Sometimes, I get lost.

I don’t know why. Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with my brain (few would be surprised). Maybe it’s one of the hidden costs (or causes) of having the sort of intellect and creativity I have. Maybe it is a necessary part of having a truly open and insightful point of view.

But I get lost.

And it can happen at any time. Sure, there’s obvious times, like when I am very tired, or when I just woke up from fitful sleep. But it can happen in the middle of a sentence. One second I am fine, the next it’s like I lose all contact and contents in my mind and I have to fight to stay focused on what is happening long enough to put myself back together again.

This is pretty goddamned stressful.

And it’s been happening my entire life. I can remember it happening when I was still in my high chair. It was especially problematic in school, when I was trying to pay attention to what the teacher or professor was saying.

Now it’s not amnesia. I don’t forgot who I am, how I got there, or what I am doing. It’s more subtle than that. But sudden amnesia is the best thing I can think of to compare it to. Sudden partial amnesia, I suppose.

Otherwise, I don’t know how to put it into words. It’s a feeling of disorientation and confusion, and it often makes everything around me seem alien and hostile. It comes with a feeling of cold fear, as one might expect of something that so thoroughly scrambles one’s noodle. There’s a feeling of disconnection and alienation.

I have many, many, MANY memories of times when this happened in a social situation and sent me into a panic as I desperately tried to get back on that moving train of social interaction that most people don’t even know exists because they don’t have something wrong with their brains that, now and then, they fall off.

No wonder I ended up with social anxiety.

On the plus side, I think the necessity of pulling myself out of these mental potholes has contributed to my mental strength and insightfulness. There’s something about the process that sharpens the mind and makes it very good at deduction.

I guess I regularly have to deduce my way back to sanity.

At these moments of disconnection, what I truly need is some sort of very solid, real, and comforting reality. For another sort of person, that might be God. But I am, for better or worse, incapable of believing things which are patently absurd and logically unsupportable. I cannot accept as true that which makes no logical sense.

And there are, as far as I can tell, no sensible arguments for the existence of God, or Allah, or whoever.

This feeling of unreality when I disconnect informs a lot of the deeper machinery of my psyche. I have talked before about feeling like I am not really real. That I might disappear at any moment like someone blew out my candle.

Looking at that from the point of view of today’s topic, perhaps what is really going on is that the world feels unreal to me. Subjectively speaking, it can disappear on the emotional level at any moment. I have felt only loosely attached to reality due to my extremely cerebral nature for a long time now.

Perhaps these disconnections are both symptom and cause of that.

either way, I wish the world seemed more real to me. Real, solid, reliable, normal. Perhaps this is what happens when you wander so far away from the walls of the mind that keep other people’s realities together that you lose sight of them entirely, and then it’s just you and the void.

And then you have to find your way back. Over and over. You never learn.

I only know one way to deal with these disconnections : anxiety and panic. Those are the fuel I use to get back to reality, or at least, as close to it as I need to be to feel better. Perhaps if I could remain calm while putting things back together, I would not feel so anxious when in social situations.

Perhaps the real problem is that I prioritize internal processing over realtime dealings with reality to such an outrageous and insane amount that even when I am trying to deal with reality directly, my internal processes can come and pull the rug out from under my consciousness by taking resources away from it to suit their own needs.

Bad things happen when you spend so much time alone.

I wouldn’t even know where to start in trying to prevent this. I don’t know. Maybe if I spend enough time trying to focus on the real world instead of the galaxies inside my skull, the problem would straighten it out.

But I’d really rather not do that, which is the problem. In many ways, despite my rugged pragmatism, I am reality-averse.

In fact, perhaps the real wellspring of my hardcore philosophers POV is that I need that in order to keep what grip on reality I have. I keep my sanity stitched together with reason, logic, and pragmatism, and every else seems, to me, like chaos, madness, and the destruction of my fragile glass tower.

I am deeply and desperately afraid of losing contact completely. One of my most terrible nightmares is the one where I finally snap completely and there is no more objective reality for me at all, and I am alone with my dreams.

Some would think that experience would be wonderful, like a peak lucid dreaming experience that never ended. Why, here in my dreams, I can do anything I want!

But I know better. I know that if I lost contact completely, my mind would descend into chaos and madness.

I need to believe in reality. Perhaps that’s why idealists (in the philosophical sense, meaning the opposite of realists) make me so damned mad with their talk about how there is no such thing as objective truth.

In that case…. I would be truly fucked.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.