We’ve all seen those shows, X-factor, the voice etc. Everyone has a sad story that has lead to their successes in life. Sometimes it takes certain things to happen to link your emotional brain with your intellectual or creative brain in my opinion. The former being the far more powerful of the three. This combo can make you unstoppable as you pursue your goal, often in unhealthy ways as well as successful. It was while writing a story using the prompt write about the most influential person in your life that I realised, why I truly am where I am today. I have shared it with you below.
As a neuroscientist I have learnt about the power of the mind. How if we tell ourselves something enough, it can form a brand new wire in our brain. If we activate this pathway repeatedly, it becomes a concrete belief. We literally have the ability to create and distort our own reality, based purely on the thoughts in our heads. These beliefs we form, are evidenced by the experiences and memories that pepper our past. Before each decision we make, the jury in our minds weighs the evidence of our past experiences and guides our reactions for the rest of our lives. Literally one experience in our past, one spoken word, one fraction of a moment, can change how we react to situations forever. It is my own experiences and my own formed beliefs that lead me to want to study the brain.
I know we are all bias, but my nana was the most glamorous woman I’d ever known. She was a stunner, even in her late 60’s she took me to the mall in pencil skirts and stilettos; she wasn’t your regular grandma. I would sit on the bed and watch her get ready for an outing. Watch as she rouged her cheeks in rose and slid the gold top from her lipstick with a ‘pop’. I watched in awe as she so gently removed the curlers from her golden brown hair and gave the fresh spool a bounce with her palm. She would fasten a brightly coloured scarf to her neck and place her hands on her hips...'ready love!'
Her smile was not large, but it had a sweetness that hid large, blue, sad eyes. Beauty aside, she was a feisty one, and full to the brim with love. Love that all of us wore like a winter blanket. Her life, at times, had been an unhappy one. Misplaced trust and confusion filled her childhood, yet she was so full of warmth in her adult life.
I had two full-time working parents, so I stayed with Nana Peggy frequently. We curled up in a single bed together and she told me stories of Goldilocks and the three bears, and a princess called Katie Clare. In the morning we sat in bed together and I ate cornies with milk and sugar, while she knitted woolen socks for charity or mended a costume for her drama group. When the heavens would open and the thunder would roar, she would hide her head under the pillow as I stared excitedly out the window. I would leave my post, only to pat her arm and tell her it would be over soon. We were buds like that.
The thunder reminded her of the sound of the war back home in Britain when she was young. As the planes would fly over their family home, little Peggy would put a kitchen pot on her head for protection and run around the garden hurling abuse at the sky, while her mother stood at the door in a state, begging her to return to safety. At times she still was that small child, but trapped in the body of a mature women now. In those moments when she told me the stories of Goldilocks and the princess, no longer was she older than me.
But one day, something changed. Ever so subtly, she changed. It started with the day of the week; she would always ask me, and I would always reply hastily, so that Grandad didn’t notice. We would be driving to her own daughter’s house, but she couldn’t remember the way. Then she would leave jackets at the mall and forget where she put her bag and go walking and get herself lost.
And then she changed. She became more emotional, suspicious, aggressive, and sometimes distant. To this day I still can’t stand emotional distance in my relationships. It fills me with a sadness and every cell in my body cries out for their return.
Some people say that oldies slip into a lovely dotty dementia, but not Peggy. She descended into Alzheimer’s disease, fighting like she always did. So much so, that when she was finally hospitalised, she spent a fair amount of time in the quiet room, strapped to her chair. She changed and I changed with her. I was too young to know how to handle it. I was losing my very best friend.
Her decline was slow, yet rapid. She stayed with us, but not really with us for 10 years before she was only a physical form. But for that ten years, she was no one I recognised. Her cheeks weren’t rosy, her hair went grey and her sparkling, blue, ocean eyes went dull and vacant. But worst of all, she had no idea who I was anymore. She would just look at me and cry like a small child, because she knew that she should know who I was. She knew I was someone, but she just didn’t know who. The frustration would often bring her to anger. So I stopped visiting, for both of us.
I used to wonder about my Nana, and why this happened to her. With a young and curious mind I theorised about people with unhappy childhoods. When things happen that rip from you the fragility you hold close, do you blur these memories, but relive them every day. Feel their presence sit heavily upon you. If they sear your heart and your skin and your bones, do you carry on living with it, or do you teach yourself to forget. Do you choose to live in a world of your own making. As I lay on the bed I would wonder if Nana’s mind was so strong, she taught herself to forget all the bad things so that she could be happy all the time for us. So that her heart would stay warm enough to wrap me up and tell me stories. But now that her mind was old, could she no longer differentiate between what she should remember and what she should forget.
Even though I don’t speak of her much, as it hurts to do so, this woman was one of the most influential in my life. So when she got sick, it changed me forever and formed a little belief of it’s own. And with it, created a curiosity and a love and a hate for the brain. For all the gods we worship in this world, the one definitive entity that could give us life and take it away was within us all along; was residing right above our noses. All the layers of a person could be unraveled before my eyes, according to the function of this organ.
I packed my bag and went back to school to study the brain. And everyone thought I was having a crisis of identity, and maybe I was. To pick up my whole life and move to the bottom of New Zealand. Leave my job, my apartment, my things, my boyfriend, to study the brain. And with no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. But that is the thing about beliefs, sometimes they are so strong, you will give up everything to answer the question that subconsciously plagues you. You are searching for a peace that you feel only knowledge will allow you.
I studied Alzheimers, hard, for a year and realised there were many more factors at play than just a desire to no longer remember. There were plaques and decay and all manor of other words associated with death. There was a complexity to that disease that dashed my naive hope of changing the world. I lost my belief, that if I studied hard enough, if I just knew everything there was to know about this, I could prevent anyone else from losing the capsule that carried their soul. I also realised it was that little inner child I was grieving for. That little person that remained, even as the learned layers of adulthood were shed during the progression of this shithouse disease. It was that inner child, trapped in the mature and decaying body that I felt for.
I turned away from the old and toward the new. Instead of studying the adult brain, I began to study that of a child’s. I may not have the power to fasten a knot on those loose and dangling brain wires, but I could investigate how those thoughts and beliefs are formed. How that little brain grows and changes and how we can do our best to ensure they have a life that is always worth remembering. And so began my career in the paediatrics department at Dunedin hospital, as a child sleep, health and brain development researcher.
Today I am like her. When home with my family I sing loudly whilst cooking. I am loving like her, but I too, have a feisty streak. Before I leave the house, even if I wear no other make-uo, I rouge my cheeks in rose. And I have a fascination with beautiful lipsticks in gold packaging and an outstounding collection of scarves. One of which is hers.
There was another brain circuit that built during my early life. The love of story telling. How a good story can transport you from your own world to another. And just like Nana Peggy, I have started telling stories of my own...about Goldilocks and all her bears and the adventures of a princess called Katie Clare.
Thanks for letting me share her with you.
10 points for guessing which one Peggy is (hint, the glamour with her legs out and the outrageous sunnies on)
Much love to you all XX
