comes the time for a new post. with it, comes ambition, imperfection and annoying rambles. for today's post, i wanted to talk about a phenomena which i haven't actually studied — i like to call it "hyperawareness".
at every single hour of my life, i think. most of the time, i think too much: i trail off into what seems like fractals of all possible ramifications for every second i'm alive. it happens to me that i can tend to the uttermost basic necessities of my mind and body and start to overthink them down to their bare beginnings. it's something i do intuitively as a learning mechanism and it works extremely well. this is not the case for when i am laying at bed, it's 2 AM and i suddenly start to imagine what it's like to stop existing.
i remember it vividly (probably because it was yesterday) when i closed my eyes and went quiet. this quiet was quickly interrupted by me realizing i am insanely sick and that my allergies were eating me alive. i started to think what it was like to have it worse, until i started to feel like i was losing all of my grips in reality. air was quickly escaping my lungs and i couldn't stop thinking. there was no more calm, only a fight towards a survival which was already there in the first place. it was a living, waking nightmare that i couldn't escape. until i did because i got too tired of thinking about it and swore to never die because that was extremely painful.
having hyperphantasia[1] all my life, it's very easy for me to visualize what actually goes on in my head. i always aced the "rotate an apple in your head" challenge as a 4th grader and i haven't stopped now. this doesn't put me in a very favorable situation for living, unfortunately. i remember once sitting in class and i started to feel every sound as merely noise. there wasn't any coherence and i just came down to the roots of what i considered correct and grounded myself there. this happened a lot during discussions in middle school where i just had to get out of there because i was feeling everything all at once. this could just be overstimulation, but this scenario in particular which i describe is more a case of "wow, everything around me is shitty" than a "make the noise stop" case.
i was writing once, yes. i remember it quite well. not what i was writing exactly — must've been something along the lines of poetry in common life — but how i was when i wrote it: pissed. a motorcycle came in ramming down a sound louder than a scream through my ears. i was so pissed, in fact, that i stopped and felt the sound of the wind blowing on the empty street. the passage of time as every second counted up, never looking back. the person that walked down the avenue and simply left my field of view. it was so vivid! so vivid in fact that i started to think about every little thing i observed. like, have you noticed how you don't live in the future and never will? or how the past is a myth that we must come to accept as a way to keep ourselves grounded, since we do not live in it but are aware of its existence? have you noticed that the force inputted by your shoes when you walk is a force very similar to how a 500kg car lifts itself off of its stationary position and goes at speeds faster than humans could ever achieve on feet? isn't all of that wonderful, crazy, maybe even unthinkable?? that's how it feels sometimes, and like, the speed at which you read this text is just a bit slower than how all of that is processed in my head. it's crazy. i don't hate it, but i don't really love it either.
wow, you've come to the end of this post! i thought it was gonna be longer, until i noticed "hyperawareness" is me feeling both overstimulation and hyperphantasia at almost the same time. i can't really explain it in a scientific sense like i do all of my conditions, this is just something i've felt all my life. every day i wake up and it's almost like i feel the bacteria destroying my teeth; my retinas slowly perceiving everything at speeds unimaginable to me; my hands slowly moving and applying a soft gentle pressure against the keyboard as i type out these sentences. it's all very weird and i couldn't give you a satisfactory answer if i tried. it's cool sometimes: writing becomes incredibly easy when you can picture the entire story like you're living it. on the other side, every second is like a new story happens in my brain. that isn't very nice when i'm trying to not explode from anxiety.
anyways, i hope you enjoyed reading. not that you would, i mean, what are you? someone who enjoys reading the rambles of a nonbinary person? get outta here. no, i'm serious, you can go.
[1]hyperphantasia is a condition observed in 1-3% of the global population. an individual who has hyperphantasia is able to trigger, manipulate and experience a thought vividly at will.