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What It Seems Like Inside My Head

To describe my sense of my own consciousness and thought processes, I am immediately compelled to make an analogy, in this case an anthropomorphism, to bring clarity to what is by nature conceptual, by likening it (my senses…) to something familiar and tangible.  In short, I feel like an egg, in that it feels like I’m put together more stably on the outside than on the inside, and that what’s inside is fluid; moving and confused.  This makes me envision that the “me” I associate with my personality and soul resides on my outside, yet this outside is thin, and hence can’t hold much substance.  Consequently, I’m forced to store memories “inside” (my head) or give them up.

          Most of all, I recognize a sense of momentum inside my head; of images moving through my consciousness that I can’t control or even hang on to for more than a very short time.  The images I “catch” eventually pull away on their trajectories and disappear, while other images “bump” me from other directions, throwing me off balance.  This may sound like a description of a dream state, which, though common, is not commonly experienced while awake, particularly while one is alert and attentive.

          Purposefully trying to recall memories is exceptionally difficult for me, because my “inside” seems to resemble a washing machine, churning images about, haphazardly shuffling them.  It’s not that I don’t remember anything, but just that I can’t rely on where the memories are stored, so it’s difficult to just “go get them”.  I passively look through the window of the washing machine waiting for a relevant thought to appear, like an ice-fisherman looks through a hole in the ice they’ve cut, waiting for a fish to “accidentally” swim by.

        The process becomes more difficult if what I want to find in there is a group of things that belong together.  I “catch” only one image at a time, since it seems that they’re all mixed up, forced apart by the momentum of this churning fluid.  While I wait anxiously for other related images to appear, the “caught” ones begin to liquefy, as if melting in my hand, and then slip through my fingers back into the abyss.  This memory recall process is usually a discouraging if not painful one, which often amounts to little more than an exercise in futility.  So, part of me (my group of memories) is arguably scattered.

Then, there’s the deception (or as I’d like to see it- the complicating factors, which hide, or at least complicate, the pattern).  Sometimes, I seem to “click” into place.  For short bursts of time, I’m extremely clear and focussed, even organized.  That’s not me doing it though:  It happens to me.  In fact, if I try to control it, it disintegrates, like a dream one slowly wakes up into.  When I try to concentrate, I end up concentrating on myself concentrating.  When I force myself to concentrate (as we all must so often do), I fatigue.  For example, while reading, I’ll all of a sudden realize that I’m trying to decipher the white shapes between the black letters on a page that I wanted to read: I get mechanically spastic.  That’s not daydreaming; it’s physical.

Daydreaming is different.  I do that too, often turning pages, not realizing that the story that’s continuing to unfold is from my imagination and not from the written words.  At some point while reading the text (oddly enough, it happens more often when I read non-fiction), my imagination just takes off from the script.  However, the motion of my eyes running over the text continues despite the diversion in themes, because (I believe) it has become so mesmerizing that I don’t notice it lulling me into this imaginative process.

All of this happens within me, without any additional “help” from outside.  That’s what I would experience in a vacuum chamber under laboratory conditions.  However, I sustain a considerable amount of distractibility from the constant barrage of competing “normal” external stimuli, as well.  Indeed, the fly on the wall is, if but only for a moment, as captivating as the teacher at the front of the classroom, whether I want it to be or not.  Even scents and the textures of materials capture my attention completely.  Of course, I have been largely ineffective at selectively dampening stimuli, one of (I believe) the classic A.D.D. behavioral trademarks.

         So, when an opportunity for clarity presents itself, I savor it, passively.  This is because I have come to recognize that these experiences produce my most valuable output.  I let the “dream” (see above) take over my body, because these dreams are more productive with “it” (what I am doing at that moment with my body) than I (my consciousness) seem to be.

I am willing to do this despite the fact that these dreams occur irrespective of my schedules and my choices.  This means that, though I might have planned on doing something that is a higher priority over all when a “dream” begins, I often allow the dream to continue, postponing or even forgoing my previous commitments.  I let the dream work for me, because (it seems that) it’s much more efficient.

Efficiency is an extremely important concept for me, because I believe that I must “catch up” with (the productivity of) other people, or my perception of society’s expectations of me as a “normal/average” person.  However, my vision of what it is that I must catch up “to” changes pretty constantly.  Many people have experiences like this I imagine, but my reaction to this impetus is often extreme.  This belief, that I must “catch up”, leads me to be very impulsive; jumping up violently to do something different that has caught my attention; one of the “somethings” that I believe will increase my efficiency.

