I was speaking with my brother and Jared - my ancient friend/current roommate - the other day about thought patterns, and the odd things we each do when trapped inside our own minds. I'll go into that later in the next post, because I think it might provide an interesting look into the workings of minds that may (or may not be) similar to your own, but for now I wanted to make just a quick update about being alone vs. being around others.
My computer ate it a week or two ago, and my campadre Enoch was kind enough to let me borrow his Macbook Air while I waited for my other amigo Justin to send me his old computer. I received it a while ago, but I still haven't taken any steps to transplant the guts from the old to the new. Which you could blame on sheer laziness - certainly that's a major part - but is more a factor, I think, of the way I feel. And think, I guess.
To really get what I'm talking about you have to know the way our apartment is set up. In the very beginning, we Chose (odds/evens) to see who got the bedroom and who got the living room (essentially the second, less private bedroom). I won, because very rarely that happens, and so I have set up shop in the bedroom. Jared is out in the living room, living things up as it were, and has arranged the couches and things to be very conducive to lounging. And watching shows/movies on his monitor, of course.
Beginning this past winter, when I picked up a WiiU, I have found myself spending more and more of my time out in the living room. I even picked up a Vita so I could keep the good times rolling. And bleed even more money, of course. Now that I'm completely mobile, I essentially spend all my time out there, and only use my room for sleeping and occasionally making blanket forts.
This has been a pretty stressful semester for me, and the last few weeks in particular have found me wound pretty tight. And, finally tying this back in with the beginning of the post, I have a tendency to live in an echo chamber; that is, a place where my thoughts echo back and forth (a metaphor I drew on for a previous blog update) without really being solved or worked through. They just resound.
It's frustrating, if I'm honest, to be stuck thinking about things you've already thought about and have, more-or-less, come to a conclusion on (or the best conclusion you can, given the state of affairs). And it cycles over and over, and I almost always find myself talking to myself to keep my thoughts straight - because if I don't, I lose my thread of thought every fifteen seconds or so - and even that is difficult to keep straight and rational. Whoa, I guess I really might have ADHD. Damn you psychiatrists...!
The end result being, when I'm alone in a smaller room, my thoughts tend to get louder. They fill up the physical space, if you'll permit me yet another metaphor, and the smaller the space and the fewer people around to fill up that space with their thoughts, the more mine take control. And so I've found recently that my room, which is pretty comfortable and set up by me for me, including the heaped clutter covering every square meter, has become a space for gloom and depression. It's almost stifling, really. But something as simple as transitioning to the living room - a trip of about fifteen steps - lightens my mood significantly.
Granted, it's still not all sunshine-roses and water-daisies (?) when I'm here alone, because while being in a larger space makes me feel better, I'm still alone with my thoughts, and with no one else present they can be given a voice as much as they wish. And then I feel like a crazy person babbling to myself for forty minutes straight!
Which is why I'm actually quite thankful that I don't live alone. I mean, I always figured that I would love to live by myself - and that's true, in many, many ways. But for right now, at least, that's not my deal. Even if the thoughts filling the room when you're spending time with someone else are dark and depressing (sorry for putting you on blast here Jared), it's their darkness, and their depressing, which is a different enough shade from your own that it helps take up some space. I think this extends to whenever you spend time with another person, and I mean spending real time, not fake faux-friendly 'let's watch something and crack jokes and then leave' time that so many "friends" engage in. Which is fun in its own way, to be sure, but at least for me, when I'm feeling down, I don't have the energy to put on that mask. The performance just becomes less important to me.
So, yes. There you go. Having people who know you, who you can really talk to and be comfortable around, is absolutely awesome when you're dealing with some miserable shit. You don't have to talk to them; you can do literally what I mentioned in the last paragraph, and watch shit with them and crack jokes. But the important part is that you don't have to keep up the mask, because at some point you can't maintain the performance any longer and if you don't have anyone you can let it down around, you turn inwards and isolate yourself. Then it's just you and your thoughts, and that can be a bad combination.
No comments:
Post a Comment