I got nuthin’.
Seriously. My mind is a blank right now. I am simply not awake enough to think of something to write about, so here I am, using the ol “write about not writing” gag in order to stall for time till my brain boots up qand spits out something I can focus on.
It’s not like I need much. Just some kind of jumping off point that can get me doing my usual serpentine wriggling from topic to topic until I’ve written enough words.
I know why I can’t stick to a topic. It’s because that is simply not the way my mind works. My mind follows the connections between things and not the things themselves. I think this is true of a lot of highly creative people. Creativity, after all, seeks to create novel connections between disparate subjects.
That’s also what makes me a generalist rather than a specialist.Sticking with one subject and learning everything there is to know about it strikes me as stultifyingly dull and mindlessly restrictive and entirely unsuited ro a lively and curious mind like mine.
I need to explore the byways and pathways of thought, not settle down and start a family and open a hardware score that competes with the big box stores by offering personal, friendly service from highly knowledgable staff.
That was weird.
It’s like all of my urge to explore got turned inward along with everything else when I was raped, and I explore in thought and not in person. Not only does that suit (and possibly cause) my reflective and thoughtful nature, but it is something I can do anywhere and at any timemk which is not dependent on having any physical resources whatsoever. Not even a computer and the Internet.
I developed this technique to deal with boredom, I think. When you have a very stimulation seeking mind, boredom is particularly painful, and in a world unlikely to contain a constant stream of high density stimulation like the one I grew up in, I had to generate my own stimulation.
How? Deduction. Broadly defined.
By deduction,. I don’t mean dashing around after a dastardly criminal wearing a deerstalker hat. What I am calling deduction is the generation of new knowledge from existing knowledge via the application of deductive logic.
A sort of “if A is true, and B is true, then C must be true” kind of thing.
So I dealt with boredom, especially the boredom I faced in school because the work was so easy for me, by thinking about stuff a lot.
That made me a generalist. Of course. I am not interested in all things equally. Nothing natural has an even distribution, after all. I have my areas of interest, like psychology, science, politics, philosophy, and so on.
But I absorb all information that comes my way, and I am a little interested in whatever happens to come my way. It all fits into my internal understanding of the world and how it works somewhere, and I am always willing to learn more.
But not too fast, or my creaky old brain will crash.
There’s knowing you’re crazy, and then there’s feeling crazy.
I know I am crazy. That, by all rational definitions, I am insane. That depression is a form of mental illness and that if yuou have it, you are mentally ill.
But I don’t feel crazy most of the time because crazy is my normal. When you have a disease that pollutes your perceptions like depression, there are no inconsistencies in how you see the world.
You see it through shit colored glasses, and that is it.
So I know my perceptions are distorted and that the world is not how it seems to me. I know that I am crazy and that therefore I should be cautious about trusting those polluted perceptions and maybe try to figure out what is really going on some time, as hard as that can be.
But at the end of the day, your perceptions are all you have to go on when dealing with reality and you have to trust them or you wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing.
So despite knowing I am mentally ill, most of the time, thank goodness, I do not feel crazy. That’s a good thing because let me tell you, feeling crazy is terrifying. The human mind can’t handle the idea that its perceptions are in error. It’s like a divide by zero error, it just does not compute.
So I panic. Hard. A great and terrible panic. That’s what feeling crazy is to me, a panic attack on an existential level. And the only way out is to stop thinking about it.
And that’s highly unusual for me. I don’t taske that escape route very often. My usual response to something I am thinking about upsetting me is to attack said thing and try to conquer it. I don’t like having walled off areas in my mind where I dare not tread. It offends my intellectual pride and gives me a feeling of discontinuity that I find unsettling, to put it mildly.
But the walls are there nevertheless. Nobody is intellectually ferocious enough to have a mind that is completely open in all directions at all times. I suppose.
In fact, a certain level of concealment and misdirection of the conscious mind is probably necessary for a healthy mind, and my fanatical devotion to what I see as the truth is certainly symptomatic of, and possibly part of the cause of, my depression.
But still. It bugs me. This leads to my therapist’s repeated astonishment at how non-resistant to therapy I am. I am, at least, spared that. I know what therapy is, how it works, and what I can expect of the experience, and why I am there.
PResumably, most of his patients lack such clarity of perception and intent, and need to be gently inveigeled through the process.
Me,l I just need a second pair of eyes looking where I am not.
Hmm, maybe that’s why he forgets I am sick.
But we’ve already been over that.
I will talk to you nice people again