Visualize, don’t dissociate. Or maybe: diagram, don’t dissociate.
But that latter one sounds like an office slogan.
In any case, that’s what I’m trying to do. Things are stressful and have been for a long time. So it goes, right? But I’m not sure I’m dealing with it altogether well. Something is broken. Jagged. Foggy. Jagged and foggy, like searching for pieces of a broken glass with no glasses on.
As far as stress responses go, it’s not really the ideal one for my brain to take.
This all makes it tough for me to access my mental Legos. Which is to say, dreams, or in a more banal sense, plans, are made of mental Legos that we are always playing with. They are made of memory and might-have-beens and maybes. I kind of picture them as glittery and shiny and see-through. They make up a potential outing with friends, a potential job, a potential cutting of the too-long toenails. They might happen, or not, we might have an instruction book (from culture?) but we have to always be ready to rearrange them. Unlike plastic Lego sets, we don’t necessarily have all the pieces and I don’t think they interlock snugly. Toppling occurs.
I think we can get too attached to the mental Lego sets we built. When it doesn’t work, you have to rebuild, and that is that, despite our feelings which probably resemble that of a toddler whose Lego set has fallen apart. Not pretty.
In any case, right now, due to a few different things, not all of which are earth-shattering but still are tough in a fundamental way, many of my mental Legos are the things that are jagged. Like they are the broken glass. And I can’t quiiiiiiite see them, because things are so foggy and gravity isn’t working the way it should.
This sounds crazytown. But actually saying it like that helps, which brings me to the first sentence – it helps to make a mental image of whatever it is you’ve got going on, I think. It is so tempting to dissociate, a word that seems to be (quite tragically) common among today’s youth. Distract yourself. But some healing, perhaps, comes through symbols which aren’t even necessarily reality. Because, of course, it always bears repeating that we are constantly dealing with symbols that aren’t necessarily reality – we rely on flawed perception and flawed brain processing, always anticipating and seeing what we want to sense/what we think should sense, etc. Abstract symbolism’s all we got, so we might as well dive in deep.
Soooooo…. Hopefully even just thinking of the shards of mental Legos will help. Like Wanda in WandaVision, the seminal 2021 art form, in my opinion. How to make sense of unbearable grief/stress/… whatever? Form a little world and populate it – hopefully, not with real people who are mentally enslaved, but whatever.
That’s making mental Legos out of other more imaginary mental Legos, I think. A dream world to help you understand your potential world. But whatever. Minds are weird.
Thoughts...?!