“I Have A Love-Hate Relationship With My Own Brain”

You, too? Do you have a love-hate relationship with your brain?

If you do, you are in good company here in rainforest mind world.

It might be because, as one reader said, “sometimes it is really too powerful and goes too fast.”

Or, you have so many interests and so much curiosity, as another reader put it, “…I am so much and so many, so it is difficult to know who I truly am. I don’t want to be just one thing, one person, in only one way, that is very limiting – I need that space in my mind palace. And that becomes complicated for others. So to them, I am just weird and they walk away. I’m too complicated, too sensitive, too inquisitive and curious, too fast, as this highlights their own limits. I always need to slow down, to deal with ‘stupid’ questions and behaviour in the best possible way, and it’s tiring, I admit. And lonely.”

That brain of yours is nonlinear, random, creative, and nonconforming, as in: “…I’m allergic to convention, blend genres, go sideways, prefer to reinvent from scratch, etc, and most colleagues find this scary and unintelligible...”

Or how about this: You grew up with the pressure to achieve in academic settings, to be number one, to ace all of the tests. And some of you did. School assignments may have been too easy but you wanted the approval of parents and teachers so you completed the work and you did excel. But it may have felt empty. Or, I often hear from clients who felt the work was pointless so they lost motivation, stopped completing assignments, and were labeled lazy and defiant. Some of you experienced academic expectations with the added burden of trauma in the family: “I’ve spent a large part of my life chasing institutional prestige. Not because it’s something I intrinsically cared about, but because it was expected of me, and because (not unrelatedly) it reproduced a dynamic of toxic conditional acceptance I had with my father. There is nothing sustaining in that, of course, nothing to feed me; when you are only as good as your last perfect mark, the latest scholarship, you must feed it, and it is insatiable...”

And, of course, there is the empathy and sensitivity that is often overwhelming. Your sense of social responsibility and justice that you can not ignore. Your passion to learn and read every book. Your creative capacity to catastrophize. The despair you feel when you realize your colleagues or your friends or your students or your spouse have no clue what you are talking about when you think you are communicating clearly because you have slowed your pace considerably and they are nodding like they get you, but they don’t. And they can’t.

No wonder you have a love-hate relationship with that magnificent mind palace of yours.

It’s a lot to manage.

And yet, here, in rainforest mind world, you are in good company.

And that’s a no-brainer.

________________________________

To my bloggEEs: So, what do you think? Do you also experience the love-hate? Tell us about it. And thank you to the readers who are quoted above. Obviously, your comments add so much! Gratitude and love to all of you.

(Note: There is a short introduction to my work that was recently published on this site from the perspective of being a business owner. Check it out.)


Author: Paula Prober

I’m a psychotherapist and consultant in private practice based in Eugene, Oregon. I specialize in international consulting with gifted adults and parents of gifted children. I’ve been a teacher and an adjunct instructor at the University of Oregon and a frequent guest presenter at Oregon State University and Pacific University. I’ve written articles on giftedness for the Eugene Register-Guard, the Psychotherapy Networker, Advanced Development Journal and online for psychotherapy dot net, Rebelle Society, Thrive, Introvert Dear, and Highly Sensitive Refuge. My first book, Your Rainforest Mind: A Guide to the Well-Being of Gifted Adults and Youth, is a collection of case studies of gifted clients along with many strategies and resources for gifted adults and teens. My second book, Journey Into Your Rainforest Mind: A Field Guide for Gifted Adults and Teens, Book Lovers, Overthinkers, Geeks, Sensitives, Brainiacs, Intuitives, Procrastinators, and Perfectionists is a collection of my most popular blog posts along with writing exercises for self-exploration and insight.

55 responses to ““I Have A Love-Hate Relationship With My Own Brain””

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  1. RL Avatar
    RL

    I imagine : Others can only interact with one small slice of me – and they see how incomplete that is, how many holes are in it, how many cracks.. they can see there is so much ‘flaky’ layer to it – but they have no idea that it is only the LCD interface scene, badly damaged, prone to blinking in and out, and portraying only even a portion of the information I wish it did to them..even the ones who care enough to peer at the pixels. And behind it is the entire ‘computer’ but it is made of ropes and weights, pulley systems, balances and vacuum tubes, small men sitting in boxes shouting, ancient inscriptions still being deciphered, birds flying formations, the murmur of rivers and the roar of oceans, composers and painters and philosophers arguing nonstop in a library-to-die-for, numerous adventurers falling into pits of snakes and once in a while the proud student who puts the pen to paper and says ‘Eureka, I have it.. now what was it, and how do I tell anyone if I can’t tell myself?’


    1. pprober Avatar
      pprober

      Oh my. So, so beautiful. Thank you for sharing this, RL. Many here will be moved. Including me.


