Author: Milan

There is literally grief in every part of me:

grief at the ends of the longest of the long hairs on my head;

in my scalp and cranium and brain and spine and torso.

Grief in the ribs enclosing my heart and lungs.

Grief all through the tract of my digestion.

From my nostrils and my mouth down my respiratory tree, carrying away carbon as I exhale

Dripping into my ear canals like hot wax, and into my nostrils as though suspended inverted.

Grief sitting present heavily in my mouth. Making me think of root canals. Of bone cancer.

Grief in the cumulative damages to toes and ankles from decades of walking and cycling;

In the way I trim and file my nails, how I treat them when they break unexpectedly: protecting the sensitive site, removing cracked fragments carefully and in their own time, medicating against infection, cleaning often, gloving and bandaging and Leukotaping

In the crest of grey emerging from temple to temple, punctuated by my widow’s peak

In the way I hear and feel the rain on my skin; how I smell it in the forest when the ground is sodden and the rain still falls. Thinking I’ve survived to this point. This is how this much heaviness feels.

In the way I think of the dead and the lost and the absent, and most wrenchingly on the yet-to-be-lost-but-doomed — the yet-to-suffer

There is grief in how I interpret a situation, a gesture, an implied motive, a social ambiguity or potential slight

In who I find that I can open up to and trust and let down the defences for and hold bare against my heart

Prior to today, it never occurred to me to choose a name for my inner mind. My parents named me “Milan” and have been called it and thought of myself as it all my life; but, all my life, I have also felt a private interior domain where I enjoyed true freedom and privacy. The experience of the world through my senses turns naturally through the miracle of consciousness into thoughts and emotions which have the feeling of spontaneity and inherentness, of my true self calling out, of meshing my mind with this singular moment in time and space, passing a judgment about the world based on my knowledge and experience and inner voice.

Sarah Seager’s podcast episode with Martha Piper and Indira Samaraseka collided on my walk home with thoughts I have been having about being neurodiverse by choice: cultivating the informed ability to think differently from the societal norm or default, and it gave me the idea that my inner mind is an entity with a meaningful existence and worthy of naming to help mentally and emotionally distinguish it from my social self as it is interpreted and others wish it to be (“Milan”).

I am calling it FILL because it naturally and inescapably pervades me, and because when emotional I’m FILLed to overflowing. My natural sense desperately wants to be expressed, but it has learned from experience with parents and authority figures that its most natural impulses of feeling and telling the truth are often unwanted and must be suppressed, at least if they don’t fully correspond with the thoughts and feelings of the authority figure. A lifetime of punishment for feeling authentically and telling the truth have deeply internalized that all social action must be strategic and considered for impact on others – a perpetual mental burden of having to model and estimate the minds of others to try to project what they want or would consider ‘normal’.

FILL fills me, but the boundary at my skin is hard and there is vacuum outside. The boundary must always be guarded, so “Milan” as perceived from the outside can sufficiently correspond with the expectations of those with authority to be able to endure in life where power is often arbitrary and unfeeling, and where many prefer comfortable delusion to evidence-based reasoning.

I am going to put some thought into how my lifetime of relationships might be re-interpreted via the Milan/FILL distinction. I can immediately tell intuitively who in my sphere of present acquaintances nourishes, celebrates, and respects FILL and those who would rather erase the most fundamental parts of my whole existence – how I respond to the unfolding symphony of the universe, and my efforts to make sense of it with others – and have a “Milan” who follows their ideal script most closely. Of course, people’s whole lives don’t fall into one category or another. Your choices determine your alignment, your alignment does not determine your choices – and all of our behaviour makes more sense to judge than our character, which is multifaceted, contradictory, and complex.

Anyhow, consider naming your inner self and thinking about what the dialog between that entity and your social self as perceived as others might be. When is your FILL cheering for you, and when is it cringing with instantaneous regret while you are making a choice which you know morally compromises you? The freedom to be yourself inside your own mind is the only thing only incapacity and death can take from you, and when we listen to ourselves our instincts are generally to be humane and work to show empathy and understanding.