Autobiographical experience of narcolepsy, time, the indifinitative mind
I don’t like spicy foods. But while at pats I started using hot sauce and only when my dad fed me something spicy and I had a delayed reaction to it did I realize that I was hypnotized still.
“When I was given muscle relaxants I hated the response because it allowed for more blood flow which made things more dreamlike” – edit this part.
Children with ADHD or autism are sometimes diagnosed with Sensory processing disorders.I have an ADHD diagnosis made by a neurologist due to my experience with losing my “blanket” and thinking something or someone stole it professing this to my dad and leading to him finding it in my dresser drawer. Meaning that the onset of wake when I folded the blanket was not yet awake and I was moving through the waking life without time, losing sense of my sequential self and into a rounded illusion.
But the delayed response to spicy led me to feel like I was hypnotized, because sleep is a hypnotic of sorts.
I was prescribed a high dose of adderall which was taken from me when I went inpatient because my family believed my narcalepsy was psychosis. The lower does set the stage for the onset of another cycle of narcolepsy.
Today I realized that when I do my favorite activity writing with the same letter in a poem with each world beginning with the same letter did I wake up again. Which is interesting because ADHD and being dyslexic causes for a mashup of neural connectivity. So its easy to fall into narcolepsy. But because of that I can also use mental tasks to wake my self up. Becuase I reorder the process; this is the use of top-bottom and bottom-up learning.
“Bottom-up learning refers to learning implicit knowledge first and then learning explicit knowledge on that basis (i.e., through “extracting” implicit knowledge)”
But my disorders allow me to enter the interworking of my brain because, when “asleep” certain parts of my body grow weaker and others grow stronger. Especially when i’m not medicated properly- becasue I cant wake my systems up without the use of an intervention of medicine. It looks like a stroke honestly, which led me to send photos of “selfies” to my mom and ex boyfriend proclaiming I was disfigured or not me. Which was a true emotional reaction to seeing my self without my typical muscle tone. But, it definitely scared everyone including me. Nothing more than a mis configuration of the somatic and sympathetic nervous system.
But through that I was able to learn about time and the theory of chaos. Becaue when part of me is asleep the other parts realized that 1. Time is not linear 2. That things in motion follow the same path forward and backward in a figure 8 that is collapsable. Because I started to notice that my body would follow these paths, I can only describe it like the astroprojection scene you see in Donnie Darko. Part of me subdued and my body would begin to follow or dance in and out of a sway- when I fell one way things in my brain slowed down and when I moved the sam way forward my visual process seemed to speed up.
Making me realize that understanding time isn’t something that happens from left to right or beginning to end. When im cold I wake up more because my body systems start to slow down but this is why adhd medication helps to wake a narcoleptic up becaue it narrows the blood vessles- it restricts them.
I think this is why people engage in strangulation or suffocation because it essentially slows the blood and leads to a hypnotic or drug-like induced experience. Which might give this same disorienting time effect.
People seek this effect out but I do not. I hate it.
To round back to the understanding of tast and my delayed response- when given spicy food I had a delayed response not normal for my conscious mind. This effect also made me feel even more disorented because it seemed as though someone was dsrupting my typical perceptions, but they werent. It was a reaction of narcolepsy.
When in a narcoleptic state it becomes hard to tighten or keep my tonung in a stady position. Because your Tonge is the strongest muscle in your body the rest of my face would fall down. Which makes sense because of muscular structure as it realtes to the neural pathways of the brain.
This led to a disassociation of visual and sensory subsequently a perceptual issue of states of mind. Similar to states of matter because cooling led to slowing down my body reducing the narcaleptic effect and heating gave way to a faster effect. And I figured that if this was happeing to my body is not unlikely that it could also be happening the organic things around me. Because as a human there a synergy to the organic matter of the earth and the were made of the earth.
In my naraleptic states I can make art which leads to a more subjective interpretation removed from rationality.
in the book tale from both sides of the brain, gazzaniga write about the duality of the brain body connection.
In the well tuned brain for a manic society whybrow describes how society is manic the brain is not- its more of a cognitive distortion, but all of my reading on neuroscience equipted me to find solstace in the “lost in translation” feeling. And I really was lost in translation, people were reaching out. I was blogging but because of covid and that distorting my perseption of time I lost connection to my rational mind. Academia brings rigidity, employment brings rigidity, and without that I needed to find it to find my way out out. But its been hard because there is catostifly low employment rates. But within two days of working on my feet I was able to bring this all together in a nondistorted fashion. Which is too be made of as you make it. Out of perplexing expierences, becoming perplexed by my almost ‘not me” presentation and trying to relaim me again and again I finally am able to describe what my art was trying to show me.
Art is an intervention used by social workers to express the inner workings of the emotional states. In one of the emotional states I posted on my blog my art but without explaination. But I bring out my meaning-making process that all. To shed light on my perceptive of my story.
As an infj I find nothing more meaningful then helping other people to understand things. And my world doesn’t make sense if I other people can connect with me and to me out of sensical interpretations. It took a long time to understand my favorite parts of being human, the five senses and the experience of the earth.
Infjs need to feel understood so thats what im doing making sense of nonsensical its entropic.
There was not one diagnosis for the array of symptoms I was having. So I took the multiple symptoms and experiences and start stringing them together to make a web of understanding that I could be understood with the hope that others can add more into it and maybe make even more sense of it. That’s the beauty of innovation, it gives way to collaboration.
As a social worker, I stand by the fact that social workers never give the right answer, they give the option for people to make answers. Social workers bestow knowledge of options and let people make opinions. It’s not a matter of my answer but your investigation of conclusions of what I am experiencing for yourself. I highlight the most logical explanations which are indifinitative but with the hope of sparking interest in a more definitive entropy. Unity is harmony and no one person has all the answers. My story is the only thing I know how to describe.