9:51pm September 11, 2014

exulansis

n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.

This is how I feel about delirium, and illness, and living near death for a really long time, and the things death taught me.

It’s also how I feel about the experiences better recounted as a Donna Williams poem than anything I could say myself:

Well Below Zero

On the edge, I ask myself,
“What will I lose,
to have lived in the depths
of ‘well below zero’?”

I grasped the tools to climb out
and scream loudly to the world
that I was all that I was,
somehow never enough,
that with all I was,
it wasn’t fair enough
that I stayed there,
a nobody nowhere.

You can make a hell as pretty
as you like
but hell is still
….a hell.

There you stand so innocent
of this, my paradox.
For every 'why’, your eyes reply
simply, “why not?”

This time we meet on equal ground,
more equal than before.
Now the ground won’t fall away
from my feet anymore,
enough that I can see and hear
a world that I can feel.
For where I am and who I am
and know it’s real.

Bolded parts for emphasis, except the title. Having lived well below zero, and having nobody know what that means, and grasping the tools to communicate your best what it means, and meeting blank stares as often as not. No common reference point.

And the caves, the caves in my mind, where all the information is, and few have seen the caves let alone believed, that I have these giant caves connected by the narrowest of tubes, and getting information out of me involves tight crawl spaces and getting lost underground.

So many things are this way.

So many times, I’ve wanted one witness, just one witness, to my reality, so that I could say to someone, “This is real.”

Anne is that person. Anne sees me from inside, not from outside, and she saves me. She saves the memory of things I could never communicate to anyone else, or even if I could, they wouldn’t make sense.

And the things I can’t tell people, because if I told them the literal unvarnished truth they would take it as meaning things about me that aren’t true. So I have to lie, in order for them to see what’s real about the situation. Or just not discuss it.

And the gaps. The miles-wide gaps between what other people know and what I know. And they can’t see the gaps because they fill them in, in their mind, when they look at me. Just like the blind spot in their eyes fills in the background pattern they are used to seeing. And I am left with glaring gaps in comprehension that only I can see.

My life is full to the brim with exulansis. And I will never remember that word. Not unless all my friends start using it. But wow what a perfect word for so much of my life. Maybe there is more exulansis to me than there is anything else. I wonder how many people that is true of, but I bet for neurodivergent people it’s so many people.

Notes: