Lost Time and “The Fog”

What has put me into the deepest of depressions is the realization of how much time has been lost. My perpetual mental “fog” lifts - albeit momentarily - only to reveal that I’ve been mentally asleep for so long it seems I’m starting life anew. There are so many things I should have done which can ONLY be done by using time to your advantage - like saving for my kids college tuition, or heck, ANY DAMNED SAVINGS - that a part of you is desperate to do something…anything…that you think will help to relieve the anguish.

When you are embedded in the fog - that mental radio1 that tunes all stations simultaneously with each competing for your attention - daily psychical survival (turning off the radio? detuning it? smashing it?) is the only thing that you focus on. You are like the deranged who hear voices in their head and desperately wish to make it stop. And somehow you do make it stop but using self-destructive methods: day dreaming, delusions of self-worth, drugs (illegal ones or “legal” ones like alcohol, tobacco or prescription drugs), carb overload (eating till your brain feels at ease…I often eat some sort of carbs in the evening which has a calming effect allowing me to sleep…sorta) . You grip onto anything that will stop you from sinking into the abyss: a significant other that seems to offer stability (often you control that significant other and manipulate them into some sort of submission so that you are in control and you are in control over the only thing you can control which is that other person…after all, you damned well know that you can’t control yourself). Each day slips by with little being accomplished except for the awaited arrival of your imaginary deus ex machina (a lucrative business deal? a magical inheritance?) that will resolve the daily mental struggles that will, so you hope, make the chaos go away. But it does not arrive and so, another day comes and again you are in the fog.

1- See: The Tyranny of Now

The Mental Etch-A-Sketch

If my brain is like an Etch-A-Sketch© with lines going every which way, then my mid-afternoon nap is like shaking the Etch-A-Sketch©…all lines are erased and I can begin with nice clean canvas.

While looking for a cute image to use with this post, a quick Google turned up this:

Etch-A-Sketch Museum

Like Rip Van Winkle

I feel I’ve been asleep for the past ten years…and just woke up only to realize that the whole world has passed me by. I’ve spent the past ten years in “the tyranny of now” with nearly all (most?) of my time spent on fighting the daily onslaught of too much mental chatter. On some level I thought something magical was going to happen (what? money would suddenly drop down from the sky? the business deal of a lifetime would magically appear?) and spent much of my day, well, day dreaming.

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I found the following quote: “Sometimes people with AD/HD are years behind the curve” from The Splintered Mind.