Brain things
Ironically, I didn’t even realize that my previous reblog was about how brains that have experienced trauma have physical differences to regular brains. But that’s what this post is gonna be about. Brains and the emotional things that end up fucking them up physically.
Because I found out the nature and cause of my brain damage and it isn’t pretty. I also had no idea this shit could happen to a brain.
So, it turns out that yes, my brain has indeed been damaged and that yes, this did happen during the years in which it was trying to develop. I spent years muddling over how the fuck I could have ended up with brain damage when, as far as I know, I never had any severe head injuries, no blunt trauma to the head (well minus the time I cut it open and had to get stitches when I was like 3), never been exposed to chemical/toxic fumes or anything like that, no fetal brain damage. Yet my symptoms were presenting as brain damage. Where the fuck did that come from?
Well, I found out where the fuck it came from. And it turns out, I even knew what was happening while it was happening. But all my pleas to fucking help me were ignored and my symptoms brushed aside as “You’re just trying to get out of something/you’re just trying to get something you want. It’s not gonna work.” I have a nasty feeling that even at the end of this post they’re still gonna be brushed off as such.
There’s something called a psuedoseizure or a “psychogenic nonepileptic seizure,” which is seizure activity that occurs with no seizure disorder present. It’s not a true seizure (due to the lack of seizure disorder), but mimics the symptoms of one, including convulsions, “absence” and loss of attention, stiffening/seizing up of the body (your legs may forget how to be legs, you might pitch forward/fall backward, etc), etc. Since there’s no physical component to this type of “seizure,” it’s not going to show up on brain scans unless one is occurring right at the moment of the scan. Which explains why this shit did not show up on the EEG or MRI of the head that I had when I was a teenager.
So what’s the cause of psuedoseizures? Psychological trauma. Basically, when exposed to ongoing trauma that just. Won’t. Stop. The brain ends up firing all these neurons all over the place, and becomes overloaded as it frantically tries to protect itself from all of the distress that it’s getting all at once. With no other option, it legit just “turns itself off and back on again” because at that point it just doesn’t know what the fuck to do anymore. And then the psuedoseizure happens.
I’d run out of fingers and toes if I tried to count exactly how many times throughout my childhood my body just froze up and I was caught just...zoning off into space. My dad would call it “mooning,” and say “Oh, she’s mooning again.” And during these moments, coherent thought is replaced with bullshit like a single line from a song repeated over and over again like a skipped record, or one single word on repeat (e.g. for an example, my brain would get “stuck” on, let’s say the chorus line of Default’s “Wasting My Time” and just go “not wasting my time...not wasting my time...not wasting my time...not wasting my time...” ad infinitum until it’s ready to be a brain again). There were times when I’d be just sitting in my room, or in school, or...wherever, and suddenly everything locked up, my eyes would fixate on...well, nothing, and I’d go catatonic. There were times when my whole body would sort of “lock” or “twitch.”
Later on, when I got my guardians, they were there when it happened. They saw how after a particularly fucked-up situation I would drop everything I was holding in my hands, and they’d have to help me hold things again for the next few minutes. They’ve seen me pitch forward and have had to hold me on both sides when it happened. They’ve been caught in the fucking center of traumatic situations with me as they desperately tried to protect me or remove me and saw how I’d fall to the ground--I’d be sitting in a chair and then end up on the ground, with my guardians circled around me and holding me and me just...breaking down because I was scared and didn’t know what was happening to me. They’ve seen me start shaking and my entire body cease to work, how I’d be hyperventilating and they’d have to fly me over to the nearest chair or bed or, barring that, the fucking floor. They’ve had to help me walk because my legs would fly out from under me and lock up. They’ve held me while I convulsed in their arms...and cried, because they just didn’t know what to do but they knew something was horribly horribly wrong and they just wanted it to stop...but it wouldn’t. Nobody who could make it stop would.
I knew something was horribly horribly wrong. I was terrified. I knew brains weren’t supposed to get stuck and I knew bodies weren’t supposed to lock up and forget how to do body things. I didn’t know what it WAS, or what was CAUSING it. I just knew that it was happening and it wasn’t supposed to be and somebody please just make it stop. I remember it happening and then, when I “turned on” again, frantically tugging at Yuna or Rikku or Cloud or whoever and going “Help me, help me...” and them just holding me by the shoulders, rocking me gently, telling me, “You’re okay, sweetie. It’s going to be okay.” Then carrying me over to the bed--and being at a total loss for what to do, every single time it happened again and again and again.
