What I'm Gnawing On Today
(Prologue) Let Us Imagine My Mind as a Displaced Fonds
My developing central nervous system was permanently (damaged? weakened? altered?) by childhood infections, including measles around age 6 and Lyme disease from a Texas tick around age 11, complex trauma, and aggressively self-medicating with alcohol and pills as a teen.
I have a lifetime of experience rewiring and rebuilding my bodymind after medical disasters and trauma. It's a practice my Gulf Coast creole family is particularly skilled in, and I credit the relatives and teachers who have showed me the way.
Suffice to say, it has been a more difficult process in my late 30s than it was in my childhood and teens. I've been guilty of trying to rush, denying my own clear limitations, and clinging to old/dysfuctional expectations of myself. I've done a lot of impossible things in my life. It has made me very stubborn.
I was a freshly tenured associate professor of practice in archives at a landgrant R1 university when neurological complications from a silent EBV infection, ongoing burnout, and competing pressures from my then-spouse compelled me to leave the field to study for a short sojourn. I had this wild idea that a doctoral program would be easier on me. Then, the pandemic hit.
I spent two years studying and teaching remotely from a permaculture community north of Tucson. I contracted COVID-19 in summer 2022. By October of that semester, my neurological symptoms and cognitive overload had become too severe for me to continue in my program. The next spring, I left my husband and our very cool rammed-earth house and moved to a dying farm commune, then home to Texas for a short and strange spell, and finally back to the PNW to pursue my health full-time.
The Meat of It
I'm short on mental endurance these days, and writing this has been something like a two hour ordeal. I can only sit up for about 20-30 minutes before the pain starts affecting my ability to think and speak with clarity. I can stand for even less time. This has been my waking experience for about three years now, with some cycles of partial relief or acute severity. I live at the mercy of public relief and medical bureaucracy these days, which doesn't leave me much time or energy to flex my brain.
There is a very real possibility that I will never be able to return to archival practice. The physical and cognitive demands of the work are out of my reach many days. I'm not sure at this point whether I can even chart a survivable path in academia, to which I've dedicated the entirety of my education and professional working life.
The future is uncertain. The past is also uncertain; I've spent most of the past seven years in a kind of dissociated brain fog, emerging at random intervals to cheer on my friends and flit around the edges of backroom chatter. My memory is sometimes fractured. I struggle to communicate verbally. Maybe this won't be forever. Maybe it will.
The Gristle
Today, I'm pondering how I might apply archival description practices to my personal (re)narratives.
If I imagine my injured mind as a fonds either displaced or disturbed by disaster, I'm more likely to describe its current state (to myself) with compassion. As a memory worker by trade, I can recognize that my self has been dis-ordered. To recognize this and to document it with kindness is enough for now.
Thoughts From Past Sams
My 2021 presentation on “memory and the end of time” https://medium.com/on-archivy/our-monstrous-archives-memory-and-the-end-of-time-d439359ca5f2
My 2020 essay on remote conferencing while disabled https://medium.com/on-archivy/this-disabled-life-academic-conferencing-in-covid-times-2b48637ba1b7