When I started this column, I wrote:
My knees, elbows, shoulders, and so on all have things to say. It’s always so noisy. Like there’s a meeting going on in my brain.
My thumbs tend to go missing, so I can’t grab cups very well. Every time, I have to ask, “Where’d my thumbs go?” It requires a conversation.
As for how things are going now, I’ve stopped calling “my knees, elbows, shoulders, and so on” noisy and started listening to what they’re saying. But those conversations happen in my knees, elbows, shoulders, and so on, so the number of meetings in my brain has decreased, and even when they do occur, the result isn’t weighed as heavily as it used to be.
And I have found that the thumbs I thought were missing for so many years actually had a clear location the whole time. Sometimes I still can’t grab cups very well, but now I’ve learned to allow for that disconnect; it’s just the way things are.
No More Need For Mental Meetings
Inside me there exist many others I can’t control consciously or integrate mentally. The reason I found them bothersome was that they got in my way whenever I tried to be normal.
For example, I might be feeling that I need to get along well with people, but not only can I not speak well, but I get so nervous that the shutters on my heart tend to go down, and I reject them instead. I even turn away sometimes when people talk to me. And though I tried attacking myself—What an anti-social guy!—that didn’t help my attitude improve one bit. No matter how much I judged myself—You shouldn’t be anti-social!—I repeated the same thing over and over. I started to wonder if something about me was lacking.