Running with Scissors
I want to write, dammit. But how? Once upon a time, I could write pages upon pages of interesting, deep, intellectual content without even trying. I could also create a realistic two-dimensional image of just about anything, give at least a vague definition of just about any word I'd even briefly come across within the past year or so, and strut contentedly in stretch denim without wearing down the seams in the inner thigh.
What ever happened? Actually, I know. It really boils down to motivation. This is something that I've continuously lacked lately. It's peculiar, really. There are some things that I've needed to take care of for a very long time that hover incessantly over my shoulders, yet I am completely deficient of any drive to tend to them. I think it's affected my mind/brain in a multilevel fashion. A lot of things that used to interest me, intellectual pastimes, activities that are self-educating, I lose interest in. I might want to know about a certain topic, but typically I won't have the patience or will to take whatever steps would be necessary to acquire that knowledge.
I haven't always been like this. Yet, as a result of just this epoch of my life, I feel like my vocabulary has been dehydrated, my memory is deteriorating, and my power over will has been plucked from the clammy grasp of my incapacitated Self, which means that my brain is rotting into fleshy useless bits of fat. And at some point, I just stop caring about the consequences of my inactivity, which means I get nothing done. When I *do* do my laundry, it sometimes takes me about a week to even put a load through the rotation. One second I'm watching Style Network asking myself: "How can these girls be such twigs and I can't even be fit?" And the next moment I'm getting up to the fridge to steal another fingerful of cookie dough. Needless to say, I don't exercise much either. Nevermind that I pay for a gym membership. And I'm not even going to get into the schoolwork factor. My little waterway of life seems to have flowed into a particularly stinky, especially stagnant and swampy marsh.
I sometimes wonder if this has a neurological basis. There is something called PAP syndrome where there is an extreme motivation problem. The person won't do what he needs to do, even if this means their death. They might be swimming in a pool, and suddenly decide that they don't really care to swim back up. They usually spend most of their time in bed or on the couch doing and thinking nothing. The only time they do anything is if somebody tells them outright. I guess this whole thing stems from some impairment within the communication between basal ganglia, the cingulate gyrus, and the frontal lobe. Usually, at least in theory, when you recieve some sort of emotional sensory input, it is processed through the limbic system, which drives our decisions about whether or not to act on something. (Whether or not to pass it on the the frontal lobe.) The basal ganglia basically decide if the frontal lobe will be activated in the cycle or not. I think sometimes it should be, sometimes not. The frontal lobe, if activated, would determine what action the person should take. But with PAP syndrome, the frontal lobe is never activated, so all this input is rendered meaningless. Well actually, the only time it *is* activated is when they are directly spoken to and told to do something, and this is because of an area that is a language center, near the frontal lobe, which does move the information to the frontal lobe, skipping the whole limbic loop deal.
Anyway, when I found out about this thing it made me think about if there was a similar but obviously less severe impairment within my own brain. I've always felt like there was something up with my brain anyway, you know. It's been awhile since I've quite felt right, and I still sometimes get very focused throbbing aches in my head. I sort of feel like I'm just waiting to be surprised one day by some doc telling me whatever's up. I wish I could get an MRI scan, but I'm sure that would be really expensive. I'll probably someday find out I've got some malignant tumor or something. Although I'm actually probably just being paranoid. But still...
9^^