Mental backflips of an active brain.

I'm going to warn you all right now that this post is going to LOOK like it's going to be depressing, but it's really not, I PROMISE.

Okay, onto the post.


I'm half convinced my color-matching, story-making, sound-differing brain is what's gotten me into this mental mess. Artists of all walks are weird. I went to music school in a purely arts building. Everyone was weird. The musicians were all crazy/screwed up, the theatre students obnoxious and overly dramatic, the writers were secluded and a bit creepy at times, the fine artists were purposeful and colorful and had their eyes half-glazed over all the time because they were trying to picture everything under their pencil. It all fits. None of it is unexpected, and somehow they shoved thousands of weirdos and oddballs into one big building and nothing burned to the ground.

Except the one time that the cafeteria's deep frier exploded one morning. No worries, everyone was fine but the entire building reeked of smoke and oil for days after.

I guess I just have to reiterate my point here. Artists are screwed up people.

So it's okay that I'm no exception. I've come to terms with it a long time ago, but there's a roller coaster involved. Also, just learned roller coaster is not one word; if you type it, spell check thinks you're trying to say "cholesterol." Anyways.

I break super easy. In every way except for physical. Okay. physical too, I'm pathetically uncoordinated which, surprisingly enough, is pretty common for drummers. Except mentally is a bit harder to explain. I break every which way incredibly easily, and it takes some getting used to.

There's extremes of being "broken" and not-so-extremes. The first one that happens is kinda like what you might witness from Abed on the show Community:


You mess too much with my brain and I just kinda have a system failure and curl up in a ball and stare back at you awkwardly and wait for the thing that scared me to go away. I have no coping mechanism for life-changing things that might happen, or things that I might find life-changing and everyone else is just okay with.

I call it terrifying, others call it funny. I don't see what's so funny about having your life flipped over unexpectedly, at the time, but I can usually come to terms with it.

The other side is the humor break. My funny breaks sometimes, if people have been too much funny. The funny breaks both ways; one way I'm in a constant state of eye-watering, unsettling silent giggles, usually once again seen from behind my knees as I'm curled up in a ball. Usually in an upright position, this time. The other side of humor break is the elimination of exterior response. I will genuinely find something hilarious, and laugh on the inside, but on the outside I'm stone-faced and usually only say, "that's funny." It doesn't clue in to me as an inappropriate reaction because inside I'm reacting accordingly. It's not until a friend gives me a sideways glance that I realize that I've done something not normal.

The other break is what I've started to call the British break. I watch too much British television and I become obsessed with filtering my speech because I'm terrified of British inflections making their way into my dialogue. It gives me a look of irregular frustration and my active listening dies. Which is bad, because active listening is the way I follow conversations and social cues, and if that's gone then I become terrified that I've missed something important and my conversational abilities break.

Which leads us to the speech breaks. One is like the above where I forget to actively listen, and the lines of speech that draw themselves out for me disappear and I have nothing, which destroys my ability to contribute. The other is deep active listening. While I'm picking apart the conversation and guessing where it's going, they've stopped talking for a couple of minutes and have to say my name a few times before I realize it.

These go in so many ways. There's every corner of human action and emotion, and at every corner there's an edge that I somehow find very hard to not slip off of.

The final big one is the accidental moral break. Something happens that scares my moral subconscious and I do another "Abed break". Sometimes it's something in a movie; my friends made me watch Zach and Miry Make a Porno and there's one scene near the end with excrement involved that had me, once again, curled in a ball and whining and temporarily unable to function. Sometimes it's in conversation. Someone who's rather crude and doesn't know me well, usually from my University, will say something shocking that shuts down my coping mechanisms. Sometimes it's situational; I see someone making out in public. I break.

My brain does all of these high-speed back flips to try and sort out my life for me, and it works so hard overtime that sometimes it does one too many flips and has to take a few to untangle itself, so I patiently wait for it to get back to normal.

Today I British-broke AND scared-broke, AND moral-broke, all at once, so I ended up walling myself into my bedroom and living here all day trying to be productive and failing.