A Poem, By Rachel (Fibro-Girl’s Fibromyalgia)

My evil heart brims with hatred.

Upon Fibro-Girl and all who surround her, I tread

Heavily with my fat, smelly feet

Such that I shall never be beat

I pummel Fibro-Girl with glee

And Fibro-Girl hollers, “Leave me be!”

But all can certainly hear my laughter

Or so I assume, for you see

You should know I’m insane, before as well as hereafter.

I am not a poet

Nor is Fibro-Girl, ya know it!

Neither she nor I

Has taken a poetry course

And that is probably why

This poem lacks poetic force.

I’m not sure that “force” made sense in the above stanza

But I used it anyway, because it rhymed with “course,” bonanza.

There I did it again.

I think this poem fizzled when

I got all meta-poetic

So I think it’s now time for this poem to end, and thus it won’t be very epic.

Important Message from Fibro-Girl:

Please don’t like Rachel (my fibromyalgia).  Please remember that she is evil, and not the good, fun, oppressed, deserving-of-pity, or misunderstood kind of evil, but the psychopathically evil kind of evil.  If there is anything positive about Rachel, it was really me, Fibro-Girl.  Naming my fibromyalgia carries the risk of making her/it likable, so please be careful and don’t do that.  Thanks! :-)

Love,

~Fibro-Girl

Anxiously Obvious Epiphany

A few months ago, I suddenly had a revelation that, with some later thought and a follow-up epiphany that I had today, would explain nearly every confused experience I ever had where I felt like I couldn’t understand things that others seemed not to have a problem with.  This revelation was something that is probably obvious to most people, perhaps even to me, but that day, it clicked in a way that it never had before for me.

I realized that having anxiety makes understanding and perceiving things difficult.  I think having fibromyalgia might have contributed to this revelation.

This epiphany exploded into existence in my brain one evening as I blissfully read an interesting book on my Kindle (Moonwalking with Einstein if you’re curious, which, ironically, is about memory).  Something happened that caused me some anxiety, and while it was happening, I suddenly found myself not understanding what I was reading.  This was a strange, deja-vu ridden sensation – strange because prior to that, I had no trouble understanding what I was reading at all and I didn’t have to re-read anything even once, and deja-vu ridden because I had experienced this a million times before throughout my life, where I would feel like I was reading another language and I had to re-read every line a few times and I would still feel like I didn’t understand.  Despite having had this experience I gozillion times, I do not believe that I have an attention or learning disorder, because there was no apparent consistency to the lack of understanding.  More often than not, I did understand, and that is probably why I usually did well in school.

Realizing that the anxiety was causing the lack of understanding in that moment with my Kindle allowed me to realize that averted and/or divided attention was to blame for every instance in my life of not understanding something I should have understood.  Everyone knows (or I assume they do) that when attention is divided via multitasking of any sort, absorption of content is adversely affected  That time, my attention was divided between my book and the object of my anxiety.  I imagine this anxiety-driven attention division probably accounts for a large portion of my confused experiences, since I’ve tended to have (undiagnosed) anxiety for years, perhaps all my life.

I think the remainder of my confused experiences could be attributed to being legally blind.  I realized today in a follow-up epiphany that the brain power I have to use to struggle to strain to read small print (I can read most things with my magically powerful reading glasses, but small print still results in straining of my eyeballs), or struggling to see what’s happening on a TV or movie screen apparently forces my attention away from the actual content that I am reading or watching and hearing.

The latter epiphany came to me as I half-watched and half-listened to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on the TV in the background while I did some fibro-stretching.  I had seen this at least once in school or camp when I was a young-un, but so much of what I was half-hearing seemed entirely new to me (I also read the book as a young-un).  Obviously much of this resulted from natural memory evaporation, but there was more to it than that.  I remember watching it in the classroom, sitting on the floor, and struggling to understand what was happening.  I could barely see what was on the TV, but I have never had a problem with hearing (knock on wood).  I suddenly wondered today why I didn’t get more out of just hearing; you can get a lot out of a TV show or movie just from hearing it.

Thus, it occurred to me that I struggled so much to understand because my attention was divided between the auditory content and my struggle to see.  This, combined with my previous epiphany regarding divided attention allowed me to realize that all those times I struggled to understand what I was reading even in the absence of anxiety, my straining eyes were likely to blame.  The strain itself – having to focus so much attention on simply seeing – drove my cognitive forces away from the content of what I was reading.  Furthermore, all that strain was exhausting, resulting in attention being diverted to the sleepiness.  I wonder if some of the exhaustion came from the fibromyalgia that loomed in my future.

Speaking of fibromyalgia, I mentioned above that having fibromyalgia might have contributed to my epiphany.  After receiving my fibro-diagnosis, I learned that stress can play a big role in fibro-owies.  Subsequently, one of my new life goals became reducing stress, which probably allowed me to experience a more drastic shift from not-stress and stress, which is what led to my initial revelation, since anxiety obviously creates stress.  Perhaps this is just a means by which to make this relevant to fibromyalgia, so that its presence in this fibro-blog will make sense.