Strands of Shadow

By Lila Tesa

As we accompany a lost child finding her way, we're given a tour of an alternative recovery program, discovery of friendship and camaraderie, a look at our response to beauty, mentoring from an old gardener, an introduction to American Sign Language, a passion for study, introspection, reaching out and eventually the building of a community. We witness how misfortune can both deepen our growth and weave into the fabric of our lives, and we're taken on an exploration of surreal events from a family's obscure past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lila Tesa
• Release date: Jan 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005030506

Lila Tesa

Between atypical wiring, a history of trauma and the maze of mental illness, I've spent a great deal of my life in various semi-progressive layers of awareness that my experience of the world around me is not always the same as that of others. My ways of processing, of perceiving, of experiencing, they often seem to diverge from the norm, at least to the degree that a norm can be thought of as something that exists. But how to ever be sure of the details of this? We can never fully know how other people are internally experiencing their lives, so thorough comparisons (or contrasts) are generally difficult to formulate. It's a compelling subject to me though, because we so often find ourselves having to interact with other people, and I often find myself desperately wondering, "What's going on in there? How is it different when it's different from mine?" I don't know that I'll ever have answers that are fully satisfying to me. I don't know that I'm capable of truly understanding and embracing whatever the neurotypical reality looks like. What I've found that I can do, though, is to deeply explore my own internal terrain, and this turns out to be a favorite activity for me. For years I've been able to do this only in conversation and letters - when I've tried to generate fiction, my mind would slam shut on me. But this past year I finally found a way through. The characters in Strands of Shadow are fully fictional, as are all the events. The way of processing thoughts and experiences, though, are all my own: same brain, different medium.

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Strands

of

Shadow

by Lila Tesa

Copyright 2020 Lila Tesa

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you know someone for whom you feel this book would resonate, please restrict yourself to sending them a link to the author's smashwords page. Thank you.

Table of Contents

Preface

Disclaimer

Read the book

Afterword

Preface

I originally wrote this book with the idea of being its only reader. Once it was finished, I started thinking about maybe showing it to a couple other people, and that brought to mind all kinds of advice, rules I'd heard asserted with great authority. They seemed to be communicating standards that I couldn't meet or that somehow represented the opposite of what I wanted to do. I wrote this book because I needed to, and I wrote it in the way that I needed to write it. I felt that this would make it a sort of non-book, something that no one would have reason to read, that only really made sense for someone like me. And given how singularly odd I seem to be against the backdrop of the rest of humanity, this translated into my feeling that this would be a one-reader book.

Each time I read through it, though, I found in myself a growing feeling that another reader could possibly find something compelling here. Growing, but not consistently. I bounced back and forth between that notion and thoughts about all the required bits that I've so urgently rejected. Even as I write this, I'm not at all certain about releasing these pages into the world. I like my brain and what it's done, but I also feel the need to explain myself a little. So this preface is my compromise between keeping my little club limited to one member and opening the doors.

I am neurodivergent and I live with severe C-ptsd. Most of the world is off-limits to me because I so easily become violently traumatized by such a vast array of stimuli: sights, sounds, ideas, attitudes, environments - sometimes it feels like there’s more on the list of triggers than the list of what remains. Much of my life is a hunt for things I can do, places I can be, people I can interact with. A scouring of the world, seeking out these little corners where I can exist, and where the person that I am can unfold and breathe and maybe sometimes shine.

I’m always tempted by libraries. The idea of losing myself in a good book is so compelling, but unfortunately I experience most books in much the same way that I experience most of the world. There have been a few that I’ve loved, and I’ll read a book like that over and over, just to go be in that place that one inhabits while reading it. But eventually I want to read another book. And so often I am unable to find anything that doesn’t leave me incapacitated.

So for one thing, I wanted to create one myself. I wanted to create a book that I could read, that I could go live in in the way that one lives in a book while reading it. A book that wouldn’t do me any damage, a book that I would like, a mental space in which I could exist. That was the main driving force behind writing this book.

There have been other reasons I’ve wanted to write, and I go into more detail about that elsewhere, so I’ll just give a brief indication of it here. One is that I’ve always felt that I had a book in me. I’ve always loved to write but only wrote letters and little essays, just for myself and the occasional friend. When I would try to approach the idea of a larger project, specifically fiction, my mind would go completely blank. My mental illnesses would close in on me and try to eat me. I’ve made many attempts, sought out many resources, over the course of my life, always with the same results. So it’s been in the back of my mind for a long time, this question of whether I would ever be able to write anything.

