I’m finding stress difficult; relentless. When the clocks went forward on Sunday it threw me. I woke up to find that I had lost an hour of the day, and this set me immediately at odds with everything. It was also Mother’s Day, so it seemed typical to find that there was insufficient time in which to complete the tasks that I had considered doing; added to which, a text message from Mum confirmed that her back was very painful and that she has gone to bed with heated pads and ibuprofen. I replied that I would take the dogs for a walk at lunchtime and almost felt relieved to have to jettison the vacuuming until another time. After all, the dust and fluff aren’t going anywhere, are they?
A couple of comments on my blog confirmed that somebody I know must have taken a drink of alcohol. Something to do with the block capitals and spelling mistakes, along with the sinister tone of the messages, made me feel uneasy. I deleted them and blocked the user. It seemed the best approach. There was a menacing tone through which the writer proclaimed themselves the solution to the situation of my son being without a school place, and there was a bit of, “Commit. Or cut the crap” which, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out. If they had indeed had any sort of a solution, they had had several months, and opportunities, to say so. Appropriately. The stress that the situation has wrought over the past eight months is considerable and, post-brain-Injury, really quite debilitating. The last thing I need is some nut job proclaiming nonsense on my blog about the thing; it minimises and ignores the severity of the situation and its difficulties.
Perhaps not entirely unreasonably, I considered punching them unconscious. However, I chose last night to go to the gym rather than to an AA meeting at which I had used to see them, I thought it the peaceful way forward. Besides, if they have, as I suspect, had a drink, the best thing that can be done is to leave them well alone.
It is part of the action of stress upon me that I would quite like to let off steam. Fighting is perhaps representative of a ‘way out’ of the feelings of impotence and powerlessness. Yet, I know that inflicting pain on another would not help in the least; in fact, my own feelings of guilt and shame would just make matters worse. It’s because I know what lies beneath these feelings that I know they’re ghosts – beguiling, made of pride, my wiring trying to lull me in to danger.
To me it is no accident that, back when I was freshly brain-injured, and couldn’t remember the sentence that I had just read, or the cup of tea brewing on the kitchen worktop, that the image of a man stuck clearly out in my mind: a man whose head, when he saw all of the suffering in the world, split into 11 pieces so that he could look upon everyone with love so that no-one had to go through anything alone.
Avalokiteshvara.
He was so moved by all of the suffering in the world that he sent out a healing gaze to everyone he could, so that none would have to go through trauma in isolation; in his pure and loving way, he tried to do what the Samaritans and other helpful organisations do now, and have done since – to offer loving kindness to those in pain.
The accident resulted in bruising to my frontal lobes on both sides – “bilateral contusions” was the medical description. The frontal lobes are the parts of the brain, at the front, just behind the bony ridges of the skull, which step in to adjudicate or monitor the reactions of other parts of the brain to situations. They might caution you against saying something inappropriate to, say, the vicar or in a business meeting. Mine didn’t step in because they were bruised; the work was parcelled out to the other parts of the brain, who suddenly received unfamiliar things to do, and got to grips with things more slowly as a result.
The frontal lobes enable us to have “theory of mind”: to imagine ourselves in another person’s place, in a situation, and temper our behaviour accordingly; sensitively. I couldn’t do this; the brain injury made everything all about me, so to speak. I was highly reactive and aggressive; brusque with everything that didn’t make sense, which was pretty much everything for a while. Though able-bodied and articulate enough, my coping mechanisms were shot to bits, and I was on the defensive all the time.
Somehow, in the midst of this, the profile of a man who embodied compassion stayed at the forefront of my mind, and I didn’t know why until about a year later, when things were tough, and the wisdom of the Buddha started pushing to the front and sustaining me.
ASD: on being a special-needs single parent 