Reprogramming Is Labor
by Aisel Thakur
I’m not kidding. I’ve had many phases in my life where it seemed I was doing nothing. I felt like I was doing nothing; felt overwhelmed by small trips around town; felt unseen and also afraid of being seen. It was chaos. I feel that way creeping in again, and that’s what makes this so hard. As I type at 11:54 PM on a Wednesday night, I wonder why my day was so chaotic. I feel like I’m floating and also being carried at the same time.
I feel like what D. T. Suzuki, the influential Japanese Zen Buddhist scholar, once said:
“Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.”
Only,
I feel no enlightenment, just utter confusion. I feel like I’m two inches off the ground, but I don’t feel like I’m suspended. I feel like I’m being dragged along from the armpits, like an angsty toddler. I feel like all my limbs want to shut off. I’ve been in so many realms today, so many hats. So many, “mama”s, that I simply desire this quiet right now.
I choose to take a breath.
Inhale.
Exhale.
This breath took mental labor. Something we don’t see, or don’t look at, rather. Some people, especially mentally challenged people, see the mental load as a sort of labor. A function that they need to turn on. A body that doesn’t practice a healthy coping system is not broken. They are simply focused on the mental labor. They see the goal, but are locked within the persona that they think they build themselves.
Mental illness isn’t a curse. I’ve lived with it my whole life. I think there’s plenty of intelligence in mental illness. That’s why I like saying mentally challenged. Cuz, trust me, every day is a dang challenge. I know I have two hemispheres in my brain, but they take so goddamn long to talk to each other. My spine hurts and the MS is still the culprit.
I used to think it was only my fault. That if I’d lost weight, ate anti-inflammatory, stayed active, hydrated, blah, blah, blah. No. I had to reprogram a whole system that was taught to manage stress like everyone else. And to be honest, if it hurt me this much in my MS body, could you only imagine how unhelpful it is to a ‘neurotypical’ body exposed to years of having to “shake it off.”
Why don’t we have a cushion for reprogramming? Or, why do we have a hushed one? Can’t we give people the chance? Or have we just convinced them to consume less, to be seen less, to be less of a bother? When in fact, the bother was inside the very ones told to remain silent.
“It’s your tikkun (soul’s healing), then,” I hear voices tell me.
Apologetic, isn’t it? I think it’s true, though. We don’t like facing our soul’s contract. We don’t want to look that deep. It’s not going to fix the problem today. Today, there’s money to be made, food to be cooked, house to be cleaned, laundry to be washed…
But did you forget?
You write the terms and conditions. We make contracts with everything at all times. The smallest contract is: who we think we are. And some of us choose to notice only that. That’s totally cool, dude, do you.
I couldn’t do that. Because I had another layer others didn’t. I had chronic pain, and depression associated with the pain. But when I began getting curious about the pain, I realized that the pain was something else screaming at me. Words, contracts, ideas that had been formed by my mismatched hemispheres trying to make sense of a neurological disorder. So breathe deeper, I did.
Inhale.
Exhale.
I saw myself. And as much as I breathed into that space, the safer I felt. The ideas about the pain started to dissipate, and slowly a kinder version of the idea began to emerge. Instead of nonsensical “logic,” a soothing memory might play as I breathed deeply. It was almost like my own body somatically healing in that moment where the skewed idea was formed.
I have yet to explore the age I am in the memory of the skewed idea. That’s a story for another time.
12:18 AM
Welcome Thoughtful Thursday.
