Faces of disease

My whole life seems to have been a series of lessons. Some really friggin harsh ones even. Many of those lessons have had to do with illness of one form or another in others, mostly mental health issues but also some very rare diseases for some reason.

There was a boy in our complex when I was a kid that died of old age at seven. I’ve known mongoloid children, and down’s syndrome kids, and thalidomide victims.
Friends of my mom take in troubled foster kids and I’ve met kids with coprophilia, and autism and aspergers. I’ve known manic depressive people and sociopaths and my own brother went schizophrenic at seventeen.
I’ve been witness to more than my fair share of ailments in others without considering my own.

{I can hear you now…
”What’s this self centered little puke on about, and when is he going to get to the point?”
well just never you mind, this idea is important and it took a good swift kick to the nards to jog loose, so pay attention.}

See…I’m not entirely ‘sane’ per se, and I had to run this whole gamut of mental issues when I was a kid.
I wouldn’t exactly use the word insane to describe myself, but sane isn’t quite right either.
It started with having to touch each piece of food to my nose before I could eat it when I was a kid, and progressed to where I couldn’t stop making strange facial gestures and sounds, having panic attacks and constant anxiety and finally oscillating between depressed and manic while being beat at home and ostracized at school.
I was a bit more than just a mess.
All of this stuff happened before puberty which I think is the only thing that let me find a way through that crap.
See, my mind wasn’t fully formed yet and we are all kind of pre-programmed at a young age to figure things out, so that’s what I did, but it was like trying to plug a bursting dam with gum.
Every time I’d develop some new mental trick to make one thing go away, another worse one would take its place until I couldn’t keep it together anymore and started planning to off myself.
I think I was fifteen, maybe sixteen by this time.
I didn’t really ‘want’ to die, I just couldn’t stay going on like that any more if you know what I mean, and that’s when I learned that ‘it’ didn’t want to die either.
In my mind the ‘it’ was whatever was making me do these things against my will. ‘It’ became separate and something I could bargain with to regain control of my self.
’It’ wanted recognition.
And… It’s gotten it.

So now there are two of us sharing this one melon so to speak.
An awake me and a dreaming me, and after the better part of a few decades of coexisting we’ve done gone and wrangled us up a language of sorts.

Crazy I know, and I don’t expect you to believe me. Why should you? I wouldn’t, but please bear with me anyway. I had to give up trying to get people to believe me, so don’t sweat it.
Just hear me now…you can always believe me later.

Now, you’d think that this would suck.
I mean, who wants a separate consciousness sharing toys with them in their attic space right?, but we are both basically good shits in the long run, (y’know, if’n you like long runny shits), so I’m good with it, and see, well, one of these consciousnesses is like ‘way’ smart, and it’s not the guy who’s doing the typing right now.

This other self makes connections that my waking mind can’t. It notices patterns and mulls over everything I’ve ever learned simultaneously in this incoherent stream of consciousness that I’ve managed to somehow keep myself apart from and yet can dip into at will. It also sometimes tries to convey the insights it has gleaned that I myself am too stupid to clue into.
As far as mellon-mates go, it’s been pretty dang helpful now that we’ve got the general ground rules down and can trust one another.
Basically it boils down to;
if I don’t take it for granted, then… it won’t take me for a ride. If I feed it what it wants to know, it is content to mull this information over, make its connections and relay them back to me.
If I share my attic toys with it, sometimes it lets me play with the toys in its box, which consist mostly of my own autonomic functions.
Not exactly fun toys, but handier than all get-out if push comes to shove.

This works for me, and although our society may view it as a form of psychosis, it is what I mean when I say, “My gut tells me something” or “Something has been tickling the back of my head” and, I’ll be danged but, many of the things it tells me seem to be bang on the money once I look into them, which makes me think that I might not have gotten too far from the mark when I came up with this whole separateness of consciousness thing as a kid to keep my mind from shattering. It was going to happen on its own anyway and in a last ditch effort I think that I may have fractured it on purpose so that I could control the break and keep ‘me’ whole.
I’m no shrink but I figure that this puts my picture quite a few dictionary pages away from the word ‘sane’ if you know what I mean.

