Forcing

This is one of those good things about the blogging world: You can read several posts over coffee on a Saturday morning, and then say to yourself, “Well, at least I’m not the only one.” It may not fully eradicate a piss-poor mood, but it does help.

I went to bed in a foul mood, and woke up in an even fouler one. It appears that I am not alone. A handful of the posts I read today reflected on feeling alone, loss of friendship, the lack of desire to get up and get moving and surround yourself with people. It tends to snowball that way, you know—you feel alienated or lonely, and instead of feeling compelled to go out and do something about it, there is nothing in the world that can convince you to move off that particular spot on the couch. Out of sight, out of mind—your friends and family think you are holed up for a reason, and leave you alone. You lament over the fact that no one wants to find out what you are doing.

Yep, that’s what I woke up to this morning. I’m not going to stand for it, though. I am not going to get sucked into that mess. I am forcing myself to go out, to do things, and perhaps even have a conversation.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being a social creature. I love being around people and I love talking with other people. It’s just that I’m a big weirdo. This is my deep, dark secret, just like everyone else, I suppose. It’s hard to explain, but I will try to tell you how my mind works. I see connections all the time.

In fact, this is the vast majority of what I see. It’s like the Fidelity commercials (the ones with the green line investors are supposed to follow), but more on the scale of Google maps with the pictures that you can expand, if you layered about four maps over one another all at once. I walk into the store, and I see some random stranger’s facial expression, and it leads to an emotion, and that leads to the thought I had while feeling that emotion, which leads to another thought on a similar topic, and the next thing I know I’m on a completely different topic. The connections spill out in front of me like some sort of fractal pattern, and I’ve forgotten what exactly I was trying to pick up in that aisle in the first place, and the world around me softens and spins. To avoid the overwhelming swirl that surrounds me (and the nausea) I tend to focus on that one train of connection, and the next thing you know, I’ve missed a vast chunk of the outside world around me, and I feel out of the loop and somewhat dazed. I follow the thought through to the end, but usually it's just the thought, and not actually action (which, in my view, seems to be more align with the way of the world), and once the the thought stream has run its course, I am usually done with it.

As you may be able to guess, this can make it hard to initiate conversations, especially with people I don’t feel that I know very well. I’ve come to the sneaking suspicion that most people do not, in fact, approach the world in this way. Sometimes the connections that I see make me a wonderful conversationalist or storyteller, and most times not. So I tend to wait until someone else initiates a conversation, and I listen, seeing the connections, and wanting to comment on half a dozen different things—which may or may not make sense to those around me.

It makes talking about the weather or something akin to it almost unbearable. It’s too big, too general. I make some small comment, and then I wait to listen until there is something smaller, something I can lock in on while making sense.

My closest friends know this about me, on one level or another. In my closest of closest friends, I can actually outline how I got to the story I am about to tell before I tell it, and they rib me good-naturedly, and we often laugh about how I get to the mental places I get to.

You cannot do that with everyone, though. Right? I always assume that you cannot just do this with any random person you meet. And yet, here I am, telling you—and I’ve never met most of you. That’s the realization I’ve come to today; that despite my certainty that I will never be able to fully describe what actually occurs in my head, and most people would not fully understand if I did find the words, and there is bound to be plenty of social awkwardness in my future, it is still worth reaching out.