Been thinking about the fog I live in lately.

Because it really is at the root of all my problems. It’s the reason I am absentminded, because things I am supposed to remember disappear into the fog. It’s the reason I am so clumsy, because it’s hard to be precise when you are suffused through and through with a depressive fog. It’s the reason behind my general helplessness and cluelessness, because the fog interferes with my executive function and makes it hard to pull myself together and concentrate, as well as sapping my confidence in my ability to handle things.

All my major person hurdles stem from this ice cold clinging fog. And I have no idea what would happen if it was gone.

Because the main function of this fog is to protect me. It keeps life at a safe difference and cools down my emotions and allows me to take a detached and intellectual attitude towards life, one based almost entirely on mental stimulation alone.

And smart but stupefied is no way to go through life, son.

Life is real. Life is present. Life is hot. Life is NOW. My only hope lies in refusing to be seduced by the fog’s siren song which tells me that all emotions can be escaped by freezing them in their tracks and then pretending they don’t exist any more.

But it’s hard to do because I have lived my life in the cold and dark for so long that I can’t remember anything else. I don’t even know how to feed anything but my mind. My soul cries out for nourishment but I honestly don’t know what to feed it, or how.

Because of this, it tends to get nourishment at random intervals, and never on purpose. The best I can say for myself is that sometimes, the fog thins enough for something I watch or read to get through to me and truly touch me. And in those moments, I feel warm and alive and connected, and I want those moments to last forever.

And I get real healing in those moments. Warmth has reached my frozen emotions and, for an all too brief time, I am a living, feeling, real human being and not the walking dead.

It’s a lot like Anne Rice’s description of what a vampire feels like right after they have fed. But I’m no vampire. Baby, I’m the walking dead.

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I don’t have it in me to feed on others. What right do I have to deprive them of their life just to sustain my own? Where is the net gain in that?

Still, in those brief times when I am alive, the ice pack around my heart melts some and I get that little bit closer to being able to feeling the sun on my soul.

I can imagine the fog going away in the abstract. I can dream a dreamy dream of the fog lifting and my standing naked and whole before the world, wet like I was freshly born but rapidly drying in the sun’s warmth, free and proud and strong.

But when I try to imagine it actually happening, I freeze up. How appropriate!

Is it just fear of the unknown? Perhaps. It’s certainly the case that I have no idea what life would be like without it. It would be greater to have the increased mental clarity, active memory, coordination, and competence, but at what cost?

I have no idea.

As far as I can tell, the fog has always been there. Maybe I was born with it. Or maybe it’s just been there for so long that I can’t even conceive of it not being there, whether it was there during a certain memory or not.

So I can’t tell you when it arrived. Maybe that day I laid down in the snowbank and willed myself to die. It would make sense on a metaphorical level, anyhow. Ice and snow on the outside, ice and snow on the inside.

I guess I should be glad I was too young to think of suicide. Imagine a seven year old contemplating suicide because he feels like he has no way out of his pain.

Jesus fuck, that’s tragic. My childhood is almost unbearably poignant. I wonder what would happen if I wrote it all down in an autobiography. Would anyone want to read it? Would it be too sad for anyone to enjoy? Would people even believe me?

Some day, maybe I will do exactly that. But right now, I have too many stories left to tell.

At this point, I don’t know how much of the fog is my illness and how much is my medication. It might very well be that I am overdue for a reduction in my meds in order to enable me to have more access to my emotions and speed up the healing/thawing process. But that would be too risky for me right now.

After all, I am in the middle of getting myself a practical education.

Today we went over the last bit of my Bob’s Burgers script, and the substitute teacher said there was a lot of really funny stuff in it. Bonus! I am slowly gathering evidence that I am a very funny writer.

So I have that going for me, at least. Makes me wish print wasn’t dying so that I could be a funny columnist like Dave Barry. All he had to do in life was to write one 750 word column a week. I could totally handle that.

Then again, what would I do with the rest of my time? What I really want is a job that pays well and keeps me busy. I have read about the hard driving pace of television,and it sounds fab to me.

I would love to have the luxury of getting really, honestly tired. Not fat-guy tired. Not depression tired. Not messed up blood sugar tired.

Well and truly tired from working hard all day.

To some people, that would be a nightmare, but for me, it’s the dream.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hell if I know.

Yeah, I am going to talk about the intellectual minority versus the average majority again. What can I say, I’m on a kick.

