Thoughts

A while ago I wrote a post about what I call (‘the Stranger’)[/blog/2015/10/stranger-danger]. This constant nagging of “What would someone think if a random stranger walked in right now?”. That there’s this indefinable hypothetical person who is always ready to judge, who’s just off-stage ready to pounce.

Recently I’ve noticed that I think it extends far beyond that. I realized that, when I’m in a situation where I feel fear of what someone may think of me, it feels the same for every person (with a few exceptions). The feeling that I’m going to be judged as unpunctual from my dad feels the same as the feeling of being judged as unpunctual by a doctor’s secretary. I don’t feel “Oh no Lucy will think X of me”, it’s just “someone will feel X of me”.

What I think I’ve realized is that it feels the same because it is the same. It feels like all people are the same person. Like every person who can potentially judge me (i.e. everyone) is part of a hive mind. Like Agent Smith in The Matrix. Like I’m in a video game and everyone is an NPC, and it’s really the Game that I’m interacting with, who is judging me. Or like they’re all being possessed by the same entity.

It’s not as though depression or anxiety are things that I talk about often. They don’t generally make good small talk. But from the talks I’ve had, I’ve noticed a few trends. From people I sorta know to people I consider close, each have their own types of questions and venues of conversation. That even deeper “levels” of intimacy can have questions that come off as shallow or less helpful than intended.

All of these can come from a place of care, I want to make that clear. And in some cases they’re very acceptable questions that can help. It’s only in some of my own situations -whether it be the way it’s delivered or even just my current emotional stability at the time- I find that they can make me want to shut down rather than open up.

I’ve been thinking about them partly to try to understand the person asking, but also to try to understand myself in how I receive it. To figure out what I think the problem is with the way they’re asking, and how that thought -true or not- effects the way I interact with other people.

Life is complex. I’ll definitely admit that. There are a million different ways to explain and define the causes and effects of a situation and it’s seldom that one can say with one hundred percent certainty, especially when there is human behavior involved. But I kind of have a theory about how my current progress, and treatment, is going in terms of health and psychology.

One of the more damning symptoms that have emerged since this whole chronic illness thing kicked off is how horribly my memory has been effected. For a while it was so bad that it felt like I could hardly function; you’d ask me a question and I’d just sit there in silence, not because of an “on the tip of my tongue” feeling but because I my brain wasn’t giving me the words for the thought I wanted to express. It feels like trying to use the web when the internet is down. The wheel just keeps spinning but the page never loads.

It always reminds me of the movie Memento where the lead character can no longer form long-term memories and thus has to “remember” things by taking polaroid photographs. I’m not quite that bad, but ever since the chronic illness really started getting serious, I’ve quite literally felt like I can’t remember past a certain point in the past. It felt like my brain suddenly gated them off and wouldn’t pull up anything; childhood memories, events, dates, and most importantly, myself.

I have a constant temptation with this blog to post things that I see online that I can relate to. There’s no shortage of them, especially on Tumblr; graphics and images of things that make me go “this expresses how I feel perfectly!”

They can be both negative and positive. There are images of encouragement of how things could be (many of which I find to be shallow and cliche), but there are also the depressing ones that describe how things are now. For some reason the negative ones feel better, I guess because it’s more cathartic, and I won’t deny to having a folder of them saved to my PC. But even though I have nights were I seek the comfort of seeing such images, I don’t think they’re actually helpful, and that’s what I want this blog to be.