I don’t know how I feel, other than that.

My ears are ringing, my skin feels static, my eyes do not want to close. I feel like I’ve been battered by high winds, but I don’t know how to describe the where of the high winds.

It’s too many people, and none of them are friendly.

I see some of my family, and the shrinks, and some people I newly know here. All pull my strings in a disastrous way.

I have to be on guard to give my family the ol’ razzle dazzle, I’m uptight among the new people I know because I don’t know how to be a normal converser, and shrinkage is shrinkage things.

I’m high strung, vibrating. I’m alone right now, and that should help with recuperation, right? But..I wish I had some company where I didn’t have to work so hard to be normal. I think that would help.

Can I at least get a good ball to bounce around in here?

I can’t… do anything. My neurons won’t let me. I know what I should be doing for my bad shoulder, for example, my physical therapy exercises, which I’ve been slacking on, but I don’t know what to do about a broken brain. Depression, PTSD, anxiety, I know these things, and I know when they come up, they pass in time. I’ve got a few tricks here and there to cope with them, and sometimes they even work =)

But I don’t know what to do about a broken brain. I don’t mean it in a mood like way. I mean that, for example, I can’t read anything for more than ten minutes, for the most part, and that’s generally if I know it well and I read it many times before my neurons were shot to pieces. If that’s not the case, I’m lucky if I can absorb a few pages. It takes me a full day to watch a movie. I just rediscovered subtitles, and now I can understand what they’re saying, mostly, even if I can’t connect the pieces of what’s happening sometimes. (As I said, it takes me all day to get through it. My queue on netflix is becoming more and more of a wreck. I hope the rest of my family doesn’t look on my page).

I went to see the new Marvel movie in theaters when it came out. I love superhero movies. I barely understood any of it. I wanted to cry.

I can’t hold a conversation with people either, really. I don’t sound very intelligent, in speaking. I repeat myself, I can’t hold a debate, and I can’t hold one thought through to the end. Most people I know have run out of patience and stopped listening. I’ve fallen back on my old habit, of middle school, of trying to be as invisible as possible.

The therapist says to take a nonjudgmental stance, but it’s hard to do when in a mental sense of it, I can’t even hold a stupid spoon.

I’ve been slacking on everything else, like the physical therapy and whatnot, because I want to hold that spoon. But as I said, I don’t know how to fix it.

And of course, I have to be very careful not to mention anything of this to family. Not only is appearing weak a bad idea in front of my aunt, who is the mother of my cousins, (they’re the only people who look at me with anything resembling unconditional love, though I have to censor myself because of that aunt. The only time I didn’t, in trying to explain to the younger one why I changed my name, the oldest said ‘can we not talk about it anymore?’) That aunt will cut me off (again) if I am slightly left of normal. Showing any of them, aunt, immediate family, in general anything other than their dancing monkey, their eyes. go. dark.