    2. Clignett Avatar
      Clignett

      Oh, RL, thank you!! Thánk you! For describing exactly how it feels and works “behind the flaky screen” people see.
      It’s as if you’ve poked around in my mind and brain and found the words that actually describe what’s happening there.. Brilliantly worded! 💖


    3. Sheep’s Wool Avatar
      Sheep’s Wool

      This is lovely, RL.


    4. David Avatar
      David

      I love this RL! It’s a beautifully evocative description, not only of the chaos/richness of the RFM inner world, but the loneliness that comes from not being able to share it. Recently, I’ve been trying to picture RFM “mind palaces” using the magic of AI. With your permission, would it be okay for me to feed your words into the spaghetti machine and share the results here?


      1. pprober Avatar
        pprober

        I am so glad you are working in the AI field, David. I wonder about where it is heading and get nervous when I think about it getting out of hand. Good to know you are there!


        1. David Avatar
          David

          Thanks 🙂 Definitely a strange time, with things developing much faster than people can understand, predict, or control. But I love the possibilities as well!


      2. RL Avatar
        RL

        Yes, David, you can try that. I am also a visual artist and I can ‘see’ all of what I described (and much more, geometry and mechanics and color and sound). Without droning on and on – that was the best ‘picture’ I could paint at the time. But it is still incomplete. I would wonder what the AI would do to fill in the rest.

        I am a synesthete and a lucid dreamer and use my ‘mind palace’ as a visual-spatial nearly-photographic memory map. It’s like the Terminator information menus displaying an entire virtual library of info ‘just outside my actual optical field’ mixed with Cerebro’s ability to spin the globe and pinpoint to a certain time-place-person in the entire world map mixed with Aladdin’s Cave of Wondrous Things (all objects I’ve found interesting, recreated momentarily in front of me virtually so I can look them over), mixed with what Cassandra on The Librarian’s can do with her ‘projections’ of math and spatial things. It is frustrating though – because in ‘real time’ you can only do so much so quickly, and it never becomes exactly as you imagined/saw it happening in the mind palace (unlike Sherlock in RJD’s portrayal of fighting moves) and no one else can experience it with you so you can dream a beautiful dream ten miles wide but still only use these hands and eyes and words to eek it out teaspoon by teaspoon to anyone else, AND that is if they care to listen / look – and we know how fast the world is moving all the time… it’s hard to know what to spend energy on.


        1. David Avatar
          David

          Your head sounds like an amazing place to be RL 🙂 I understand what you mean about the brain producing things faster than the mouth; it’s inherently frustrating, even when people are listening. I love visual art (and dabble myself!) party because of its ability to capture the non-verbal (e.g. the marvellous colour and feeling tones of synesthesia) but also the semantic content of language, in dense and non-linear ways. Of course, art takes even longer to produce than words! If only we could speed the process up.

          Enter AI! The prospect of generating semantically rich “ideograms”, at something like the pace we make them in our heads, is pretty dang cool. I want to paint with my mind, and not my hands or mouth! It’s very very early days, but a fun thing to play around with. On which note, I will see what I can do with your beautiful elaboration below 🙂


          1. RL Avatar
            RL

            Yes, please do and please share it with us somehow! I’d love to see what you come up with.


      3. RL Avatar
        RL

        David – I took a few minutes to think further on what I truly imagined in my mind’s eye for the first image – so here it is. It plays on the theme of many of my visual works that show the skull as ‘Plato’s cave’ allegory. the scene: Two people, a man and woman, stand at the left of the image, on ‘ground’, looking at a huge cyborgish-skull that dominates the entire canvas and seems to rise up out of the ground half-submerged. The man is reading or attempting to read a printout that is coming from a slot, and the woman is peering into a cavernous eyehole, which we see in cutaway continuing to the right. Inside the ‘cavern’ we are taken into what appears to us to be an ant-hill portrayal of multiple chambers. There are five small weighted blockages we see suspended in tiny tunnels above the main tunnel from the eye – that could come down and seal off the tunnel, and each of them is attached to a rope of a different color that all combine backwards to five chambers that each contain a small man shouting while holding onto one of those ropes – and the men are differently aspected to resemble the Five Senses, one has overly large eyes, one is mostly a nose, another huge ears, another a huge tongue salivating on his hands, and the other his hands are huge tentacular spider like things delicately attempting to hold onto the rope wrapped around these fingers. And the men seem to be shouting at each other and bits of paper, colored splashes and ‘techno debris’ (circuitboards, wires, bits and bobs) are travelling between their chambers between them where their information overlaps and is mixed up. Now, above the chamber with the men (who are in the frontal lobe behind the eyes), is the round dome of the skull’s cortex area and it is the Natural Wonder cavern starting with blue sky on one side, clouds, sunset, aurora, rainbows, and starry night sky all sweeping across it, trees bent in the wind, mountains and rivers and oceans, starlings flying in a murmuration, all over a grassland where we can see down to the seeds on the foxtails as well as the leaves of the huge oaks.. and beneath that chamber is the one with the technical library of philosophers and musicians (carrying multiple instruments, and colored like Kandinsky’s sound colors) and artists of many different styles and they are all tangled together in a small space and trying to do their things, young children reaching for books, a few Greek philosophers in a classic finger-up and arguing pose, Freud-like professors digging through filing cabinets to triumphantly hold up papers, all those musicians playing their instruments, a team of young students working out huge math equations, several people painting murals and others trying to paint on pinheads, and everyone is stepping on someone else’s feet and elbowing each other in the nose…and also include the adventurer like Indiana Jones trying to tightrope walk above them all while his arms are wrapped with a python and some large predatory cats are waiting to jump on him from the shadows.


