupid, gender issues, and the shift in my BIID thinking, all when I was seven. So I won’t repeat it here.
Yes, gratitude. I am not a person who is going to sit around waiting for paralysis to happen. I will make it happen. It has taken me a long time to understand the nature of the gift I received from that teacher so long ago.
Tags: Alicia, BIID, Compassion, Gender, KAFOs, Leg Brace, Muscle Spasms, Pain, Paralysis, Sensation, Shoulder Disarticulation, Ventriloquist
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1 On 23 October, 2009, Alicia said:
And therein lies the creator, the one inside who can view any event as positive or negative. This is what my post on self-esteem is all about.
Compassion…the Christ figure, before dying, said about his tormentors in Luke, “Forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”
I always thought it interesting that in the word, “tormentor,” we have the word “mentor.”
You have experienced a compassion inside that is ancient; it is a rightful, noble part of our humanity, and it is found in the ability to craft something meaningful and beautiful from even the most unskillful offerings of others.
That is art. That is the life poetic.