Undiary
On knowing too much and saying too little
Last month, I published every day at Inkhaven. No way was I going to keep that pace up after the residency ended. But now it seems I’m writing nothing at all. This is my second post in two-and-a-half weeks. Nothing!
Sure, I have plenty left to say. Several of my fellow residents reassured me of that. They wondered, like everyone who’s talked to me for more than five minutes – or like that one 12-year-old asked me once, when I was 5 – how do I know so much?
Well, I have a sticky brain. It’s in my nature to hyperfocus, to find everything interesting. Before I can even consent, a deep part of me grabs at the kernels of information and squirrels them away, as though in fear of some never-ending winter of unknowing.
Don’t be quick to envy this trait of mine. It’s complicated. Until my mid-20s, there wasn’t much incentive for me to be a person with coherent preferences. High school was stressful, but it was trivial. What use are independence or agency, when you can absorb everything that any teacher requires of you, and all your joy is in the exploration, and some of the other students hate and demean you for it? No, no, you double-down and paper over your mind with even more ideas, more ideas all the time, at the expense of everything else.
You ask him what time it is, and he tells you how a fucking clock works.
A perceptive acquaintance, once upon a time
Undergrad was not much more difficult than high school, but the cracks in my personality started to widen. Life in a distant city! No more parents and no more overseers! Suddenly I could kiss people and drink alcohol and have all sorts of new experiences. (I was still almost too timid to have them.) All those delights – plus the realization of what I’d been denied – stood out in my mind, pointy as any of the ideas I’d loved. Because the source of my “talent” was never simply “memorizing schoolwork” – it was “having pointy senses”. The one leads into the other.
You can cover that in the “autism” umbrella if you want. You’re half-right, at least. But how much does that label help me? Usually it feels more like a conversation-ender. Now we know what MLL is. Phew! Now we can move on.
A lot has happened since undergrad. I went to grad school for the first time. To do research, you need to have preferences. Shit. How do you do that? The view from the inside of being-a-hoard-of-information is that everything is contextual. Words and objects are convenient packages, but actually, everything is connected. Interest is everywhere and nowhere. I didn’t start my master’s program in fluid dynamics because of a strong pull towards the field, nor was there some other direction pulling strongly-enough-away to make me quit. All around were cliffs, and my fear to approach them. I lingered for months and months, near-motionless and slowly imploding.
Of course, in the end I had to quit. And to move forward, I’d have to learn to choose something. But how? How could I build up “I should focus on something“ against the onslaught of “I am focusing on everything“? At the time, I couldn’t. I grew depressed. I languished for years.
Suffering isn’t the incentive any of us deserve, but it’s the one I got. Slowly, slowly, it bent me towards defined interests and introspective competence. I grew a fulcrum.
Now I have the capacity to act on my own behalf. I can choose what to say! Sometimes though, if I don’t spend time talking with the friends who help me to keep my interests bound, my mind runs overboard, adrift in the ocean of ideas. No words volunteer themselves. I know everything, which is nothing. And I can say nothing.
This post is to remind me that I have changed, that I’ve found a better way, and that there are friends I should talk to more.