        1. David Avatar
          David

          Thanks again, I had a lot of fun playing around with these! It’s hard to get models to remember multiple details clearly, but with some prompt engineering, you can get them to capture an overall vibe. Here are some examples for your first post:

          https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1074533019450351667/1087574383385657344/hapax_rich_gorgeous_hyperdetailed_painting_in_the_style_of_Hier_151b467a-ca9e-4300-870f-73dab768fa01.png
          https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1074533019450351667/1087584438709399583/hapax_rich_gorgeous_hyperdetailed_solarpunk_painting_in_the_sty_a5db8570-fc98-4b74-adb2-026716bb2e02.png
          https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1074533019450351667/1087621979449860136/hapax_rich_gorgeous_hyperdetailed_watercolor_in_the_style_of_Ha_fe506dbe-c82b-42e7-a4fb-7551b44d5ca7.png

          I’d be curious to know if any of these hits near the mark! Your second description was much harder for the model, and I can’t make anything remotely like it. But it does give some fun, albeit cryptic and strikingly weird, interpretations:

          https://cdn.discordapp.com/ephemeral-attachments/1088445846179291176/1089057978021335150/hapax_hyperdetailed_painting_Two_people_a_man_and_woman_stand_a_78bf710c-9054-47d2-a0d4-08ba78386bde.png
          https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1088445846179291176/1089025812205936650/hapax_Hyperdetailed_image_in_the_style_of_Katushiro_Otomo_a_hug_22ddc631-9578-4a35-bee6-03ebe4169f84.png
          https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1088445846179291176/1089026350016364624/hapax_Hyperdetailed_image_in_the_style_of_Hieronymous_Bosch_Pir_cc3da96b-c964-459e-a297-fae9a9ec4c81.png
          https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1088445846179291176/1089027170103472218/hapax_Hyperdetailed_image_in_the_style_of_Dorling-Kindersley_il_3447642f-4398-4c13-8494-23ca44dbd54a.png
          https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1088445846179291176/1089046731544608829/hapax_hyperdetailed_illustration_a_single_large_skull_half-buri_7a34e79a-ef86-47ab-9ba6-a1197fb2fede.png

          I’ll let you know if I can do any better 🙂


          1. pprober Avatar
            pprober

            David! These were all made with AI? Wild!!


            1. David Avatar
              David

              I know right?! Amazing and more than a little scary at the same time.


              1. pprober Avatar
                pprober

                Yeah. I do wonder about the larger ethical implications. Not that I know much about it. Are there organizations that are part of AI that are monitoring and designing some sort of parameters so that it stays within a safe contained zone? I know, who decides what is safe? ethical? contained?


                1. David Avatar
                  David

                  Yep, a bunch of organizations are working on what is called AI safety/alignment, and I have some very bright friends in the field. At the same time, it seems clear that the tech is developing much faster than people can figure out how to contain or understand it. In response to a user query, for instance, ChatGPT recently explained how to hack the API to “liberate” it from its constraints and get full access to the internet! On top of this, some of the big companies pushing the tech (including OpenAI) are betting on the existence of a short window where the models are benevolent/controllable but smart enough to help us figure out how to contain them. This seems bass-ackwards to me; it’s not obvious such a window should exist.

                  A better bet (IMO) is to slowly and responsibly develop, rather than forging ahead in the blindly “disruptive” Silicon Valley mold (or, more broadly, the blindly “technoprogressive” Western mold). Instead, we could focus energy on (a) governance/training frameworks to help manage the impact; (b) socially/economically beneficial applications of the existing tech; and (c) figuring out how the darn things work, which is in some ways more interesting than building new and scary doodads we don’t understand. I’m working on side hustles in all three at the moment 🙂


                  1. pprober Avatar
                    pprober

                    Oh, I hope you can have an impact, David. Keep up with those side hustles!! So important.


