“He has a lot going on in his head”

 -my friend’s mom after reading my first blog post.

This is the only thing I’ve ever heard from her.

I think that every so often it’s good practice to sit down and take stock of your life. Check in with how you’re doing, like checking in on an old friend.

Actually that’s just a good hook for a blog post. I almost never think about doing that. I don’t have anything like a calendar reminder set for every 3 months to make sure I’m hitting my goals — I can barely do that on the order of 3 hours. 

But I already wrote the hook, and only a coward would edit their writing. So in the words of the ever wise Mario, “here we go.” 

Slice of life

I would say, honestly, my last few months have been unremarkable. I’ve been job hunting, and sometimes I’ll open Hinge, but otherwise I’m just doing normal person things. I probably spend too much time on Twitter, but that’s also a normal person thing.

I think there’s something strange then about the fact that I feel as if I have completely lost my mind, and that it’s been lost for nearly a year at this point.

Well more like 9 months ago, but who’s counting? 

And the irony and thematic significance of such a fact is not lost on me. There’s some sort of deep absurdist tension between living the most stereotypical life imaginable and also having the most strange conscious experiences in spite of that fact.

I got a degree in philosophy, and the only math I studied was the stuff you can’t monetize, and now I’m living at home with my parents. Everyone joked that getting a degree in philosophy would mean I’d end up unemployed, even though philosophy undergrads statistically have higher earning potential, and here I am — working in a bar.

So yes, this is what I expected. 

Well not the working in a bar part, but something like that. Not earning a lot of money and doing a part-time job I often find impressively boring. 

That’s a pretty mundane outcome. And basically how lots of people who graduate college spend the first 6 months.

And yet, totally unrelatedly, I feel as if I keep losing my mind. I stared into the void and now I don’t know how to be normal anymore — and I wasn’t particularly normal to start with. 

There is an almost ever present chaos surrounding my mind, even as I go about my very normal life and take very normal and mundane daily actions. 

I feel this tension a lot in my life. 

For example, I took an evaluation to put a numerical number on how dissociated I am day to day; to measure with science how ungrounded my brain is, and the results are just — mundane?

Like I am in fact scoring ~2x the average, but it’s well below a psychologically concerning amount.

I mean I gave a range of values for many questions to account for uncertainty, so my score is actually between 1-3x the average… which is still fine. 

And I noticed when answering the questions I score really high on all the measures that aren’t that concerning to score high on, and don’t experience any of the stuff that really messes with your life.

I don’t have false memories and I don’t have blank spots in my life. I don’t show up to a place and have no idea how I got there, or why or where I am.

I just feel weird a lot.

Feel detached.

And I feel like I’m losing my mind; and have lost it over and over again. But based on these evaluations I actually haven’t. And based on my ability to live life I haven’t either. I score low on depression tests and while it turns out I almost certainly have ADHD, I mostly got that one sorted out (thank you pharmaceutical industry).

So what the fuck. 

I’m just really weird, it seems.

But again, staggeringly mundane. Like I spend most of my time procrastinating on work, reading comics — scrolling through Twitter or closing and reopening reddit. I am, on paper, living an extremely stereotypical 22 year old life.

And as far as I’ve been able to tell there’s nothing diagnosisably wrong with me (outside the ADHD).

Which of course makes sense, because typically to get diagnosed with something it has to impact your ability to live life, and I’m living a stereotypical life from inside my parents’ house. 

So again, what the fuck is going on?

Like I cannot go outside without causing myself to dissociate. I’ll go on walks and faceplant into platonic forms or abstract objects. It’s emotionally overwhelming how beautiful the world is, and I keep obsessively trying and failing to take pictures of every pretty cloud I see — which is all of them?

I have such a strong introspective catalog of my phenomenological experience, which is aptly named since being me is incredible, that taking Adderall, doing a shot, or just sleeping too few hours will make me feel like a completely different entity.

I fundamentally don’t understand what it’s like to feel grounded, like I just don’t have an associated concept for that phrase. 

I am constantly getting lost in my imagination, which switches on instantaneously, often without me intending to use it.

I don’t feel like a real person, probably on account of the 2x the recommended daily dosage of dissociation. And this also means streets I’ve been on a thousand times will feel completely new and unfamiliar, despite my storied history with them. 

And to top it all off I am becoming fundamentally doubtful of my ability to meaningfully or properly connect with other people, despite the ever present evidence from my myriad friendships that actually I’m quite likable. Of course in fairness one can be charismatic and also an atemporal entity that can never be properly grasped; though this seems unlikely to be relevant to my life, despite the ever present feeling of it being true.

And also there are apparently no nerds on hinge, cause fuck me (non-literally, which is the annoying part here), so it doesn’t even matter that I’m a cosmic horror from a universe beyond — my dating life is largely unaffected. 

*Sigh*

I’m trying to write something approachable. Something normal and relatable.

A slice of life.

Of my life. 

But I don’t know how to. Or more accurately, to take a slice of my life right now is to get a mouthful of ever present ungrounded unreality.

I don’t feel like a real person. I feel abstract and ineffable.

And some of this is the fact I wrote this post mostly in the evening, because I have a publishing deadline and I’m behind, but I don’t think that’s the real cause. 

I don’t know what the real cause is. Maybe it’s a byproduct of ADHD, which has been suggested to me.

Maybe I was just so sad and so naturally introspective last spring that I dug too deep and woke up a metaphysical balrog.

 I went on lots of late night walks in an attempt to cure my heart break, and all that really managed to do was make me feel an overwhelming sense of beauty and an ever crushing weight of loneliness.

And now whenever I go outside past sundown my brain explodes and takes constant psychic damage from how pretty and how confusing streetlights and shadows look.

Again, what the fuck. 

Like I want to describe what the past few months have been like, because that’s the prompt for this blog post, and I don’t know how to do that in a way that doesn’t sound sickeningly poetic and self-aggrandizing.

When I go outside my consciousness melts away, and it feels like I hold pure emotion between my fingers or gaze upon the rawest form of the universe.

I find that I lose myself in a picture or a movie, and it barely takes half a minute for the riptide of fiction or imagination to pull me away from the universe. 

Shouldn’t I just be normal? Is there something broken in me?

Why can’t I go outside without wanting to cry? Mostly not because I’m sad, but just because I’ll become so overwhelmed with feeling just by experiencing the world in the way I normally experience the world.

Maybe I should just stop listening to music.

Maybe that’s the problem. 

And to be clear, I don’t really dislike who I am. Actually I have a pretty healthy ego. It’s mostly fun to be me, even if it’s very intense. But again, there’s an ever present tension between that and these other feelings of complete alienation from reality.

Honestly, I think I just need a 9-to-5 job and maybe to go on some fun dates.

And in fairness, I’ve been trying to bring about both of these things, but unfortunately I’m very incompetent in addition to my ever-present cosmic detachment. 

So I don’t know.

I mean that’s normal, I almost never feel like I know something. Another mundane and expected facet of being Max. 

All I can really say is that these experiences make for great writing material. I have so many long and indulgent essays almost finished and almost ready to be shared with all 3 of the people who put their email down on substack.

So I really don’t know. All I did here was rant for 15 hundred words. 

Maybe those pieces will do a better job communicating what a slice of my life actually looks like. Probably not, but they’ll probably have a better ending than whatever this was.