This Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, has started a love parade that you absolutely MUST read (and then hopefully hop aboard)! It is here: http://thebloggess.com/2015/12/the-sixth-annual-james-garfield-miracle/ I swear to GOD if you read that blog and some of the comments and don’t start to cry, well, I don’t know what I will do. IT’S JUST THAT GOOD. I turned in some full-blown sobs, snot and EVERYTHING. So I dare you, in fact I DOUBLE-DOG-DARE you to read that blog and try not to cry. You just can’t do it! And then do something good. And then report back. HUGS!!!!!
I don’t like to give credit to anything that’s dark or twisted like bipolar disorder: it’s a dangerous disease, statistics show that 1 In 4 people die from it by taking their own lives. But my doctor tells me that it’s a double edge sword – it’s not a good thing that I have it … Continue reading just another linkdump
This article was originally published by Ravishly.
They promised I would “grow into it.”
When I was small and new to this world, my parents placed a radio beside my crib.
“We used to play classical music for you,” they told me. “You loved Bach.” For years, I fell asleep to the sounds of 12 different violin concertos, the music bouncing off the walls and into my tiny ears.
My mother swears that this is why I took up violin.
My parents eagerly exposed me to any and every song with a violin solo. I went from Bach to Riverdance to Dixie Chicks, the music captivating me. By the time I was 12, I told my parents that I wanted to make beautiful music like the people on the CDs.
They made me promise that I wouldn’t quit after just a few weeks. I would’ve promised them the moon in the sky or my allowance for every week of my life to have a violin of my own.
They conceded. We went to a store filled with violins from countries all over the world. I had my eye on one that came from Germany. I remember holding it, expecting to make a triumphant sound like all the musicians I’d listened to since infancy, and was shocked that I could hardly make it croak.
“You’ll get better after some lessons,” they told me.
“And after you get some rosin on the bow, of course,” the salesman added with a wink.
It was a little too big for me, but the music teacher at school promised that I would “grow into it.”
I’m not sure I ever did.
* * *
I believed that Lily Peters was the prettiest girl at Rhode Middle School.
And I was the luckiest kid at Rhode Middle School, I reasoned, because I was one of her closest friends. We were cast in the school play together and for those three months, we were inseparable.
I remember looking at Lily with so much envy.
Lily was idyllic in my mind. I grew out my hair and wore it just likes hers, with the messy bun perched right on top of my head. I got contact lenses and I carefully applied the same powdery shade of blue around my eyes. I begged my mother to let me wear high heels for the school dances, the slip-on sort that Lily would wear.
I dragged my mother to the store to buy pleated skirts, but they could only be pink — Lily only wore the pink ones. And they could only be from Limited Too, the only acceptable store for Lily’s taste.
I tried doing all the same things — like it was an equation, and if I did the math just right the product would be the same — but was left with the lingering sense that it was some sort of farce.
When Lily became friends with Cameron from Speech class a month after the play was over, I could feel myself being pushed to the sidelines. I started to feel less and less important. Not even my pool party at the local recreation center — the one with the amazing water slide and the lazy river — was enough to regain her favor.
It all came crashing down one day in English class, when a giggling and mischievous Lily passed a note to Cameron. Cameron, delighted by what she saw, started to giggle uncontrollably behind me.
“Can I see?” I asked, feeling left out.
“I don’t think you want to,” Cameron said, smirking and shooting Lily a look.
Grabbing the note from Cameron’s desk, I opened it up expecting to laugh along with them. Instead, I saw the words, “Don’t you think Sam is really weird?” scribbled in Lily’s flawless cursive writing, a heart dotting each “i.”
My face began to burn, tears blurring my vision. Lily’s assessment was not unfamiliar. It was one that I’d pondered many times — why, no matter the equation or the formula or the number of pleated skirts I squeezed my body into, was girlhood so evasive?
Why didn’t I belong?
Lily never said. But the farce was confirmed, on perfect pink floral stationery, no less.
