Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

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What to do When the Closets Open

You know those 2 am post traumatic stress moments?  You know, when the “worst case scenarios” come out of their closet, throw open all the tidy drawers you kept closed in the light of day, strewing the folded ‘what ifs’ and sullying the newly laundered, ‘maybe we’re past the worst’?

more dirty laundry

Last week I was this basket case, wondering if the physical therapy my daughter was now engaged in to help strengthen her muscles, was doing damage rather than good.  She had come back from an appointment earlier in the day complaining about how sore she felt. Usually, sore muscles are a sign of pushing beyond one’s comfort level or norm. But in the recent past, too much stress on her physically (trying out a new sport) had most likely led to a relapse in her illness. Now awake and thoroughly surrounded by those guilt tripping needlers in my mind, I was giving in to my fear.

How did I not make myself more anxious than I already felt?

I had to get out of bed so as not to wake my husband, find my notebook and write down those fears. Also, I wrote down the facts of what had happened that day and in so doing remembered what her physical therapist had told me about how long she might be sore. 3 days he said, (and he was right), but I had to live through those days and see for myself, all the while listening to her “ow’s” and needs for neck or back massages, (which I was glad to accommodate). Each day the pain subsided a bit and I kept this, and my 7 years of experience, as my mantra.

Writing has been one of the most important things I’ve been able to do when I can’t do much else. I was able to go back to bed and sleep.  And in the morning I went to look for a poem I remembered by a woman named Anne Harrington.  The opening stanza is piled like a stack of laundry and reads:

Jammed/Crammed/Damned

Emotions piled in a corner

     One on top of another

     Stuffed in

     Crammed

     Jammed

     Heaped high

     Overlooked

     Too busy to get to…

I could get to them, I just couldn’t make them behave until I could put them on paper.

Someday I hope to be stacked more like this:  A zen stones skyscraper

 

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Brain Review

After reading a blog post of mine, I was recently contacted by a woman, Allison Morris, who has made a simple graphic  (at onlinecollegecourses) of the brain to help people understand the supposed functions of each area.  While I applaud this lively experience I am reminded by Joseph LeDoux, in The Synaptic Self, that the brain doesn’t only have discreet areas of operation, it is in the synapses that information is recorded and stored and then transferred to other areas of the brain and to the genes themselves.  Here is a statement by him:

Synapses are the spaces between brain cells. But more importantly, they are the channels of communication between cells that make possible all brain functions, including perception, memory, emotion and thinking.

It’s practically a truism to say the synapses underlie personality since synapses underlie everything the brain does. More important yet: synapses are the sites of storage of information, including information that is encoded by our genes and also by our experiences — our memories.

When it comes to personality, genes and experience are just two ways of doing the same thing — wiring synapses. That’s why I say, To the extent that we are a product of our genes and experiences, we are our synapses.

This doesn’t mean that the essence of who you are is encoded at a particular synapse. It means that your self is a very complex pattern of synaptic connectivity in your brain.

In thinking about how emotion, writing and the brain come together, this man has pushed my understanding along quite a ways.  If this area interests you, I highly recommend his other book, The Emotional Brain too..