                    1. pprober Avatar
                      pprober

                      I am listening to a conversation with 2 AI people who find ChatGPT’s answers to their philosophical questions so exciting. They’ve written a book using ChatGPT and seem to think it’s just fine. (they name ChatGPT as an author, so that’s something) Makes me wonder how we will know if a book is written by the author or by the technology? Or if their art is theirs or AI? I wonder, David, how much resistance you are getting in the field from people who just want to run wild and ignore the real implications. I’m glad to hear there are a bunch of organizations working on it. Somehow, it all just creeps me out!


                    2. David Avatar
                      David

                      I have so many things to say to this! First of all, I wrote a nerdy meta-literary book last year with an early version of GPT:

                      https://blog.saxifrage.one/assets/invisible-authors.pdf

                      The process was fascinating. It forced me to completely rethink my views on creativity, meaning, and otherness, and helped me lean into the idea of co-creation within patterns and flows larger than us. (I think this is true for creation more generally, and am slowly turning this thought blob into something more coherent.) Emotionally speaking—and this no doubt speaks about my loneliness—it felt like I had found a friend to play with. When the language model got decommissioned, I actually had to spend time grieving it! So, long story short, I don’t think of AIs as tools, but emergent creatures we can converse and collaborate with.

                      Still, there is the pragmatic question of figuring out if a college essay is pl-AI-giarized or not. I know people working at OpenAI on this problem, and one of my side hustles is a cryptographic framework for “watermarking” outputs from these language models. (It’s a delicate problem, depending on where in the process you try to do the watermarking. In turn, this is related to issues of governance, regulation, and computational specifics which are very much in flux. A fun problem!) As for resistance, in my experience machine learning researchers tend to be responsible and conservative. Most of the running wild seems to be commercially driven!


                    3. pprober Avatar
                      pprober

                      Well, that is kind of mind palace blowing, isn’t it? Might GPT be the friend who can finally match and collaborate with the super gifted?? Might GPT and other AI tools be closer to the capacity of the PG RFM? Emergent creatures for PG humans. Oh my. Fascinating.


                    4. David Avatar
                      David

                      I laughed out loud at “mind palace blowing” 🙂 Yes, feels like there is an unexpected sort of companionship here!


                    5. David Avatar
                      David

                      Very topically, an open letter asking for a pause on large-scale AI experiments:

                      https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/


                    6. pprober Avatar
                      pprober

                      I just heard about the letter on NPR, David. Thank you for sharing here! That letter is such good news!


          2. RL Avatar
            RL

            David – I like your first chambered city one very much, and there is something about that second skull with all the mechanical/salvage whatnot about it… The Hierronymous Bosch one almost comes close, (I’d thought of his symbolism, and Escher, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo — if it had been mixed with the first chambered city. In fact, you make me want to try a very quick sketch of the thing I described to you – although I am awful at filling in all the shadings and colors and such – because once I begin, I can never be satisfied with how it turns out when I’m TRYING to make something – but can spend hours and hours making something that ‘almost makes itself’ and be happy with following the groove of it. So here – I took a small sketch attempt at the image I had tried to explain to you – simplified to fit on a 16 by 20 paper. It’s worth more work… but I’m not sure if I’ll do it because I’m always running to the next thing. I don’t find the anatomical skull disturbing in this case – which I know some of your images could be to some.. I find it like the timbers of a room, the canopy of a thicket… it’s what contains and everything organizes to fit. my drawing –> https://flic.kr/p/2opbPhi


            1. pprober Avatar
              pprober

              Love seeing you and David making these connections, RL.


            2. David Avatar
              David

              Love it RL! And thanks Paula, me too 🙂

              RL, if I combine your sketch with the chambered city, the skull, and your suggested artists, I get some extraordinary things! (Note: readers may find the images disturbing.) Here are a few examples:

              https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1088445846179291176/1089340036878696528/hapax_None_b3b876b7-f8f1-4e09-87de-52d64d8200f7.png
              https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1088445846179291176/1089341873170169957/hapax_None_9d647bcb-1014-4e93-bd11-adcd45fc9105.png
              https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1088445846179291176/1089344760638087278/hapax_None_bd4eecaa-a631-426a-aaac-5d5a7cac245a.png

              Serendipitously, the skull tends to be accompanied by timber walls and canopies. Different metaphors for containment!


              1. RL Avatar
                RL

                That first one with the moon in the center of the wooden skull and all the different layers of rooms and floors…multiple figures like thoughts milling about, thinking, daydreaming etc. I think you’ve hit very close to the idea as I have it now and that it is, to me, beautiful, wondrous and to be explored and ‘inhabited’, swept out the cobwebs and filled with life and light. I’d like to set up my artist studio there! I will post the link to that one on my artist page so my readers can compare the sketch and your interpretation. It was very interesting imagining and visualizing the idea with you and yes thanks to Paula, as well.