* * *
The teacher said that I was a gifted musician.
I was first chair in the Rhode Middle School Honors Orchestra, the best of the best. I was ecstatic to be the best at something. I was on my way to making beautiful music, like the violinists I now listened to on my CD player on the bus every morning.
I tried to move my wrists like they did, to make the vibrations hum and tremble, to make my violin weep the ways that theirs did.
We didn’t have anything but violinists in my old orchestra, but it was at Rhode that I heard a cello for the first time. While the violin made me excited, the cello had a stranger effect on me. The cello was deeper, more emotive, and twisted my heart until I thought it might burst.
Every day in orchestra practice I would stare at the cello players in awe. Their music made my high-pitched violin — something I once felt so accomplished in — seem so inadequate, so empty.
But it was too late, I reasoned. My parents had bought the violin and they would never stand to invest in another more expensive instrument, to pay for more lessons, to start over.
Besides, this is what I was destined to do. From the crib, remember? I recalled the stories my mother told me, when the Bach violin concertos lulled me to sleep. I remembered the Dixie Chicks concert when it was broadcast on the television, when they pointed at the violinist under the spotlight and said, “That’ll be you someday.”
I practiced diligently every day after school. Remembering, as I went over my scales repeatedly, the way my mother would squeeze my hand when the violinist at Riverdance played faster, and faster, and faster.
But sometimes, when I was all alone, I’d stand the violin up on my lap and pretend, just for a moment, that it was a cello. I would close my eyes and imagine the deep bellowing of Bach’s Suite No. 1 rattling in my chest, the most dizzying and captivating melody I’d ever heard.
But the vibrations of my violin against my chest, too high a pitch, were a tragic reminder of what I lacked.
I grieved — and the grief, at the time, was so unexplainable to me — contemplating the mistake I could not utter aloud. The mistake, the very undeniable fact that my violin could never produce such rich and deep and lovely sounds.
My violin would never be a cello.
* * *
I wanted to be good at femininity, the kind of femininity that girls like Lily and Jessica and Courtney could wear so effortlessly but I never could.
I wore the homecoming dress with the high heels, my feet aching, my stubbornness forcing me to wear them until everyone, especially the boy I liked, had seen me.
It was a performance, I knew it, but I gave it my best — lusting after the affirmations, the encore, someone or anyone to tell me that I had done good.
I didn’t want to be myself, but that was OK. I just wanted to be beautiful, to be worthy.
So I practiced applying mascara the way I practiced my scales: repeatedly, persistently, and with great attention to every lash and every note.
* * *
My best friend in high school, Lucas, was a cellist. At our director’s urging, Lucas decided that we should enter the state competition as a duet. He chose a concerto by Mozart and invited me over to his house after school one day to give it a whirl.
He brought me down to his basement and into a makeshift practice room, with sheet music strewn about and his cello leaned precariously on its side. He carefully tipped it upright again and, sitting down, drew it close to him.
As I removed my violin from its case, he began to warm up with a G major scale. I paused, letting the notes wrap around me and echo in my ears.
I wondered what it must feel like, to keep your instrument so close to your heart.
He looked up at me and smiled, setting down his bow.
“Hey,” he said with a laugh. “Do you want to switch instruments? For fun?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed, with a little too much excitement in my voice.
Handing over the violin to Lucas, I made my way to the cello, hands trembling.
What if I was terrible at it and all my dreams dissolved in a single moment? Or what if, miraculously, I was so proficient that I could convince my parents to let me switch instruments? The moment was ripe with possibility and heavy all at once.
Bringing the cello near — tilting my head and bringing my ear as close to the strings as I could — I took a deep breath. I pulled the bow across the strings in a hesitant, slow glide, and felt the weight of each note in my chest.
Something about the richness and depth of the sound, reverberating in every bone in my body, felt so tremendously right.
Playing each note so carefully, I looked at Lucas and confessed, “I should’ve played the cello.” The confession was drowned beneath the vibrations that filled the room.