Another reason is that I’ve found that my experience of being alive seems to be significantly different in ways from that of many other people, so there is the notion that there could be something worthwhile about bringing some of this to the page. I feel that I have a certain character, humor, intelligence, really I’m not sure what name to give it, but this being that I am, I wanted to give it a place to shine through, in this sort of medium. I wanted to show some of the bright lights that shine in my eyes, and sometimes through them. This felt urgent for a long time, and a day came when I found that I had to abandon it, only to get it back in a different form, but that’s a story for another place and time.

But back to how this book isn’t what some of the conventional wisdom seems to suggest that a book is supposed to be. As I said earlier, a main motivation for me in writing was to create a book that would be free of things that I can find traumatizing, even though many of these things are often considered to be important ingredients in any work of fiction. Many aspects of conflict. You know how they make your main character really miserable at the hands of some disturbing person, so that you just hate them, you become so angry that when things resolve in favor of the protagonist the release is almost cathartic? I can’t do that. My baseline stress levels are so high that that preparatory conflict puts me over an edge of sorts. So, in this way and in many others, some may well find this book to be terribly uneventful. My apologies if you’ve somehow come here in error, with a mistaken impression of what the book was going to be.

So, writing for myself, what does that look like? What do I like to read or think about? What’s going to be in here? Typically it’s got to do with inner workings. Of a person’s mind, or their emotional processes. I have spent enough time fighting for my life within my own being that this sort of terrain has become my home in a way. I am not averse to darker feelings and thoughts, and am not willing to be told that they’re something to be overcome or moved past etc. (Well, I can’t control what anyone chooses to say, or tries to say to me, but I can express that said saying will certainly result in more of those dark thoughts, directed at said sayer.) I like goofball trains of thought and twisty bits of interaction, and hope that I’m able to fully enter that mental space, in the writing, where I’m able to access my ability to generate these sorts of things. Because I want them in this place I’m building.

I can’t fully say what changed between the decades during which I couldn’t write and the beginning of this project. The main issue seemed to be a matter of access to many of my internal resources. I’ve found this to be intimately connected to aspects of my mental health. And while my mental health persists, in many ways, in dragging me through a waking nightmare, I’ve been lucky enough to stumble into (or possibly, partly create?) a few cracks in the walls that it had erected, that had been keeping me from being able to generate fiction for so long. Even then, even once I had begun to construct some scaffolding upon which I could begin to write dialogue and develop characters, there have been overwhelming obstacles. One such obstacle has been that ever-present standard collection of advice, expectations and norms, that tell us how we must do and not do things. It was crucial for me to dispense with these things. It’s not so easy, though, to discard things you don’t know you’re holding, or that are holding you. So many notions sit within a culture and seep into us without our knowledge or consent, so it can be a glacially slow process to even become aware that they exist in us, that we’re affected by them - a vital prerequisite to effectively rejecting them. This slowness can be a reality, unfortunately, even if you think of yourself as someone who rejects most of what the world around us presumes that we will accept.

A couple comments on the specifics of what I’ve done here. I needed characters for this thing. And with the world being such an unworkable place for me, I couldn’t develop adult characters very well, giving them lives that I don’t understand, that I recoil from. So I made most of them teenagers. They don’t quite have to live in the world yet, in certain ways. So you might find these teenagers to be a little more sophisticated in some aspects of their mental processes than they ought to. My somewhat sincere apologies if this is terribly disturbing to anyone.

There are a handful of conversations here that happen in American Sign Language (ASL). For the most part, I’m just giving the English translations and not attempting to express what the communications would actually look like in ASL grammar. There are systems for conveying ASL in print, but it would have complicated the writing, slowed down the reading, and possibly not been very interesting to anyone who isn’t studying the language.

So, you’ve been warned, right? You’re entering my part playground, part therapy session, part manifesto, part fantasy world, in a form that looks suspiciously like a novel. The rules and the culture are a little different here, as they must be.

Lila Tesa

November 2020

Disclaimer

I am not a therapist, a doctor, or a professional in any medical or psychiatric-related field, nor have I, in the writing of this book, consulted with any such professionals. I am also not a carpenter, a marine biologist, an insurance agent, master gardener, mailman, dog catcher, speed chess player, restorer of vintage bicycles, Linux guru, cartoonist, funeral director, sign language interpreter, pirate or singer of sea shanties. I have also never learned to knit.

