Dissociation vs. Feelings of Reality

 Dissociation vs. Feelings of Reality

I just returned to my cozy shed from a short(ish) shirtless walk. (the walk was about 1.5 miles or so). I walked along the train tracks, went to the park, which was empty aside from a couple of parked RVs, and swung on a large, shell-shaped swing. I watched the rope teeter back and forth until I eventually felt motion sick, then I left. I ended up walking downtown, where there were two other shirtless dudes (yay! I wasn't alone).

Anyways, why am I writing this? Today I feel especially collected. Too often when I am maneuvering through life, I feel almost as if I'm in a quasi-fugue state. It's a surreal feeling of unreality that I don't like, and in fact actively despise. However, today the world felt real. I felt grounded. I felt sane. Everything was coherent, and I was "in the moment," so to speak.

I had some interesting thoughts while walking, but they mostly all fizzled out; like clouds passing me by. I ought to buy a tape recorder and a camera so I can start documenting these little moments. Some of the things that stuck out to me were the plants, the graffiti, and the appreciation of history I felt walking around. Also, the wind chimes; there were multiple sets of them jingling together, each playing a separate track to a nifty little song.

My mom thinks wind chimes are annoying. I am starting to see that point of view, though I used to find them very beautiful. Also, a sidenote: have you ever noticed that nobody every talks about windchimes in the media? I can't recall a single television show, movie, video game, or social media post where someone used the word "wind chime." It's uncanny.

Anywho, here are some remarks I wrote on July 27, 2024:

"I just read through some of my old notebooks; the amount of details I was able to preserve; my memory, and the color of my language, stuck out to me. My thinking has changed so profoundly I'm not sure if I can revert. It's as though I lived purely to write - as if that were my sole purpose in life. I distinctly remember trying to hold as many details about the conversations and moments around me within my skull, that I could not think of anything. I'd repeat to myself "PSMEFLES", or something like that, repeatedly until I could get to a notebook. Every letter would be shorthand for something said in conversation, or some pithy maxim. It drove me nuts.

During the past couple years, my mind has become overgrown with abstractions; the real world fell by the wayside as the terminology I used shifted into an amalgamation of pseudo-maths and jargon."

Everything is for better or worse; it is hard though to tell worse from better. All I can say is that dissociation is definitely worse than the opposite, and that (phenomenologically), right now is a moment I wish I could hang on to.