I have tried, may times, to put myself in the shoes of a perfectly average person of perfectly average intelligence, and I have never succeeded, at least not to my satisfaction. ^[1] I can get glimpses and I can understand them from an analyst’s point of view, but I just can’t seem to imagine what it is like to be them.

It’s a hard limit. When I try to imagine what it’s like to be them, all I can think of is to imagine thinking like a child. Not in the sense of IQ, but in the sense of their being no hard division between the objective and the subjective, and therefore life being more a mix of emotion, instinct, and reasoning than it is in the rare air beneath my hair.

I am not saying that these people are childish, primitive, or stupid. I am saying that it’s the only frame of reference I have to understanding them.

I think the problem lies in my over-intellectualized fear of surrendering to emotion. My intellectualism is the main mechanism by which I enable a sense of being “in control”, and leaving that cool parlor of intellect and opening the door to unreasoned action seems like chaos, madness, and death to me.

So my mind just won’t go there. The wall between emotion and reason is foundational to my adult personality. I see people acting directly out of emotion and I just shake my head because I can’t believe someone can do that and get away with it.

That speaks volumes about me, I know.

Because I also envy them. It seems like life would be so much simpler if one just acts directly on emotion. Maybe not better, exactly, but simpler.

I mean, obviously these people are making it as adults in modern society. So it’s not like they are savages. They are, in fact, way better at life than I am precisely because they have had to learn to cope and adapt without being able to escape into abstraction, and therefore developed naturally and healthily.

So just to make it crystal clear : if I can’t truly understand them, the problem lies in me, not them. I am a broken person. They are whole.

It all comes down to one of the  fundamental questions that I wrestle with : who would I be if I didn’t have all this intellect? Who is the person inside the machine?

I’d be average, of course. But beyond that, who can tell? I feel like my high IQ has dominated my life (and me, in a sense) ever since that day when I suddenly figured out how to read, like, all at once.

That’s when people started talking about how bright I was, understandably, and when I started to get attention and praise for being so gosh darn smart.

It’s also the thing that lead to my not going to kindergarten, and that was likely the dominating factor in why I was so bad at socialization. And that led to me being bullied and ostracized, and that led to everything else about me.

This all makes it hard for me to truly, deeply relate to the average majority. It also causes me to fear them because they are, to me, unpredictable. Not only that, at any moment I might find myself in a social situation full of unspoken expectations where I am clearly supposed to know what to do, but I don’t. Then snap! goes my tenuous connection with them, and they look at me like I’m an alien, and I feel humiliated and ostracized and far colder than I ever did when I was alone in the dark.

Somehow, with my fellow brainiacs, that doesn’t happen. It’s like we’re all playing by the same hidden rules and there is a deeply subconscious mutual agreement that we all behave reasonably and with a certain amount of thought.

No doubt we have our own unspoken rules, assumptions, and taboos that would seem just as random, arbitrary, and confusing to an outsider as the usual rules seem to us.

The difference is that somehow, most of us have developed the same rulebook in relative social isolation from society and from one another. I can meet a nerd from Texas and find I have a lot more in common with them than I do with the average folk next door to me. There is a mutual recognition and we can be more relaxed with one another than we ever are amongst the “mundanes”.

How is this possible? It makes me think that this naturally occurring intellectual class that I go on about is built into our DNA and our hardwired social programming, and part of that is being able to recognize and communicate with one another instinctively.

Perhaps some of us are born to be wizards, or fighters, or clerics, or thieves. Maybe the classic D&D character classes are actually a representation of the naturally occurring roles a human society needs in order to function.

It needs people to fight, someone to heal, someone to think and plan, someone to explore and patrol, someone to be clever and good with their hands, and someone has to be the one who deals with what is going on inside people’s souls and who tends to the more abstract needs of the people.

Societies that had this job differentiation distribution would succeed over others that did not because they would always produce people suited for the necessary roles.

It makes me wonder if other archetypes recognize and relate to one another. I have definitely met people who seem like they were born to play the solider/fighter/guardian role. And of course, we nerds are the thinkers, the philosophers, the planners, the designers, and so forth and so on.

Some of us are also the clever ones who can make things.

I can’t say I can think of anyone who seems destined to be a healer, at least, not in the real world. Ditto for a spiritual calling, except for people like me who are drawn to being a therapist. But I might be unsuited to recognizing such.

Oh, and then there’s leadership as well. All societies need leaders. Hmmmm.

OK, so I am still working on this theory.

Anyhoo, what I am really trying to say is, I don’t get normal people.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.