I am lyrically stunted. I just don't perceive song lyrics the way you probably do. Exhibit A: I always thought Stevie Nicks was singing, "just like the one winged dove." My husband, pointing and laughing, explained to me that white winged dove makes more sense and that's probably what Stevie meant. At times like this, he turns my own evil teacher tricks against me and says things like, "Uh, let's use our context clues please?"I guess I made that bed. Always a fan of the self-denegrating humor genre, I later riskily performed what I can only describe as an interpretive vignette of what a flying one-winged dove would indeed look like. At a work holiday party. At my principal's (i.e. boss, evaluator, bestower of financial future) table. Think circles, beer in one hand, free arm flapping most ungracefully.
There are some things I've been meaning to tell you. One is that I had the great pleasure of hearing Maya Angelou speak a few months ago. It was honestly too huge to write about at the time. I can only equate how I felt when I saw her to how I felt when I first saw a real-live sketch Van Gogh made in preparation for a painting that I received love, comfort and beauty from for years and years of my life. Instant overwhelming feeling of gratitude and love.
I first read Angelou's, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" when I was 14. It was a very dark time. Sharing someone else's darkness (as Angelou shares in her memoir), knowing they lived through it, gave me hope. It was precious to me, she was precious to me, like a friend that I really needed. This was right after I moved out of my mom's. To make a long story short, I was given the wrong test, and so medicine that I never should have taken. I have never felt darker in my life, and I believe I will always feel humbled to what those who suffer true deep depression like that are going through. It is senseless and naive to ever, EVER judge them, as we can never perceive the world as anyone else perceives it exactly; the chemicals in our brains, and sometimes the neural pathways from childhood can literally leave us absolutely wired for debilitating depression (thanks to brain plasticity, it is possible for brains to re-wire, by the way), slaves to the brain's circuitry. That's not to say we don't have some control, and I'm not talking about moral relativism. It is just incredibly humbling to consider the degree to which chemicals and neuropathways control our emotions, thoughts and perceptions.
Anways, increasingly, the ridiculous medicine drove me into this mega darkness. I remember being at school one day in 8th grade and actually having a reality break. I was seriously drugged, straight out of a "this is your brain on drugs," commercial. I would just refuse to pick up my head during classes, and I cared not a bit what anyone thought about that. I doubt that teachers in my rural German-mennonite school community were equipped to deal with this, so I spent a lot of time sleeping in the nurse's office. I would just lay there, hoping it was true what they said, that I would feel like living some day. On this particular day, the climax of the whole God-aweful experience, I stumbled from the little nurse's office cot only to observe the walls and furniture around me grow and twist like some Alice In Wonderland nightmare. It was total sensory cluster-youknowwhat. I would reach out for something, and it would be further than it should, bigger than it should, smaller than it should. As you can imagine, I freaked. School counselor (whose coffee, I regret to say, had previously been involved in an Ex-Lax scandal among myself and a group of friends) drove me to a community mental health center where it was FINALLY figured out that they had been wrong all along. Misdiagnosed. Wrong diagnostic test. Living with grandma turned out to be pretty good medicine in and of itself.
Soon after, I got my spunk back, and somehow they let me graduate 8th grade although I am almost positive I missed over 60 days of instruction and surely flunked almost everything. (I have no idea.) Although I never felt that way again, my brush with crazy gave me a strange sense of comeraderie with, well, crazies. I didn't know crazy was something you could catch, and it's still tempting to see a giant chaism that separaties the crazies from the non-crazies, but the humbling reality is that, in the words of Maya Angelou, "We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike."