In a single scale, I broke my own heart.
* * *
I can tell you the exact moment I realized, without a doubt, that I was not a woman.
It was when I put a chest binder on for the first time, during a freezing Michigan winter, late at night. It was when I recognized my own queerness for the first time.
Shocked by my own silhouette, I could feel everything shifting. I ran my fingers across my chest, studying myself intensely in the mirror, trying to resist the joy that was coming over me. I did not want to love what I saw, but I could not take it back.
“What do you think?” my partner asked me from the other side of the room.
What would the future be now? Now that I knew the truth?
“I think it’s…” I was holding back tears. “I’m trans. I really am transgender.”
“Yes, I know. Why are you sad?” they replied.
I recalled the moment that I held Lucas’ cello near me, and all the years after, when, no matter how beautifully I played my violin, I never felt whole or satisfied. The way my scales withered on the vine, how every pass across the strings was empty, and how the notes were always too shrill.
And the regret that washed over me — intense, relentless — when I watched Lucas every afternoon, swaying side to side as his cello beckoned so sweetly from across the room.
“Because nothing will ever be the same,” I whispered.
A thousand Bach violin concertos swirling around my crib, imprinting those melodies on my brain, had not changed the fact that I was meant to be a cellist. And a thousand “she”s, beginning from the moment that I was born, had not changed the fact that I had grown up to be a “he.”
It was in that moment — imagining who I might be, and the terrifying and glorious possibilities that it held — that I realized that the instrument we’re given is not always the one we’re meant to play.
“Failure” was the original title. My previous posts about strength now seem trite. Failure, only applied to myself, implies weakness. Weakness implies lack of strength.
If I switch strength to determination, then a new set of antonyms exist: fear, hesitation,wavering, and unfixed are a few. I especially like the latter, as it can have more than one meaning.
Perhaps what I will tell myself is “I have permission to waver, to fear the unknown, and to recognize that I remain unfixed.”
If I am unfixed, then I have not failed. If I have determination, then I do not need strength.
Do you ever think you over react? Me? I say to myself, over react? Never! I am the modicum of tempered emotional reactions. Ummm no, actually I’m not. Happiness for me is joy, glee, giddiness. Sadness for me is ultimate doom, and blackness. Where is the middle ground? The happy medium? I do live there sometimes and sometimes I do not. Actually for someone with bipolar disorder, I am a fairly balanced person, but when something out of the ordinary happens, such as a concussion, well, I may lose it just a little, really, just a tiny, little bit.
Actually after I hit my head, I felt so amazingly good LOL! I haven’t felt that good in forever. All the worry, the depression, anxiety, all of it was gone. In its place was a peace, an acceptance of everything, a pleasantness and an optimism, and happiness and a calm. This lasted for almost two heavenly days, after which the anxiety, depression, sadness, pessimism, all came rushing back. Sigh, I’m almost willing to hit my head again to get that feeling back. Is there any way to whack your head, just a bit, yet prevent brain damage? If anyone knows of one, by all means let me know! Please.
I believe the good feelings were due to my brain producing endorphins to relieve the pain of the concussion. Yes, concussions are pretty painful. You, or in this case, I hit the back of my head against one of the most unyielding and hard substances in the world, ice! A whack of my head, against the ice, and my neck snapped back and my brain hit the wall of my skull. Luckily I fell backwards. Apparently that is the direction of choice. If I’d fallen sideways, I could have ruptured an artery, such as the middle meningeal artery, and that would have been a whole lot worse. As in subdural hematomas, coma, and death, if the pressure was not relieved by a craniotomy (a hole in your skull.)
So I dodged a bullet there, Generally I’d say that I got away easy, as the CAT scan showed no bleeding and even my tail bone was not fractured, though it feels like it is. Even the headaches I had for two days in Buffalo weren’t as bad as the worst migraines I have ever had.
The plane ride seems to have exacerbated the symptoms a bit in that I’m having headaches again, but not really, really bad ones.