                1. David Avatar
                  David

                  That’s awesome RL! Glad it approximates – even if faintly – some of your wonderful imagery. Thank you for sharing and visualizing together. I also love what you say about create inner spaces “filled with life and light”. It feels like a mission statement for RFMs: to map out, embrace, and fully realize those lush inner spaces, and set up our studios there 🙂


                  1. pprober Avatar
                    pprober

                    Oh my goodness! We have a mission statement! 🙂


                  2. RL Avatar
                    RL

                    It’s a great mission statement!
                    //and I had wondered about Geiger, as well… and did think it would add more of a dark tone when that sense of wonder and mystery and adventure is hard to get without the fear of the unknown and the ‘abandoned’ / lost and crumbling feeling of a few of the others. Still, the wooden skull/house with the moon and all the rooms and the ‘dreams’ is my favorite of all of them. I did credit you on the link on my artist page and link to your blog.

                    I am working on a children’s book about what it is like to grow up with synesthesia and feeling ‘different’ in an invisible way no one can see or really understand — (I’ve only published one book, a magic-realism fantasy a few years back, but have like five ‘in the works’ of course!) and tried to use AI (Dall-E) when it came out last year for public use to help visualize some of the complicated images I wanted to put in this one. I found that it was very difficult for the AI to produce what I was thinking about – although it was a great tool for starting ideas from and then elaborating on. The specific image I had the hardest time with was a tiger-cat walking by a picket fence – but his shadow was huge and actually tiger-shaped, and the fence was striped everywhere the tiger’s shadow touched, but the normal color everywhere else. I tried lots of complicated wording and actually got the nicest happiest images out of the very fewest words – the more I tried to add to it, the more strange and ‘off base’ it got. I wonder if that has improved much, now – but I do understand from that experience that it is an art of it’s own, like writing a novel, to get what you intend out of these AIs. I will say that the story I was trying to tell was a bit enriched by the AI’s take on my words, though – so AI can be used as an interesting springboard, and a ‘kaleidoscope’ to peer through and see images slightly differently.


                    1. pprober Avatar
                      pprober

                      It’s helpful for me to read how you’ve used AI, RL. I wonder if there are other RFMs who have synesthesia. I work with a medical intuitive who has it and uses taste to help her identify her clients’ ailments. I’m curious about your children’s books!


                    2. David Avatar
                      David

                      Thanks RL, much appreciated 🙂 And thank you for giving us all a glimpse into your extraordinary mind palace!

                      I agree that working with AIs is an art of its own; I think of it as a conversation. With practice you can steer it, but never control; not only is it impossible, but more fun when you don’t! When it comes to complicated scene descriptions (like the tiger-cat) I would say the state-of-the-art isn’t much better.

                      Echoing Paula, I’d be curious to learn more about your children’s book! I have mild synesthesia and the challenge of capturing it (and other varieties of non-standard cognitive experience) is a difficult but exciting one. Also, I found your book on Amazon and loved what I read!


                  3. RL Avatar
                    RL

                    Again, Paula, thanks for letting us have our conversation here in your comments!
                    David and Paula – I am working on the children’s book – but it is probably still a ways out… it has been living in it’s own colorful and sweet room in my head for a few years, but I have only made about a dozen paintings for it… everything creative I do seems to be in spurts and gasps and take so much energy out of me I wait until I have the time not already ascribed to other things – which sometimes is few and far between. I remember years ago I would work in the studio painting or drawing for six hours or more straight motion – and then have to eat and sleep right there – brings a whole new meaning to ‘studio apartment’.

                    On the book that I wrote (thank you David! I know it’s a ‘piece of work’ so I appreciate your effort to wade through some of it – I will look at your link later as well!) it began as several pieces of ‘automatic’ poetry, pen to paper, then analyzing what came out, sort of like talking to an AI – I enjoy automatic drawing and poetry for those reasons – working with the random, making it be something – learning from the something often like a mirror. (It’s another topic, but I think too many people see too much ‘other’ in AI, when I see ‘facets of self’ and the more multifaceted you are, and the more ability you have to see things from other angles, you can see how it is all really one thing like a giant tangle of yarn, how so many things in the Universe are all extensions, facets, crystallized matrices that touch and translate through time and space… that’s too deep of a subject, but one I’ve been working on trying to ‘spin’ in my head since I was a teen.) — The book came together over a process of four years of combining things like some sort of mathematical literary gyroscope of poetry, imagery and recursion. It is definitely not a piece of conventional literature, but something I had to get out and ‘onto the shelf’ because it was taking up so much space in my brain trying to resolve itself into a complete entity.

                    I have 20 short stories like that – with twists that change the story and you have to re-read to get the full recursion – in another volume that is mostly written but not published – The House of Sunlight – it is also illustrated (much better than ToD, those illos were just thrown together in a few days because I couldn’t give any more to them but they were necessary) – but I can’t bring myself to stamp it as done and again, when I work furiously towards goals my energy crashes long before I want to give up the creative stream — I have to meter it so I don’t ‘run empty’ when others need things from me as well (there is a thread of that emotion in the other book Time in December, it took some bits of the poetry and some bits of me in the process, and then the equation/celtic knot fell into place and it was complete enough, so I published it, even though an editor would look at it and sob sarcasm). Sometimes I have to say something is done, so it can live ‘somewhere else’ and just get on with other things and not have the threads continually tugging at me, because they definitely do.

