After beginning the day very energetically, I underwent a global slowdown when I clonked my head hard on a tile wall this afternoon while cleaning. But I'm going to work my way through this post to capture some more cogent thoughts I'd had earlier today.
I spent my morning in a department store. When chemical sensitivity mushroomed in my life, this kind of thing became a once-a-year event, if at all. It was hot and dry inside, for sure, but there was a profound difference in my reactivity to scents and to the natural gas heating. Even if a migraine were, in fact, going to happen later this day or two days from now (this is now impossible to discern, given that I clunked my head and a headache would be a natural thing), I can still report here that, thus far, my reactivity to synthetic scents has already been profoundly different this day from what it would have been, under similar conditions, in previous years.
And now I'm going to walk into some comparatively uncharted territory in reflections on chemical sensitivity . . .
I'd like to talk about memory. While many scents still remain immediately aversive to me and I instinctively pull away from them, they're not "getting in," systemically speaking, as they had been accustomed to doing. Those few seconds or minutes of my unwanted exposure to them have not been doing the neurological and inflammatory damage to me that they used to do. I'm not getting that unmistakable neurological buzz and pulsing around my forehead, nose, and eye sockets. I'm not getting that systemically sickened, "sideways" feeling. I'm walking through these scents, sniffing them, and often coming away "okay."
And, sometimes -- this is the thing that I wondered if I'd ever be able to say again -- I'm enjoying them. Now that (pause of speechlessness) - that is something.
Can you believe this?
I do, because I'm living it. It's incredible. There's an amazing amount of "normal" coming back to me. And with it comes . . .
"Snow flurries" of memory. Those tiny little pieces of moments, days, seasons, and years that make up a lifetime. Little "snowflakes" of this or that day, or a familiar kind of day, or "a day just like today," or a "season that felt so much like this" converge upon me as I drive along on various errands -- and I'm amazed at how very much memory can just shower a multiplicity of feelings and impressions upon you all at once.
Makes a person want to cry, partially with joy, partially with a bittersweet sadness -- because there's just so much there. I have to believe that these cascades of memory are enabled by my increasing ability to tolerate, specifically, chemical fragrances. Many of which were once a part of my daily life.
When you're chemically sensitive, huge pieces of that "scent aspect" of life get tossed aside by medical necessity. I'm now realizing how very much this deprivation of familiar old types of scents can impede the normal flow of memory and paralyze one's sense of continuity. You realize what you've missed, and just how much you've missed it, often only when it returns. [If that "often only" didn't make perfect sense, please excuse it because I can't, at the moment with my thick-feeling skull, come up with an alternate word combination.]
I personally think that this return of "familiar memory" in so many infinitesimal bits and pieces, this progressive filling in of the empty places of one's own spirit, must also have a strengthening effect upon the neurology of the brain itself. This, in turn, would further assist the brain to return to a more normal "baseline" of reactivity to chemicals. Basically, the more you recover, the more you recover.
If that makes sense. :)
I spent my morning in a department store. When chemical sensitivity mushroomed in my life, this kind of thing became a once-a-year event, if at all. It was hot and dry inside, for sure, but there was a profound difference in my reactivity to scents and to the natural gas heating. Even if a migraine were, in fact, going to happen later this day or two days from now (this is now impossible to discern, given that I clunked my head and a headache would be a natural thing), I can still report here that, thus far, my reactivity to synthetic scents has already been profoundly different this day from what it would have been, under similar conditions, in previous years.
And now I'm going to walk into some comparatively uncharted territory in reflections on chemical sensitivity . . .
I'd like to talk about memory. While many scents still remain immediately aversive to me and I instinctively pull away from them, they're not "getting in," systemically speaking, as they had been accustomed to doing. Those few seconds or minutes of my unwanted exposure to them have not been doing the neurological and inflammatory damage to me that they used to do. I'm not getting that unmistakable neurological buzz and pulsing around my forehead, nose, and eye sockets. I'm not getting that systemically sickened, "sideways" feeling. I'm walking through these scents, sniffing them, and often coming away "okay."
And, sometimes -- this is the thing that I wondered if I'd ever be able to say again -- I'm enjoying them. Now that (pause of speechlessness) - that is something.
Can you believe this?
I do, because I'm living it. It's incredible. There's an amazing amount of "normal" coming back to me. And with it comes . . .
"Snow flurries" of memory. Those tiny little pieces of moments, days, seasons, and years that make up a lifetime. Little "snowflakes" of this or that day, or a familiar kind of day, or "a day just like today," or a "season that felt so much like this" converge upon me as I drive along on various errands -- and I'm amazed at how very much memory can just shower a multiplicity of feelings and impressions upon you all at once.
Makes a person want to cry, partially with joy, partially with a bittersweet sadness -- because there's just so much there. I have to believe that these cascades of memory are enabled by my increasing ability to tolerate, specifically, chemical fragrances. Many of which were once a part of my daily life.
When you're chemically sensitive, huge pieces of that "scent aspect" of life get tossed aside by medical necessity. I'm now realizing how very much this deprivation of familiar old types of scents can impede the normal flow of memory and paralyze one's sense of continuity. You realize what you've missed, and just how much you've missed it, often only when it returns. [If that "often only" didn't make perfect sense, please excuse it because I can't, at the moment with my thick-feeling skull, come up with an alternate word combination.]
I personally think that this return of "familiar memory" in so many infinitesimal bits and pieces, this progressive filling in of the empty places of one's own spirit, must also have a strengthening effect upon the neurology of the brain itself. This, in turn, would further assist the brain to return to a more normal "baseline" of reactivity to chemicals. Basically, the more you recover, the more you recover.
If that makes sense. :)
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