I don’t always know which side of the river I am on.

It comes up in my dreams a lot. Confusions between similar things, things seeming to divide and overlap on their own, not know whether I am looking at the opposite shore or whether I am there. Watching myself do things, and yet, still being the one doing them. A sense of the infinite fractal tree of possibilities of the future, where choices lead every which way into the future, and a sense of sadness that I will only ever – that I can only ever – live one path through that forest of options.

I’m only one person, after all.

One person with one life and one point of view and one trip through life. I supposed it says something about my unusual mental state that this bothers me. I want to do everything, see everything, look at things from every possible point of view.

But I can’t, so my combination of deep insight into human nature and vivid imagination will have to do.

I have never had any problem. putting myself in someone else’s shoes. At least, not since I was in Grade Four and realized that everything people do make sense to them. After that, the jump to realizing that other people have their own lives just like me but different – that every person is as valid and real a person as I am – was easy.

That’s still a fun one to contemplate – truly contemplate – when I feel like blowing my own mind. To imagine even one person’s totality as being equal to what I know to be my own is staggering. To repeat the exercise seven billion more times is nigh on impossible – but it can be fun to try now and then.

For me, that leads inexorably to humanism. The common element in all of us is our humanity. Not just in the literal biological sense. But also in the spiritual sense. Once you accept not merely the knowledge of this shared humanity but the deep down emotional truth of it, judging others becomes more difficult because you know that, like you, they are on a journey not even they truly understand and their actions are motivated by things unseen and unknown.

This effect on judgment can be hard for people to accept when they start to apply to the judgments and hatreds that are important to themselves. Judgments like “my parents did a terrible job of raising me” or “the divorce was all THEIR fault” or “it’s not my fault that my kids are lazy and badly behaved – I do the best that I can” can be incredibly important to people’s self-image and self-esteem, and I would never suggest people are somehow no good unless they rip those elements out of their psyche.

That would be far too judgmental of me.

And I am no paragon of it either. For me, it’s the direction I wish to go, but I don’t actually expect to get there. To me, that’s what it means to have ideals. They don’t provide a roadmap to an established goal.

They are just directions to self-improvement.

Anyhow, when the true acceptance of the humanity of others makes judgment more difficult, it opens the mind to truly understanding others without all that judgment in the way. Then you can see the world through eyes other than your own, spiritually speaking.

Given that unusual point of view of mine, it’s not a surprise that I have a certain amount of confusion as to who and where I am sometimes. And why I need help focusing. That’s why I am so mission oriented. When I have a clear goal in mind, I have a focal point for the kaleidoscopic scintillation of my endlessly searching mind.

My inner world is so demanding and distracting. I wish I could just empty it out and have some peace of mind now and then.  Not only would it give my poor overworked circuits time to cool off and rest, but it would make dealing with the real world so much easier.

It’s like I am always at a loud party straining to hear what the person on the phone is saying to me. It’s so exhausting.

In theory, meditation performs that function. At least, that’s my theory of it. Meditation teaches you to shut down all those background mental processes that you don’t even know are running and in doing so, lets you mind truly truly rest.

I’m saying “true” and “truly: a lot today. I wonder what I truly mean by it.

Maybe once you finally finish the task of force-quitting all those background programs and achieve a state of unified, simplified, harmonized consciousness, the relief is so profound and the sudden insight of such scale that the only word we can use is “enlightenment”.

It all sounds great on paper. But I have a lot of psychological issues which fuel the shark-like restlessness of my mind and so far in life, I have not been able to tame my monkey-mind enough to do more than lightly dabble in meditation.

I have too much of the problem meditation solves to solve it. Catch-22.

The real barrier, though, is the one that keeps me from getting exercise. I know that at least half and possibly much more of the problem is that I have all this energy that my depression, obesity, and sleep apnea get in the way.

Especially the depression. I have said before that madness is when you know for certain that doing a thing will make you happier and yet still finding yourself unable to do it.

I know damned well that if I got more exercise, I would be calmer, more focused, and a lot happier. All that excess energy demands expression and when it doesn’t get it, it turns into the energy source for anxiety and depression.

But I still can’t make myself exercise, because exercise hurts. And when I am exercising, I don’t have all my usual psychological defenses at hand and that makes me feel exposed and hounded and scared.

Or at least, that’s what I think will happen. I could be dead wrong and find that the energy release as well as muscular tension release makes me feel wonderful.

I guess I will never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I have been trying to explain how I experience the world and what is going on in my head for my entire life.

I’ve talked before about how, despite me repeatedly telling you about my frosty tomb of cold circuit only emotions, in many ways. I “feel” my way through the world.

