Last year I was in a tornado, and I wanted to talk about it with everyone, to try and get over the shock and put such a rare one-off event in perspective. I was amazed by the fraction of people who were able to dismiss this bid
(nods) Yup. For about a year after my stroke, I was pretty much unable to talk about anything else, for similar reasons.
Eventually I got into the habit of letting people make conversational overtures, then dropping the stroke into my response (not unlike I just did, come to think of it). Some people would then talk to me about my stroke, some would continue along their primary path, and it all worked out reasonably well.
Eventualier this would evolve into a funny dynamic where several minutes into a conversation I’d make a passing reference to my stroke and they’d be like “WHAT? Talk about burying the lede, dude!” (Coming out to childhood friends is funny this way, also. “Husband? What? Huh?”)
Is being in a tornado even remotely like it’s portrayed in movies?
Is being in a tornado even remotely like it’s portrayed in movies?
One obvious difference is that you don’t have an aerial view. Instead of seeing a well-developed twister moving erratically, it was actually too dark and stormy to see anything. A consequence of this is that the sensual experience of it was dominated by sound. First a peculiar roaring (is that...? What is that?) and then a realization of the path of the sound, and that it is moving towards you...
A less obvious difference is how singled out you feel, it’s a psychological impression. In a movie, you expect interesting things to happen to the main characters. In real life, it was really shocking to us that we were the main characters in this experience that felt like a movie.
My family is religious but I was satisfied with how rational we were. There was some idle speculation or joking at first that it was an act of God, or God was trying to tell us something. But to whatever extent we were serious, it was more like a question or hypothesis that fizzled out when there weren’t any subsequent ‘messages’.
Did you irrationally feel singled out with your stroke? What parts of the experience did you want to tell about?
Yeah, absolutely, the “singled out” thing is big. I think a lot of people react this way to traumatic events… it’s different when it happens to us.
A lot of my reaction to trauma generally is this kind of split-screen emotionally dissociative thing where I am simultaneously having irrational reactions and being aware that my reactions are irrational, and neither branch seems to do much to influence the other. So I was often in a superposition of “I am the only person to ever experience this singular event and it is all very very meaningful” and “I am one of many people experiencing this all the time and it’s just a thing that happens.”
The parts of the experience I wanted to talk about varied… it was more that this was the most central aspect of my life for over two years, by a very hefty margin, so I thought about everything in terms of it. It’s a little bit like teenagers in a new relationship, or a lot of people after a bad divorce, where everything connects to that experience. Which is entirely understandable, but tedious for third parties.
I hear you about the religious family/act of God thing. My mom spent a lot of time agonizing over that. I eventually suggested to her that if she needed a narrative in which my stroke was a purposeful act, she should adopt the narrative that God sent me a recoverable-from stroke at 40 so I would start treating my hypertension and not have a fatal heart attack at 45. She decided that yes, that was a better narrative, and that was that.
(nods) Yup.
For about a year after my stroke, I was pretty much unable to talk about anything else, for similar reasons.
Eventually I got into the habit of letting people make conversational overtures, then dropping the stroke into my response (not unlike I just did, come to think of it). Some people would then talk to me about my stroke, some would continue along their primary path, and it all worked out reasonably well.
Eventualier this would evolve into a funny dynamic where several minutes into a conversation I’d make a passing reference to my stroke and they’d be like “WHAT? Talk about burying the lede, dude!” (Coming out to childhood friends is funny this way, also. “Husband? What? Huh?”)
Is being in a tornado even remotely like it’s portrayed in movies?
One obvious difference is that you don’t have an aerial view. Instead of seeing a well-developed twister moving erratically, it was actually too dark and stormy to see anything. A consequence of this is that the sensual experience of it was dominated by sound. First a peculiar roaring (is that...? What is that?) and then a realization of the path of the sound, and that it is moving towards you...
A less obvious difference is how singled out you feel, it’s a psychological impression. In a movie, you expect interesting things to happen to the main characters. In real life, it was really shocking to us that we were the main characters in this experience that felt like a movie.
My family is religious but I was satisfied with how rational we were. There was some idle speculation or joking at first that it was an act of God, or God was trying to tell us something. But to whatever extent we were serious, it was more like a question or hypothesis that fizzled out when there weren’t any subsequent ‘messages’.
Did you irrationally feel singled out with your stroke? What parts of the experience did you want to tell about?
Oo, that’s a new question! Cool.
Yeah, absolutely, the “singled out” thing is big. I think a lot of people react this way to traumatic events… it’s different when it happens to us.
A lot of my reaction to trauma generally is this kind of split-screen emotionally dissociative thing where I am simultaneously having irrational reactions and being aware that my reactions are irrational, and neither branch seems to do much to influence the other. So I was often in a superposition of “I am the only person to ever experience this singular event and it is all very very meaningful” and “I am one of many people experiencing this all the time and it’s just a thing that happens.”
The parts of the experience I wanted to talk about varied… it was more that this was the most central aspect of my life for over two years, by a very hefty margin, so I thought about everything in terms of it. It’s a little bit like teenagers in a new relationship, or a lot of people after a bad divorce, where everything connects to that experience. Which is entirely understandable, but tedious for third parties.
I hear you about the religious family/act of God thing. My mom spent a lot of time agonizing over that. I eventually suggested to her that if she needed a narrative in which my stroke was a purposeful act, she should adopt the narrative that God sent me a recoverable-from stroke at 40 so I would start treating my hypertension and not have a fatal heart attack at 45. She decided that yes, that was a better narrative, and that was that.