The Sound of My Own Thoughts

(From "The Misadventures of No One Famous" my memoir)

This entry was written before i found out that i had Graves Disease. My thyroid had been dying for some time, according to doctors, and it was literally in the death throes around this time, causing me a great deal of mental anguish. To anyone who has suffered from thyroid disease, you know what i mean. Happily, i had my thyroid nuked, and am now on lifetime medication to control it.

They should only enjoy the fruits of those dark demons,
but never have to do battle with them.

I've lost the sound of my own thoughts. I have so much trouble with that: just having a thought, recognizing it, communing with it. I noticed this the other day in a rare moment when I was having a smoke break alone on the front porch. The thoughts marched in and out of my brain and I didn't recognize them. They were disjointed, odd, meaningless--rather pathetic, actually. I can't recall now what they were exactly.

I know much of that is because I've spent 24/7 for the last year and a half with a loquacious partner. I love her stories and she is intelligent and interesting and quite often hysterically funny. But I crave some solitude, Some quiet--some time to reacquaint myself with my own thoughts.

That's why I'm sitting in the driveway in my van writing this.

I'm about to enter a new chapter in my life. It could be the best chapter ever, the one I've been waiting for like some ticket-less wannabe passenger on the train of real life. I watch the trains come and go--see other people boarding and going somewhere. I wish I could go too. But am I running away, or running to? No matter where I've been or who I've been with, I never can count it as a success. I always have some screaming ugly in my brain, ripping my psyche to shreds, leaving me feeling victimized by my own mind. My error, I think, is in the notion that "success" and "normal" are terms that apply to me in the most fundamental sense. That's when I had my little mini-epiphany. All these years, I have struggled to do the things i felt i must--offer what little talent i had to the world, hoping to finally create stability and calm in my day to day life--finally place my energies into art and writing and music.

But the reality is that those things are merely points of light in an otherwise darkened room. I still have difficulty dealing with stress. I continue to impose order on my chaos, inventing still newer ways to obsess and control the minutia of each day; still am thin-skinned and self-loathing and angry that I can never be that person I was before everything good in me imploded and rained down like shards of glass, cutting me, creating more wounds in my scarred skin.

I don't think highly enough of myself that I can just dismiss my hideous behavior with, "Oh, it's just the way I am, and I don’t care if anyone approves." I'm not strong enough to change certain behaviors--the chemicals fighting, brawling, wrestling in my brain are too powerful. And I'm not so naïve that I believe it's acceptable to behave the way I do. I hate who I've become, yet I have been incapable of changing that reality.

I'm a nut-case. Crazy. Sick in the head. Messed up. Mentally ill. How tragic that is. What a total pathetic loss. Potential, just jack-hammered into smithereens.

The safest and wisest thing I can do is never again fool myself into believing that I can maintain a committed, co-habitation with anyone else. It would be asking too much from another human being. I should never invest too much emotionally in the success of a lover, or the success of keeping one. It’s a fond, fruitless wish, and exercise in futility. The people who cross paths with me, or count themselves as a friend or acquaintance, should never have to see the ugly side of me. They can enjoy my momentary calm, the fleeting generosity and kindness, the humor over a cup of coffee, the painting I just finished, the song I just recorded, the novel I published--and never have to endure the stomping rages, the tearful despondency, the invisible self-esteem. They should only enjoy the fruits of those dark demons, but never have to do battle with them.

The real challenge, after truly accepting these things about myself, is to embrace fully that I will never again enjoy the company of that SELF that has been usurped by this new self. I have changed, slowly but surely. I must release my hold on the hope that I can be loving and kind and generous and easy-going most of the time. It has become obvious that the person who possesses those qualities is now possessed by this demon. My only hope is to keep the demon in check when I am in the company of others, and let her rant and rage around in the safety of my solitude; and to glean some creative penance in songs and books and art. I've run out of time. I'm 40 years old, and what could have been changed is now only a dream. And like a dream, I must allow it to fade from my consciousness and never let it interrupt my day with the should-haves and whys that torture my waking moments.

My dog loves me and he won't walk out. He'll be the constant companion that helps me feeling needed and loved unconditionally. He won’t argue and push all my buttons. He will give me hugs and make me smile and laugh, as he has always done. He will not have pressing needs and agendas and ambitions to tax my strength. He will only ask for food and water and a pat on the head, and a trip outside to relieve himself. He is the only one who can safely build his world around someone like me.

The Sound of My Own Thoughts

From Crayons to Gel Keyboards

The Evolution of the Writing Instrument

When I was a toddler, I recorded my lofty thoughts with my favorite Crayola, teal blue, from my selection of 64 crayons of "Different Brilliant Colors." I recall that I never wrote on walls or furniture as some children are wont to do. I preferred to save my creative endeavors, and felt it unlikely that I could rip down part of the wall and hide it in my sock drawer. So I wrote on paper. Colorfully.


As I grew older, I moved to pens and pencils. Colored ones, at first, so that the transition from rainbows to uninspired black lines would not be overly traumatic. Bic, Eberhard, Trusty--always number two, because number three was too light, and any other one smudged. I filled spiral notebooks and steno pads with stories and poetry, and even wrote my first novel in one of those record books with the hard covers. I had to have a pen or pencil that flowed (or flew, if past tense rules are followed logically), because my mind would charge ahead and I would have to write quickly to keep up. This is probably why my handwriting became such an infantile hieroglyph.

I spent my entire young adult life (as if I'm some doddering old lady--although, come to think of it, I have been known to dodder on occasion) typing up my quaint little stories on what I now (lovingly) refer to as a Smith Corona AK-47. The bell at the end of the right margin informed me of an empty clip. It wouldn't have been so bad, except I was continually chasing this piece of machinery across my desk. I knew I'd either have to nail it down or buy a heavier model.

The heavier model turned out to be an IBM PC, which seemed the ultimate technology in 1985. I felt so important. I had an actual computer to take care of all that busy work that often dissuades writers from finishing those laborious and voluminous novels. I went through just about every obligatory software there was. EasyWriter, Easy Working Writer, Professional Write, and finally, WordPerfect 5.1, which I learned to hate, then found MS Word, which i use to this day.

Irony available here: upon editing and updating this piece of writing, I had to convert it to Word (for Windows)--the program I have used for the last five years--and I won't change to anything else again. I mean it. Really.

Consequently, I have a profusion of floppy disks that hold various writings within various programs. The transfer process began to get old after I finally got everything switched over to Professional Write, and then discovered WordPerfect. I swore up and down that I would never change again; WordPerfect was the program for me; it was too much trouble to switch everything to another; I WOULD NOT learn another damn program. Then I realized that it really was difficult to remember all the function keys. I still had to glance at the cardboard reference chart suspended next to the monitor to remind myself that center was Shift F6, not Ctrl F6, or Alt F6. After two years of this continual referencing, the idea of Windows with icons that I could simply point to and select, grew more and more appealing. I exercised my female right to change my mind, and announced that my very next purchase would be Windows. But only WordPerfect for Windows, since I had slaved over it for two years. I had to save at least some face.


So now that I have trudged through the Swamp of Software, survived the Morass of Manuals, and emerged a Word Processing Force to be Reckoned With (or, With Which to be Reckoned, if I want to be grammatically correct), it eventually became time to retire the old IBM, since it was showing signs of not only wear, but a sort of computer strain of Alzheimer's. So my IBM PC-asaurus, has faded into a fossil in some technological graveyard of keyboards, joysticks, CPU's, LCD Monitors, and dot-matrix roller printers, and undoubtedly a 22nd Century archaeologist will dig them all up and snicker at its crudeness.

From Crayons to Gel Keyboards