Out of the Mist is an excerpt from the reels of mind cinema cataloged during a challenging time parenting on the enigmatic edge. 


 

Parenting can be challenging. Parenting a child with mental illness in the mix and no operators manual -difficult. This track was written and recorded during the last four or so months of a difficult 15-month period trying our best to get the medication right.


 

It’s interesting that in as much as the brain has been studied, we really don’t know much about it. The side effects of medication are as varied as people.  Sometimes, with some people, when you carpet bomb an area of the brain with the objective of facilitating electro chemical activity or quelling anxiety you also negatively affect that person’s presence and/or as was the case in this situation you experience paradoxical side effects. Rather than get less anxious you get more anxious. Even more vexing is the lack of understanding on medication efficacy and the autistic brain.
 


 

This track is motion with all the contrast; the hues of varying degrees of tension and disruption that was around every day. Also, the track is about hope as much is it is about pain and process. A cautionary tale of my interconnectedness of being. Catharsis. Composition that comes from stirred emotions that land outside my head. Colors and textures in layered aural composition.  The mood swings. The dark hues emblematic of the acerbic overtones of anxiety-driven mania. The hope.


 

Out of the Mist is ultimately about the emergence of a person, a being, a presence beyond the tamped down, muffled and muddled person we knew… What steps out of the mist is unexpected, good and bad.  At its best, the essence of what might be that person someday. A person we strive relentlessly to support in becoming the very best version of self.   Coupled with a mix of the right pharmacology and frontal lobe maturation, we see the emergence of a present, freethinking person going after life. Engaging, conversive, awkward, complicated and yet, so endearing.


 


It’s taken me three years to finally get back to finishing this piece. Also, in the spirit of revisiting, it was also time to approach my son about my concept of this art and my public intentions.


 

One day while on a walk I broached the subject. I summarized the decisions we made, based on the information at hand and our intent to enable him to be at least somewhat present to learn.  He listened quietly to my carefully worded ‘Effexor days’ statements. Then exclaimed, he was not aware that his creative drive was killed by the medication. No recollection of that at all… I mentioned how medication can enable so much capacity in some people and yet take away so much from a person (the cost of the good?) in this case creative drive, then Alex quipped, “you stole my childhood from me.”



I thought the conversation was enveloping a window of time. The very difficult time post High School we call the Effexor days’ and the subsequent emergence ‘out of the mist’. Such as the case with Effexor. Along with the mania, irritability and increased anxiety Alex, always the avid artist and voracious reader of everything stopped drawing completely. As well, the reading lamp dimmed during this period of time.


 

However, Alex’s statement about stealing his childhood was even more cutting. In that, the paradoxical effects of one drug, Effexor, and the resulting struggles were my focus yet, the fog or mist of some sort, had existed for years before. All starting at 3.7 years of life with an Epilepsy diagnosis and the carpet-bombing anti-seizure medication quest that ensued.  It struck me. The sense that we lost ten years to some type of fog. Medication taking as much as it gave.


 

That fog being the bi-product of anti-seizure medications having a definitive effect during the primary education years. Shaping us all.


 

The last thing Alex said, delivered with a wry smile ending the conversation was, (a nod to pop culture meme), “the red pill or the blue pill?”


 


It’s been said the best stories come from scars not wounds. Perhaps, that’s telling in how long it’s taken for me to commit to this narrative now, Out of the Mist

 

Audnoyz (Steve)
Covid March ‘21