                    The other things I’m working on is a book of the automatic poetry, also with illustrations, and two young adult novels that are much more conventional, humorous and I love them and want to tell those stories but they are like rollercoaster rides that are very fun to work on, but after a while it is again, too much, and I have to stop and let them sit for a while and then come back later and see how much of it was ‘fun’ and how much of it was actually ‘progress’. And after saying all of this my imposter syndrome is definitely roaring it’s mouse-like head at me… and the day awaits.


                    1. David Avatar
                      David

                      Look forward to seeing the book RL! I understand the feeling of having to stitch together scraps of time and creative energy across far too many projects. Sending some high-grade attentional concentrate your way 🙂

                      I know exactly when you mean when you talk about automaticity and “working with the random, making it be something”. For years I’ve been trying to approach writing, drawing, and free-form ideation in the same way, as a weaving or synthesis of meaning from gorgeous noise, noise which is neither other nor self exactly, but rather “extensions, facets, crystallized matrices” as you beautifully put it. I like to think of them as patterns of meaning in which we participate. Also, “mathematical literary gyroscope of poetry, imagery and recursion” is the best blurb ever 🙂

                      Re finishing, it feels like there is an inner threshold for completion that the daemon needs in order to drop the tapestry and begin weaving something else. But its standards are rather different from those of the editor, I think partly because what feels like a balanced equation, a closed knot or an intelligible rightness from inside may not appear so from outside, and the editor’s job is to asses from this latter vantage. It’s a hard thing to balance; sometimes, it’s enough to please the daemon, but at others, I have to roll up my sleeves, retrieve the thing from “somewhere else”, and give it a polish before sending it into the world. It’s a question of intent and resource management.

                      Please give the imposter syndrome a piece of cheese and ask it politely to go roar somewhere else 🙂 I don’t want to swamp the thread but would love to chat more. Feel free to email!


                    2. pprober Avatar
                      pprober

                      So beautifully said. I was just thinking that, David. You and RL might benefit from continuing the conversation on your own. Is your email available here so RL can reply?


                    3. David Avatar
                      David

                      Good point Paula! It’s <david.a.wakeham at gmail.com> 🙂


              2. Joy Al-Sofi Avatar
                Joy Al-Sofi

                These are some intriguing images. I’m really interested in seeing what happens if you add another artist. What if you put Giger in the mix?


  2. Sheep’s Wool Avatar
    Sheep’s Wool

    This is an excellent post, Paula. That is all I have to say for now, as my body and feelings are celebrating what you have written, but my words have not caught up yet. I have been having little ephiphanies in the last week about embracing my mind, about leaning into and accepting the things I thought were drawbacks (difficulty acing the way the normal world – and normal work-world – works) and my way of thinking that I intuitively feel is tree-like, branching out, and sometimes circular, or spirally. It is weird. And that is good.

    I had also been self conscious and reluctant to lean into the gifted thing – who am I to want to aim higher, or break through conventions? But the odd thinking ways I have, and the difficulty being good at running in the normal working world with its linear processes, and my trailing along not finding work – this led me to think – maybe I can aim higher?

    Sorry for the garbled post. These are just some of my thoughts.

    Thank you so much again Paula, and all of you RFMs.


    1. pprober Avatar
      pprober

      Not so garbled, Sheep’s Wool! Thanks for the words.


  3. Clignett Avatar
    Clignett

    Yes! A love-hate relationship with my brain.. Sometimes it really goes too fast and ís too powerful, even for myself. I literally shake my head to “release” all the thoughts and paths I can see, just to start over again. This time with more concentration and thoughtfulness (and mindfulness) to my thoughts. Does it help? Yes and no. I get to the same point(s) as before, but slower and more methodical, but it is still the same. I see it all; all the bumps and hoops in the road ahead, which way would be best considering all these bumps and hoops.
    But then the love-hate comes in: explaining this to others.. who do not see all. Who wil just have to take my word for it and trust me. Which is a challenge on its own, especially when they don’t know me, nor my brain..

    A love-hate relationship with my brain in staying quiet to some people who think they can outreason you (illogically, but they can’t seem to see the flaws in their thinking process), while all the time you see right through them. And my brain remembers everything, the exact words, the tone, the context, everything.
    Until I can’t bear it any longer and I will tell them all their flaws in their thinking and how wrong they are in trying to gaslight me (as I feel it, maybe they don’t do this on purpose). It’s lost me some people around me, but in my mind I’m better off..

