walking

Hard science has uncovered a mechanism whereby the same collagen abnormalities in EDS that make joints especially flexible seem to affect blood vessels, making those with it prone to accumulation of blood in the veins of the legs, an effect that may lead to exaggerated cardiovascular responses to maintain the output of blood from the heart. This and other foibles, which I feel are versions of the same response, put those of us with this issue under immense pressure and strain, all the time, as our version of "normal" so just imagine how much we then react to any additional triggers, to which we tend to be hypersensitive (I share my about theory about that too...), setting off our nervous system at regular intervals in a way that has nothing inherently to do with mental health...although, no surprise, it can start to manifest as anxiety over time. Joining some dots and celebrating just how much people with hypermobility type EDS deal with as their daily benchmark...plus some practical ways of making it better.

I am picking up on ways that spectrum types seem to connected to an earlier permeation of human being that lived much more closely amongst animals and in Nature, and even with animal themselves (since those early people did not feel the same disconnect with other species that modern humans do) rather than to the currently dominant neurotypical strain of human that has largely disconnected from Nature. In our extrasensory abilities, as in an ability to sense many things that we can’t "just" pick up with our conventional five senses (to the exactingly detailed standards we prefer...), our ability to preview how something will feel in advance by tuning into the experiences of others, plus our trends of mixing up and crossing over those senses, as in the way of synesthesia, and of using visual images as memory and information rather than “ideas”, I sense this link. In the way our bodies seem to connect with and respond to circadian and other natural cycles more than most people, I sense that link. In my case, the way I work, quite compulsively and intuitively, with symbology and complex metaphor feels as though it harks back to an earlier format of human that lived deeply immersed in Nature and took all sources of data, logical or otherwise, as clues leading towards a fuller sense of meaning. In our joined-up way of processing, and our deep frustration with systems built to serve social ideas of human behaviour, prescribed largely to serve ideas of lack, profit and control (but which make no sense in the broadest sense or supporting life for all and which fail to take care of the “bigger picture”of our world) I feel like some sort of honorary member of the animal kingdom shaking their head in dismay at the way the world has been turned over for personal gain. Yet, to seem more neuroptypical, in order to blend in and survive, as we saw it, we may have traded off our profound connection with the body and its senses to focus on our heads...