I am never idle. When I was young they thought I had extreme hyperactivity AND depression. As I became a young adult they realized that I had a mental disorder that forced me to live my life in extremes.
When I'm awake, I'm moving nonstop, constantly involved in a project or a task or a conversation. When I sit down, the pendulum swings, and I go completely still, and can spend hours reading, watching animals play in the yard, or just scrolling my newsfeed. Sometimes the lights are on upstairs, but most of the time I'm just idling in neutral.
When I get involved in something, I hyper focus on it. My brain can think of nothing else. I eat, sleep, and breathe whatever that whim is. And most of the time, just as quickly as I latch on to it, I forget about it. I have impulses to move furniture or jobs or whatever and I can't stop until it's done. But if I don't do it the moment that the thought enters my mind, the thought is gone, and I'm left grasping at, "What was it that I was thinking about doing?"
Even my sleep is this way. On one hand it's deep and heavy. Nothing can stir me or wake me. On the other hand I suffer from night terrors that cause me to thrash and scream and cry out, or I walk in my sleep, trying to finish my tasks from the day.
Trying to explain this to people is a fruitless effort. They think that I'm impulsive, compulsive, flighty, inconsistent, and sometimes unreliable. To say that it's just a part of my disease would make no sense to most people, because a lot of the time the things that I do directly affect them in one way or another, and it always feels like a personal attack.
My thoughts fly through my brain like fireflies in the night. Effortless, yet elusive. There one second, blending into the scenery the next. I desperately try to catch them before they're gone, but if I can't get to a piece of paper, or a cell phone, or if I don't jump up and do whatever that whim is telling me to do at the moment, it's gone, and chances are good that I'll never hear from it again. There are times that you can find me just standing in the middle of the kitchen, lost in thought. I guarantee that what I'm thinking about is what the HELL it was that I wanted to do so badly 15 minutes ago. Whatever it was is gone now.
I have learned to live with this. I get pissed at myself all of the time about my forgetfulness, and I've been trying to find some peace through yoga and mindfulness. But it's a day-to-day process. Yesterday I left my car keys lying in the grass after switching car seats (and cleaning out my entire car in the process) and my husband found them and brought them in. Today I am super focused on getting this blog post completed, a task that I started 3 days ago on Evernote when inspiration hit me, a task that today I am struggling to find the words to complete.
Every day is an adventure. My brain is never settled. Meditation is so overwhelming for me because I don't know how to just "be still" or "focus inward". But I'm trying.
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