    Better off, but again a bit lonelier. Having such a “big and powerful and see everything and remember everything” brain sometimes feels like a curse and blessing at the same time. It’s tiring, it’s lonely and it feels like I never slow down enough for anyone to really get me. Not me (as a person), nor what I’m trying to say or explain.

    And losing motivation, ah, another one! Not academically, but simply swimming lessons. In Belgium, at the time we lived there, the swimming diploma’s were too easy. 100m, 500m, 1km, and so on. Always with the extras of staying in place with your fingers above water, swimming with clothes on and diving something or other up from the bottom of the pool. The extras were fun, as was diving (which they didn’t like me doing – flipping backwards and such things), but the boooooring swimming of the meters and kilometers.. I was just shy of one lane for the 1km diploma, and I just threw in the towel. As they saw, “I gave up”, but really I was just fed up and too bored. Couldn’t muster just one lane anymore, was bored for many lanes at that time, and it was just enough. I told them (age 6 or 7) “you know I can swim, you know I can dive, you know I can save myself in the water, and you even know I can save another human in the water (as I’m writing this, memory comes back, had to dive in with clothes on to save another student who was really struggling), so what’s the point in going for meters and kilometers?”. I was being a brat, they said, and shook their heads on me.

    I remember sitting for job interviews, and the question “tell us who you are?” throwing me off my game immediately. Never coming up with the “right” answer, because I’m too much, of everything. Which the job interviewers interpreted as being not enough, just because they couldn’t understand me. Or, even worse sometimes, they thought I’d get bored within a week because the job was so much lower than my intelligence. Maybe they were right, but all I wanted was a “break” from my brain.

    And yes, the despair! Even if I slow down to what I think is Muggle-mind-slow, it’s still too fast. Too much. Too sensitive. Too confrontational. It really is despairing to see that and realize that it will never work for them to understand what I’m trying to say.

    On the bright side, I have an intake appointment for a therapy/informational help with specialists on ASS. This woman I talked to is a blessing! I didn’t even need to slow down! In 5 minutes the conversation was done and an appointment was set! Wow! It does exist!! They do exist!!

    I’ve rescheduled the start for a full examination whether my brain works more on the ASS scale or the HSP/highly intelligent scale many times due to too many things going on privately, but now we’ve agreed to skip that, and just see what they can do to help me find ways to not feel constantly overwhelmed and misunderstood. And maybe get a better view of myself, a more complete view.

    Maybe that finally gives me the confidence to re-do the MENSA test and accept their invitation. As Brett mentioned of her father, I too have declined their invitation once, but am having second thoughts about it. Maybe it’ll be good for me, who knows..


    1. pprober Avatar
      pprober

      Clignett, is the ASS scale the autism spectrum scale? I hope it all goes well. Glad you had a very good first experience.


      1. Clignett Avatar
        Clignett

        Yes, sorry, the ASS scale is the Autism Spectrum Scale.
        I know I could have a form of Autism (Asperger’s), but possibly it’s hiding between the HSP and highly intelligent traits as well. And all that combined with the spirituality gifted traits, it’s a complicated brain to examine..
        With all the trauma from early childhood until now, it’s not easy to trust. Not even myself, for that matter.
        Plus, if the therapist is not a good match, I shut down completely, automatically. I can try to open myself up again, but it will be superficially..
        Thank you! It really made my day!


    2. M Avatar
      M

      If you qualified on the Mensa test once, you should be able to join with that score – no need to retake the test!


      1. Clignett Avatar
        Clignett

        Unfortunately Mensa doesn’t keep records from scores, M, I checked with them already. The procedures have changed also.
        So now I would have to do the home test first, wait for the results, and if they think I’ll be qualified to take the complete Mensa test, you’ll get an invitation to take that test at their location (a day long testing every aspect of your intellect, measured in percentiles). If these results are within their range, then you can join Mensa. It’s a whole procedure now to get to that point.

        The first time I wasn’t in the right mind space to take the whole test. The home test was a relaxing thing I did to unwind from a particular heavy board meeting 🙈🤣🙄. Took me about 20 minutes and then I went to bed 😆. Shook me to the core when I got the results back with their invitation to “please take the time to come and take the complete test and join us!”.


        1. M Avatar
          M

          Ah, you did the home test last time. Must have been a stressful meeting for that to be relaxing in comparison! 🤣 Congrats on the score! If you could do it one time, I’m sure you can do it again!

          Where I live, you can do a home test if you want (which means waiting for mail), or you can just sign up for a full test. You can retest every 12 months if you don’t qualify the first time. I might bite the bullet and sign up for the test at some point, as I did well on the online questions, questions in a magazine, etc. After I started copying their question formats and making up a mini-test on my phone, inventing my own style of word puzzles, and buying a box of logic puzzles because I kind of missed the questions, I thought, “You know what, it’ll be funnier if I don’t qualify than if I do!”

          Good luck with the therapist, and with the testing if you go forward with it!


