I don’t really know when my thought process turned into a jumbled procession of ideas, sentences, images, emotions and whatever else… I suspect it was a gradual process that occurred over the years. I’m too often by myself, and spend far too much time alone in my head. With no real need to maintain a fixed mental focal point in my day to day routine, i’ve slipped into a stream of consciousness that does not run through my reality, but parallel to it. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus my thoughts and attention onto and into the world around me. Instead I find myself easily distracted by that second voice in the mind that seems to do the “thinking” for me. As I write this one sentence I realise that the only remaining way for me to engage with my thoughts in any coherent manner is by writing. The simple act of being is no longer enough to keep my thoughts in order.
As I finished the previous sentence, I counted almost ten instances where my thoughts about what I am now writing were derailed. At each pause for reflection my mind teetered on the edge of more scattered thoughts. It is starting to frighten me that I’ve come to this.
“That parallel place across the line where our minds idle. The area responsible for daydreams, connecting things together, memories, anxieties… whatever that area is called, day by day it claims more and more of me.”
In conversations I am hardly ever fully present. It is an excruciatingly difficult task for me to really focus on what the other person is saying to me unless my whole body is engaged. If I am merely listening, I can not focus, I can not remember the details of what I’ve been told, or what I have spoken about. I can’t remember now, what was in the first paragraph I wrote. It is no wonder that I can re-read something I wrote, a poem, a piece of PR text, or a story and have it reoccur as something completely new, so much so that I question wether I even wrote it. Until this moment I thought that it was some neat little quirk. I was wrong about that. It is not a quirk. It’s a fault. A defect resulting from this loose connection I have to the world around me. Again, I can’t recall what I wrote in the first paragraph or the second unless I glance up to re-read them. If you can remember what I wrote without looking back, I envy you. I’ve re-looked at the first paragraph at least four times now, and I still can’t recall what I wrote.
