🌟 Welcome to Your Guided Comedy Meditation, Y'all
Howdy, you magnificent neurological mysteries!
Welcome to something completely different from Rarely Serious—the newsletter that figured out what rare disease patients REALLY need isn't another treatment plan. It's permission to visualize their condition as something hilariously absurd.
Today, we're doing something weird. We're going full-on guided visualization—part comedy sketch, part therapeutic exercise, 100% Texas-flavored strange.
Fair warning: This issue requires imagination. If your brain's too tired for that today, bookmark this sucker and come back when you've got energy. We'll still be here, being ridiculous.
Ready? Let's get weird.
🧘 The Great Neurological Imagination Exercise
Close your eyes for just a second. (Okay, keep ONE eye open to keep reading. We're not monsters.)
Now, I want you to imagine something with me...
[IMAGINE YOUR SPACE HERE: Your nervous system as an object]
What would your nervous system look like if it were a physical object you could see?
Is it a tangle of Christmas lights where half the bulbs are out?
A GPS that keeps recalculating but never finds the route?
A telephone switchboard from 1952 operated by a very confused hamster?
A Wi-Fi router during a Texas thunderstorm?
My nervous system? It's definitely an old-timey thermostat that can't decide between "flash-fried jalapeño" and "cryogenically frozen armadillo." There is NO middle ground. Just like my the polarity of my nerves. NORTH or SOUTH ? —I've flipped poles 47 times in the last hour.
🎨 Visualizing the Invisible: A Texas-Sized Q&A
Q: What does your fatigue LOOK like?
[IMAGINE YOUR SPACE HERE: What does your fatigue look like if it were visible?]
Is it:
A weighted blanket made of anvils?
Gravity suddenly increasing to 3x strength?
Wading through a pool of queso that somehow became sentient and clingy?
I don’t really know, I just go to bed.
For me? My fatigue looks like those videos of astronauts trying to walk on Earth after six months in space. Everything's just... heavier than it should be. Including my eyelids.
Q: If your symptoms were weather, what forecast are we looking at?
[IMAGINE YOUR SPACE HERE: Your symptom forecast]
Personally? "Partly painful with scattered numbness. 70% chance of surprise muscle spasms. Heat index: unpredictable. Expect sudden vertigo squalls throughout the afternoon."
The weather person inside my body clearly graduated from the same school as the ones who can't predict Texas weather—meaning they're wrong 90% of the time but VERY confident about it.
Q: What does your pain actually LOOK like?
[IMAGINE YOUR SPACE HERE: If you could see your pain, what would it be?]
Not the doctor's boring 1-10 scale. I'm talking VISUAL.
Is it:
Tiny angry bees with electric cattle prods?
That static TV screen from the old days, but inside your muscles?
A disagreement between your bones and your nerves, conducted entirely through passive-aggressive notes?
Mine's like all of the above + or - a zillion. My nerve endings are mad I didn’t join the BEW union.
Q: How would you draw your understanding of your condition?
[IMAGINE YOUR SPACE HERE: Your comprehension level, visualized]
Picture this: A stick figure with a question mark for a head, holding your 47-page dental file upside down (no wonder the dentist gave me flowers) while your web browser is open on seventeen tabs in the background.
Or maybe it's that spinning beach ball of death from your computer—the one that appears right when you need your system to WORK.
Yeah. That.
🤠 The Texas Two-Step Through Symptom Management
Now imagine this with me...
Your body is a honky-tonk dance floor. Your nervous system is supposed to lead, but halfway through the song, it:
Forgot the steps
Decided to improvise interpretive dance
Invited chaos as a dance partner
Started doing the Macarena while everyone else is two-stepping
And YOU—magnificent you—are still out there on the dance floor, making it work.
That's not failure. That's IMPROVISATION.
That's showing up to the hoedown when your nervous system brought disco. And somehow, you're still dancing. Just don’t dress disco, I’m serious.
🌵 Final Dose of Imagination Therapy
Here's what I want you to imagine one more time:
[IMAGINE YOUR SPACE HERE: Yourself, six months from now]
You're reading this newsletter archive. You're remembering this exact moment—when you paused, visualized, and let yourself be ridiculous about something that's often deadly serious.
Maybe your symptoms are better. Maybe they're the same. Maybe they're worse, and you're tougher than you ever imagined you could be.
But you're still here.
Still showing up. Still finding ways to laugh at the absurdity. Still building community with people who GET IT.
You're ridiculous.
Your disease is ridiculous.
Your resilience is genuinely amazing.
And somewhere in Texas, we're raising a glass of sweet tea to your specific brand of magnificent weirdness.
Keep imagining, keep showing up, and never let them tell you that visualization isn't valid medicine.
"Join the Texas rare disease community at Texas NeuroRare—where we balance humor with hope texasneurorare.org |
Disclaimer: We're not doctors, therapists, or certified meditation guides. We're just folks with rare neurological conditions who discovered that imagining your symptoms as a confused hamster on a telephone switchboard somehow helps. Your mileage may vary. Side effects may include: unexpected giggling, the urge to draw stick figures of your symptoms, and temporarily forgetting to be miserable about your condition.
Educational only—talk to your clinician. Or don't. We're not your mom.
We ain’t your imagination.