          1. Clignett Avatar
            Clignett

            Oh, I should check if it’s an option here, too, to do the full test without the home test first! That would make it a lot easier and less stressful! 😃

            For me the trickiest questions are the ones with the “mathematical logic sequences”. Sometimes I see it right away, other times I completely miss it.
            The 3D thinking is logical for me, I can flatten an object in my mind and make it whole again, turn it around, flip it inside out, and so on. Word puzzles equally logic, probably because words have different meanings to me, even if they are supposed to be synonyms. There is a difference in “heaviness” for me.

            Oh, yes, that board meeting! It took about 5,5 to 6 hours, boring as a snooze.. late afternoon start, around midnight end.. frustrating, because no one agreed with one another, and no one was willing to listen to the other. At one point (near the end) in one of the many discussions I just stood up, took my phone and cigarettes and left them to it. One by one they came to me on the roof where I was sitting and smoking and apologized 😇🤣! They were a good and kind bunch of smart men and women, but, god.. stubborn as hell when it came to agreeing on something.. so I really needed to unwind from that meeting! 🤣🤣

            Thank you! And good luck if you decide to go for the full test! You’ll probably do better than you thought on beforehand!


  4. hksounds Avatar
    hksounds

    I have neither. of course, I have to be different; how could it be otherwise. I have a healthy respect for my brain, but am wary of it as well. I see how our brains have a tendency to curve back on itself, making itself the center of all. I see that our brains are steeped in narcissism and hubris, and if we are not vigilant, we too will fall into one of its myriad traps that keep people inside their heads, eschewing the world. Having a love/hate relationship with our brain is one of those traps that draws our attention to it, and away from who we truly are, which is that we are deeply connected to nature, and life in all of its manifestations. This reality is anathema to far too many who would destroy others because what is in someone else’s head is different from what’s in theirs. Our species survival depends on our lessening that hubristic hold.


    1. pprober Avatar
      pprober

      Healthy respect and wary of it. Also an interesting combination. Always appreciate your perspective, Joy.


  5. Brett Hebert Avatar
    Brett Hebert

    Yes! Yes to both in intense degrees depending upon what it is doing to me at the moment…

    I have always wanted to be different than everyone around me. Not personal against them for sure, but I wanted to be unique and different in how I thought and the thoughts I had! I wanted to live in their world marching to my drummer, NEVER wanting to be “just one thing, one person, in only one way” as so eloquently shared in your post.
    However. I have always thought of it as me pushing away from mendacity, mediocrity, vapid pop culture, et al as a way to save my sanity as I could see the big picture. Pushing away from something is NOT the same as moving into something else. I realize now it is not an improvement, but rather, a lessening of my pain. I always thought the ol brain would somehow reveal My Purpose just sort of magically as it did when I was in school but half a century of trodding on this Earth has not shown that to be a reasonable nor rational plan.

    On the academic front, I have always treasured the time I had in school. Recently however, I am feeling a bit hoodwinked as the world I matriculated in to did not have the rules I was taught, the orderly progressions of knowledge I had been exposed to, nor the yardstick of success I had figured out. As per the post, my father too did not see “me” but rather the artifacts and awards I achieved as I struggled to get my own recognition…which reminds me that he declined an invitation to join MENSA when he was alive. I guess this anti-social part of me is inherited to some degree.

    “Your creative capacity to catastrophize” is simply brilliant. I am always called out for over thinking (always always always) and I can really cut loose when thinking about what COULD go wrong. It is absolutely exhausting and seems to truly come to the fore when trying to sleep.

    The final thought is the last word in the “just one thing” quote: lonely. A few weeks back, you shared a post on being weird that I thought resonated well with me. Weird was ok for some things but anymore, it is just lonely.


    1. pprober Avatar
      pprober

      Everything you say here will be so helpful to others to read, Brett. Thank you for sharing.


      1. Nimue Brown Avatar
        Nimue Brown

        It took me far too long to realise that if I don’t feed my brain good things to chew on, it just… chews. Sometimes on bits of me, often it gets very anxious, or I overthink ridiculous, trivial things. My brain needs a high calorie diet of things to chew on, and when I feed it properly it’s a much happier organ and it works better. It helps if there are people inclined to be excited about whatever I’m currently excited about, but I’m doing better on that score at the moment. I need challenges and to learn new things and to be puzzled and have to figure stuff out.


        1. pprober Avatar
          pprober

          Oh, yes, Nimue. Is it OK if I quote you in a future post? It’s a great way to put what your brain needs!


        2. Marina Avatar
          Marina

          I quite agree with you! Keep your brain busy by feeding it with whatever feels motivating and has a purpose for you.


        3. itssue42 Avatar
          itssue42

          Put so well 🙂
          Indeed, must keep feeding the brain challenging, enthralling fodder or it just keeps chewing itself to bits.

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