I’d gone to the school about it because it happened a LOT when I was in school--in high school it got to the point where it’d happen constantly, because high school was an extremely hellish and traumatic place for me to be in general. I went to the school nurse ALL the time, the counselors, the teachers...pretty much everybody in the school who I could talk to. I’d tell them that it was so bad in there that it was making my body freeze up and I was experiencing actual physical pain, that my vision blurred and that my brain stopped being able to think thoughts, that I couldn’t hold things anymore...what could they do? They had no idea why the fuck those things were happening either and my parents were called countless times...and then they were told “She’s doing this because she doesn’t want to be in school. Just don’t worry about it.”
I went to doctors about it. My dad’s wife overrode the doctors and told them it was just “something I did when I didn’t like something” or “she’s just trying to get her way. She starts up on this stuff when things don’t go the way she wants them to.” In actuality, they happened when she was going at me, when I was being abused, when I was being bullied or exposed to overstimulation at school (you think middle/high schoolers give a crap? Hell, they found it funny and would keep on prodding me just to see that shit happen again). I had the one brain scan when I was 12 (EEG) and one when I was 15 (MRI) and when nothing showed up on either one of those, it was as if my dad’s wife had her “suspicions” confirmed about how I was making the whole thing up “to get something out of people.” When I was little I went to my dad’s wife about it because she was the only one I had to go to about it--no guardians back then. She told me “That doesn’t happen to you.” I told her it does, it really does. “No it doesn’t, stop it. There’s nothing wrong with you.” I told her it does happen and it hurts when it does. “Then it’s something YOU’RE doing to make it happen. YOU tell yourself to make it stop happening when it does. It’s all YOU.”
(For the record, what the fuck benefit would a 9-to-16-year-old girl get from faking seizure activity???)
It happened a lot when she was going at me or after she had gone at me. It happened a lot when I was in school (like I said, there became a point in high school where it happened ALL THE TIME). It happened a lot when I was being bullied or abused. Now I know why. But back then how the fuck was I supposed to know, especially when something was clearly happening to me and my soulbonds saw it happen, and yet I continued to be told I was either making it up or causing it to happen.
And that was my developmental years, ladies and gentlemen. That shit was going on in my brain throughout every single of the years my brain was just trying to grow and form into a brain.
So my brain wasn’t able to fully grow and form into a brain.
Every single one of those fucking psuedoseizures was causing actual, real damage. Because a brain isn’t supposed to just “turn itself off and then on again” and a brain also isn’t supposed to be constantly exposed to the type of stimulus that CAUSES it to have to turn itself off and then on again. I knew that. A kid knows when something horribly wrong is happening to their body. They know that they’re not supposed to be locking up and seizing every day, ESPECIALLY knowing that they don’t have epilepsy or some other seizure disorder that would explain that away.
But no. “You’re just trying to get something out of us.” “It’s all YOU. If you don’t want it to happen anymore, YOU make it not happen.”
So my brain destroyed itself because that bitch refused to take fucking responsibility for the fact that her own actions and the trauma that she was inflicting on me (either directly or by-proxy, by just letting school bullies and overstimulating maladaptive environments let loose on me with reckless abandon and then overriding any and all attempts to mitigate it) were actually causing it to destroy itself.
Of course, if she let the school intervene and I was taken to the doctors for more than just a 30-minute brain scan (I wonder what a brain scan would show NOW that the damage has been done?) then I would’ve found all this out way back then.
But that doesn’t do anything now does it? Now when I use “My brain got stuck” as an explanation for why I’m, well...the way I am, I can say it knowing that I know exactly how, why, and when it “got stuck.”
I wonder what a brain scan would show now that my brain is done trying to grow. I’m going to see if I can get to a neurologist.
...And now when I think about SO MANY of the things that I did, or the things that happened, I can at least forgive myself because now I know that I literally was not, and am not, playing with a full deck. Of course my brain doesn’t do shit that normal brains do, or even that other autistic brains do. Because normal, autistic, or otherwise brains did not spend their entire developmental years fucking seizing because they were being abused so damned badly that they had no choice but to shut off.
Great.
Like I said, I’m going to see if I can get to a neurologist now that I know this shit was going on.