         Most often though, this violent behavior I exhibit is not caused by me changing my course to pursue a situational efficiency.  Rather, it is caused by me being surprised by a memory of something that I was supposed to have “already” done that I have, until that moment, forgot about, or missed the opportunity to do.  I am immediately startled by what I’m afraid the consequences of my inaction might be.  This panic of mine is enhanced by my inability to group essential memories together quickly (since I have such a hard time recalling the individual memories, to begin with).  It is my experience that this behavior of mine can often be confusing to others around me, if not quite frightening.

         It pains me to see the damage I cause to other people so consistently, especially because it doesn’t seem to me that I make up for it in other ways.  This realization encourages me to (over-) compensate (for my sub-satisfactory behavior) by offering other people exceptional sensitivity and favors.  I feel such a need to redress my offenses, that I forget to find out whether or not they want any help at all, much less help from me!  Over time, when I do this enough, the recipients come to realize that there’s a pattern to this behavior of mine.  They also see that it puts a burden on them, by first forcing them to accept or decline favors from me, and then by demonstrating that I can’t even tell consciously that I’m doing it.  So eventually and inevitably, they break off contact with me.

         Most of my difficulties and shortcomings I simply accept as personal attributes that, among other traits, make up my personality and character: They define who I am (and in this case, who I am not).  For instance, I would love to be an environmental scientist, but I am not good at math or chemistry, or I’d love to be able to play guitar better but my pinky is very short and bent inwards.  These are circumstances that are clearly not in my control, but even more importantly are predictable.

So, by contrast, by far the most distressing experiences I have are those that appear to be inconsistencies, both to myself and to others.  They commonly involve negative surprises, too.  For instance, I can remember many appointments and messages, but then don’t remember others.  These experiences, at first glance, may sound common, even human, and therefore forgiveable, to the extent that they are exceptions and not the rule. 

However, the frequency and intensity of my forgetfulness is (I believe) uncommon.  I can, to most people, appear to be fairly reliable sometimes, even for comparitively prolonged periods of time.  This, of course, confirms their suspicion that, contrary to my warnings, I can be reasonably relied upon.  This belief in my reliability is supported by the “common” (if not universal) experience that effort can be directly correlated with success, at least as a strong trend.  This is my experience also when evaluating “other” people.

It would seem to follow then, that people would tend to be more successful at the things that they have a personal interest in, like a hobby or a personal mission than at duties that they carry out simply to fulfill their societal/familial responsibilities.  I don’t find this to be true in my pursuits!  I seem to be no more successful at the things that are personally important to me than any other thing.  This, by itself, is discouraging to me.

Unfortunately, the worst part of this process isn’t my failing to meet my personal goals (since through time I can “come to grips with” that), but rather how my success in reaching these goals (or lack thereof) is judged by others.  I imagine that people naturally assume (as I would) that if I am unsuccessful at doing something that I appear capable of doing “sometimes”, that it (that something) simply isn’t that important to me.  As a result, I probably appear to be lazy and selfish when I don’t accomplish things that “are” important.

The problem is compounded further, when I realize that the results I usually achieve, even when I apply a considerable amount of effort, are not noticeably different from the results I would expect from having put next to no effort into a given task.  Since this seems to be such a unique experience, it’s not possible for me to get empathy from others, or even to be understood.  It reminds me of how the protagonist in the movie “Groundhog Day” must have felt, in that no one else could relate to his anguish, and much worse; the agonizing process repeated (and in my case “repeats”) itself without end!  I feel toyed with!

Another facet of this unusual behavior/disability of mine is that neither the complexity (or lack thereof) nor the frequency of a task I undertake necessarily corresponds to how successful I am completing it.  My morning routine illustrates a typical case in point.  Every day before breakfast, I used to make a pot of coffee for my family, which entailed filling the pot with seven scoops of coffee grounds before adding the water.  Over that three year period, I managed to not loose count of how many scoops I had already put in the pot while getting the next scoop less than 50% of the time.  That means that out of almost 1000 chances, under what could arguably be considered extremely routine, even ritualized, circumstances, I was unsuccessful at putting seven scoops of coffee grounds into that pot more than 500 times.