I Changed My Mind

Multiple moments of mental metamorphosis.

I have already submitted a story to the competition, but I’ve changed my mind. It happens.

As moments go, and one after the other, they always do, the story of the month-long moment and its aftermath is fine as it stands. That is, it qualifies as a profound, upsetting and unsettling experience.

It’s a story from years ago that I have always wanted to run in a challenge. My decision to run another piece was not because the first didn’t fit the prompt or was in any way insincere.

Perish that thought.

Talking of thoughts, I have many others and I would like to share their endless dialogue with you. This is my account of a continual metamorphosis that arises simply from my negotiation with life itself.

Thirty years ago, in the midst of my opening skirmish with my brain, I was told by a psychotherapist friend that I was suffering from maladaptive thoughts.

OK. So that’s nice. Wait… what?

It turns out that my friend always carried a length of rope, a crowbar and a box of high protein snacks in the boot of his Beamer, in case of the Eschaton occurring while he was in the supermarket. I’m not sure that his informal diagnosis can be separated from the lunacy of his prepper plans, but despite of “in case of apocalypse, break glass”, the concept of maladaptive thoughts has stayed with me ever since.

Maladaptive thought – the idea that your brain takes input and twists it into something unwholesome or destructive – is difficult to think about when you can’t trust whatever output your mendacious skull-pulp wants to make of it. Endless mental iteration upon reiteration of this kind creates a logical chasm you can fall into until all thought becomes a category error.

So, I have my fair share of brain-buggering mental health challenges, but I am not the wounded, miserable bastard you might think I am. My psychiatrist can confirm this. We had a good laugh when I told her about how non-committal my suicide ideation was – my plan was to go out to a local hillside in a thunderstorm and take my chances with a copper umbrella. I summed up the concept as idlecide.

That’s a joke by the way. I had a look online and literally nobody sells copper umbrellas. All of which brings me to this nugget from the tiny madman that lives inside my skull.

You can make a joke about the direst moments of your life, but win a yacht or a lottery fortune and you will end up five years down the line as a divorced, gibbering alcoholic who lives on a tow path with a shopping trolley. I’d rather do the hard stuff first, thanks, then have a laugh. I tend to avoid becoming unfathomably rich because of the downstream consequences of financial success.

So, there it is. The first salvo of free-association that is my continual conversation with myself. The last time I engaged in self-talk this much was when I was eight years old, where my rich inner life™ (© Mum and Dad) turned out to be mere training wheels to the random unicycle that is life. Self-talk keeps the distracting, self-assassinating voice at bay. I allow myself to be the mutterer, the whispers in the bathroom drowned out by the white noise of running water.

Nobody else knows this, you are the first I have told.

There is solace to be had in the sound of your own voice and the bonus is that there is never any disagreement.

Solace brings to mind the argument of no pain, no gain. It seems related to the concept of solatium, a compensation of solace for an emotional harm. It is consolation as the opposite of desolation. In The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live (2009), author Arthur W. Frank says: “Consolation may render loss more bearable by inviting some shift in belief about the point of living a life that includes suffering.”

Everything, it seems, is transactional, including your pain.

In writing this piece, I wanted to recount a moment of personal enlightenment. That sounds very noble – almost as if I had to tie my legs in a reef knot for a week and gargle llama milk from a bamboo tumbler. In the end, I decided to concentrate less on the moment and focus instead on a life of connected instances communicated by the ebb and flow of an internal conversation. So much better than the llama milk and yoga.

And there it is again: the idea that you can only attain something good and wholesome like enlightenment or a state of personal self-discovery after some kind of self-torture of your psyche and a session of major yogic disfigurement. It should never be that hard to tune the world out enough to find yourself. No pain ≠ no gain.

Because of the inner life, I notice the most trivial cognitive dissonances in my skull. Not all of these are bad. It’s only by drawing a line between how I am and how I seem to be from some kind of over-the-shoulder FPV of going about my day, that I can recognise when everything is just about to turn to shit. It’s like an out of body experience for my out of my mind experience.

It’s not without its moments of joy though. There is a speech in the Peter Chelsom film Funny Bones, that features Lee Evans as a clown savant. The speech is about how clowns can only inspire deep joy by performing from a well of deep emotion. I wholeheartedly buy that miserable comedian schtick. I find joy in the most inauspicious places and moments.

They are going to think you are completely nuts now - please don’t tell them the story about the colourful car.

This is how immediate moments can be, but also how banal and quotidian their form can take. On my way home from the shops, I spotted a car turning from a junction. Its colour – a kind of metallic orange bronze-red infra-doo-dah, mixed in another universe with more colours and the guitar chord of D suspended 4th – had a profound, almost visceral effect on some usually quiet part of my brain.

Oh God.

My heart raced and my pulse quickened. The effect was a sense of seeing something from a different plane, a shared dimension, another time.

As soon as I saw the car, something called inside. A semi-tangible craving, like a word on the tip of your tongue or the rapidly retreating recall of a detail from a dream.

It almost hurt, but it was also one neurone short of being delicious.

Yep. You are NUTS in all caps.

It was an ephemeral experience, but it seemed loaded, somehow. It reminded me of all the times I spotted cars in a particular shade of what I variously called mega-mauve and power-purple in the late ’90s. It used to make me oof, like a stroke of the solar plexus. I mentioned this to my wife at the time and it’s a sign of how strong our relationship is that we’re still married, because she quite rightly thought it was absurd.

It’s called synæsthesia, you twitistic twonk.

In other words, it is all in the mind. Well, I changed my mind and if that isn’t a transformative moment on my mental and emotional journey, I don’t know what is.

• Thank you for reading to the end of this rather odd piece. I've never written anything quite like this before, but it’s a mostly accurate account of where I am in one of my weird moments, with some license and liberties taken.
• For entertainment purposes only. Do not attempt at home.
• May contain traces of regret.