I see the world through different eyes...

I see the world through different eyes. Some days my eyes are glazed over, making the world look foggy and blurred. The world doesn’t seem real. But what is “real”? Are you real? Am I real? This room? Are the flowers outside really flowers, or are they simply what I believe flowers should be? If I wanted to believe the sky was really red - I mean really, truly, deep down in the bottom of my heart believe the sky was red – could it be?

I see the world through a fog, through a tunnel. It’s like everything is distorted and nothing seems to quite be in the room with me. Everything is happening in some alternate universe that I have just tuned into on my TV, but the TV is in my brain. The TV channel doesn’t come in clearly but I’m just not able (or too lazy) to fix the antenna to make the channel come in cloudlessly. Occasionally the channel goes out completely and I’m left on my own for a while, with my own thoughts (if I happen to have any at the moment). And sometimes my thoughts take over and it doesn’t matter what is on the TV at the time, my brain shuts it off and takes over, going into overdrive, running through lists or examining past experiences. It seems I have no control over my own brain during these times, but I can gently try to bring it back to the television, turn it back on, and try to tune it back in the best I can.

Imagine seeing everything – people, places, events, the world, life, everything – through a fog, a cloud, a dirty lens. Imagine feeling like you’re never seeing things clearly. Like you’re never really experiencing things. Like you’re in a jumble of a dream that is your life and you don’t know how to make things clearer. Your television is missing that “clarity” knob and you can’t get things into focus. This isn’t the “normal” sense of lacking clarity that everyone except for the most enlightened experiences. This is in a class all its own. Part fatigue, part brain fog, part noodle soup, part orange Jello, part swiss cheese brain. All of this adds up to what it’s like to have a brain that just doesn’t seem to be “all there”.

I see the world through different eyes. Once in a blue moon (or more like a pink moon, if there’s such a thing, because I’m sure that’s less common) I have a moment where I can see things clearly, where the fog clears for an instant and I can see people and things the way they really are. It only lasts for an instant before things go back to the way they are, but it lasts long enough to give me a taste of how things could be and that’s enough to keep me fighting so that maybe, just maybe, someday I’ll have a whole life filled with moments like that.

--February 5, 2006