For most of my life I have been aware of black outs and their lesser known brown outs but I have always associated them with heavy drinking or drug use, something that had no relevance to my own life. What I didn’t realize is there are a lot of things that cause a black out and most have nothing to do with substance abuse.
So that’s what I am going to talk about today. Did you know that most people experience this phenomena at some point in their lives and that many don’t even realize it? I certainly didn’t even though I was having them regularly for five years straight. It was something I chalked up to forgetfulness. I mean we can’t all remember everything right? But it went from little things to really big things I really shouldn’t have forgotten and that’s when it became scary. I had spent a week making a birthday present for my boyfriend at the time but this was a month or two before I needed it so I hid it to be retrieved later. The only problem was I then blacked out that whole week and had no idea I already had a gift for him. And then when I found it sometime after I needed it I still had no recollection of ever making it. I was terrified. This had never happened before. At least I didn’t think it had. Turns out I was wrong about that too.
For as many years as I can remember I always believed I didn’t have the chops to finish a whole novel and that’s why I never published anything (save for one book about the above experiences.) I couldn’t finish a work of fiction – that was just beyond me. Or so that’s the narrative I believed until I found hidden in a cache of old files a complete manuscript. It wasn’t only written it was edited and ready to send to a publisher. Although I vaguely remembered the stories I had no recollection of ever finishing it. How could I forget something so huge that must have taken me months to do?!
Stress. That’s the answer. It’s probably the #1 cause of black outs. You see the date on the manuscript was right before I got involved with my ex and he…. was intense. The second he crashed into my life everything I did was all about him. This was mostly because he was a narcissistic asshole and that’s just how these people work but it was also feeding off my own insecurities. I was twenty-five at the time, had never been in a romantic relationship, and I believed I was just so lucky to have found someone who’d accept me for all my flaws (including my chronic health issues) that I believed I had to do everything possible to keep him. Only problem was he didn’t accept me for all my flaws and by the end of our relationship liked to claim there wasn’t even anything wrong with my health to begin with! He didn’t want to see it so he didn’t. But right from beginning, even on my worst days, I made damn sure to have enough energy to make dinner for him before he got home, even if that was the only thing I could do during the day, and it often was. The weekends were always a fucking marathon with little to no sleep pushing, pushing, pushing, to get some huge-ass project done that’d take normal people months not one fucking weekend.
Mondays I literally retitled Crash Day and I wouldn’t even get up. I’d just sleep off the past weekend. I lived in dread of long weekends because I never knew if I could keep up the stamina to keep standing that long!
As you can see it was a very perverse, toxic, and lop-sided dynamic that started out stressful beyond words and only amped up until five years later I wasn’t remembering shit.
I’ve learned a lot in the interim. Mostly that no romantic partner is worth that, that I am valuable and lovable just the way I am. Chronic illness and all and if someone can’t see that than that’s their fucking problem, not mine. Never again will I compete to keep someone else’s attention or lessen my own struggles just to appear normal or healthy. FUCK THAT SHIT.
But even so I can still have stressful bursts in life and guess what? That means I can still occasionally have little black or brown-outs. And you know what else can cause these? Depression. And lack of sleep. Which are also obscenely common and probably worked in conjunction with stress in my case. Depression isn’t merely feeling sad it actually causes chemical changes in the brain. And maybe that’s the root of black outs, a way for the brain to deal with trauma. Had I remembered my writing I would have also remembered who I was before that relationship begun and I would have seen it for what it was – a fucking sham. And the birthday present? This was during a stretch of time he was torturing me with increasing lack of availability and bad behavior trying to see how far he could push me before finally breaking up to go marry some other woman. You could argue that some part of me sensed something was very wrong and decided for me that he didn’t deserve another little piece of my soul (my art.) He didn’t. It ended up in the trash.
I guess what I am saying is that black outs are far more common than we realize and if you find yourself suffering from them you should probably look long and hard at exactly what you blacked out because there might be a far larger underlying issue there.
