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In senior year of college, still grieving from losing my best friend Scott in a plane crash off New Zealand that summer, I was tasked with writing a paper of no more than 10 pages for my upper level neuroscience class. I was grappling with formally accepting my atheism, + what
that meant in terms of never seeing my friend, whom I deeply idealized, as complicated as our friendship had evolved. So something took over and I started my paper with the beginnings of earth, the coming together of nucleic acids to form RNA and DNA and, then, life; touched on
evolution, mainly focusing on the brain, and, eventually, came to my goal of explaining how a brain could produce a mind, using a bunch of studies from the years leading up to this class, especially one that look at sensory nerves from the paw of a monkey and the areas of the
somatosensory cortex to which they connected. In that study, the researchers cut the nerve to the paw. They maintained that, in that setting, the fibers in the cut nerve grow out in random directions and, as such, a fiber that used to connect to one digit might grow back to
connect to a different digit. And, yet, ultimately, stimulation of each digit still activated the same regions in the somatosensory cortex, suggesting it was the PATTERN of the stimulation that determined the activity in the cortex. To me, that toppled the idea of
"grandmother cells" in the brain. The thrust of the paper was about how we could go from nucleic acids to a human mind, but, in my head, I concluded that if there was no "grandmother cell" then there was no "Scott" cell. And if there was no "Scott" cell, then
there was no "Scott" cell to die when I die. The meta-level PATTERN still existed. +, in theory, when we, or, really, since I was mourning and yearning for an atheist version of Heaven, I, disintegrate into star dust, then, perhaps, we continue to exist in some meta-level
patterned way (perhaps akin to how Neo will be "resurrected" in Matrix 4, fyi, for sci fi nerds). It was barely enuf to soothe me, but I knew it was all I had. When I was done, it was 40 pages, not including citations. But it was my masterpiece. I greatly respected the
professor (we had had a drink together one day and we shared storied of barium swallows and the barium enema he had where, the moment the radiologist said he was done, he shit himself right there), + he was serious about turning in a paper no longer than 10 pages. So, naturally,
I wrote a 2nd paper, this one far more limited, focused on some thalamo-cortical circuit + their reciprocal connections--something about GABA receptors, glutamate receptors, autoreceptors, + the like. I turned them both in and told him after class that the first one was more for
me. We never talked about it after that, and I believe I never saw him again. And thinking about it brings out a sadness in me I tend to touch with my penchant for melancholic music and melancholic crime noirs. It reminds me of a friend from my Cath grade school in KY.
I moved to Potomac after 6th grade and lost touch with everyone in Louisville. But I found Polly on some social media thing about 2 years ago and we re-connected. The thing that struck me was her first words: "you always seemed so sad." What I remember back then are three main
things: 1) the only time I EVER prayed was to ask God to make me like Todd, who I idealized and who was into sports and didn't have a congenital anomaly like me (Poland's syndrome), 2) I was deeply in "love" with Beth, a girl who asked me to "go" with her in 4th
grade; she'd chase me around to try and kiss me, and I, burdened by a social anxiety disorder I never knew I had til well into my late 30's, would run or, when my male classmates would hold me down so she could kiss me, I'd squirm all over, sometimes so nervous I was dripping
spittle down my cheeks, and somehow she'd plant one on me. and 3) I was ALSO deeply in love with Miss Wood, my 4th g teacher who told stories of playing guitar so much her fingers bled, who I tried to impress by asking to read to the class Hardy Boys books during lunch (she
thought they would be too scary) + by lying + saying I laid against a tree in a field + made stories out of the shapes of clouds. My parents invited her to our home + I cleaned up my room, including all my drawers, especially my underwear/sock drawer, like I've NEVER done since.
To this day I remember my disappointment that my parents didn't invite her to see my room. I had planned to show her my underwear drawer and expected her to be impressed and proud of me. I was too anxious to ask her myself. In any case, the Polly statement lingered in me, bored
into me, and then I remembered, 4th grade was when my sister was in 7th grade, presumably around the time of her puberty, which I, decades later, put together was a trigger for badness to come, that have reverberated for her and for me decades later, and, even in 4th grade,
having already "run away" in 2nd or 3rd grade (after my sister had gotten in trouble for something trivial), I must have known what was happening or possibly happening. It must have been burrowing in, cuz it still remains corrosive inside of me, though, with time and therapy and
love, it's become less corrosive and more surrounded by a grounded firmament). I sometimes picture that sad boy in 4th grade--I can better picture Todd sitting in the last row, as if taking in the class as his own clique)--but I picture him reaching out to me as a 50 yo, saying
wordlessly, two things: 1) 'you got this, for both of us' and 2) 'I'm your validation--the validation no one else would, or could, give us'. And I do 'got' this, and I love that passionate underwear drawer fixin boy, the boy who'd play "Call Me" by Blondie while staring at the
phone, hoping it would magically make Beth call me (though to paralyzed to realize that, in the context of "going with" Beth, I could call her (of course, I'd need her number to do that, which I never had). As an FYI: a year later, in 5th grade, she walked up to me and said
matter of factly: "I don't want to go with you anymore." And that was that. I think the 4th grade me knew I was destined to be a shrink. What the 4th grade me didn't know was that my past made me a justice seeker that was hiding under layers of social anxiety and insecurities,
waiting to come out in full force when I was grounded enough to dig into my strengths. And that may be the other part of "you got this". In any case, I'm not sure how I started this thread or why or how it evolved in the way it did, but there it is. A window into my mind.
A window into me.
