Living Out of My Mind

Something especially important to remember in these late days is we rarely question what’s in our heads until the moment we realize something in our heads isn’t working.

For me this happened for the first sometime in the sixth grade, but it was prompted by the actions of my elementary school principle. In the sixth grade I already had a jacket because Principal Floyd had identified a lack of motivation that, had it been something else, would have put me on the cusp of having an IEP if I’d been in a modern, public school.

But in 1986, in a private school, I was sent to the library we shared with the elementary school to take cognitive function and IQ tests with the same instructor who’d given me swimming lessons. She was a very intelligent person although she might have been best know at the school as the loudest singer in chapel.

The result was that I had a higher than average IQ and that was about it. No plan. No special help. Really, I think they just wanted to see if I had a mental handicap so they could farm me out to another school. Instead, I was tossed back into the classroom, which I guess was slightly more helpful than the shaming I got by being sent back to do my work in a lower grade classroom on prior occasions, or being verbally and physically abused by my classmates for my glasses, scrawny physique, and generally not living in terror of the school’s social pecking order.

But in the sixth grade I started to write and in starting to write I realized there were alternatives to my existing behavior and role in life. I wrote the types of fantastic stuff juveniles do, but I also thought “I could be someone more like this.” A detective. A do-gooder. And finally, simply, a writer.

Routine submerged me, though, and I went back on autopilot. In the eighth grade I became aware that the administration at the school viewed my violations of the dress code and lack of a discernible hairstyle not as rebellion but as a form of personal expression. How they arrived at that conclusion and what they thought I was trying to express I have no idea of but it prompted me to wake up again. I started writing. But by my first year in high school I was already working and had essentially outgrown my peer group. I still, however, lived in my head. Circumstances forced me to choose more favorable circumstances to put myself in, but I was still very much on the track of going with the flow rather than directing my own life.

In college, I figured out that being an introvert didn’t work for me. I became more sociable and more assertive. But I still went on autopilot - for years at a time. Like the school, most people I encountered in life didn’t seem to know what to do with me. Why would they? I didn’t know what I was doing with me. The world I really existed in was between my ears.

After college I had two children and I think that, for the most part, is what finally cleared the fog. Now someone outside was more important than the characters in my head. And the characters in my head started helping me, again, to reach outside. To engage the world through writing in more meaningful ways. The ultimate result would be dozens of CASA reports I authored over the past eight years. Here, it was finally me becoming the person I’d dreamed of back in the sixth grade. The detective of sorts and a do-gooder in a more substantial and meaningful fashion than I’d previously imagined.

The world is increasingly a place of hallucinations and perceptions driven by dueling narratives not of the world but about the world. Spin. Plausible and sometimes implausible interpretations of reality exploited for maximum political and sociological effect. Friends and family are to be discarded if they don’t adhere to the fantasy to which we choose to subscribe. The West, en masse, is going on autopilot. And I recognize it. Because I’ve seen it in myself.

There is no “wokeness” and there are no “cancelled” people. We’re all asleep and therefore automatically irrelevant, which is right where the dream weavers of our culture like us to be. It gives them the advantage of moving in the ways they want and doing the same with culture. By playing with our minds outside reason they get us to buy worthless junk we don’t need but that we truly believe is critical to survival. We shop for food that we ingest to the dismay of our own physiology and when our bodies start to rebel, they sell us a pill for it. We form political convictions with the full weight of a religious mania that casts our fellow human beings who hold to the opposite narrative as brain-dead subhumans to be socially discarded and disregarded.

But they’re are not. And we are not. We’re all just Timmy Avers going through the motions on autopilot, even when we become Tim Avers and we’re walking away from an ambush beat down by football players thinking “well, that’s high school.” Only now it’s all of American life that’s become numb, mechanical Tim Avers. America is just one big, stupid high school. Jocks beating up geeks and poor kids who hate on rich kids in an endless cycle, and every person believing in the infallibility of their own prospective.

Maybe when we have kids we wake up. Surely I’ve seen examples running in both directions. But the key is to find something that keeps us searching for truth and prevents us from marching strictly to rhythm of the societal drum beat. We have to find our own pace, whatever that may be, if we intend to continue to grow as a culture and achieve good results on the whole.

We have to. Because we have seen the disaster that necessarily follows monoculture and prescribed sameness. It’s stagnation and in some cases literal death.

As usual, I’m too serious for my own good, but we have to rise above the rhetoric of hating on people and adhering to the notion that we are the only adults in the room and everyone who thinks differently from us is defective. In other words, we have to stop being being childish, like we were when we were literal children. This way everybody will move forward, even if they resist.

That’s getting outside our own heads. That’s compassion. That rejects hate and embraces empathy and a belief in people. And that’s what the world needs now.