1

‘No drugs in this house!’ Auden was shaking with rage. "No drugs in this house? Jesus. There weren’t any drugs. I mean, it was in a scene in a movie. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to go crazy in there. Watching people getting high on a screen makes me a pot-head now? This is barely living and I’m not even allowed to do that, I’m gonna lose it, I swear."

It’s true, Luna replied. Let’s kill her.

Thank you. You always make it easier. But you’re ok, aren’t you?

Yeah, I guess I am.

I wish I understood, or maybe it’s not about understanding.Auden continued as they walked farther and farther from the house. I wish I could just feel the way you do. Seems like that’s not in the cards. Everything does me in. I know it’s not like that for you, but you still know how to voice the intensity that I’m experiencing. I wish people had a clue about that. What that kind of support looks like and how urgent it is. I’m lucky I’ve got you.

You’re not the only lucky one.

What, so this is good for you, getting to listen to the unending ravings of the perpetually angry?

Well, I’m not saying we’re wired the same, I’m not saying that without you I’d become you, but someone’s got to get upset about this stuff. If I were alone in it, maybe I wouldn’t have the exact same reaction that you experience, but I think I’d be carrying a lot more stress than I do with you here. Hearing your anger validates my feelings, keeps me from feeling like I’m going to lose my mind. Probably more slowly, more of a rotting away, but still no fun. Your anger kind of burns a hole in that, we try to treat your burns and we can both go on.

It’s good to know you feel that way about it, I mean really good, that I’m not a total liability to you, that there’s actually some value in knowing me and talking to me, for you. But. She still drives me nuts. I still feel like I’m going to crack. I really do think something’s got to give. I need to move out, or she needs to be medicated or something.

I’d hate it if you left. And you know she’d never accept medication.

Oh right! The wretched drugs. There’s no escape from her insanity.

Perhaps if she were hit by a bus.

Thank you. I don’t want to be this angry.

A compact car then.

Weirdo. I appreciate it though. But what am I actually going to do? Can we do some kind of intervention and get her into therapy or something? Should I apply for study abroad? Maybe build a cabin in the woods and start writing my manifesto?

Maybe. I mean the therapy. I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t know how she’d react. I think an intervention would backfire if anyone tried something like that on me.

Yeah, me too.

And I still don’t want you to go.

What do I do then? I’m still shaking, I’m so angry.

"I think it’s a hard problem, and if there is a solution, we won’t find it while we’re all worked up. I think for now we just blow off steam, then sometime when we’re feeling more sane we sit down and outline the problem and what we need. Then we let the whole thing percolate in the back of our minds for a few days. I do my best problem solving when I’m not trying to think about whatever it is."

Wait. You’re worked up? This is ‘worked up’ for you?

I’m worked up on the inside.

Again, weirdo.

Thank you.

So how do you propose we blow off said steam?

Well, we could run fast, wear ourselves out. Or head down to the ravine and just scream. We can compose deranged morbid poetry and recite it as we walk. Or we could make nasty grimacing faces at anyone unfortunate enough to be walking in the opposite direction.

Ok, nixing that last one but I really like it. I’m going to go with running and poetry for 200, Alex.

It’s Luna.

Right, right, so sorry. Also, RIP Alex.

Auden continued, I have a modification to propose.

Yes?

Simultaneous running and poetry.

Sounds perfect for a crazy person and a weirdo.

Hey.

Luna shrugged and started to run. Auden propelled himself into a sprint, caught up and and kept pace. They shouted out verse as it came to mind.

"Sheila, Sheila, where’s your head?

There, under the flower bed?"

"Sheila, what’s that on your plate?

Is that arsenic you ate?"

"Some will say our work is shoddy

But they never found the body"

The running recital continued until they were out of breath and ideas, and they collapsed, panting, against the chain link fence on the side of the trail heading toward the ravine.

Head back? Luna asked.

Yeah. That was good. Thanks. I mean, it’s a band aid, but still.

We’ll figure something out, we’ll get through this. I promise.

Awe. You writing greeting cards now? That one would go good with a unicorn on it.

I’ll make a note of that, thank you.

They made their way back to their street and braced themselves for re-entry. As they approached the house they saw a figure on the porch, that became recognizable once they got close enough.

