I have a very slippery mind.

On one hand, it means that my mind can find and slip through the tiniest cracks in someone’s bullshit. Or to a lesser degree, my own.

The slipperiness also makes my mind very quick and agile. I have a lot of mental maneuverability. In the right situations (say, ones where verbal skills shine) I am quick-witted, pithy, witty, and total in control of myself and my situation.

On the other hand…. well,. things slip my mind very easily.

I really feel like no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try to stay on the ball,. things go missing. There’s a limit to how many plates I can keep spinning and when that limit is exceeded, for every plate I start spinning, another crashes, and boom goes that memory.

I have never been any good at keeping a lot of things in my mind at the same time. I have specialized rather heavily in being a deep processor, and that comes at the cost of not being much of a multitasker.

And that wouldn’t be such a problem if I had the self-discipline to make and keep lists and calendars and so on. But I don’t. Doing the necessary tasks often, ha ha, slips my mind. Those inner processes of mine are extremely demanding and they will delete anything that stands in their way if they need more mental space.

It’s like I start off with great intentions, then I think really hard about something, and my “keep my shit together” tasks go out the window.

It’s a crude approximation, but apt.

Now arguably, with enough therapy,. a lot of the junk in the attic of my mind will get cleared out and that could pave the way for something approaching competence.

That makes sense in theory. But I have a sneaking suspicion that I would end up using that extra space to think yet deeper thoughts.

That’s the benefit for me of being 43. I may have lost some perspicacity to age, but the older I get, the deeper my mental integration goes. I feel like my mind has deepened with age, so that everything my mind does draws from a deeper and far more powerful source than when I was younger.

So powerful that it scares me, to be honest. The power of this subconscious creative engine of mine is staggering. The feeling of being a small man walking a large dog (and vice versa) grows with every day. The one thing that reassures me about it is that my mind can’t run away from me too much because it is, after all, only a supercomputer. It still needs me to tell it what to do.

So I am safe for now. Unless I develop a psychosis. But I am too old for standard psychosis and too young for senile psychosis, so I think I am good for a while.

Normal people don’t think things like that, do they?

But when you are mentally ill science-minded genius who loves psychology and has a deep  DEEP fear of finally losing all his marbles, you need facts like that in order to control the fear so that the fear doesn’t control me.

When I went through mental and physical hell in my early twenties – when I was consumed by hypochondria and paranoia  – one of the many thing I thought was happening was that I was going crazy.

Turned out not to be the case, mostly because I was already crazy. My thought processes during that period of time were extremely unstable. It was hard for me to keep a thought in my mind for more than a second or so. The enormous shit tornado^[1] of pain and anxiety and confusion and everything else ripped my thoughts apart. I was extremely depressed and anxious and ill and I spent most of my time propped up on a couch watching TV in those periods where the storm was not so bad.

And spending the rest of the time in the bathroom.

And as I have said before,. severe IBS left me malnourished, dehydrated, with my electrolyte balance completely off and a gut like an earthquake zone.

That’s what happens when a disorder wrings your guts out until you have absolutely nothing left in you (and then some) and then keep you empty by murdering your appetite with a straight razor in a graveyard at night, and even makes it so that just drinking water sets off the intestinal fireworks.

But you have heard all this before.

I am still figuring out how to adjust to the knowledge that you WILL forget stuff. Important stuff. ^[2] And that, at least until you at least gain the competence to write shit down, there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it.

I suppose my existing coping mechanism will have to do : being self-effacing and friendly and humble and apologetic so that people will forgive your frequent fuckups.

It’s nothing I set out to do, but I suppose I had to develop some kind of defense mechanism, and I am definitely not the sort of person who can pretend these things don’t matter or blame it on others.

I have too deep a sense of responsibility for that.

I keep coming back to the same answer : I need a personal assistant. Someone whose job it is to keep track of what I should be doing, as well as what I could be doing but is not yet a must-do.

Only a live human being with a functioning forebrain can compensate for my mental vacuity and general reality issues. Someone bright and focused and competent who is willing to be the gardener who takes care of this delicate little hothouse flower.

For now, at least, I can’t fix my brain. It is what it is.

But maybe someday I will be able to pay someone else to do it.

I wikll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.