The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind.
The sheer number of experiences I could have is
uncountable,
breathtaking,
and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox.
~~~
Sometimes, I have these little moments of clarity.
It’s like, everything seems to be lined up perfectly, just for a moment. Everything is crystal clear, and I feel like I understand everything, all at once.
And then it passes.
Some people might say that it’s a sign of mental illness – I don’t know what it’s called, exactly, but it’s up there on every bipolar screening test: “Do things ever feel vivid or crystal clear?”
~~~
We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over,
and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us.
We see the same things each day,
we respond the same way,
we think the same thoughts,
each day a slight variation on the last,
every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms.
We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us.
~~~
The world hurts.
I don’t know how everybody else doesn’t feel it; and for a while, I never realised that they didn’t.
~~~
Imagine if someone you love died, today.
Imagine how distraught you’d be, how broken.
How many people would be devastated, how deeply it would cut through your lives -
Today, 150,000 people have died, or will die.
That’s all of the pain I would feel if someone I loved died, only hundred and fiftythousand times over.
Every single day.
~~~
And no, I don’t have all the answers.
I don’t know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become.
But I do know one thing:
~~~
The world hurts. I was discussing with someone today about cognitive load, in particularly how it relates to neurodivergent people – your brain is constantly working to process out extraneous stimulae, like the sound of the fan whirring in the background that’s keeping you from melting, or the feeling of your clothes on your skin, or the sound of your heartbeat rushing in your ears.
Except, for someone with some form of processing disorder[0], your brain isn’t so good at filtering out all of that stuff, and so you have to, on some level, consciously deal with it. And that takes mental effort, and so there’s less of it to divide up amongst the other important things.
Often, people say that they have no idea how I can deal with that all of the time, every moment of every day. For a long time, I didn’t even realise other people didn’t.
~~~
The solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold.
It doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations.
~~~
Every day the air-conditioning turns off at 6:14pm.
If you point this out to people, they’ll go “oh, yeah”, as if they’d noticed, but only in the back of their mind somewhere, never to be consciously thought of unless you bring it up.
~~~
It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.
~~~
I’m not like everyone else, in some ways.
I am the product of my experiences; moments strung together into a cohesive whole.
My life is made of little boxes. What I choose to do with them makes me me – what you choose to do with yours makes you you.
I’m just like everyone else: human.
~~~
This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
~~~
– Dreams [xkcd]
[0]: processing disorder, as in “auditory processing disorder”, “sensory processing disorder”, “visual processing disorder”.
