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.