Brain Fog

Your mind is not always your friend

I've been learning a lot about complex trauma over the past year, because, as I’ve written about before, I’ve come to realize it’s a root cause of a lot of issues I deal with day to day, and I’d like to figure out how to heal and move beyond it.

One thing I've noticed is that if I get deeply emotionally dysregulated by something —say, a fight with my wife, or some event that triggers strong anxiety — I have something akin to an emotional hangover that lasts for a day or two, and impairs my cognitive function.

I feel scattered and unfocused and drained and tasks I normally do with ease, like writing, become very difficult and labored. I feel uninspired and unmotivated, and it's annoying as hell when I have things to do.

Today has been one of those days.

All day, I’ve been trying to get in the headspace to write. Instead, I’m in full ADHD mode, firing off tweets, flitting from thing to thing, doing my best to ignore the headache that is starting to feel like a golf ball behind my right eye. There’s an article about quantum physics and consciousness I’ve had open since before Christmas that I finally decided to read, but the best I could do was skim it in spastic fragments as precious little of it sunk in. It’s like trying to pour more water into a cup filled to the brim. I highlighted a bunch of it and sent it off to a friend in the hopes he could tell me if it fit the puzzle we’ve been trying to solve.

To complicate matters, my kids are on break, and they are currently playing computer games right outside my office door. There’s a lot of yelling and screaming and for some reason my 11 year old, who is playing Fortnite with friends, keeps repeating whatever he says half a dozen times as loudly as he can. “LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN. OKAY. OKAY. OKAY. OKAY. OKAY.”

Somewhere, the toddler is whining about something that I need to go check on.

There is so much going on in my head. Connections. Convergence. A feeling that a bunch of seemingly disparate things are interconnected and coming together and some related something on the macro level is changing that is probably really important if I could just figure out what it is. But it’s like trying to remember the details of a dream that fade more and more the harder you attempt to grasp them.

I finished The Telepathy Tapes last night, and I don’t even know where to begin to describe what a momentous, life-changing experience that podcast series has been. The sudden, unexpected death of a particular individual we’d gotten to know throughout the series hit me like a sucker punch, and it shattered my already fragile emotional state into fractals of gut-wrenching sobs. A real person, really loved, who really died, and the grief that was left in the wake of that event seemed to wrap its fingers around my own collection of personal tragedies and rip open the wounds. The tears that flowed were not just for this individual (whose name I’m intentionally not revealing because the surprising turn of events felt narratively purposeful) but for all the other things I’m grieving in my life. I wanted to turn the damn thing off, because I was already in a somber enough mood, but I forced myself to keep listening, and I’m glad I did. I finally finished the whole series this morning, and the information this project has revealed like some divine epiphany is just sitting in my awareness like a splinter in my mind. It’s so momentous, so utterly compelling, so reality-altering, I don’t know what to do with it yet.

And yet I’m morally certain that it’s true. All of it. Sometimes you just know things, and I know this is real. I can’t explain it. It’s an instinct that has rarely steered me wrong, and has served me very well in my career as a writer and pseudo-journalist.

The doubters and skeptics can go pound sand.