I count myself as lucky, that even though I did do something as stupid as not wearing a helmet, and very ungracefully falling on my butt and then thwacking my head against the crystalline, diamond hard ice, I came thorough it quite well.
Concussions are not good for anyone, especially I might add, for people with bipolar d/o, as emotional disturbances can occur. Even in this aspect, I feel I am doing fine. A little emotional spike a few days after the concussion, but since then, calm.
And of course, my mantra is “Wear a helmet!”
After I come back from Pakistan, yes my next adventure, I will buy a helmet, hire an instructor, and learn how to ice skate, really well :-)
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That is also a mantra of mine :-)
“Apigenin, a substance found in parsley, thyme, chamomile and red pepper, improves neuron formation and strengthens the connections between brain cells….
The research team conducted by Rehen demonstrated that apigenin works by binding to estrogen receptors, which affect the development, maturation, function, and plasticity of the nervous system. This group of hormones is known to delay the onset of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. However, the use of estrogen-based therapies is limited by the increased risk of estrogen-dependent tumors and cardiovascular problems.”
Brazilian research shows that the flavonoid apigenin has potential to treat diseases like schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s –
Brazilian researchers from D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) have demonstrated in laboratory that apigenin, a substance found in parsley, thyme, chamomile and red pepper, improves neuron formation and strengthens the connections between brain cells.
Previous experiments with animals had already shown that substances from the same chemical group as the apigenin, known as flavonoids, positively affect memory and learning. Many studies highlight the potential of flavonoids to preserve and enhance brain function. While the effectiveness of flavonoids for brain health is not an entirely new concept, this research is the first to show the positive effects of apigegin directly on human cells and the first to unraveling its mechanism.
The scientists observed that just by applying apigenin to human stem cells in a dish they become neurons after 25 days—an effect they would not see without the substance. Moreover, the neurons that were formed made stronger and sophisticated connections among themselves after being treated with this natural compound.
“Strong connections between neurons are crucial for good brain function, memory consolidation and learning”, says neuroscientist from IDOR and UFRJ Stevens Rehen, leader author of the paper published today at Advances in Regenerative Biology.
The research team conducted by Rehen demonstrated that apigenin works by binding to estrogen receptors, which affect the development, maturation, function, and plasticity of the nervous system. This group of hormones is known to delay the onset of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. However, the use of estrogen-based therapies is limited by the increased risk of estrogen-dependent tumors and cardiovascular problems.
Researchers believe apigenin can be used as an alternative approach on future treatments for neurodegenerative diseases as well as in neuronal differentiation strategies in laboratory.
“We show a new path for new studies with this substance”, points out Rehen. “Moreover, flavonoids are present at high amounts in some foods and we can speculate that a diet rich in flavonoids may influence the formation of neurons and the way they communicate within the brain.”
At least four large companies are holding clinical trials to study something called monoclonal antibody therapy. This therapy uses genetically engineered antibodies to stimulate the immune system and attack a nasty compound that is elevated in the brain during migraineheadache pain. The treatment would be injected periodically. It has had excellent results in early trials, and could be available within a few years. “Not only is this the most hopeful thing on the horizon,” said Dr. Joseph Safdieh, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College who is not involved with the trials, “it is the only hope on the horizon.”
But why has it taken so long to find a fix for an ailment that so many millions suffer from? The answer may be that what looks like one syndrome could actually be a symptom of a number of different conditions.
According to Dr. Steven B. Graff-Radford, the director of the Headache and Orofacial Pain Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “most migraine sufferers are undiagnosed or given the wrong diagnosis.” He said, “They go to their general doctor — when they should be seen by specialists — and are told they have sinus or tension headaches, which are treated with antibiotics or psychological management, when they have other kinds that should be treated another way.”… “
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“Failure” was the original title. My previous posts about strength now seem trite. Failure, only applied to myself, implies weakness. Weakness implies lack of strength.
