No Longer Forgetting to Pee, Just Deciding to Wait
Inspired to write by the image.
When I got sick (long covid), it overwhelmed me to the point where my brain forgot how to process signals, so everything got processed as pain. If I got hungry, pain, tired, pain, cold, pain, needing to pee, same thing, and all this pain focused on my torso and pelvic region. That was a year ago, and for months I couldn’t move, walk, or well, exist.
Now, sitting here, I’m hungry and tired but not in pain, which is the result of consciously training my brain in how to interpret the individual signals. A recent instance was walking, exercising. I could walk maybe 1 km before I couldn’t, for the pain. Then I realised all that pain I was feeling was just my muscles stretching. Keeping that consciously to mind, I walked 5 km without pain.
While this was an achievement in that moment, I paid for it that night, because my dream brain does not have such control, so I woke in pain as my muscles grew, or whatever it is that they do at night.
This illness has been quite the experience, especially as I have had to consciously decide what importance to place on the signals my brain receives. If there was one pain I would choose to keep, it was the ‘needing to pee’ pain, but as my brain has grown better at interpreting signals, that pain has gone, too. However, I maintain an awareness of my inner workings that I either previously lacked, or was not conscious of. So this is less an issue than it was for much of my life, perhaps because I now decide, I now tell my brain, to pay attention.
It is almost as if I am putting ‘the disassociation’ to work. There is a part of me that is separate from the rest, but rather than let it forget what my body parts look like, such that it takes over when I look in the mirror and tells me that all this expanse is ‘not me’, I have placed it in charge of my internal workings. It is now the supervisor as tracks how I am functioning, observing behaviour and functioning, and either reporting back to me, or tweaking how I react such as to improve the process.
Note, I don’t have an inner monologue, or voices, though I do perceive myself as being run by a committee, going off or behaving on as many tangents as there are attendees in the ongoing board meeting. In that instance, the disassociation is the auditor or the janitor, observing, fixing, making better.
Anyhow, back to ADHD, forgetting, needing to pee. Having had to retrain my brain on the signals, and having experienced this forgetting, both of bodily signals and functions, and of core events, people, interactions, and life as it has happened to me, in general, I now view the forgetfulness of this supposed ‘disorder’ differently. Of me, I’m not sure the forgetfulness is part and parcel of the ADHD, but rather a side-effect of dealing with a world not set up for our type of inherent experience. Basically, we think, act, and be in a way that is at odds with the world, and thus are subject to trauma when it refuses to let us live in the way that is natural to us. Heh, well, maybe that wasn’t so basic, so I’ll try again. Basically, to live fully in this world, we must break against it’s rules, it’s bounds. Trauma. And the forgetfulness is the result of that trauma. We are so focused on fitting in, that the most basic of behaviours, of actions, such as where we put our keys, or needing to pee, are left by the wayside.
The forgetfulness, in this instance is a trauma outcome, not part of lived existence. For, as I get better, experience less pain, am no longer riding the very edge of simply coping, I am actively forgetting less of the day-to-day events, and also reconnecting with previously forgotten memories, building links to events thought lost.
These days, I don’t forget what needing to pee feels like, and I know when I’m hungry. It is then up to me to consciously decide if either of these is important, right then. And it often isn’t, because I’m concentrating, focused, and since I’ve been so well trained over the years, I know that I neither need to eat when my tummy rumbles, and the extent to which my bladder retains, to the very second.
This I now remember.
What things do you forget, and when?