3:21pm February 28, 2012

Fuck.

The longer since the opening, the more I know that rapid exposure to hundreds of people has somehow injured my mind. It’s hard to explain.

Like… maybe a bit of a computer analogy would be useful. Normally when I overload the resulting shutdown is more or less graceful. The abilities that go away do so in a relatively orderly and predictable fashion, even if it’s severely uncomfortable.

What’s happening now is much worse. I think I’ve described the way neuroleptics affect me. They rip through my brain in a way that does not respect the boundaries of what is what. Then they take all the parts and move them far apart so they can’t talk to each other. The rips in there are jagged and unpredictable. The lines of communication are sporadic. Things can hurt me in ways they normally can’t.

Well somehow this shutdown has managed to replicate many of the effects of neuroleptics. It’s hard to do anything. I can’t find my abilities properly. Or assess a lot of things. There’s this searing but entirely cognitive pain, serious enough to distract me from anything I try to do. WTF happened? This is just bad. Like instead of shutting things gracefully someone did a hard shutdown or a kill -9 on a bunch of processes or I don’t know what the fuck. Whatever it did, it did actual, serious damage that will take actual, serious time and effort to repair.

Which means no going to art. No taking on new projects. No working on old ones unless I can do so in a way that isn’t physically or cognitively taxing. No all-nighters if I can help it. No conferences or speaking engagements. The cognitive equivalent of the rest I had to do this fall to recover from the way the intestinal blockage and related infection trashed my body.

Fuck.

My normal pain can be controlled pretty well by anticonvulsants. There’s no meds for this. And it’s severe. And it makes me want to curl up and do nothing forever. But that’s not an option and would probably make things worse. And I feel cut off from all the things that would help, although I know that’s an illusion.

Unfortunately there’s no manual on how to handle this. Other than from now on I will have much more respect for the cognitive possibilities in overloading situations. I’m used to a much different kind of shutdown. Much different.

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