“I’ve always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives.”
— Billy Connolly.
I find it hard to pay attention. Actually, I find it impossible to pay attention. There is no conscious thought that could possibly direct that willful attentiveness for any length of time. Either I’ve spent four hours straight researching polar bears and now I’m too hypoglycemic to cook food or I accidentally zoned out five seconds in to what you were saying to me and now I’m desperately trying to figure out what you’re talking about before you stop talking and I’m expected to reply. I don’t even realize when my attention wanders, someone says “best of both worlds” and then I’m off on a Narnia thought tangent with the wood between the worlds and what I’d do if I ended up there, and how I wouldn’t make the same mistakes that the Pevensie children did, and what I would pack and… BAM. I’m snapped back into reality and realize I have no idea how long I’ve spaced out. When I zone out, I zone out 110%. My brain tunes out all the sound and visuals of reality until I’m watching and listening to a 3D movie in my head that my thoughts bump into and alter like a cliched version of a psychedelic trip. I’ll make facial expressions and movements and even whisper without realizing it, like I’m physically in the scene in my brain. I’m not in control of what I’m seeing though, I’m along for the ride for better or for worse, I can’t choose what gets played. It’s like you combined the autoplay feature on youtube with the “random article” button on wikipedia and threw them in a kaleidoscope. This makes it frustrating to try and explain my ideas to people, none of my thoughts are in word format, they’re this complex swirl of emotions and visuals. Talking about abstract concepts for me feels like when I’m listening to a foreign language, translating it to English in my head, thinking about it, translating it back, and then speaking it. “Why do we respect the dead more than the living?” My brain pulls up swirling visuals of Dia de Los Muertos and the Founding Fathers, there’s this emotion running through me (no idea how to name it) that I get during the christmas holidays when all my family is around and I feel warm and happy, I replay the audio and visual from a funeral I attended from ten years ago and a new emotion of loneliness runs through me. And from that I answer “because they can’t defend themselves and because we’re scared of death.” You couldn’t ask me how I distilled that answer from the crazy acid trip my brain goes on, despite my twenty years of experiencing the process, I still have no freakin’ clue.
Sometimes though, I can use this crazy method of brain function to my advantage. I can occasionally recall things because the images of them swim forward in my visual landscape and I literally just describe what I’m seeing. “How many molecules of oxygen does ozone have?” Instantly the molecule appears in my mind and I know the answer by “seeing” it. Or other times I’m uncomfortable, whether it be during a long workout or at a party, and the slip out of reality into these vivid daydreams gives me a few minutes of relief. I love listening to engaging stories that people tell, I get to “watch” it happen, it’s akin to watching television. Pretty cool for an introvert such as myself. Unless it’s a particularly graphic story and then it’s like “whoaaaaaa buddy I did not want to watch you skiing naked.”
Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming, getting snapped back to reality. It seems like my brain has a mind of it’s own, flipping the switch at random times back and forth, daydream, reality, daydream, reality, daydream. It does that with all sensory stuff actually, that random flip between polar opposites. Sometimes I get into my truck and I can’t turn the music up loud enough, I’m listening and yelling along to the lyrics and I’m overflowing with happiness, and then all of a sudden what felt great suddenly hurts like none other. My ears physically throb, the sounds all blend together, and that good feeling I had splinters under the wave of anxiety to turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. The same thing happens during conversation with any group of people over four of us, sometimes their conversation suddenly is too much for my ears, they throb in time with the words said but I can’t distinguish anything that’s being said, I’m fighting to stay still through this weird type of pain. It happens with touch too, a back rub goes from the best thing ever to feeling like sandpaper in an instant. I’ll get a paper cut and whine about how much it hurts, and later in the day I’ll look down and realize I’ve been pressing on the cut to make it hurt more without realizing it. Sometimes I’ll stare into the sun because it feels good to have that intense light shining into my eyes (yeah, yeah, and I run with scissors too) and other times I barely make it outside squinting and with sunglasses. I have no clue why. Maybe the stork that delivered me to my parent’s doorstep flew through some low pressure on the way over, accidentally shook me up in the turbulent air of the thunderstorm while it flew at top speed dodging the lightning bolts crackling down around it.