So this idea is two-fold.
First of all, I believe that we do ourselves and our children a huge disservice by not acknowledging that there is a part of our minds that is connected to something greater than our waking selves and need to revive this concept. Lack of it is leading to a majority of the mental illness we see around us.
All ancient societies seem to have known this and it baffles me that the society I see around me suppresses and ridicules such notions. Our minds are capable of far more than we give them credit for, or rather, what we give them credit for greatly limits what they can ultimately achieve.
We must change this!
This idea then is not only a WIBNI but also a Let’s All and so MFD-able. Which is a shame because it’s the most important part of this two part idea. Hopefully this next part won’t be delete-able.

{Yeah-yeah, pipe down! I’m getting to it already. Sheesh!}

Now you might be asking yourselves; why on Earth would 2fries be spewing his guts up all over the hb like this?...again.
and that would be a very good question, with like this, completely and utterly shitty answer.

See… all those kids with all those problems I mentioned above left their impression on this other part of me, as did their parents.
So for the better part of my life now I’ve noticed patterns in facial symmetry, expressions, body movements, mannerisms, and a thousand other things that I can’t really put into words, which scream at me from the back of my head when a couple I’ve just met are going to have a down syndrome or autistic baby, or if an individual themselves are likely to develop some disease that I’ve seen symptoms of in the past.
This…knack is not something you can go bandying about. You can’t just meet a new couple and say, “Yikes, hmmm, y’know I wouldn’t be thinking of having any kids if I was you two”, or “Hey buddy, have you been tested for Parkinsons yet?” It wouldn’t go over too well but it might if the questions were asked by someones doctor.
So I would never know for sure if my mind was playing tricks on me or not and I kept all of this stuff to myself.
As the years went by I would see some of these couples have kids born the way I had thought they would be, and some of these individuals develope the diseases I had hypothesized in them earlier. It began to prove out my hunches.

When I first met my wife her son was four years old, she says five and she’s probably right because she is far better with numbers than I am, but I remember it as four and I’ll be damned if his every movement didn’t remind me of my brother at his various stages of his life. My mother has remarked on the similarities a number of times in the past as well.
This did not influence my decision to ask his mother to marry me but I always had it in the back of my mind that I could help him to not follow in my brothers footsteps. I tried so fucking hard, but from the rebelliousness to chemical abuse to psychotic break and finally institutionalization. I just wasn’t able to help him.

So this is the reason for the info overload.
I’m about as crushed as I can be and still function, and I’m going to spend the next decade trying to put my son back together the way I just spent the last decade trying to put my brother back together and I just don’t give two shits about concealing my own mental illness if it has a chance of keeping anyone else from having to go through this.

There is nothing magical about the information that bubbles up from this other me. It is not precognition in any mystical sense of the word. I’ve just been able to make contact with the little savant that I believe exists within all of our minds, and if ‘it’ can know these things based on visual cues alone then today’s computers could be taught to do so as well using facial recognition software and self learning programs.

Early detection of disease is the best prevention and perhaps if my son had known how great his chances of developing mental illness were, it may have kept him from experimenting with drugs in a way I was not able to.
The flip side of this coin is how easily the information could be abused and used to segregate, but I believe that the benefits of this advance knowledge far outweigh the risks if it were used properly.

Some of you may be in a position to be able to manipulate the programs that would teach a computer to draw these same inferences based on visual clues. For me this only works on Caucasians because I have not been exposed to enough people of other races to determine their nuances, and the number of diseased people I have met is relatively small, but a computer program would not be limited by either this bias or insufficient data from which to draw conclusions.

This idea has no scientific basis, I’m just listening to my gut…but ‘it’ is right on this one, and testing the theory should be fairly simple beginning with a sampling of similarities between photographs of individuals with rare diseases being compared to the wider data base and progressing to video recognition of more subtle cues.

.

Look, I think that reading a string of condolences would pretty much do me in just now, so, if comments could be contained to the merits, or lack thereof, of the ideas themselves I… we would appreciate it.