After a cursery skimming of mental illness symptoms, I found nothing on referring to your own mind as a garden, so whew big sigh of relief there.
I have periods of rest from the otherwise constant tending of my head: when sleeping, before my morning coffee, a huge espresso jolt that hauls me out of a dream stupor after 30 minutes of snoozing NPR has failed to wake me. While watching television, if it is purely entertaining. I can't watch local news or the other shows my husband loves. . .Deadliest Warrior, Man vs. Wild, Deadliest Catch, Ultimate Warrior. Too much of a reminder of how tough the world is beyond my mental and actual garden walls. And playing word games on my phone (my current obsession: Word Solitaire, high score 12,286). The rest of the time, I'm turning gray matter with a relentless questioning of, well, everything. Unless I can distract my mind with electronics, my mental conversation never stops. The relief I get from writing is that I can for a short while focus the conversation to words, sentences, the subject and craft of writing. Writing truly calms my mind and relaxes my body. So sleeping, waking up, electronics, and writing. I used to also have running, cycling, or swimming, those repetitive sports that leave the mind free to wander, on this short list of mind soothing methods, but for the past few years I've let them go: too busy, too tired, too dizzy, too achy. Too afraid of getting more hurt than I already am. My body, as a neighbor to my mind, has suffered. Like living next door to a drummer, my body, starting with my neck has begun to collapse from the incessant barrage of brain noise.
A true story: For the past year and a half I have been experiencing constant ringing in my ears (called tinnitus, but I prefer the more descriptive term ringing in my ears), intermittent disequilibrium, and neck pain. Two MRIs, a CT scan, and half a dozen doctors later, I have two diagnoses: my neck is collapsing under the weight of my head and I have an incurable inner ear disease named after a French doctor. First of all, my head is not that big, if anything it's smallish for my build. I can only imagine that the doctor was speaking metaphorically and that the weight of my thoughts has finally proved too much for my neck, which is average to scrawny. As for the incurable disease, I sought a second opinion, was given a multitude of tests, carefully calculated attempts to knock me off balance followed by careful measurements of the success of each endeavor. The clear winner, hot water poured into my ears, elicited instant vomiting and vertigo that took me days from which to recover (just write recover from, recover from, why is that so hard?). At the follow up appointment, the doctor said he couldn't say I definitively had Meniere's Disease, but he couldn't rule it out either and that I responded more strongly to the hot water in the ear test than most, but offered no explanation for why this might be and what it meant in terms of recovery. He suggested a psychiatrist to help me cope with all the physical ailments he couldn't fix. The outcome: I am more careful in the shower (a tip: never wet the inside of only one ear, wet both or neither, but never just one unless you like taking naps on the bathroom floor in a pool of your own vomit). I also went online for help and from this web-doctoring decided to start regular myofascial release and chiropractor adjustments and have since managed to keep my dizziness at bay. The ears still ring none stop, but I have a much deeper appreciation for the mind/body connection and the intricate and difficult task this system has in keeping everything running smoothly.
Before I found any relief, my world had retreated to my house and garden and short forays to work and my kid's schools. I even stopped grocery shopping, because the aisles made me seasick. Neurotic, you might say. Sure. Go ahead, your among the learned doctors in that diagnosis. Yes, being me for nearly half a century has resulted in a multiple of neurotic tendencies, but this is not a disease under which I have to suffer for the rest of my life. There is a gate in my mental secret garden. A locked gate most of the time, but doctors don't hold the key. I do.
Bottom poppy: my brain on stress. . .retracted, out of focus, tattered.
