electrical language of the mind and body
How to short-circuit with grace
There’s a feverish pulsing in my chest. An explosion of color showing up for others, wiped by the realization that my type of reciprocation is rare and not much shared. It’s a hollow one, manifesting as an overly-caffeinated-without-caffeine type of feeling. Everything and nothing. Lightening speed but not fast enough. To be so articulate and emotionally rich at times feels like a curse.
In my mind are frayed ends are buzzing with electricity. Thoughts with no true outlet. They spark and fly and burn, but I’m a bundle of loose ends, splayed open and sparking at the tips. They are prongs without ports. A tangle of conductive green, desperate to slide into something snug and mirrored. I am humming alone in circuitry.
Among these thoughts lives the emotional space between physical intimacy and emotional closeness. I can speak of almost anything — childhood, grief, memory. Fashion, books, knitting. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. The desire to be loved, seen and held by someone who possesses the emotional maturity enough to do just that.
But I want texture and truth. Right now, all I feel is static and adrenaline.
I notice this sort of alarm as a vast, hovering orb made of flickering translucent flames. It shouts at the openness required to love. It feels too large to name, so big it bears no handle or shape. No beginning, no end. I look at it inquisitively, trying to trace where it came from, but it is a true foreign body. An alien visitor in a growing psyche. I am dreadfully out of practice. No familiar threads to what defines a crush. No circuits firing for someone worthy of me.
I don’t regret how deeply I care — for people, for things. But I think I’m allowed a thread of anger when my care is treated as ambient noise. I’m allowed to expect presence, not just performance.
When not met, I return to where I’ve always been understood. The safest parts of myself live in words. In the constructed narratives that have lived within my walls, shaped by survival and solitude. Lately, I’ve been learning my nervous system works harder than it needs to. That the hum I’ve always thought of as a flawed outcome of a tumultuous childhood might just be a kind of injury. Oh, bittersweet relief. I’ve been working with a neurologist for chronic pain. Being twenty-five with chronic pain is its own kind of dissonance — too young to feel this worn, too tired to explain it. According to my doctor, the hemispheres of my brain have long been experiencing a form of dissociation — a breakdown in communication between parts of myself that were never meant to live so separately.
The other day during testing, he had me hold my arms parallel to the floor, close my eyes, and take forty marching steps with my knees at hip height. It sounds simple and childlike, but my body was in revolt. My heart rate spiked and I felt so warm. Each step felt like it was happening inside a vacuum, disconnected from intention and literally removed from space. I couldn’t tell where I was in the room or how I was moving through it, just that I wanted it to stop. Because I’ve always kept going. But inside, I was panicking. Fully, physiologically.
When I finally opened my eyes, I was on the other side of the room. I had drifted there without realizing. With no awareness or anchor. Just blind, untethered movement.
Later, he told me that reaction said everything. That my brain works extra hard to regulate toward safety when challenged. That it doesn’t trust its own environment. Or more truthfully, it never learned how.
Chronic stress, chronic pain — whatever name it wears — I am frayed. I am tired. But I can still be new.
I can make things poetic. Put words to thoughts and dress them up to feel softer on my skin. The safest parts of me have always been the ones I could narrate. The written word, the imagined closeness — this long built idea of safety is where I’ve learned to live without invasion. But the body, my body, still flinches. It lifts up and out of itself in silent light when it remembers things it cannot name. Circling it are echoes of control, within them live erasure and violation of the heart.
I don’t know what to do with all this electricity. It’s hissing beneath my skin, unspooling like red roots — branching out in no particular direction. I’m tired of narrating my inner world so clearly, only to be met with absence, performance, placeholders. It’s begging to be received with the same circuitry it was given.
This isn’t rage. It could be a slightly mineralized form of loneliness and frustration, but I’m not really angry. I just think there is so much stored in our bodies and right now it’s zapping to the surface.
And perhaps the loneliest part is being so wired for connection and still short circuiting in silence. It’s like my efforts for others pass the finish line and just keep going. Maybe that’s on me. I’ve always been told to adjust my expectations, but what’s so wrong with wanting to be met in kind? To give as I hope to receive, just like the golden rule said we should.