My Brain Today

She keeps my notes.  They aren’t special, only quickly scribbled thoughts on torn pieces of paper.  She hangs onto them as if looking for a place to put them.  I wonder if her internal placement of these notes is similarly carried out.  Is the note in the dish a symbol for the fact that I wrote such a note in the first place?  Is the message important to her? Is it confusing?  Is it just more noise in her already cacophonous mental territory?

I’ve often thought that the state of my car and house is a metaphor for the organizational structure of my mind.  Perhaps it’s a puzzle to be solved, a puzzle of my own making.  My world has been crafted by my hands, under the direction of my brain and to the consternation of my conscious self.  What else resides in my mind?

I’ve been running for so long, because I feared the answer to that question.  To see the truth of who I might be or what I might have done, to be surprised by the upsetting of my cherished apple cart of reality, seemed too unsettling.  My mind chose to know less rather than to face the frightening possibility of something lurking in the darkness.  I don’t so much fear that I’ll be alone.  I fear that my own thoughts might be too much for me to bear.  Running from conversation to conversation, distraction to distraction, has kept me from facing my unknown fears.

Life and love lost finally forced me to look.  Something deep within me would not let me ignore it any longer.  I call it my self-saboteur. The Wrecker.  Mainly through public social “failure,” I have forced myself to consider myself. Maybe at just the right time, when I was finally strong enough, I was able to let myself act the pain out.  All of my life tells the story.  Even though I’ve resisted self-discovery, hoping to get by with an acceptable self-presentation, the unfolding has continued.   And now, after years of struggle, I’m actually starting to embrace the process.

I don‘t know how to solve my romantic issues or clean my car, so I‘m using this blog as a stepping-stone to cleaning, organizing, or at least doing a fearless moral inventory of my mental mess.  Thank you for reading.

Up until now, I’ve been posting in a way that feels random to me.  I’ve just been getting out what I feel.  Convinced that everything is allegorical, that the metaphors of my everyday life are a window of sorts through which I can understand past events too tragically dramatic to be processed and held in clear memory form.

Here’s another example:  At 42, I’m starting to lose my close-range vision.  A lifetime at 20/10 had me thinking I was seeing clearly. My ego has always been tied to having an eagle eye.  Now, holding my phone at just the right distance from my face is becoming unnerving.  Today though, I stepped outside, coffee and cigarette in hand, and gazed upon the skies.  It’s a cloudy day, like the beginning of so many stormy days on the sea with my dad.  And, well, I noticed something about the clouds.  I noticed everything about the clouds.  Their detail is exquisite!  Really, I’m only noticing what I’m noticing.  What’s right in front of me has always been wrapped in fantasy and dissociative denial.  Now that I’m writing, I am seeing my own way of looking.  What’s in front of me, my car, my career, my love life, and the conversation in front of me are all blurry.  The possible contents of other people’s heads are fuzzy, hazy, and undecipherable to me.  But, from a distance, I’m seeing the whole picture much more clearly.

This blog is raw.  I don’t edit much.  I just throw out my thoughts, and what ends up posted is constantly changing.  If you’re enjoying the process, thank you for coming along.  I’m sorting.  The themes and direction may seem to shift in the coming months, but what you’ll get is going to be me, more and more clearly.  That’s what I’m hoping to get from all of this.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III