Tonight’s blog entry is going to be an experiment. I want to see what happens when I write as fast as I can without stopping to think or anything.

I’ve done this experiment before, but that was way before I started developing myself as a writer was back in 2011. So I am kind of curiousa as to what will happen now.

So get ready for an entry even more meandering, disjointed, and bizarre than usual!

Let the experiment….. BEGIN!

Well there frst thing to do, obviously, is to start anywhere at all. No trying to find the “right” opener. That’s like trying to plan being sponteneous. It just doesn’t work.

Part of the point of this whole thing is to encourage myself to be more spontaneous in my life and my writing. I have talked in this space about how all my imkpulses have to pass a strict border check that lets very few of them through, much to my detriment.

To act without needed to think it through on any level – going purely by gut – would be a powewrful act of rebellion for me. It would signify a level of trust in the world that I have never had except possibly when I was a prechooler.

But once the school damage set in, I turns into a person who treated life as a chess game, with every move carefully considered and weighed and considered from all possible angles. Underlying it all is a vast mistrust of the universe and a deep conviction that the only way to be safe is to stay one step ahead of life by thinking ev everything out and checking for potential disasters and controlling the fuck out of outcomes and in general never, ever, ever doing anything out of pure emotion.

That’s no way to loive, as I like to say. For one thing,. lifer requires a lot of decisions and you often simply do not have the time to think them through. It’s go with your gut  or nothing. And nothing is not an option.

Another thing wrong with that approach was pointed out to me by my therapist recently – oit’s a hell of a lot of work. The mind has to work pretty hard, in an absolute sense, to do all that processing and predicting and pruning.

It’s the sort of solution that only a highly intelligent brain would even be able to contemplate let alone implement, and the fact that when my therapist brought this up to me, all I could do was ;lamely say something about how I am used to it speaks volumes about how messed up my mental situation really is and points to the nature of the problem on a concrete level.

It’s one of computational overhead. And it’sa tricky one. I’ve spoken before about freeing up my mindspace by ridding myself of all those unexpressed emotions.

That can be looked as an a ct of freeing up mental CPU cycles. And those CPU cycles can be used to support mood.

Turns out, being happy takes a certain amount of processing. The average person’s minds does a lot of calculation as it figures out how to balance the individual’s mood dynamically at all times.

We depressives lack that balancing function. So our moods are unstable and unpredictable. In response, we develop external balancing mechanisms which vary in form but which all have the common trait of activating the reward center of the brain whether the addiction in question is physical, chemical, sexual, emotional, or even spritual in nature.

These balancing mechanisms are very crude and have nowhere near the kind of efficiency that a healthy individual’s long developed and refine self-balancing instincts can provide. It’s like the difference between catching a ball in your hand and catching a ball in mittens, blindfolded, and the ball is on fire.

It’s like healthy people have thius force that pushes back against negative emotions, and people with depression don’t. A healthy person’s mind received a negative input that initially pushes the mood deep into the red, but then this other mechanism pushes back until the final result as a mood that is a little worfse than before, but not anythimng like the deep and horrible abyss that a depressed person’s mind would go to.
When the negative input is received, it pushes the mood downward without resistance. No wonder it craters so hard.

So we now have to ask ourselves what this balancing mechanism is. how does it work, how to fix it, and how did it get broken in the first place.

The simpel answer would be “trauma”, but that hardly adds any information to the debate. Presumably it involves trauma that is beyond the human mind’s ability to heal and which therefore persists and acts as a wound on the the psyche which causes long term problems of its own.

What I really want to know, though, is what IS psychological trauma on a biological basis. It seems odd to me that thois sort of thing can happen – that the human mind is vulnerable to a form of injury that has absolutely nothing to do with physical trauma whatsoever. Mere input can destroy parts of the system.

It’s something we all understand on the everyday level – bad things happening to people hurts them,. Tjat’s obvious to pretty much everybody.

But wbhen I try to imagine what is happening in the brain, I draw a blank. Presumably it’s something deeply biochemical and therefore opaque to someone like me who larned absolutely no biochemistry in school.

But still…. what the hell is happening in there? And is it possible to prevent it or at least immediately treat it with a form of mental first aid.

And is there a way to train the human mind to better respond to this trauma? Could we raise a generation of child who are far more psychologically robust than us? Could mental illness become a thing of the past this way? Dare we find out?

Well that’s my words for tonight. Did not turn out much different than a regular bog entry, did it? Well I fugred out a lot of the observatiobns above as I was writing them, and so I ghave profited from this idea that way.,

But if I do it again, I will clear my immediate environs of  distracting displace substances like food and drink. I ate supper while I wrote this, and I think the pauses to take a bite or a sip gavem me too much time to think about what comes next.

Next timne., I will put the pedal to the metal and see where I end up!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.