"My Brain is Awake"

In Which I Write About NonLinear Time (Meaning Time Itself) and the Moment (Unknown) of first Self Awareness

Jun 18, 2025

My 3yo asked me, “What are you thinking about, Mama?”

And like lightning, she tells me she has an internal life and she knows it and that she see that I have an internal life and she wants to know about it. She is conscious of her own consciousness and my own. She knows that there is an internal life happening inside me. She knows there is an internal life happening inside her. She asks about it.

How long? Since when? Where did it emerge? What moment?

Emily Ogden talks about beginnings in her essay How to Give Birth. She says that life is like language is like minnows “darting across the water.”

That is, that by the time we recognize that something IS, we realize that we have known it IS for a while.

Or that by the time something has become an IS, it must have already at some point prior to that recognition become that thing.

There is no marking of beginnings without a marking of middles and ends…
When is [my child] calling my name and not filling the distance himself and my coming with the sound of his lips battering themselves against each other? Can I claim he means me and no other? One day I can, and then I think it was never not me. And I am both right and wrong: it was me to the extent that pronouns existed at all, which is to say, the extent that there was separation between persons. But there was not always.

I also think this what Johanna Hedva is also circling, drawing loose language sketches around, in her work on disability and time.

You will look behind you, expecting that causality to be clearly marked, but it will be evasive, tricky, even gone. Rather than a straight line, there will be a constellation, many points, distant and far. Did Point A even exist? What about all the moments you’ve been sick, in pain, incapacitated, debilitated before? How to fit those into a linear storyline that moves in only one direction? What about the moment, the changeability, how you've gone into pain then come out of it, then gone into a new, different kind? How to include all the places of experience within your body that you’ve discovered, orbited, and to which you’ve returned?
If there is a Point A, it is you, at the center, and the fact of your disability moves outward in all directions, 360 degrees. Which means it is not a chronological force—or rather, it is not only that. Time goes haywire in the blast radius of disability. It slows down, stands still, folds back on itself, branches. It is cyclical time, haunted time.” (p 63-64)

Haunted time. Time that contains many presents at once. Restructuring, remaking of it all by new moments.

A false container of beginning-middle-end. To write such is to write a myth. A useful one, I find, for many things. But useful only until it becomes the only time story.

Jade T. Perry says that marginalized folks are “time refugees”. I think this is what they mean: that when we stand outside the center, you feel the force of time as a different force, not of inevitable continuation for visitations forward and backwards. Beginnings and endings twist on each other.

I am thinking about all of this because today my 3yo asked me, “What are you thinking about, Mama?”

How long? Since when? Where did it emerge? What moment?

The growth of roots under a plant. It isn’t a tomato yet—it is a tomato plant. And then, one day, there is a tomato.

It isn’t a mind yet. And then it is. And has already been. And we don’t know when or how.

Emily Ogden talks about this. How we call babies babies not because they are babies as a fetus but because they are the stuff that, if uninterrupted, will someday be a baby. And when it is a baby, we will look back and marvel, for at some point it definitely became life but where? When? How?

I was thinking about my skin and the fresh injury I’d inflicted in an anxious moment. I chose to answer Pippin’s question honestly. I said I was thinking about a booboo.

“And what are you thinking about?” I asked.

“About Snow White and ‘Punzel and Elsa in the castle and I want to go but I don’t know how.”

Desire thwarted. Wanting and not having. Dreaming and not realizing. A world constructed in imagination that suddenly exists. Is suddenly talked about. Unclear to her what is achievable and what is not. Is there a castle? Is that blue roofed apartment complex THE castle where they all live, these friends of hers who tell stories and keep her company?

The other night during bedtime, Pippin said to Robbie, “I can’t sleep! I tired but my brain is awake! It singing Miss Rachel song! Hop little bunnies hop hop hop!” The difference between body and mental awareness. A song playing on loop in the mind. Is this real? Does everyone have a song playing in their head? How am I supposed to sleep when I can hear but not hear the song?

Self aware. A self spoken in words. The difference between I and thou. Curiosity—is this what is happening in your mind?

Mom, what are you thinking about?

A question to cross the bridge. Curiosity about where I have gone in my quietness.

I used to watch my mom have conversations in her head. Her mouth would be closed but still move, her eyebrows lifting and lowering, little shakes of the head. Always an argument, a point she wanted to make or wish she had made. A world in her mind separate from me.

Or her sitting in a big arm chair, reading her large study Bible, the sound of its gentle spine the sound of her feelings. Her journals and prayers leading into a separate consciousness. Prayer the way I learned my own internal self existed. I knew I existed and that I was loved so I asked Jesus into my heart when I was three. I read the Bible like it was written to me. The world a private conversation designed to engage me, to love me.

I see the same sense of belovedness in Pippin. I see it in how she flops in my lap to stim with my hair before bed and tells me all the stories from the day. From the trust she throws into the people who love her. The way she calls her three dearest friends from school “my sisters”. Belovedness, everywhere. How easy it is then to realize you have a mind when you know yourself loved. How little threat it seems to pose at the beginning.

I think illness cracks time into the shape it always was. No linearity. Just event and explosion through time. Even me as a child, drawing a poster to celebrate my love of Jesus, I think now of that sweet little body likely carrying endometria, the explosion of pain to come. Is this in her body too? Was she born carrying all the pain of herself?

When a body is born with ovaries, she [for I shall call her she for ease in this paragraph] carries all the eggs she will ever have. And these eggs carry the dna of future children. A grandmother—who is not a grandmother yet and may never be one but will be called one when her daughter (that she may never have) gives birth—carries the eggs that will be her grandchildren inside her the day she carries her daughter inside her. Part of my body existed in my grandmother’s womb. My Pippin, in part, existed in my mother’s womb when she carried me.

For what is existence but a marking in reverse? A story told backwards through bodies and time.

As the benediction sings, “As it was in the beginning, it now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.” Time twisted into itself. A self waking up to a song stuck in your head. The knowing.

“I am here. I see I am here because I have been here.”