Okay so this is an old (about a year ago I think) exposition I wrote about me and my brain. It has some repeating topics and points from the previous couple entries but I guess that's a good indication that I haven't strayed too much from where how I think about myself in the past year. Enjoy?
I’ve done some meta thinking on how I think. I’ve tried to analyze how my brain works. The best I’ve come up with is that my brain is a very scary place. Like imagine an old playground at dusk where only one of the swings is still moving despite no wind and no kids. Yea, that’s my brain. It disturbs me on many occasions. But I do find it fascinating when I come across something that makes me react. It could be a certain idea that strikes a chord with me. A certain scene that I can see so very vividly in my mind’s eye. A summary of a story that I want written or to write. A character’s breakdown that resembles how I want to feel. A character’s actions that make me want to scream at the world, ‘Look at what he has done!’ The way a writer has used words to transform something mundane into something brilliant. Same with photographers and the composition of their images. A piece of clothing or facial hair or collar bone that makes me whisper, ‘want.’ A touch, caress, kiss that I so desperately want for myself. It’s the new stuff that makes me think about why I thought that.
My dad and I have very similar brain patterns. Where my mom and my brother have identical ones (it’s very eerie sometimes), my dad and I complement each other. We get the dumb jokes and puns that we come up with. We talk about anything and everything. We work on projects together and catch each other mistakes. It’s like running brains in parallel. I’ve had similar experiences with several friends, not to the same extent, but my male best friend and I got our brains really close for a while in middle and high school. We were/are both weird and it was nice to have someone who didn’t question that, outside of family of course (my family still thinks I am weird but accepts it for the most part). I didn’t have to explain my brain’s leaps and bounds through logic before my best friend saw exactly what I did. I did the same for him. I could predict what he would do and I could head him off when he was going to do something stupid. It was great. But then he went to a different college and we grew apart. I lost track of his brain patterns as I tried to keep up with everyone elses’.
It’s fun to analyse how my thoughts occur. Sometimes they just tumble out like a waterfall and just avalanche down and across until they end up somewhere very far away from the original. Other times my thoughts stay on the straight and narrow, stay on the same track until I’ve gone around the merry-go-round a handful of times without coming up with anything new. When I write it feels like I am looping around and around but somehow I get somewhere. Sometimes thoughts just come to the surface like lily pads rising from the depths of a pond. Some of those thoughts are answers to questions I didn’t even know my subconscious had asked. Sometimes they are subtle, others are like epiphanies. And they aren’t always timely. I remember solving multivariable calculus problems while I was mowing the lawn.
My style of thinking is a combination of nature and nurture. I was given the potential for the range and depth of my thinking and a natural aptitude to pursue my interests, but that potential and aptitude was preciously nurtured my mother. She fed my growing mind at a very young age to a broad range of topics, genres, cultures, possibilities. I chose to interact with people who also wanted to expand their thinking. I was given free reign over my curriculum and imagination. I greedily read all of the fantasy I could, I excelled in and sought out mathematical concepts, I visited museums and dabbled in art to the point of compulsion (I’ll still draw if given a blank piece of paper and five minutes). I developed myself without limitations. I am very creatively logical and have very logical creativity.
In college I had the opportunity to take several psychology courses which I enjoyed tremendously. At the time, I could talk for hours about the various theories and how they could be applied to myself and my world. Now I’ve lost some of the terminology and the names of the theorists but the cores of their ideas stick with me as I continuously analyze myself, my family, and my friends. I do my best to figure people out and I try to keep my beginning assumptions to a minimum because I am aware that everyone sees the world a different way. See George Kelly’s personal construct theories. I find that if I keep this in mind then I can have good conversations with people without dissolving into arguments. But at the same time, I play a lot of devil’s advocate to people’s views whether or not I personally agree with them. I devil’s advocate my own views and arguments a lot. I get into arguments with myself a lot.
I also tend to play out conversations that I want to have with people in order to prepare myself. Unfortunately I am fairly accurate with the people I am close with so I can actually talk myself out of having that conversation. That really doesn’t help with I am looking for advice on what to do with my life. Sometimes people surprise though. And I really dislike talking with people on the phone. I use a lot of facial and bodily context clues that I can’t see over the phone. I’ll psyche myself out over calling someone up because I create conversations in my head of a terrible, stuttering, idiot me despite the fact that when I do actually finally pick up the phone, it usually goes perfectly smoothly. I don’t know why I have such a broken mental perception of myself on the phone.
My mental perspective of myself is strange. I am very independent and always have been and so I am very sure of myself to the point of arrogance. I’ve always had a strong stable core. It’s changed and evolved over time, but I’ve always been Me. You would think that would make me a better person, that I could see and fix my flaws a lot easier that way, but instead I just sorta stare at them and say, yup, that’s me. It’s not that I don’t want to fix my flaws but it’s that I am too lazy to do so. But I am very aware of them and tend to incorporate them into my perception of the world and into my predictions of what will happen in actions or conversations. While the brain can be a very powerful motivator when there is a will behind it, it is also a fairly large obstacle.
Despite all of my introspection and meta-thinking aided by time, psychology, and experience, I still can’t figure out how my brain works. All I know is that it’s pretty scary sometimes.
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