Let’s talk about timing.

It came up in therapy today. I was talking to Doctor Costin about the barriers between me and others, and how I thought that my need to really think about what I say causes me to react a second or two too late in regular conversation, and how I thought that was a big barrier I needed to overcome.

It’s obvious what causes the problem : I overthink things. Everything I say has to pass through a gauntlet of proofreaders and test audiences and the like just to make it out of my mouth. A moment or two of delay might not seem like much, but it means not only that I come across as sort of alien, but that people are likely to jump in and start talking instead of me in order to keep the conversation flowing.

You really don’t want to be the person who drags the conversation to a screeching halt every time you speak. People get tired of waiting.

The problem, at its root, is one of control. And what’s the classic problem with control? Whether you would be better off just letting things work themselves out.

Being the heavily cerebral intellectual type person that I am, my response to everything in life is to try to control it via thought. To perceive, process, and understand what is really going on in hopes of, via this knowledge, to be able to control outcomes.

In other words, to make things go my way.

And that is, of course, what all living beings must do. The problem, as usual, is a matter of degree. When you start trying to use a hammer to tighten a valve, you know you are using the wrong tool for the job. And there are many instances in life where this “thinking everything through” approach is just as foolish.

Conversation is one of them. I have come to the conclusion that competent conversation with most people requires doing something that is anathema to a thoughtful type like me : act without thinking. By the time I have thought it through, no matter how brilliant the remark is, it will be useless because nobody is listening any more. I had my moment and I missed it. Conversation is like jazz, and if the music comes to you, you are either ready to jump in or the beat goes to somebody who is.

Thus, I find myself on the precipice of terror. Acting without thought is simple something I do not do. To even contemplate it fills me with that deep unnamed dread that needs no specific outcome or particular focus in order to exist. It’s deeper than that. Deeper than our Promethean forebrains or Johnnie come lately reasoning skills.

It’s that deep deep feeling that if X occurs, Something Terrible Will Happen. Something so terrible, you dare not even predict it. It is literally unimaginable.

But sooner or later, I have to learn to live life in realtime. The two second delay method is just plain not working. So I am going to have to leap off that precipice and pray I learn to fly before I hit the ground. I have to deliberately suppress the overthinking part of my brain and go from the gut and see what happens.

This has been happening spontaneously lately, which is good. It means that I have evidence that the world will not fall down around my ears if I speak without thinking. The situation is not, as my fears would lead me to believe, that if I speak without the intense vetting and correction process, I will say horrible things that will make people hate me.

That is seriously what it feels like, folks.

And to be honest, it’s not like the current method is working super well. Most of the time I am desperately out of sync with others, and I feel like I am always struggling to keep up. A great deal of my feeling of social isolation could be simply the result of my lack of synchronicity. Crossing that gap between me and others has to be worth a little risk.

But it will also put me in the rather unique (for me) position of not actually knowing what I will say next. I can be sure it will be something I mean and that it won’t be completely stupid, but other than that… well, what I say depends on what they say, I guess.

Again : control. I have to keep telling myself that something does not have to be predictable in order to be safe. Improvisation is also acceptable. Heck, chaos is acceptable as long as it’s minor.

That’s going to be the real sticking point. When I think of a situation which I can’t anticipate, control, or contain, my mind goes blank with terror except for a single screen flashing CHAOS! MADNESS! DANGER! over and over again,.

But that’s clearly not an adaptive attitude. The universe is vast and the part of it that even the very brightest of us can predict and/or control is infinitesimal. Dealing with life clearly involves learning to tell the difference between the malign and the merely chaotic. Unpredictable = evil is no way to go through life.

And that means that regular player in my psychomachea, trust in the universe. Trust that it is not, in fact, malign and out to get me. I know this intellectually, of course. In fact, I have gone on about it at considerable length in this very space. The world can’t be out to get you because it’s not a person. And so forth.

Clearly I need to take my own advice. There is no logical reason to feel that the unpredictable (and hence chaotic) automatically must be horrible.^[1] There has to be a way to be comfortable with taking known (and unknown) risks.

But the only answer I can think of is a little thing called faith.

And I just plain don’t know if I am capable of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh right… P. S., there won’t be a blog entry tomorrow. Too much to write and too little time!