Recently, someone asked me if my brain ever stops churning. The short answer is not really, except for those moments when suddenly everything goes blank, and I find myself sitting on the floor of my office or lying on my couch staring at a ceiling or wall. I will admit that happens often, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve used every last brain cell, and my entire being needs to recharge. I’m not saying this because I think I’m a brilliant human – it’s mostly that I don’t know how to turn my thoughts off, which for the most part, has resulted in years of terrible sleep and the amassing of large swaths of useless knowledge. Okay, not all of it is useless. I’m forty-five years old and have finally figured out how to knit most of it into something comprehensive, but my thoughts are still like one never-ending skein of yarn that is pretty consistently tangled.
I read a lot. I love stories and poetry, but I’ve been immersed in nonfiction for the past few years. My office is filled with literature about teaching – pedagogy, art methods, and the importance of play. It’s also jammed with books about social history, autism, expressive art therapy, art history, and memoirs. My reader is clogged with research papers, some of which I’ve looked for specifically and others I’ve found while jumping down the rabbit hole of citations, which I call reference surfing. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I sit in my comfy office chair in the dark, think about the various things I’ve read, and envision these lasers of light linking one thing to another, like how I’d imagine synapses connecting to neurons.
I mostly chalked this frenetic research and reading and pockets of sleeplessness up to OCD (indeed, I take meds for that), as the information would swirl and repeat in my mind, and I’d find myself wondering why I was thinking about it at all, what the point was. In the past few years, I’ve realized that I was building something. It’s taken half my life, but as my mother will not hesitate to tell you, I’ve always had to do things my way, and often, I come to the space where everyone knows I should be late because I’m carving my own ever-difficult and never-linear path.
When your mind works in haphazard ways, you often feel like you don’t fit in. You might assimilate into situations and know how to present outwardly, but inside, you feel like a weirdo amidst a sea of regular people. As a little kid, I spent much time clinging to teachers. I was desperate for understanding, even if it didn’t appear that way on the outside. I didn’t have the language for what I was thinking or feeling, and I gave up on trying to express most of it at a certain point. That resulted in years of people saying, “You care a lot about me, but I don’t know you at all.” I said to someone recently, “I know I’m a pretty closed-up person,” they looked at me and said, “Ya think?” It was said in a caring and humorous way, but that does sum it up.
Back to the never-linear, non-stop loop that is my head. Here’s what I learned this year: all that reading and asking questions and poking around in different pockets of information and finding joy in working with children and feeling unbelievably attached to the concept of advocating for those who can’t always express themselves in what we might consider “conventional” ways? It’s super personal, but simultaneously, it’s a calling, a realization that I know what my life’s work should be. I feel an unbelievable connection with those who yearn to be heard, seen, and understood. I feel the need in every fiber of my body. It’s not an “I’ll fix it” moment. It’s a “Let’s stop, let’s connect, and let me learn about you by letting you be yourself. You don’t need to have words. Humans speak their truth in so many ways. Let me see your truths. Then let’s work on how I can help the world understand you. Somewhere in the middle, languages will converge.”
Some people go to concerts or museums and feel their world swirl with emotion. I get that feeling when I work with kids. Everything else melts away. Their art, their movement, how they fix their gaze or even breathe becomes a language, a pattern, and sometimes a puzzle. I look at children’s minds and emotions the same way that I experience an exhibit at MoMA or close my eyes and listen to a symphony.
My favorite poem is tattooed on my wrist in Morse code (actually, it’s just one line because I have small wrists, but it’s the best line, in my opinion). It’s spoken to me in different ways throughout life. Still, lately, I’ve wondered if the best lesson of the text is that movement – physical, mental, metaphorical – keeps many of us from fragmenting. We connect to people, the environment, and our worlds differently. That churn, that deep need to understand others the way I had yearned for as a child, keeps me whole. And I would not trade that aspect of myself for anything.
Keeping Things Whole
BY MARK STRAND
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
object of memory 