Hi guys. Totes in a manic phase right now. Meds got fucked up blah blah blah. You’re tired of hearing it and I’m tired of writing it.
I noticed something today, though. I was at a hotdog stand downtown, and I was buying the hotdog, and I was like “Can you put ketchup on it for me please?” and the hot dog guy was like “The ketchup is right there.” He was pointing to a bottle of Heinz that was literally 6 inches in front of my face. I hadn’t even seen it. I’d been standing there for five minutes and I hadn’t even seen it. Then I asked him if I could have a soda. He said yes. I asked him what kinds they had. He laughed and pointed to an open cooler at my feet, overflowing with soda cans.
I’ve had these incidents all my life, to the point that they define me. My friends will happily tell you that I’m the ditziest smart girl they’ve ever met. Then they’ll laugh, because they mean it lovingly. But it’s always been frustrating for me. It does make me feel dumb. I miss things that are right in front of me. I never even think to actually look at them, to process their meaning. It’s embarrassing. And it happens most often and worst when I’m manic. I really noticed it this time. I looked around me. I hadn’t really seen anything. I’d stored nothing about what I’d seen. I’m interacting with the physical world only when absolutely necessary. My brain is limiting the visual input it processes, because there’s already too much shit bouncing around in there. It’s protecting me.
Years ago, a bunch of really smart doctors linked a bunch of electrodes up to my head and did three hours of testing, flashing lights and sounds and pictures at me. I slept through most of it. I was pretty fucked up at the time. They were trying to figure out why.
The results came in: “This was exciting for us,” they said. “You have the most normal brain we’ve ever studied. It’s nearly a perfect brain. There was just one thing … ”
And then they told me that I processed visual input much, much slower than the average person. Not that, like, I saw things slower, just that I processed the input slower. Like, half a second slower, which is a pretty giant gap in brain processing time. They showed me scans of normal brains and scans of my brain during visual input processing. They explained what the colors meant. “I don’t see slow,” I thought. “Have these people ever seen me play Guitar Hero? That’s ridiculous.” Then I cried a lot and demanded Jack in the Box on the ride home.
But I get it now. I see just fine, I just don’t process that input normally. With all that visual information getting processed at such a delay, my brain has selected only the absolutely crucial pieces to process, to store with semantic meaning. It’s why I walk into walls and break my toe, it’s why I can’t see the ketchup, it’s why I can’t figure out how to organize my kitchen, it’s why I still get really confused by toasters. “Haven’t you ever seen anyone make toast?” I get asked a lot during toaster incidents. And I haven’t, really. I have probably been in a room with, or even stood next to, someone making toast, but I wasn’t even close to capable of noticing what they were doing with the toast. If it wasn’t absolutely a priority for me, I wasn’t really processing it. It would have been too overwhelming to do so.
I don’t know how on earth you fix this, but it’s kind of a breakthrough. I’m not really a ditz or a klutz, I just really honestly truly didn’t see it. Not like everyone else did.
Kinda cool, right?
