Thinking at the Speed of Light

Thinking at the Speed of Light

[It's about time for a new blog.  I warn you, this one maybe a bit heavy for some.  So, keep any open mind and try to believe I mean it all in a good way.]

So "Thinking at the Speed of Light" is, of course, an exaggeration, but not much of one really.  I have read and studied the bipolar condition – dozens of books, some deeply scientific and medical, others more about people who live with it.  Some, many I should say, have this condition in a far more severe form than I do.  My own diagnosis is fairly light, on the less severe end of the scale.

However, at some point, I always seem to go too far.  There is no mature conscious thought in it.  Something hits the wrong key and something totally inappropriate comes out of my head.  It is not always a particular thing, more often the accumulation of many different things.  This is why I seem to jerk around in fast conversations, stand up at weird times and my voice will begin to quiver, or choke off completely.  It is never my intention to speak inappropriately.

I am not apologizing for my bipolar condition, sometimes I do have to be precise about just what it is and the symptoms and side effects of the medication program I am on to control it.  Friends have said, I am appreciated and cared about, and I believe that.  I do believe it.  However, my brain is still sort of cracked, it will never be “cured”, I deal with it and everything as best I can.  There are and will be times when I may react very “inappropriately” as a means of immediate unthinking self-protection.

It is always very embarrassing for me.  It sticks in my mind, each time, forever.  I feel the judgment of others like needles in my heart.  And occasionally the medications I am on stop working and I have to go through a whole new program of trial and error(s) with new ones.  So just imagine the mostly calm and quiet guy people generally assume is me, and understand just how much willpower and energy it can take for me to maintain that when my brain feels like walnuts being ground up in a Quizinart. 

This is where the thinking at the speed of light comes in to it.  Every time, every single time, I find myself in a conversation I find my mind racing to analyze what is expected of me in order to participate – as a reasonable person.  You see, when discussing books or something intellectual my brain can go into overdrive and somehow I can remember everything I have ever read, the author, the context, sometimes almost the very page on which I read it.  My vocabulary can become Nobel Laureate in nature and people don’t know half the words I am using.  I always have to stop and define or explain things.

At other times I draw a complete blank.  If pushed, I can’t remember my wife’s name.  Where exactly I live.  Even simple words escape me.  The ole noodle just shuts down.  This is usually when the conversation turns to politics.  Somehow politics gets my heart rate going like a rabbit and my brain goes into dumb.  I admit I am a Political Progressive (I don’t like the term Liberal, because all the nut-case neo-cons have made the word Liberal into something that is heard as profane – fuck their hard hearts).  I just don’t think it is possible to fix problems by ignoring them, hating them, blowing them up or shooting them in the head.  I don’t think wars work and I have been in one.

So some subjects, like politics, I have to try and stay away from.  I can handle it at the voting booth, I just can’t handle it in a polite conversation.  Then there is Fundamentalist Religion.  I can take plain Religious Faith, just not the Fundamentalist “The Bible is the only true, literal word of GOD!”  “And everybody better get on board or we’re gonna shoot you for that one too.”  Or, the Muslim Extremists or any of them.  I’ve studied the Bible and the Koran and the Torah and all that Mechezalbub, and the People of Shafram Ifram Apendico wiping out the people of Whoopieduppee because they cut the Lord’s sacrificial chicken in the wrong direction, is just too much bullshit for me.

“Well, it’s in how you interpret  it.”  How can it be literal if you have to interpret it to have it make any sense?  So just to keep all of my deeply religious friends, of whom I have many (and I do love them as friends, from many many years of friendship) I have to keep my mouth shut because my brain won’t stop shouting, “How can you honestly believe that crap!!!)?”  As much as I love them, I respect them, so it leaves me wandering in a murky mental quandary. 

In so many situations, I have to keep all the thoughts flying across my inner mental mind screen, like the subtitles during a foreign movie from moving so fast I can’t properly read them.  It seems like there are twenty or thirty of these moving lines of mental text streaming behind my eyes all the time.  And, often the languages are not always English – or, at least I can’t totally make out what language they are.  I have to pick one and do all I can to focus just on that one.  Laser in on it, if possible.  Blot out, push away somehow, all the others. 

I force myself to swallow down the disrespectful or hurtful words, or random chunks of sentences, that pop into my head as a reaction to some quip or witticism from an acquaintance.  And, there are some people who just revel in making fun of, or attempting to make a fool of other people.  The first thing out of their mouth will be some witty comment on a hat you happen to be wearing, or the fact that you’re trying to park your motorcycle, or your tie is a funky color – something hahha witty.  Swallow down the “Fuck You!”.  Swallow down the “You know I just donated a pair of shoes like yours to the Veterans Thrift.”  No “You should go to a professional Barber, having your dog chew your hair like that, is just not working for you.”

The thing I have come to appreciate is how my religious friends, and even a few who are rather towards the neo-con side of politics is how they – in particular – are unaffected (I say unaffected, when I reveal my disability).  Seriously, the biggest issue seems to be with people who are stuck in the middle – people who haven’t stretched their minds in much of any manner at all.  I find kindness can crop up in the most unlikely places and people and the same thing is true of bigotry and stigma.

So the next time you encounter a person who seems to have a problem relating on the common plain (plane), as you view it, trust that what might be passing through their mind is so far beyond your own comprehension you might give them a little love and understanding.

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