My mind has a lot of echo and reverb on it, and I don’t know how to turn them off.

Thoughts echo. Feelings reverberate. I can’t put anything out without it coming back to me in some sense. It’s a hard thing to put into words because its interiority level is so high. I don’t know if anyone else has ever experienced it.

But for me, it’s everyday life, and I think it’s key to my needing low stimulus levels in order to remain calm. Stuff coming in reverberates as well. And you can easily imagine that my echo can turn a relatively mild stimulus into a really strong one without even breaking a sweat. Every echo that happens before the last one ends adds to the amplitude.

I am guessing that did not make things any clearer for most people. Le sigh. Oh well, hopefully you get the idea.

And this echo works for all forms of input, including the social and emotional. This has the effect of amplifying my emotions and hence my mood, at least some of the time. I can go from placid to overwhelmed in an alarmingly short time.

This is the first time I have told anything about this, even though it’s been happening for as long as I can remember. I remember it happening when I was a toddler. My parents would be trying to say something to me and I couldn’t understand them, even though in other situations I could understand them just fine.

Then, when I went to school, it would happen at seemingly random moments. Or rather, it would intensify. I eventually learned to control it and damp it out, but until then, it was hell. Imagine every sound you hear echoing in your head and getting louder, without end. It was a nightmare.

It was so weird that I was afraid to tell anyone about it. I know that makes no sense, but I also know that most people have been in that situation at least once in their life. The desire not to seem weird and thus end up alienated is a very strong urge in most human beings, even us outside the envelope “there is no box” types, and I was already a somewhat timid child, so I kept it all inside and never breathed a word of it to anyone until right now.

So…. lucky you, I guess.

Looking at it now as an adult, I wonder if there is some kind of defect in my brain. Some important circuit that in a healthy person keeps this recirculation of thought under control is busted in me, and so things bounce around in my head way more times than is actually useful for maintaining a train of thought.

In fact, it is this echo overload that often leads to my train of thought getting derailed. Or at least have a switch pulled on it at the last second so it ends up on a completely different track. Some thought, idea, or emotion will unexpectedly grow more intense and all I can do is try to remember not to go there any more.

But why? I don’t know. I remember that when I was a kid, the theory about stuttering was that stutterers heard their own voice coming back to them on a slight delay, and it made it very hard to get words out.

And I had a stutter when I was a kid. It got worse when I was nervous or overexcited. I grew out of it eventually, or if you prefer a more individualistic narrative, I conquered it. I definitely remember getting pissed off at it and deciding I was going to stop myself from doing it, and it seems like I did.

Now it only comes out when I am very tired.

Still, I remember that feeling that my words were coming back at me, and struggling to get my words out while that was going on. Maybe that problem went a lot deeper than a typical childhood stutter. Maybe it goes all the way to bone.

Well not the bone. Brains don’t have bones. All the way to the brain stem.

Now this echo is not a sensory hallucination type of deal. I do not literally hear the same things over and over again. Thank goodness, too, because I would be batshit fucking crazy by now if it did.

As opposed to now, when I am, at most, off-brand fertilizer crazy.

No, it happens in the mind. That is what makes it so hard to put into words. Like I said, interiority. It is easier to describe what it is like to suffer from depression, and I have been trying to do that for decades.

The results of which you can read in like, two thirds of the entries to this very blog.

If this really is a brain thing (and it sort of has to be, unless aliens are hacking my brain again… damn kids), I wonder if there is any kind of treatment. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you can fix with surgery (eep), but maybe there is some damned clever bit of mind trickery that fools your mind into turning it off.

Failing that, I suppose I could just experiment with illegal drugs till I find the one that turns off only that part of the brain, and develop a crippling addiction to it.

I’m just kidding, I would never do something like that. I could never, ever afford it.

I will have to bring it up with my GP next time I see him. That will be soonish, as I am almost out of my non-psychiatric meds. I have no idea how I will explain it to him, and doctors are not the greatest listeners, but I have to give it a try.

In the meantime, I suppose I can try to research it myself. But I am leery of that. Attempts at self-diagnosis are very dangerous for a recovering hypochondriac like myself.

Maybe I just need to disconnect the amplifier’s power source….

Either way, I will do my best to remember that this is a thing with me, and deserves my attention.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.