the body electric

In the age of the hunter-gatherer when everyday was fraught with peril, the human brain had already evolved to quickly make sense of its surroundings and identify danger. The fight or flight response is very ancient.

But our DNA coding is messy. Neuroscience has learned that even identical twins process information from their environment differently. From the moment that we are conceived, we respond to our world in a manner that is unique to each of us.

Our experience of reality is subjective.

Everything I see, everything I hear, everything I feel is filtered through the prism of what a specific apparition or explicit emotion mean to me. The form of the world that I live in is the form that I give it. I shape and color it, fill or empty it of meaning, assign its value.

The world I live in is a complete and utter fiction of my own making.

We humans are mythmakers and storytellers in consequence. We are coded to try and make sense of our lives even when they make no sense at all. Mind and body collaborate to shape perception. Perception is reality whether it aligns with facts or our fancy.

To further complicate human experience, in the complex interplay between body and mind, feeling and emotion begins in the flesh, what was originally referred to in neuroscience as the body loop.

If my brain is injured or my wits diseased, so is my flesh in consequence, for they apprehend the world in partnership together. If like the song, I Am a Rock, and feel nothing, I can only sustain such a condition by numbing my flesh from which all feeling emanates. I cannot numb my mind, even with near constant inebriation.

It will continue to rule over my now senseless limbs, but once the flesh has lost the capacity to feel, the mind cannot rule well in the absence of crucial feedback from the body.

These are lessons learned in direct application from my own life and from years of study in my effort to understand the genesis and cure of my brokenness.

The Story

I was young once, and believed I was in love. The girl in question was miles out of my league, but I wove a myth of her and I forever, a fairytale romance for the ages.

Needless to say, I was the only one smitten, and the shock of that discovery after pining for her for almost three years broke an already broken soul. In the aftermath, I anesthetized my emotions into nonexistence.

Before this unhappy experience I was already terrified of asking girls out. Following my discovery, I did not believe I ever could again. Several years later in graduate school, the course of my life was seemingly fixed and solitary in the acceptance of its mythic tragedy.

I had felt nothing for so long by that point my condition seemed a normal state of affairs. And what of it, I thought. All my hurts and torments I relinquished to the ash heap. I had dealt with them and learned my lesson.

I shook the dust from my feet. I am a rock; I am an island.

But life is nothing if not ironic. With my fate all but sealed, life surprised me in my self-pitying state with the message that I still held value. A casual acquaintance perceived my condition and shared her concern.

The discovery that someone cared shook the scales from my eyes. Only in this manner did I finally comprehend my lack, the realization leading to an outpouring of grief of such intensity that I have never experienced its like before or since that day.

I felt like someone had plugged me into an electrical outlet, energy surging through my muscles while I wailed at the top of my lungs, twenty years of suppressed grief released in waves of anguish. I could not have stopped it even if I had wished too.

And when the tears finally ended, I was flooded with joy and relief of such a magnitude that I had never before known. All the toxins of rage, bitterness and disappointment from my youth left my body with those tears, and I felt clean, as if made brand new.

And the fear of asking a woman out vanished with them.

None of the events that followed it up until this very day would have happened without it. The woman who had expressed her concern when only an acquaintance, comforted me while I wept. We talked daily after that and soon we were close friends. Our relationship quickly evolved to romance and courtship.

In the natural course of such radically altered events we married seven months later and began creating our own myth and melding our two stories into one. After two children followed, I joined the U.S. Army to better provide for our growing family and ended up making a career of it.

But in the decades after that extraordinary day when my walls came crashing down, I went cold and numb once again.

This lesson was so important I needed to learn it twice.

Some of it was simply life. Some was the macho, stiff upper lip of a soldier's bravado. But most was me running away from my emotions like I had as a boy.

The Revelation

When I was in my last year of service in the Army, my wife and I drove from Maryland to Savanah, Georgia to attend our daughter's graduation from college. And yet, even celebrating what should have been a peak experience, my joy was buried in numbness felt all the way into my bones.

My skin tingled with a paralyzing anesthetization, swallowing and burying my pride in my daughter's accomplishment whole. I experienced such great exhaustion, I'm still amazed that I did not return to our hotel room to collapse in the bed.

After the ceremony, I remembered what had happened to me a quarter of a century before and realized I had fallen a long way from grace.

The inability to experience joy at one of life's high points was intolerable. Once we returned again to our day-to-day life, I made myself a promise to find a pathway back to health.

The Cure

The Victorian writer George Eliot believed the most essential element of human nature is its malleability, the idea that each of us can "will" ourselves to change. What happens when I choose health, choose to evolve?

The emotional highs and lows of life are part and parcel of the human condition and worth substantial time and effort to restore them. We cannot anesthetize the bad emotions without losing the good with them. Taking Eliot's example, I believed writing could play an important role in restoring feeling back into my life.

A year later I began working on a novel with an amnesiac main character but without recognizing the significance of its symbolism in my own life. In those days I still described rather than evoked. If I could not feel, how could I evoke feeling in my writing?

The best writers make us feel what the characters feel. And in so feeling, the reader willingly shares the character's experience. They write in equal measure from their emotions and the mind. When I finally began to tap into my feelings an entire world opened itself to me and slowly I began to experience emotions again rather than anesthetizing them.

This is one of the great joys of storytelling. Even when we write narratives and characters seemingly disconnected from our lives, our stories can become personnel in ways we cannot begin to imagine. They can help restore us to health.

After working on the novel for the next two years, I discovered the significance of my main characters amnesia in my life after writing the following:

I wonder wistfully if I might once more defy time and begin anew, restoring the life and years the locusts have eaten, filling in the blank spaces of my memories with the symbols and metaphors that haunt my nights and populate my dreams, unearthing plot and subtext, restoring clarity and color to the sepia tones of a distant past, infusing with emotion events that long ago lost their power to move.

I had forgotten how to feel.

I suffered from emotional amnesia. But unlike the day when the damn within me broke and the grief spilled out, I did not experience a quick fix. My revelation was not sudden, but gradual. Many years passed before I learned again to fully and unashamedly rejoice with those who rejoiced and mourn with those who mourned.

In the intervening years I only knew how to pretend.

Eight years after my daughter’s college graduation, she asked me to officiate her wedding. When she and my soon to be son-in-law walked together across our front lawn to where I stood waiting, I witnessed my little girl weeping as she approached hand in hand with her forever beau.

And I wept with her.