I think I have identified one of the major roots of my problems.

Basically, I am not psychologically stable.

Big news, huh? Kind of comes with the whole “mentally ill” thing. But this is something different and I have to admit to being a little freaked out about it.

I realized recently that all my life, I have had these times when I become… confused. It’s like there is a flood in my brain and it washes away all my coherence and focus. At these times, the world becomes quite terrifying because I can’t concentrate and everything becomes sort of a wash of sensations and staying in contact with reality takes all of my will because the blood inside my head is threatening to wipe me out completely.

It’s been happening all my life. I can remember it happening when I was just a preschooler. Something shifts in my head and suddenly I can’t think, I don’t understand what is going on, and I feel like I am going to faint. It’s like a very nasty head rush, like when you stand up too fast.

It started so early in my life that I guess I just accepted it as a natural part of my life. But now that I have become conscious of it, I am wondering if I have a serious fucking problem.

I mean, that shit is just not normal.

My intuition is that it has something to do with my malformed sinuses. I think something is going on in there that puts pressure on my brain and when that pressure is relieved or just shifted, the blood rushes into the new space and I get all spaced out and dizzy and fucked up.

I am guessing that, as a child, I just didn’t have the words to express this problem to anyone. And my parents discouraged me from asking for anything anyhow, even for a trip to the doctor. I can easily imagine that if I had brought it up, they would have reacted as though I had just interrupted all their plans because their plans never included me.

No wonder I grew up to be the kid who never asks for anything, never complains, and always says yes to whatever my parents wanted, even to the point of trying to do my own clothes shopping when I was only 8 years old.

But that’s a topic for another day.

This tendency to get brain flooded informs my social anxiety and insularity to a very high degree. It is hard to be socially confident and relaxed when, at any moment, you could suddenly lose nearly all of your marbles and even just continuing to hear what people are saying and respond sensibly is a herculean task.

But you know one thing that keeps it from happening? Staying still. If I just sit or just lay down, that kind of thing almost never happens. But the more I move about, the more likely it is to occur, and the experience is terrifying in a way I can’t even begin to convey, so I have, subconsciously , been conditioned by this problem to equate lack of movement with safety.

I’m seeing my GP on Friday, and I am going to bring this up. I won’t mention the whole “since early childhood” angle, as that will lead to unnecessary complications. I will just make like it just started recently.

There is a lot of crazy shit going down in my head, to be honest. It was writing my piece on my conversation issues that made me realize it.

I have a seriously haunted head.

(Great song, by the way. Don’t let the mellow beginning part fool you, it seriously thrashes later on. )

There are all these complex emotional reactions going off like fireworks in my head practically all the time. The smallest interactions (with, say, a cashier) comes with a simply staggering amount of psychological baggage. It’s no wonder that I am clumsy and awkward (in more than one sense) and have trouble dealing with reality when there is so going inside my head that it drowns reality out.

Having become conscious of this, it frankly staggers and terrifies me. I really am crazy. Spending all that time alone and isolated and feeding my brain has caused my inner world to grow out of control like an abandoned flower garden. My defense mechanisms have gone beyond merely maladaptive and have become positively cancerous.

I have a lot of things I have to get out of my head before I can have the kind of calm and clarity and above all, quiet in my head that I so deeply crave. I am tired of life being so hard and so complicated for me simply because it’s a Chinese New Year parade in my head all the time.

No wonder recovery has come to mean “feeling more solid and calm” to me. I am trying my best to evict all these unwanted guests in my capacious noggin and reach a place where I can just be me, by myself, in peace and quietude.

I have squatters in my brain, man.

And all this craziness in the cranium has a lot to do with my fear of getting close to people, too. For a long time, I have known that I was afraid to get too close to people because I thought that my issues and the bleakness of my inner landscape would destroy them.

But now I know that I am afraid for myself as well. I have lived my entire life trying to keep this raucous menagerie calm, and that is no way to live. It is high time I kicked them all out.

But it’s not that easy. Every ghost contains its own measure of unprocessed emotion, and one cannot merely wish that away. The human mind can’t delete things.

It can only move them around, and when you push and unpleasant and complicated emotion out of your consciousness, it doesn’t go away. It just goes to the end of the line of other emotions trying to get expressed too.

The only way to deal with things is to deal with them.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!