Static and Books
No Static
Today I’m lucky. I can think clearly, which means I might actually get some things done that I’ve been dragging on doing–small tasks like putting away one small basket of laundry so I can wash my unmentionables, cleaning some fountain pens so I can put them away, and some work on my 150+ book To Be Read pile. A literal pile, as most of it’s non-fiction and I much prefer reading non-fiction in physical form.
But other days…static. And I thought I could share how that feels in my brain.
Static
I am working to identify the cause of the static, because it’s become a serious impediment to my day to day living (I’m hoping it’s as easy to fix as incompatible meds). But in the meantime, a description.
In the center, my brain. My precious, neurodiverse brain that tries to keep me protected. It’s working fine, even if I think different than I did before my traumatic brain injury 6 years ago. I used to visualize it as a literal file cabinet with neatly labeled folders and information in each of the folders. My brain is not so good with the filing anymore, so everything’s scattered.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that I do a lot of lateral thinking, to make connections. That’s worked well for me in the past but not so much over the past few years. I’ve never been good at logic puzzles; I am more of an intuitive thinker than a logical one. Kirk instead of Spock, I guess is as good an analogy as anything else.
So just outside my brain is a layer of static. I’m starting to develop one as I’m writing this. Some days it’s a thin layer and I can get things done, albeit more slowly that I’d like. This is where my checklists and cheat sheets come in handy at work–they’re something I can rely on when there’s static.
But more often than a thin layer, it’s a thicker layer and it presses in on my brain, making it harder for information to make it out of my brain. This is one reason I have morning rituals. Every morning, I get up and get dressed (after a shower if it’s a shower day), start making coffee and then take my meds. And I have just remembered that I forgot to take my meds today because my coffee routine wasn’t the same as it usually is. So I’ll be right back.
So this layer of static. It makes it harder for me to verbally articulate things I’ve done or why I’ve done them–in part because it takes me longer to do the mental processing, because my brain’s being squished. Which I know is frustrating for other people, but it’s also extremely frustrating for me because it makes me feel vulnerable and stupid
And then the static is at its worst, there’s an associated phenomenon, which is that I can literally feel physical pressure building up at the front of my head, behind my eyes and sinuses, just pressing, pressing, pressing.
There are things that can lessen the static and pressure, but they are few and far between: reading an interesting book, painting, singing with my chorale, sometimes knitting and watching something interesting on television…but that’s not exactly a whole lot of things.
Writing isn’t on the list, which is something I mourn. I do a lot of journaling and I’ve finally found a tarot deck that I vibe with and I write out the story that the cards tell me, but all this is handwritten, not digital. Which means I think of things I want to write about here and I can’t, because writing here causes the brain fog to get worse.
And then, of course, there’s my anxiety disorder overlaid on top of all of this, which just makes things even harder. I want to do more writing and be better at other things, but it’s so very hard.
Anyhow.
The Giant TBR List
Last week, I decided to finally get my TBR in order and set up a book log. I’m using my Hippo Noto notebook, which I literally waited to get for four years–I’d assumed I wasn’t ever going to get it. It’s 500 pages of Tomoe River paper, with a dot grid.
The first thing I did was to attack the bookcase in the bedroom, which is where all my TBR non-fiction lives. I sorted them roughly by topic, moving the books I’d finished or wasn’t going to finish (Anne Helen Peterson’s Can’t Even, I am looking at you since you decided that the only generation that could suffer from burnout was yours) to the bottom shelf. Then I made a list of them all. Then I hopped onto the Kindle app on my computer and sorted out everything that wasn’t in a collection into an unread one and created a collection for books in progress.
Then I made few more collections: one for fiction that’s unread, one for fiction that’s in progress, and another for non-fiction. And then I made a few more lists in the notebook, including one for everything that’s in progress.
I also have a separate list for poetry, because I want to start writing poetry again, but I need to fill my brain up with more poetry than the bits and pieces of Yeats and Shelley I remember from college which was…a very long time ago.
It is…a lot. But it’s good to see how much reading material I have available, since I"m putting myself on a book budget except for some selected books.
And I’m also making notes about the books as I finish them (I’ve finished a few short books that I prioritized as easy wins), with the idea to steal a page from Marissa Lingen’s blog, where she writes short summaries of books she’s read recently. I’ve always admired the sheer amount of reading Marissa manages every month and I’d say that I want to be like her when I grow up, but that would be weird for both of us.
At any rate, I feel like I finally have a handle on what I have for reading material which is honestly a pretty good feeling. Even the slightest bit of getting control over my mental landscape is useful–now the list of what I have to read is offloaded onto physical media and I don’t have to use my brain anymore to track it.