Uncle Aaron!

Hey Kids, How’s it going?

Great, Auden said, now that you’re here.

Well thank you.

But she’s driving us nuts.

How’s that?

We’re not allowed to do anything. She doesn’t like the movies we want to watch or the music we listen to, or our friends, it’s like we’re living in a prison.

Do you have any idea what it’s actually like to live in a prison?

Okay, no. But I just feel like I’m suffocating, everything at home is so restrictive, it’s like I can’t stretch out and see how far I extend, it’s like I have to cram myself into this little box.

You know, it’s a tricky thing, growing up. It’s like we go through a stage where we need to do things that our parents don’t like, or actually things they hate. I think it’s part of finding ourselves, breaking away from our sense of being their children, and it takes a lot of force to make that break. Plus you’re getting flooded with all kinds of over-the-top hormones at your age, and-

No. Uncle Aaron. You don’t understand. This isn’t us being rebellious. We’re not giving her any trouble. She’s really going nuts on us. Losing it, screaming, blaming us for something that happened in a movie. Auden’s hands tensed up with an almost violent anger, and then he just dropped his head, letting his face fall into his hands. Just today she yelled at us for having drugs in the house, and there weren’t any. Not actual drugs. Just on the screen. She was shrieking. We had to leave.

It’s true, Luna added. It’s been really hard to live here.

I’m sorry. Maybe I underestimated what you were trying to say. But do you remember when you guys were little? Or even up to just a couple years ago? She was a good mom to you. You had good childhoods, Didn’t you? I mean, that’s the same person you’re talking about. Can you give her some points for all she’s done for you for so long, being there for you, being so good to you for so many years? Can you float her any benefit of the doubt? Can you remind yourself that this is the same person and cut her a little slack?

We did have good childhoods. She was a good mom when we were little. But it was different. We were kids. Having your mom decide where to take you and what toys to get you and how your time would be filled, it made sense then. Auden continued. But it doesn’t now. And she’s reining us in so tight and being so psychotic when she can’t force us into her fantasy of who she wants us to be, honestly Uncle Aaron I feel like I’m going to lose my mind. Everything I try to do, everything I like, every friend I try to make, it all just sets off this craziness. She doesn’t want us to have lives at all. To have thoughts of our own, to be like, actual real people. Why did she even have kids?

Well, she didn’t really.

What.

Aaron was silent for a minute, alarmed that he had just shared this with them, but chose to proceed, deciding it was necessary for them to understand.

Sit down.

Your birth parents died when you were both very young, Aaron continued, to silence. Sheila chose to take care of you.

Oh god.

Auden stared off into space. Luna looked like her mind had stopped processing, not for lack of trying.

What kind of person gives up her life to raise someone else’s kids?And never even talks about it? Auden asked, seemingly addressing the void into which he was staring.

She’s a remarkable person, their uncle answered.

They sat on the porch and he told them some of Sheila’s story. What he knew of it, anyway.

I can tell you a good bit more.

2

Sheila sat at the table, looking down at her plate. Mom had made her a bologna and cheese sandwich on white bread with the crusts cut off, and there was a little bowl of grapes. These were her favorite lunch foods, but it was hard to eat. She used to eat easily, happily, when she was really little, but there was a sad, heavy feeling most of the time now, since the lights had gone out.

She barely remembered the light in her world, but her belly seemed to know something was wrong. The light had been in her mother’s eyes. Her father’s too, when she was really little. There was warmth and happiness when her mom would put her lunch in front of her. There was still food every day, and it was still her mother preparing it and bringing it to the table, but somehow at the same time it was as though her mother was dead. She didn’t know she was grieving. She was sad and lonely and skinny.

Her older brother and sister had gone off into their own worlds. Maybe they didn’t need Mom and Dad much in the first place.

More and more, the sadness permeated the house, and it became hard for the girl to breathe. She went outside and sat on the front steps, drawn toward the warmth of the sun.

She shut her eyes and tried to draw comfort from the rays hitting her face. She pretended it was working, because she imagined that was better than not pretending it was working. She decided she would stay a couple more minutes.

Something wet touched her knee and she jumped, eyes open. It was the nose of a brown puppy, eagerly attempting to share some affection.

She reached for it and it climbed into her lap, licking her face as she hugged it. She sobbed and laughed at the same time, feeling she’d