Often, during moments of frustration, Lovely expresses that her mind moves too fast for reality. Every brain is different, so I can only interpret this from my own experience, and it manifests in the way I’m unable to pay attention to any one thing for that long. It’s not attention deficit, if anything it’s attention surplus. I’ve long accepted that my favorite experiences as an audience member – at concerts, museums, and films – are those that are so inspirational that my mind goes off into its own daydream trip, even as my body stays put in the seat. It doesn’t matter how captivating the work is, and sometimes something I witness can be of incredible quality, but it dissipates with my short-term memory if I’m unable to seed ideas of my own out of it.
It happens in conversations too, and it’s not a rare situation for someone to get upset at me when they notice my eyes start to wander while they talk. “Tell me what I just said,” is one of the worst things you could say to me, if you were inspirational enough there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be able to repeat it verbatim.
One of the reasons I stopped my daily writing years ago was because I felt like I had wired my brain to think in journal form. I started chasing down experiences just so I could write about them later, only to get there and piece the words together as I experienced them. I was never in the moment. Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai says, “stop writing about the snow and be in the snow.” But now we’re living in an era where everyone “does it for the Gram,” where anyone at any given moment may be motivated by the ulterior motive of making a post out of it. Or getting a CV line. Or something else that, as I write, I realize might not be so bad after all. Unless you sit at home and philosophize all day, life is a series of transactions, either with others or with yourself. I’ve been in my head lately (as I tend to do during these crummy months of winter), negotiating my time and energy and I’m not quite confident I’ve been getting the best bang for my buck. I end up exhausting myself with buyer’s remorse for my own time, and then feeling shitty when it seems like everyone on my timeline is just living their best selves in the moment. I need to remind myself of how our experiences are manicured these days, that it truly takes great effort to convey oneself as care-free.