here in the cavern

Page Nine

Friday 2 May 2008 Greenfield

So what's the cavern? The cavern is where this particular person with Asperger's lives. A song I wrote back 10 or 12 years ago has a verse:

I cannot gain a candle,
much less a candle throng,
here in this lightless, flameless cavern
in which I wander,
perhaps belong. .....

Anyway, the sense of isolation, the lifelong sensation that I wasn't like other people in some mysterious, hugely important way, has been with me all my life, and always growing stronger.

Everything I've ever written about isolation or alienation has been talking about my experience with humans. In the animal realm, I have never been isolated and alone and shut out until now, until the loss of them, until the DMH's exercise in control.

Now, without the animals, the cavern I've always lived in is deeper, darker and more dangerous than ever before. These cauliflowers at the DMH, who are supposed to be helping people with psychological problems, appear to understand nothing about serious depression, or about Asperger's syndrome, or even about the effects on a person of long-term, severe physical pain caused by my over-zealous immune system. Maybe my metaphor is unfair to cauliflowers.

So where are the words, muse, the right words to describe the extent of the depression, the extent of the pain, the extent of the loneliness? I can't find them. But I do know this: Nobody belongs in this kind of agony, and the DMH increased my hurts and traumas a hundredfold.

Update 5 August 2009: I think this post describes as well as I can the devastation of losing all the animals, the bitter resentment of having gone to a huge social service agency for help and being for the most part ignored. And then later, after Matthew's news about protection and all that, I developed a great belief that they would locate me somewhere, because I truly believed that's what they always do for people in protection. And I had much more faith in them to give me back some of my animals than I had had in the DMH. All down the shoot: belief, hope, the reunion with even one or two of my dear, dear friends.

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~

(photo from greeting card)

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless stated otherwise. all rights reserved.