And not just when I have lost my glasses. Ba dum bum.

No, I mean it in the sense that I experience the world as very finely tuned emotions first. I experience them as sensory inputs second. The timing difference is negligible, but in terms of processing priority it’s massive.

In a sense, all I am describing is what it means to be a fundamentally intuitive person. And it’s kind of mindboggling, at least to the Western mind, to imagine that I do all my complex analysis, creative, synthesis, and all my other magic tricks via emotion, but that is seriously how it works for me.

Everything I do involves my intuition working as the powerhouse processor that it is, and my conscious mind being merely the computer operator. All that it does is enter commands and interpret results. The rest happens under the hood.

Of course, when a brain like mine, that can be a very powerful combination. It is, in fact, the only way truly powerful minds can operate. The speed and power derives at least partially from the fact that processes operate on their own, without using much of the conscious mind’s limited bandwidth, and therefore can process enormous amount of information and still produce usable results.

That’s why us INTJ types constantly compress and optimize that signature highly refined picture of the world in our heads. We can our minds to run as efficiently as possible so that the right answer or solution can be derived with the least expenditure possible.

Yes, we are efficiency fanatics even within our own minds.

And yes, this brutal efficiency of mind can make us seem coldly calculating and even inhuman sometimes. But that’s just how we solve problems. Problems we passionately want to see addressed and that we are absolutely sure can be solved given the application of enough brainpower, common sense, creativity, and the will to succeed.

I see the world as full of problems to solve. But I am not interested in solving them merely because they are interesting puzzles and it amuses me to solve them. I want to solve them because I am determined to make the world a better place by the most effective means I can find.

I want results, goddamn it. And I will ignore, override, reroute, work around, unplug, deactivate, disintegrate, and destroy whatever gets in the way.

And that makes me, in some ways, very demanding. I won’t accept inferior solutions as being the best we can do. I will demand that things be done right according to how I see it at times. I take a dim view of people who put their own petty squabbles and interpersonal BS ahead of the group endeavour. I have very high standards of self-control and lose respect big time for people who don’t pull themselves together when the time comes.

But it’s true what they say – people who are demanding of others are often even more demanding of themselves. Maybe too demanding… I’m only human, after all.

So that’s one way in which I have been trying and filing to get my point across for what seems like my whole life. So many things have clear and logical solutions to me and yet the problems just keep going on and on because there is nobody with a lick of sense in a position where they can actually do something about it.

But on the other side of the coin that is me, I have always been a heavily poetic person in that I feel a lot of things which are hard to put into words. The only way to express them is in poetic language, as opposed to linearly descriptive language, because the emotional content is too important to the message to eliminate.

So I talk about feeling like my heart is trapped under a glacier of frozen emotion and that recovery is a process of icebergs periodically breaking off the glacier with a mighty crack and plopping into the ocean of emotion, and from there to float southward and melt.

To a lot of people, including a lot of people who would (ha!) consider themselves very logical and sensible, that paragraph would be utterly incomprehensible. The language would be too figurative, too nonliteral, too “imprecise” and above all too emotional for them to be able to process.

All I can say is that it conveys how I feel in the best way I know. And like many poets before me, I still feel like I am not really saying what I am trying to say.

Poets can build entire careers out of trying to say what they really mean.

As I have mentioned, I think I might have a toe on the autism spectrum, and when I look back at my childhood, I remember being overwhelmed by all the input to my little brain. Not just the sensory stuff, but the rich stream of emotions and intuitions that came along with that sensory barrage, as well as inputs from things like my empathic understanding of what others were feeling, the part of my mind that tried to predict future events, the constant babble of semi-verbailzed thoughts that are the byproduct of all that mentation, and so forth and so on.

I think that might have been why I took refuge in the logical analytical mindset in the first place. Logic, reason, science, and so on – those counter the cacophony within and act like islands of refuge in a sea of babble.

It would makes sense, and possibly apply to everyone on the spectrum. The difference lies in severity of effect versus ability to cope, I suppose.

One more try : when I am out in the world, I feel everything I experience. I have deep envy for people who can experience in the world in a purely sensory way and enjoy every moment as it comes. To me that sounds like heaven.

Because when I am out there, I have to shut nearly everything out or all the emotions will swamp me and I will get overloaded and have a panic attack and feel like I am drowning.

Only very slowly have I been able to open my sensorium up to include more of what is happening in the world around me. The creature is responding well to the medication and is beginning to wake up and show interest in its surroundings.

So part of my walking in the sunshine at last world is to finally be able to simply experience life without all this goddamned grating echo chamber bullshit going on in my head so I can just…. be.

My mind has no off switch and no volume control.

Guess I will have to learn to do it myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.