Neurodivergent Dharma
Making meaning out of lived experience
“Because the world is round, it turns me on.” -The Beatles
Aching to enter.
In front of me, an amber colored candle, made from years of collected leftover wax, burns slightly unevenly, leaving a lip with a broken gap where the flame is framed like an ultrasound, revealing its heart. Four cards are spread across the ground, colorful and enigmatic, red and rust and olive green, with words that peek into the soul: “prosperity,” “trust,” “heart,” “acceptance” — oracles of what? My needs? My strengths? My desires?
I’m exhausted. I feel like my blood is tired. Outside my closet door (perhaps you should know, I am inside my closet), the indigo patterned coverlet of my bed calls me, saying, “Come, child. Sleep.” I could curl up in her woven arms, become the archetypical infant I have always been, innocent and tender.
Instead, I am awake, because for a parent whose child is finally asleep, being up at night feels as good as being naked after a shower. At the risk of further exhaustion, I plunge into pools of my sovereign being, cat by my side, sage smoke curling into my hair where it will stay until I shower.
I am the kind of person who will risk exhaustion for meaning.
Not always by choice, but by compulsion.
It begs me to stay awake, like a lover who wants more. In my closet, I touch the soft heart of my animal body. My eyelashes flap, winglike against my face. Darkness hugs me, and I sense a big-ness, a vast-ness, a presence in the room. It is inside my skin, tugging at sinew and cell, aching for expression.
Submersed in sensation.
Today I told my son, “I am slightly dehydrated.”
He said, scoffing, “How do you even know that? Are you a videogame character with a hydration bar?”
In the absurdity of everything that is his mother, he told me he was going to make a meme out of me and send it to all his friends — direct quote.
The fact is, I knew I was dehydrated because I had only drank 2.5 bottles of water, shy of my full 3-a-day threshold for full-powered-body-functionality. I also knew because a warm, clenching feeling in my mouth told me I was thirsty. I was like a baked potato, overcooked in my comfy sweatshirt.
My lived experience is like The Princess and the Pea. I notice the slight buzzing of silence in my closet. I feel the quiet humanity of the dresses and pants, holders of past memories and nods to future ones, draped in stillness from bars above my head. The wrinkles in my rug are patterned and uneven, dusky brown like an ocean shoreline cracked and dry.
I am an ocean shoreline, as absurdly complex and infinite as every grain of salt in the water, sand, and air, every revolving spiral of seaweed scent and gull cry.
Everywhere, flecks of information spark against me, interacting with my senses. It may look like disorder to notice this much input, brain regions “over”-activated, not pruned to filter relevant data, but it connects me to something greater. To the universe? The cosmos? Nature? God?
I listen. The silence continues to buzz. The darkness feels like water.
Why am I here?
Making patterns.
Without any striving, the candle glows, the cat sleeps, and the water bottle holds water.
In stillness, I can make myself this way too — just a Mary, being Mary. I close my eyes, half smile softening my cheeks, and rest my head against the wall. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be.
The momentum stops, and I feel more like space than solid self. All of the matter inside me is slippery, lubricated with wonder.
I almost forget what it’s like to be a day-to-day human, to be a single mother, a therapist, business owner, friend, and partner. I almost forget that I live in a country divided by resources and politics. I nearly forget my chronic pain.
“I” slip away entirely.
When I inevitably slip back, I slip into a story of momentum — 10:32 PM and the minutes of my sleep window are ticking away. A string of words glows on my computer, a sentence with a comma, waiting to be completed. It’s Sunday evening, and I have a doctor’s appointment in the morning, where I will continue a conversation about my health, fresh questions and new steps to be explored.
I imagine licking a thread of string, jabbing it through the eye of a needle, getting ready to sew. I take the fabric of fast-paced, ever-changing, ever-unfurling reality, and sew it into something I can understand and feel. Something that gives my life texture and dimension, not just plain cloth.
I bring my face closer to the candle in my closet, watching its playful fluidity. A word comes to my mind: “intemperance” — the title of a book I’ve just read. It mingles with my inner milieu, dashes of recent dreams about anger and people crossing boundaries percolating to the surface. I write it down in my notebook, scribbled slanted, a marker of my journey.
I don’t actually know why I am here, but stringing together beads of my path makes patterns. I blow the candle out.