Sasha Piton

Irish-French-American Sasha Piton has travelled widely outside the US but has recently settled in Dublin. In her new series for The Journal, she shares the insights of a new arrival on a country she’s trying to call home.

THERE HAS BEEN a silent knot living in my brain my entire life. I just didn’t know it had a name.

Last year after I returned home from visiting Ireland in April, I knew I wanted to move here. I asked my therapist to please remind me of that whenever we were doing deep emotional work, and I felt like my life had no direction. I was in the thick of unpacking childhood trauma and anxiety.

Every session I just kept saying, “Well, there’s what my brain initially felt and then what was accepted by the world around me.” That combined with many other things, led me down a path of assessments and psychologists that gave me a diagnosis I’ve wondered about since I was 10 years old. Autism Spectrum Disorder. Ok, cool. But what are my life dreams? Move to Ireland is one, hold onto that.

The diagnosis fell to the backburner and I just kept myself focused on the goal: move to Ireland. And I DID. Now I’m doing all the things I used to think about, concerts, comedy shows, pubs and I told many people I just saw myself taking a French class.

Your girl is enrolled at the Alliance Francais and after a few classes, I started to notice the knot in my brain, again.

I asked my teacher if there were grades in this class and she confirmed that there aren’t. I came home, sat in front of my TV, put on The Golden Girls and asked, “How do I actually learn a language?”

I put the girls on in French at first, but immediately I hated that. I’ve spent my whole life watching the show, observing all their facial expressions, the way the jokes land, their cadence of speech, and I need that to stay present in it.

Then I put on French subtitles, noticing my brain was still in the disengaged place when it comes to French. But then I started reading the subtitles out loud. I don’t know how to describe when something hits the brain in just the right way where chills go down my spine because almost like a disco ball in sunlight, I can see all the light refracting in bright pieces, even though they’re not connected yet.

That moment led me down a rabbit hole to figure out how my brain works. I honestly didn’t think I’d find anything. But then I came across: Gestalt Language Processing. And I feel like one study after another described my entire childhood.

It’s being studied to help children with autism. There it is. The diagnosis I received a year ago but thought I could out-run. Or just ignore.

In an instant, my body filled with rage and grief and I could feel that it finally caught up with me. For two days I kept flashing back to my experiences; nine years old, unable to read, going to test after test where nobody could figure out what my learning disability was. I couldn’t describe that I could memorise phrases and repeat it and follow along with my finger just like they did, but I had no idea what the words meant.

I was pretending to read and to learn but really, I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand until all the dots clicked at once. I was in 5th grade when my teacher asked if I was willing to work with her. Every day I came either 15 minutes early or stayed 15 minutes later so she could work with me one on one.

She would ask me about books I could read (which were first and second grade reading levels; senior infant, first class level in Ireland) and ask me to look for only one thing at a time. She took me to the library to teach me how to search for a book, what a key word meant, and how to tell who the author was.

And the most important, she had me re-read books and do reports over and over with a different assignment each time for the same book.

I did a report on The Great Brian twice before I learned it was actually called The Great Brain and not a single character was named Brian.

She helped me understand how I saw things and what steps I could take to see a bigger picture.

One day, it all clicked. I had to zoom out and work backwards. I saw pictures as I read and if I could zoom out then I could slowly fill in words to give more detail and context. I went from a first-grade reading level to an 8th grade reading level that year and got my first As in any academic subject vs participation and drawing.

I felt like I had cracked the code to my brain but then I lived on the high of getting an A. That letter A proved that I wasn’t stupid. So that was all I aimed for after that. I knew I wasn’t always learning, mostly just pretending, and I just had to keep going. I ALWAYS did extra credit and it would annoy my teachers: “Sasha you already have 100% in my class, you can’t do this extra credit,” but I would melt down and cry and freak out because I felt at any moment, something could come along that I couldn’t work backwards from. I felt like I was on borrowed time and needed a buffer for the day my system failed me.

I graduated as valedictorian of my high school with high anxiety and a deep understanding that unless a teacher gave me creative freedom over an assignment, I had been pretending to be smart that whole time.

How can I actually learn this time?

Now I can’t help but wonder – what if anxiety was never the problem? What if it was just what the knot looked like when it was dressed up enough to be in front of others?

I was in college before someone corrected what I used to call “stress” to, “You have anxiety.” I responded with, “I don’t know what that means. I think I’ve always struggled to manage my stress, but you can tell?” Anxiety was just barely being talked about in 2008, and no one ever used that word to describe my meltdowns. I was always told I had to figure out how to rein it all in. That life isn’t always comfortable, and the sooner I could embrace that the sooner I could talk myself into just being calm. I did that. So it shocked me that other people could still see my “stress.” 

Related Reads

An American in Ireland: I reversed the journey my ancestors made, just to come home

I received two bachelor’s degrees (in music and theatre; like, yes, let me just express emotion and write about what I’m naturally hyper-fixated on) and almost minored in French, but I needed one more class to get that minor.

I knew I couldn’t fake my way through one more French class, though.

I was in the upper 400 classes merely memorising words for oral presentations and major info dumping on particular situations to pass with Bs, but I had no idea what I was doing. It was for the grade, not to learn French.

So now, 15 years later, I’m in French 1.2 asking myself, “How can I actually learn it this time?”  There is a cadence and feelings to this language that exist naturally in the back of my brain. I dream in French. I had a whole portion of my shaman-led ayahuasca journey in French. (Read: I was hoping to cure my anxiety.) Technically, my first language was French when I was a baby. But this knot… and years of pretending I learn in a classroom has been in the way of me accessing that part of my brain. That part of me.

The joy of connecting the dots

For most of my life, I’ve had anxiety. I have done breathwork, meditation, changed my self-talk, gone to therapy, went to retreats, led retreats, spent time with shamans allowing my subconscious to teach me, drummed with indigenous healers, and now moved to Europe to embrace a different way of life.

While my life is far richer, more peaceful and grounded because of those things, I’m now zooming out and dots are connecting.

Maybe it took moving to Dublin and the Irish showing me what it looks like to thrive, to ask a question I never thought to ask before? What if the reason I haven’t been cured of anxiety is because that isn’t the diagnosis?

What if, instead, I just untie the knot?

Sasha will be back with more insights into her adopted home next week.