TW: mass murder, islamophobia, domestic abuse, authoritarian statism, national security state, extreme alexithymia/hyper-empathy, bogus autism “cures”

TW: bright, strobing colors, intense, dissonant music, images of jaws (in the video link)

Nautilusing – n.

(See Anna Meredith’s piece, “Nautilus”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vajhs2wBeCU)

1. A dark month of the soul.

2. A personal apocalypse, where everything shall be cleansed.

3. That thing you do that might be because you’re empathic, but you’re not quite sure.

You wake up one day, open a browser, and read the news. You see a headline, you open the story, because it’s about your people and death. Murder. Lots of murder. Of people just like you: trans, queer, black, brown. Family.

You’re devastated.

Imagine the worst physical pain you’ve ever experienced – a broken leg, an abscessed tooth, childbirth – then make it emotional.

Your nerves are at 400 percent, the sky is crimson and the ground vibrates in a way that clashes with the frequency of the air.

You fall into a gaping fissure. All is dark now. You’re alone.

It’s as if you’re in an alternate reality, where the shooter is a guard, and the guard is allegedly a muslim, and then, everything branches off. You’re sort of a mixed race punk rock muslim-ish somebody. You’re not out to your family about being queer or being trans or being sort of muslim (you’re a revert, if a very taqwacore one). (Back in non-alternate reality, this isn’t that far off the mark — you’re old enough to have pre-dated taqwacore, but you spent your teens and early 20s around muslims and western sufis.) But you manage, and you have friends, chosen family, a lover or three.

You hook up with the shooter at the club one night, without you knowing much about him. He’s guilty about having sex, a sexuality, a body. (Which is strange, because he’s always around the club, and he never goes to mosque. Does he even have a Qur’an? Who knows.) He leaves you, then beats his wife instead. He feels guilty about it, so he ups his devotional meds, and goes to mosque more often. (The fact that he never was much of a muslim, and if anything, the feds dropped him off of the watch list because of not fitting the profile they were going for, seems ill-relevant now. The “husband with a history of abuse who works around a shit-ton of weapons and has a security clearance” profile seems to go without consideration.) Then he’s in the news, for weeks.

None of this happened, it just feels like it could’ve happened – one minute, you’re on the floor, dancing – then: a flood of adrenaline, of dopamine, running as the sound of airplanes rang in your ears as people fell around you, and you managed to escape out the back.

Ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump.

The next day, it’s even worse, because the political machines kick in. “This is why we need more security, and more contractors, who will employ more people like the shooter.” People object to their pain and grief being used this way, and so much blood and murder and oh god, try to focus, oh god to, to, to, look, it’s not ok to do this in our name, ok?

It’s not like wanting to die, it’s like being in so much pain that your body wants to extinguish itself. You keep it together, and fight mightily against the urge to do anything rash to calm your nerves. It doesn’t work, which is to say: there was no problem, you’re not suicidal, this is just how you’re wired. You feel things. Which is to say: Everything. (You figure out months later that there’s a reason for this, and that it’s normal – for you – to feel everything at once, independent of rational thought. Why nobody bothered to mention this to you for decades – friends, parents, teachers, gurus – is a mystery.)

You also don’t necessarily want it to stop – the passion that gives birth to this is also what fuels your creative work, you presume. Either way, it’s not without its merits – you can feel everything, smell everything, touch everything. Sometimes, it’s as if you can hear people’s thoughts, but you don’t, you just have a keen sense of things, or at least, that’s what you tell yourself to not remember the time someone affirmed that you did read their thoughts, or that you appeared in their room one day even though you were miles away at the time, or felt the rather horny ghost in your apartment one night when the candles flickered, up the hill from the Castro.

A week passes. You’re out of the hole, but you’re still on fire. Everything is a huge, raw nerve. You talk with a friend, they love you, they try to understand, but it’s hard for them to make sense of what you’re talking about, or even if it’s real. (They’re Canadian.)

