...a little print

I dwelt too low that any seek --
Too shy, that any blame --

When I was a child I suffered for several years from Selective Mutism . That is, though I didn't have a speech delay or any other discernible condition, I spent six years in what one of my sympathetic but frustrated teachers called "self-imposed exile". I didn't talk through the second half of elementary school all the way up to tenth grade. At home and in the neighborhood I could talk fine. At church, though, it was like school. When I say I didn't talk I mean that literally. I would nod or shake my head. That was it. I myself did not really understand what was going on and back then it was not a diagnosis. I didn't get treated, therefore, except for the normal therapy benefits of living in a functional, supportive home. And those ought not to be minimized.

It's going to sound like I am a basket of weaknesses, after my last post about anorexia. I will admit I'm weak, but at the same time God has given me a variety of natural strengths and supernatural graces. I have been through 8 natural childbirths and managed the pain and uncertainty without a problem. I've spent over a year total in the hospital caring for a severely ill infant and child. I'm strong in some ways. But I think that I have an easy time with some things that are incredibly difficult for some people, but some things that are standard operating procedure for most of the population are difficult for me.

I also think my anorexia and selective mutism sprang from the same source. I had to cope with circumstances that were beyond my personal array of coping abilities. We moved several times in several years and I seemed to get the most pathological set of early elementary teachers out there. My school years were nightmarish from my perspective. The way they taught was not the way I learned, yet they expected me to learn their way. I wanted to read and write and take walks and play musical instruments and have time alone, and they wanted me to listen and fill out worksheets and go to gyms and play games I had no interest in that usually involved flying objects and lots of noise. The cafeteria was complete bombardment. In junior high I started hiding in the bathroom in order to eat lunch. It was repulsive, but better than the alternative. Then I learned I could just skip lunch.

I was completely bored by the sequential mode of learning, and when tested I was always on the high end of the percentile range in spite of my daydreaming, because I was a classical visual spatial learner. When I was ready to learn I got the big picture right away and didn't need repetition. I could keep up in a class by spending five minutes with a book, and I didn't care about grades, so I was happy as long as the grades didn't go down to the point where the teachers and parents would get concerned. In this manner I got through 18 years of school, though I don't really count the 4.5 college years because in a college it's easier to manage the overload. Colleges give you freedom to self-manage the overload, and that was what I needed.

So selective mutism and anorexia for me were both ways to take back control in a situation where I didn't have control. When I was in 6th grade I used to babysit for parents who were both psychologists. I read their bookshelf when their kids had gone off to sleep, and one of them was about autism. I used to wish I was autistic. At that time the conventional wisdom was that autistic kids were closed off from their environment. I longed to be closed off. Every day I went to school and felt like I was being scraped by sand or sunburned -- day after day after day. Now I think the authorities recognize that autism is a more extreme reaction to the same problem I had -- sensory overload. When I discovered anorexia, it was a way to numb feeling. If you didn't eat for a long long time you would get dizzy and spaced-out. This turns out to be a sort of natural anesthetic, or maybe the anesthetizing is a byproduct of the starvation. At any rate, it worked.

I am getting carried away in detail. What I started out to say was that I got over the selective mutism, then the anorexia and depression. Long journey, but it started by coming back to my childhood Protestant faith, then to love and marriage and children, then conversion to Catholicism. I was fine for several years, but recently I have been dealing with a recurrence of the social anxiety that precipitated the other things. I am not sure why this became such a trial again. I think perhaps it was because I forgot the vigilance. I still have the condition. I just don't always manifest it. Recently, just in the last few weeks, the problems with social anxiety have subsided again. I find myself easily managing situations that used to require every coping tool I had. It is nice, but since it's such a sudden reversal I don't think it can be really due to anything I've done to help. It's like running compared to barely being able to walk. What's the deal? I don't know, but I thought I'd write it down. Elizabeth says a blog is like a journey and this is an oasis moment in my journey.

The thing is, I don't spend my life in fear and trembling. It's just when I get into public, that sometimes, without warning, I will stammer and avoid eyes and forget what I was going to say and feel like I've turned into a ship's wheel in a storm -- stiff and not sure which way it will turn next. When the wheel spins, I still know it's in God's hands, and many people are weathering more severe and unpredictable storms than this one.