My life consisted of very little accomplishment during the worst of my symptoms. I just got through each day, and I was finding this intolerable. I needed to find something useful that I could do even when I was foggy.
A friend was putting together their family photos and knew that I had a knack for digital photo restoration. He asked me if I could fix then up, since many of them were very faded and damaged, and I felt that I could give it a try, working on it as I could since there was no deadline.
Something interesting happened. Even on days where I was very foggy and barely able to think, I was still able to work on the photos. This can be dull tedious work, but it held all of my focus and attention. I looked at the photos and saw only the defects, and could quickly remove them. Sometimes, zoomed in, I had no idea what I was even looking at, but I could see what was wrong, what did not belong- dust, cracks, stains, spots. They all quickly disappeared as I worked on the images. I found the work both absorbing and calming.
In my quiet office, completely focused on an array of pixels, I had found something that I could do, something I could do even better than when I was clear headed, where such repetitious work would cause my mind to wander. Here I was completely absorbed in the task.
As a friend pointed out who works with autistic children, it was if I had keyed into an almost autistic level of focus. In a 2011 University of Montreal study, it was shown that the brains of people with autism focus more resources in areas of the brain devoted to visual perception. At the same time, fewer resources were allocated to areas of the brain used to plan and control thoughts and actions.
Of course, I am not saying that autism and fibromyalgia have anything to do with each other. When I was in severe fog, though, I had little ability to plan or coordinate anything, but I could sit down at the computer and rapidly restore photos. I was completely focused on the task, unhindered by other thoughts or distractions.
When the photo project was done, I realized there was an even bigger project I could work on that would take a long time. As a sex educator and free speech advocate, I had been collecting digital versions of erotic art for many years. I had tens of thousands of images. My plan had always been some day to clean some of them up and include them in a history of censorship.
It seemed like a good time to start on that, since I was foggy most days during this period and really needed a task to do. I was amazingly fast. Day after day I cleaned up art that had become colored, faded and stained over time. My mood greatly improved, because I now finally felt like I was accomplishing something.
After I discovered Savella, the foggy days greatly diminished. They still came, and when they did, I had the art project to work on. This continued over a couple of years, and by the time I was done, I had digitally cleaned up some 30,000 drawings, paintings, illustrations, and photos in HD resolution. My unfoggy self could never have had that level of output. It is an amazing collection of art, much of it dramatically restored, that will be spread throughout my five part series on censorship.
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