Some days, I literally want to bang my head on the wall for doing dumb things unexpectedly and doing dumb things unexpectedly with people watching. Not that I've lost my mind, far from it. The structure however that the mind is built on has been experiencing massive fluctuations similar to a storm at sea.
I can't yet pinpoint exactly where these fluctuations are coming from. It didn't occur to me that I could find the problem as it's not a new thing entirely, happens seasonally in between the calmer stretches. So I more so adopt the passing clouds framework and just let it come and go without getting too worked out about it.
Everything seems to get over my head or isn't heard properly requiring me to further ask questions just to make sure I'm actually understanding what someone just said. I think the technical term in neuroscience and psychology domains is cognitive fatigue or brain fog. But this one is has less of a defined root cause stemming from any single identifiable source.
You know that feeling when you walk into a room and completely forget why you're there? Now imagine that happening on a near consistent basis mid-conversation, mid-task, mid-presence, etc.
Funnily enough, nothing is actually 'wrong' in any obvious way. All the metrics, in terms of sleeping, eating, moving enough, check out fine. Still I keep noticing this buffering, which is a bit similar in my mind to this perception that someone's turned down the resolution on my brain, and everything that used to be crisp and clear now comes through pixelated and delayed.
The worst part is the audience when they're present watching the confusion register on their faces. Confusion is manageable. Being observed while confused is really not.
Definitely something uniquely mortifying about watching yourself malfunction in real time while others bear witness and you want to explain, "I'm not usually like this, I promise," but that just makes it worse.
And I've learned, through repetition, fighting it only amplifies the static experience. The more I try to force clarity, the more elusive it becomes. Better to acknowledge the glitch, lower my expectations, and ride it out with whatever grace I can muster.
In this case, it's having an under-ordinary mental/emotional(they're the same layer) season, knowing that this too shall pass but before that happens, trying to indulge in some form of radical permission to be mediocre until the weather changes.
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