The Long Dark Compartment Syndrome of the Soul
Embrace all Hope, ye who enter here.
Do I tell this story? Should I tell this story? Have I already told this story? Forgive me… this year has been a lot. In addition to the malestrom of late-stage capitalism’s decline into oligarchy, I’ve been spelunking the depths of my own personal cave.
Dante wasn’t kidding when he told of “rings of hell” — but hell is simply a storefront to dissuade the unserious.
One must be the Orpheus to her/his own Euridyce… but here’s the secret: You MUST look back to move forward into now.
I just witnessed a mechanism of my somatic reawakening.
Rewind: a traumatic experience at the age of five effectively cut me off from my body.
I broke my arm in the playground. I was jumping with the other kids. They were having so much fun. And the very first time I climbed and took the leap… it was the last time I ever tried to fly… for a very long time. It was a supracondylar fracture of the humerus [and no… it wasn’t quite…]. Doctor Cristofaro, who single-handedly saved mine, said that every complication that could have gone wrong went wrong. My left arm went sideways, and when they opened the arm, they had to perform a fasciotomy [I learned this is the word for leaving a gaping hole in your tissue] because extreme swelling and trauma were causing compartment syndrome and Volkmann’s ischemia. The nerves and muscles were dying. Seven surgeries later, it was healed. It became a part of my history. A story to tell.
“Hey, Tom, what’s the deal with your arm?”
”Ah, you should see the other guy…” I smile and then go into the script: “Five-years-old, I-broke-my-arm, a-lot-of-complications, I-was-in-the-hospital-for-three-weeks, had-seven-operations. They-said-I-almost-lost-my-arm. But-they-were-wrong. It’samiracleandI’mverylucky.” Rinse. Repeat.
And recently I realized something strange. I feel pain like everyone else. But here’s the weird thing: when I’m in distress, physical or emotional, I feel it acutely. But when I go to locate or pinpoint the specific pain or the distinct emotion, it all goes fuzzy. It evades language and logic. It’s the strange quantum state of terror where I can see the trajectory of my pain, but I can’t identify it. And then when I finally identify it, I can no longer see where it’s going. It’s the uncertainty principle of alexithymia and impaired interoception.
My first experience with physical trauma taught me that the body is a terrifying, painfully fragile thing. My five-year-old brain, my exceptionally perceptive and intuitive five-year-old brain, addressed the vulnerability by initiating the Live-Inside-My-Head Protocol1. I retreated deep inside and in went the exile. My own personal inner-child-in-a-plastic-bubble quarantined in solitary confinement, an oubliette of existential angst for 43 years.
The Fountain of Lost Youth: Get Junger
I read a lot of Carl Jung. Not enough to be an expert, but enough to know a little about the mass lying beneath the surface… the titanic unconscious that can support the emotional tonnage of all spacetime while simultaneously shredding the hull of the most ironclad juggernaut.
I mention Jung because I think when I started meditating regularly almost ten years ago, I was setting into motion an unconscious game plan that led me to this mid-life crisis. Maybe I read Prufrock too many times. Do I dare remark that this all began when I was a patient etherized on a table? Maybe I realized there’s more to me than a ragged pair of claws on some sandy bottom…
As way led on to way, roads diverged and all that, I eventually got my physical health under control, stopped eating like an eight-year-old at Disneyworld, started a regular exercise routine, and finally began to realize that what felt like fear, anxiety, and depression my entire life was more likely unaddressed neurodivergence.
Did the trauma when I was five knock me onto the spectrum? There’s a significant link between trauma and neurodiversity… It strikes me as a chicken/egg scenario. Our divergence in a world not made for us is traumatizing in and of itself. Yet our very divergence (our internalized “weirdness”) leads us to traumatic situations….
No. I was a highly sensitive kid, even in the small sample size, before that accident. In fact, that accident was likely catalyzed by my neurodivergent self. I had no idea how to play like the other kids… I felt different, I tentatively joined the play and… that was it.
At 17 they told me maybe I had ADD (there was no “H” then). But even without the H they said, “but he’s not very hyper…” — I had more faces than Lon Chaney, I was the man of 1000 faces and I had quite the mask.
“He’s so quiet, so sensitive, so polite…” “
You should see him at home…” Mom would chuckle. Because while I was socially appropriate in public (I was terrified not to be — god forbid I seemed as “weird” as I knew I was), I would have meltdowns, tantrums, inexplicable terrors at home.
