The dream

Last week, I had a dream that I had Down's Syndrome. It sounds funny, or stupid, and in the cold light of day it seemed a mixture of both. I tried to talk to my friends about it, but unfortunately only managed to make it sound funny, at first. With a little explaining of how I felt and what I think the dream was about or influenced by, Jon at least could see what I was saying. Nick showed just how clueless he remains when he told us last night that he thought it was so funny he texted all his friends to say that I'd had a dream about having Down's Syndrome and had been apparently "disappointed" because if they'd known my parents would have had an abortion.

It's difficult to explain. For about as long as I can remember, I have felt that I wasn't just "different" to other people, but that there was actually something wrong with me. Growing up, I was always very clumsy -- I'd walk into door frames, had very bad "spatial awareness" and sense of balance. I remain clumsy to this day, but it's not considered an issue now. But as a child it was considered possibly very serious, since I have an uncle with Multiple Sclerosis and I'm told some of the early warning signs are perceived clumsiness.

That might explain why at school I would sometimes be pulled out of lessons to have tests run on me -- to check my hearing, check my balance, check my coordination -- but was never given an explanation at the time. I know so many people have said and will continue to say "I would have asked". I don't know why I didn't ask, didn't demand answers, except that just wasn't me.

I've heard told that as a child I was late to start talking -- again, it was assumed there was something wrong with me. The experts concluded there wasn't, I just didn't feel like talking. I also remember however-many visits to speech therapists -- surely by this time I was talking -- but why I was going, or what it achieved, I can't tell you. Especially as I still can't pronounce my "th" properly ("three" is the same as "free") but that's very much an Essex/London accent anyway.

In later years, there's been emotional problems. There's been depression and god knows what else, and from a medical perspective doctors never really agreed what was wrong with me. I blame it at least in part on a tendency to act out -- if you tell me I'm depressed, I will be. If you tell me I have borderline personality disorder, or bipolar depression, or whatever else label you want to give me, then I will be able to parrot fashion repeat back to you the symptoms, if that's what you want to hear.

I was watching the movie Garden State earlier this evening. In the movie, Zach Braff's character has been on medication constantly since he was a child and no longer feels anything -- until he goes home for his mother's funeral and stops taking his medication.

I have gone cold turkey from various medications myself in the past and it was not fun. In fact, it was about as fucked up as it has been possible to feel. I once had a psychiatrist cancel my prescription for anti depressants because he felt it hadn't been firmly established if I might be bipolar in which case the medication I was taking would have been completely wrong. The unfortunate thing was, I wasn't given anything else and he never returned my phone calls -- let alone make a second appointment -- so I felt like I was left to fend for myself. Anyway, the point is that it can be positively dangerous to just stop taking these kinds of medications and you should not do so without consulting your doctor who would advise you on how to gradually cut down.

The film has nothing of this -- it showed nothing of the soaring feeling of complete indestructibility I would first feel when I quit the meds, this giving way quickly to a spiralling depression and a desire to really hurt myself. Zach Braff's character seems to instead slowly begin to feel all kinds of things again, in what appears to be a smooth and almost seamless transition. I know, it's a movie -- it's not meant to be taken literally. But it annoyed me.

My dream was about feeling like there was something wrong with me. It was about finding out there was something wrong with me -- of always suspecting, and then finding out it had been kept a secret. And I do know almost for a fact that my Dad at least would consider abortion to be the kinder option for a child with Down's Sydrome -- I have no idea how well educated about the subject he is, but I remember him telling me before that the children you see with the condition are a very lucky minority who are able to live an almost normal life -- and that instead 99% of people born with the condition are so severely handicapped... Well, you get it by now.

Even if I didn't explain it very well, even if I made it sound funny at first because I didn't know how else to bring up with my friends a lingering feeling of distress from a dream, I was fucking insulted to hear Nick say how he was texting his friends about it, because it was so funny. Sometimes I think I should tell my therapist about the violent thoughts that boy inspires in me, almost without effort on his part.

As a post script... I don't know. I grow and I prove things to myself -- passing my driving test was one of the biggest achievements in my life, since my instructor when I was 17 gave up on trying to teach me. He said he had "run out of ideas to help [me]" -- but at 25 I sure showed him when I did pass my test. I'd had an instructor who wouldn't give up on me, and helped me to believe in myself. And I realised that even if I do walk into door frames and bang my head when I pick up the post off the mat, that I can still drive a car perfectly well. I am trying to rewrite the story that is my life, or who I am, in so many ways -- but clearly some issues remain in that old subconscious mind.