The news is total shit – it’s like it all never happened. Nobody talks about the FBI, or private security, or anything of much relevance. (Yesterday’s news.) Days pass, then weeks. You’re still on fire, but you learn to not take the political gesturing seriously.

Then, the murderer’s wife is arrested. This pisses you off – don’t they know she was abused?

The story vanishes, and you go on with your life. You learn to be even more circumspect about the news. Sunlight still blinds you, the smallest of noises make you jump, vacuum cleaners sound like they’re sweeping up sonic debris off a tarmac. The worst part is that it doesn’t seem to trace back to a particular trauma. Your mother died years ago, but your vigilance across a variety of topics provided an outlet for your grief, although there were a couple of potholes along the way – the bank messing with your account again (and again, and finally, getting it all resolved), the occasional person who tried to take advantage of you, someone who sneered at you in a wait line (you think – you couldn’t make it out), so you said “What the hell is with boomers” to the clerk, and they said “Customers in this town”, so you know that at least maybe you read the situation somewhat right this time.

The sound of birds helps, even if the smell of everything doesn’t. The laundromat across the four lane highway and half a block down smells like a detergent factory, someone’s fireplace smells like their house is burning down.

Everything is an epic struggle, a reckoning. Spilled grain in the supermarket is a crisis. There are no minor disagreements. You manage, and persevere.

Nevertheless, you recover, and pray it doesn’t happen all over again. Which it will, but you know now. (You don’t actually know, you’ve just experienced a variation on the same thing that happens periodically. You hope it will pass with time. It doesn’t.)

It took you 55 years, 6 months, and however many days for it all to drop in your lap one day, while you were looking for information on being highly sensitive. (Highly Sensitive seems more like Highly Euphemistic to you, but you roll with it.) Figuring out that you’re autistic is both a relief, and a sort of unwanted cleansing fire of its own, especially when you run across people online who think that neurodiversity and autistic self-determination is the same as fascism for some obvious agenda/reason that seems to be about ignoring the spectrum and going for that old timey autism, the kind that can be reduced to nothing but brain chemistry, or psychology, or demons, or vaccines, or vitamins, and fixed with a pill or an exorcism (or with selective abortion), which somehow does not qualify as being eugenicist or fascist or anything other than good and just and pure and by the way, did you know that all self-diagnosing parents of autistic children have Munchausen’s? If only you had bought my book and listened to my coterie of ill-wishers and taken whatever supplements I happen to be promoting this year, maybe you would have known.

But you staple your head back together, and a couple of days later, it’s an amusing anecdote. (You do remember the neurologist’s name, with a strong “AVOID AT ALL COSTS” note next to the link.)

You read and read and read and drink water and drink water and eat and exercise and read and read and rest.

It all starts to make sense. “Oh, ok.”

The songs dance in and out of your head, several of them a day, but you’re learning to listen. Soft means “I’m good”, loud means “OK, this is too much”. Sometimes the songs are more like metaphors for what you’re going through, sometimes they’re just a song.

You almost fall into a ditch again. You throw a ladder across the sink hole, and smoothly, if somewhat awkwardly, climb across.

Then? You watch the news.

You laugh at the devil, even if he is in the white house now. (Which is to say: again.) Just like you did when you were eight, and somehow understood multiple theological interpretations of what the supposedly infinite manifestation of evil was supposed to look like, and told your mom, as if it was a standard grade school sort of passing thought.

You pace, talk to yourself and flap your hands. It feels like flying, sometimes. Soothing.

You sleep with earplugs and with a night mask, even though there’s almost no traffic at night. You think about getting a white noise machine, then remember that even that is possibly too much. You need a room that is pitch black and still, an eight hour mausoleum of sorts, but the rents keep holding you in place.

You wear sunglasses on cloudy days. The auditory slurry of sounds that even three stories and double-paned glass can’t keep out, seems more manageable, sometimes.

At least you know your emotions and your thoughts are in separate rooms much of the time.

Ain’t gonna let no gunman, turn me around. Turn me around. Turn me around.

Two ravens land on the balcony. They remind you of your parents, so you say hi. They fly away.