I don't know for sure if I have always been this way or not, but I think I have always been pretty curious about the world, and wonder if it is from my less-than-ideal childhood. At least at school, for the first several years, I wasn't exactly the most popular child and ended up spending a lot of time alone, observing the way people interacted and behaved, often when they thought no one was looking. I also got to experience prejudice and bigotry directly, as well as how groups will gang up and individuals will join, who alone would not have played a part. The silence was deafening also.
Yet, despite this, when I look back, I feel that I had a terrible and good childhood, because while it was terrible in the extended moment, it also became the basis of who I am today, and after a fair bit of reflection over the years, I have come to the conclusion that I am not such a horrible person.
That is "self-reported" however, so my opinion can't be trusted.
But, whatever I am or am not, curious and observational has been a large part of getting me to this point today. Yet, I often find myself faltering, unable to keep up with my own mind, unable to get the right words out of my mouth. The other day I read a story about a news anchor in Oklahoma who had the start of a stroke on-air.
When I had my own stroke last year, I was far more affected than that and still, the EMTs didn't take me to the hospital. And now, I am at times closer to where that anchor was, which obviously isn't ideal considering my line of work speaking in front of people daily. And, I see the judgement in their eyes, the impatience, the frustration, the belief that they know me from what they observe.
Yet, what I have learned is that regardless of how embarrassing it is as I see their faces, I have also had to come to terms with it and essentially say, fuck it, this is me now and I will do the best I can with what I have. At the end of the end of it all, I want to be able to say that I gave it my best shot, regardless of the results, because I can't control the results, I can only control what I do in the lead up.
But, I feel like an idiot most of the time, because despite most people not likely noticing much other than me not being overly eloquent or intelligent, I am in a constant state of awareness of it and, I can feel it constantly, whether it be my tongue stumbling over words, my fingers hitting the wrong keys, or my brain being unable to find my thoughts, that are laying just beneath the surface of my ability to grab them and bring them to the fore.
It is painful to think, the headaches haven't stopped and my body says, sit on the couch and give up. What kind of life would that be? Would it improve my mind, my attitude, make me a better parent or husband? I don't think so.
And, perhaps what might be the worst of it all is that my curiosity is waning, where while I have the want to explore, my motivation to actually do so is very low. This could be because the more I learn, the harder my life becomes, because I have to build all of that information into some form where my brain can store, recall and apply it in my world - which has become a very manual and labor-intensive task.
I don't think people realize how automatic their thoughts are, because we feel that we are doing the thinking, but that is apparently not the case, at least for much of what we are thinking and how we are thinking about it. When the average person reads a book, images are created to represent what is read automatically. For me, I have to build it piece by piece out of parts I already have, much like fashioning something in Minecraft from indescript blocks. It is only once the pieces are put together to create a shape that it is recognizable, but even then, there is no guarantee of retention, but upon recall, there will be the knowing that "I knew this yesterday."
Building thoughts from scratch is incredibly frustrating, especially since much of the time, even though I am trying, there are no materials to build with. It is like putting together Lego in the ark without the book, but still wanting to have something at least somewhat recognizable to the picture on the box. And even if building something, it doesn't mean that it is built the way it needs to be built, which then requires deconstruction and relearning to try to get it right.
When I took the picture above, it reminded me of a still life oil painting from the renaissance period, but it got me thinking, how life is still, until we move it. The process of human creation is thought, word, action, but now, I cannot speak nor can I act, unless I manually build a thought. For a human, a still mind can be calming, but if that mind remains still, life becomes still too. It stagnates, atrophies and at some point, is moving so slowly, it doesn't seem alive at all. And, at some point, never moves again.
At the moment, I can still move because I can force myself to think, but for how long, I don't know. But, just like everyone else, it will be for as long as I can and the results will be as they are.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]