27,000 Strikes and You're Out

I understand the notion of three strikes and you’re out. You have two chances to figure it out, and one final chance to hit it out of the park. The thing is, if developmental trauma affected your prefrontal cortex, what if you need more chances to do something right? I don’t know all that much about how early trauma affects the development of a child’s brain, but I can tell you that I can feel a disconnect with the front of my brain and my ability to carry through with a new idea, with executive function, with the ability to hit the ball, or use the cash register correctly the first fifty-eight times, or fill in the blanks as per instructed. (Yes, I drove three hours to vote for Biden, and yes, I check marked the box instead of filling it in, a fact which, I learned three hours later after driving home, killed my vote.)

Maybe the prefrontal cortex has nothing to do with that stuff, but I feel like it does.

I wish I could have had a second chance on voting that day. My brain, you see, is chronically busy being both an adult with adult responsibilities and thoughts and also being an infant, terrorized and alone, trying to negotiate the world in a body that feels fundamentally and dangerously wrong. (Imagine you are working with machinery that cuts felled trees in half lengthwise. Imagine you get fed into that machine by mistake and find yourself cut in two. Wouldn’t you freak out? That’s sort of what it’s like to lose your mother as an infant—and, okay, well, as a 42 year old whose mother just died, but at least then I could verbalize my feelings and get a therapist.) With a brain like this, it’s really easy to check mark a box instead of coloring it in because most of my energy is going into being present without passing out.

It took me dropping out of college three times to, on the fourth shot, understand the trick to doing well was to go to every class and do the homework. This may seem like such a duh realization, but that’s because your mind and body are in cahoots, and they get each other. It doesn’t matter if the mind knows it’s supposed to do homework if the body isn’t along for the ride. On my fourth college try, my body woke up, felt safe enough to look around, and it said, “Hey, I think I’ll do this thing instead of running away.” (It’s hard to separate the mind and body—really they are one, but I’m trying to make a point, and a conversation is more interesting often with two characters.)

Mostly what I’m saying was that I didn’t go to all my classes and I didn’t do all my homework those other college tries because there was a block between understanding why I needed to do those things and my mindbody. My mindbody was distracted. My mindbody did not see how doing homework was going to keep my head above water. It was like the world was asking me to decorate Easter eggs while my hair was on fire. Uh, hello! I don’t give a flying fuck about your Easter eggs. I am in mortal danger and you don’t even see it or believe me or care! I needed SO MANY CHANCES to let my mindbody dip its toe into the idea and to try it out, again and again and again until finally the idea (do your homework; save money; believe in yourself; tell the truth) made sense and was something I was able then to accomplish.

That’s all I have to say for now. I wrote this for M.

I gotta go take a nap. All this focus has exhausted me.