But even so… I wasn’t “Hyper.” But the cruel truth of mental health, of neurodiversity, is that nobody sees how your brain works… and we often lack the language to convey the condition. I have a linguistic gift; it’s part of my elaborate mask. I can be quite articulate. That is why when I run into these neuro-spaces that exist pre-linguistically2, I become overwhelmed. If I can’t articulate it… my identity spirals into crisis. Words are all I have… that is, when I’m in that ego state.
Because the five-year-old from June of 1982 is a feral caged child, and he doesn’t have the words, but he feels it all.
…
February 20, 2026
This morning I felt the chest burst and I immediately shouted it down. It’s like an inverse Great Wave Off Kanagawa. My chest hollows, and the vacuum immediately fills with adrenaline. Fight or fuck it all…
STOP! SUCK IT UP! MIND OVER MATTER. YOU GOT THIS!
That’s the neurotypical advice. Mind over matter over mind.
I stifled it and refocused and sure enough—BOOM It hits again... HARDER. Oh yeah, I remember. That's me I'm shutting up... Sorry, can I do the thing?... okay?... a tentative truce, but I knew it was just a stop-gap because the inner kid's not crying wolf, so when it comes again I don't take offense. I see it as a desperate plea from someone who has been waiting over four decades to be seen. Reflexive, knee-jerk, chestburst STOP! THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE ANYTHING MAKEITSTOP. Breathe, refocus, feel chest... I'm holding my breath... deep breath... release jaw... that seems to help... self feels felt... seen... acknowledged. It's the I DON'T WANNAS... They just get in the way. They never get their way. They try to protect The Exile who is coming to light. They are the first-responders. Protectors. I DON’T WANNA! I didn’t want to go to the hospital, I didn’t want to feel the insane pain of my arm being crushed beneath the weight of its own inflammation, I didn’t want to be afraid, and I didn’t want to be locked in the attic of psyche for 43 years, but here we are.
Now is the point where I should mention that, in the last year or so, I was drawn (thank you, Jungian Unconscious) to two particular therapeutic paradigms: Internal Family Systems (IFS, parts) and Somatic Experiencing. Both of these modalities are strikingly compatible with my needs. I effectively locked the part of myself I was most afraid of, most protective of, and cut him off from his body. Parts: IFS looks at the “parts” of our personality as distinct aspects we can address and integrate. Somatic Experiencing explores the profound bond between mind and body. The Body Keeps The Score, as the writer said.
The me I shrouded in old newspaper and bubble-wrap became The Exile.
The Neurodivergent Exile
AuDHD Weirdness: Dramatic, immature, old soul, too much, not enough. Sensitive, strange, empath. Genius, dumb, lazy, brilliant, weird, nerd, geek, freak, creep, neurotic…
10:39 AM – It’s like I forget there’s this driver within me holding it all together. Object permanence and parts… we start to get in each other’s way.
Are IFS Parts frequencies of energy? I mean, isn’t everything just a vibration of a quantum field? This is all way above my pay grade, but if I understand it correctly, it’s all energy. What is a thought? Some disturbance, an energetic upheaval in a neural network. Perhaps parts are the energy patterns created by vibrating neural networks. Perhaps when these energetic vibrations interact, they do what waves do: interfere… From that interference springs forth new vibrations and the plight of the empath or the flight of the empath is on the updraft of these thermal conflagrations.
Waves of varying frequencies reinforce, amplify, cancel out, diminish, find resonance, dissonance, and in the overlapping fields the interaction forms contrast and it I Chings its way from yin to yang and all points in between. From absolute zero, the vibration spreads, and then there is light.
All of this to say that beneath or bequeathing it all is me planking in plank state holding it for at least 60 seconds or all of spacetime…
Catching and caching, waving and saving, performing, conforming, reforming.
Because the deeper I go into this Mandelbrot set in my brain, the more there is to find. I’ll never get there, but the colors and shapes…
But I’m already there. Watching as The Exile flees the cage and dives into the fractal everywhere and nowhere.
Mid-Life Crisis
***
Dark Night of the Soul
***
Death and Rebirth
***
Strength
***
Love
- Just dubbed, ad hoc… cleverly because it’s the protocol wherein I retreat from the terrifying world to live inside my head where it’s presumably more safe. ↩︎
- Is this a thing? Is Pre-Linguistic a concept? If not, I want to make it one. I’ve struggled my entire life with the concepts, feelings, emotions, and thoughts that predate the words to contain them. ↩︎