Category: Words

Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.

–Pink Floyd/Wish You Were Here

 

Whatever gets you through the night is alright.

–John Lennon

 

As someone who is slow to both fall asleep and wake up, I spend a lot of time in what I think of as the in-between space of life.  The space between being asleep and being awake.  It’s not quite a dream space, but it isn’t quite consciousness either. It’s almost-but-not-quite-asleep. If someone were to talk to me, I think I’d respond, but it’d take me a second to shake out of it.

For me it seems to be kind of a what-if space. I have conversations there I wish I could really have. Or that I wish I hadn’t had. Or that I did have and wish had gone differently. Or sometimes theg just seem like random discussions about life.  It’s pretty much always a conversation,  rather than anything film-like or full of images. I’m not sure there even are images.  Sometimes there are snippets of gestures, but I feel them more than see them.  A caress.  A hand brushing my hair back.

The in-between space doesn’t feel dreamlike, but it doesn’t feel like reality either. I don’t have, I don’t think, much control over what is said there. It’s often related to something I’ve been thinking about, or maybe trying not to think about, in my awake life. Often I know who I’m talking with, but a lot of the time I don’t. Sometimes I can’t even distinguish specific words, it’s just a sort of reassuring whisper nuzzled against my ear. Words  just kind of stream into my head.

Very occasionally a phrase will sort of pop out at me that I feel like I need to remember, so I’ll get up and write it down. Often I’ll remember segments of the conversation, but they’re mostly ephemeral. I’ll remember the mood more than the precise content.

I  think the internal conversations help me sort through things that I need to work out. They’re part of my internal CPU. I used to think it held  me back to hear people speaking to me from the past. Now I think if I really listen to what they’re saying I can process the lesson and move forward. Whatever they say, I would really miss them all if they went away. It’s not a bad way to start and end the day most of the time.

Then again, if I Googled it, I’m sure I’d find out that it’s a symptom of incipient psychosis.

Please don’t tell me if it is.

 

I’m just wondering why I feel so all alone
Why I’m a stranger in my own life

-Sheryl Crow/Every Day Is A Winding Road

 

This is how it goes:
One more failure to connect
With so many how could I object?

–Aimee Mann/This Is How It Goes

 

It is not a secret that I am bad at being around people I do not know. I am socially awkward, shy,  and terrible at small talk.  I’m the one hiding in the corner watching everything from a distance. Whatever the opposite of a social butterfly is? That would be me.  I love spending time with friends, in smallish groups, but large groups of people will never  be a comfort zone for me. Or even small groups of strangers.

It took a long time for me to get to the point where I even wanted to be around people at all.

Partly because I’m introverted by nature. Partly because I’m solitary by nature.
Partly because being around groups of people makes emotionally and mentally tired after more than a few hours, even people I know and like. For a day it’s great. Longer than that and I start feeling like I want to crawl out of my skin. Sometimes, too, I just don’t want to be bothered figuring out new people.

In order to stay relatively sane, I need solitude in doses that many people would find strange.

Earlier in my life, I had the added worry that people might not like me. I felt like I had to act like someone people would like, and it was paralyzing. Plus, if you are never yourself, either internally or externally, you’re always a stranger. In your life. In everyone’s life.

If you’re a stranger to yourself, how can you connect to other people?

It’s hard to be someone else, even for short periods.  It is why actors are paid pretty well. Most of us aren’t very good at it. It’s like keeping track of a lie–it takes a lot of mental energy to keep track of who you are supposed to be when you’re pretending. It’s much simpler once you figure out that there will always be people who don’t like you no matter who you are. Some people won’t like the real you, others won’t like the pretend you. You can’t make everyone happy.  If you cut out the pretense, and stop worrying about who doesn’t like you, it all gets a  lot easier.

Some people have a public and private persona throughout their lives. I don’t know  where they get the energy to maintain the duality. I have a hard enough time just maintaining one moderately flawed self. Having a second personality for public use, like a politician, just seems like too much work. Do I swear like a sailor when I’m out in public? No, like everyone else, I do have to moderate my behavior at times. I try to maintain at least a shallow coating of professional veneer at work, but I’m mostly “myself.”  Sometimes I have to make an effort to talk more and swear less. But to have a distinct personality that you deploy when you’re in public? Maybe it’s easier for those people than just being seen as socially awkward. I’ve never understood it though.

Then again, I’m such a dork that I can’t even sit next to a stranger at a dinner table and make civilized conversation for an hour or two.

Potayto-potahto, I guess.

Mr. Politics is probably just muddling through as well as he can. Just  like I am.

Or he has no real soul, and just pulls on a handy skin as needed to distract people from his real self.

I suppose it’s not really something I need to worry about!

 

Think, think think
Let your mind go

Let yourself be free

–Aretha Franklin/Think

 

You mind is made up but your mouth is undone.
–Elvis Costello/Accidents Will Happen

 

I’ve run across the phrase “disordered thinking” several times recently at work.

It considered a bad thing to have disordered thinking. In fact, it’s one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. I want to make sure I don’t  belittle the actual psych diagnosis, which is serious. I wouldn’t want to actually have disordered thinking as a diagnosis, but I don’t mind a little disorder in my thoughts. I’ve been known to encourage it, in fact.

If your thoughts are all orderly all the time, how is there room for any serendipity to sneak in?  I’m betting that serendipity is not a big fan of order.

Not to knock critical/analytical thinking–it is definitely one of life’s essentials. It is something that should be a bigger focus in school.  A bigger focus, than, say, teaching kids to pass tests. Teaching us to think analytically is crucial in making sure we are (for one thing) not prone to believing anything anyone  tells us. Without critical thinking, there really is a sucker born every minute. Politicians, advertisers and religious leaders tend not to be big fans of critical thinking as it teaches you to question everything and apply disciplined thought processes in the analysis of what you read or hear.

There’s a balance to hit though, because too much critical thinking makes us dull. Too much analytical thinking kills inspiration, intuition, imagination and art.

Yeah, balance again. Sneaky bastard.

It’s pretty apparent where I fall on the scale. I think I used to be more analytical in my personal life, but once I started to do work that was more analytical in nature I tended to use it all up at work. What that means is that if you talk to me outside of work, I may be a little prone to going off on tangents.

 

I’m guessing most of you who know me outside of work have noticed that.

It’s a big part of why I started writing again. I needed a space to corral the tangents. Which is not the most rational thing I’ve ever written, when I see it on the page. What I mean is that it gives me a bit more of a disciplined approach to the tangents. In writing, I can take a particular tangent, and flesh it out a little bit in writing instead of spinning off into a million different directions. I can indulge myself in a little scrambled thinking in a slightly more orderly way.

 

Great. Now I’m being both tangential and paradoxical.

Oh well.

 

 

 

 

 

On an odd, random note: spell check tried to suggest that the correct way to spell critical is triticale.  I disregarded the suggestion. Sometimes I think spell check just likes to fuck with me.