I accidentally thought myself out of my mind and stumbled upon mindfulness. My true essence. Very present, but almost empty. I’m like a fisherman on a boat, fishing for thoughts from under the water, deciding what to keep and what to let go of.
The thoughts are not suppressed, they are water themselves, they take the shape of whatever I decide to see. I am not dissociating, I am very much here, and I am very much real, and yet, it doesn't matter if I am not.
I think that mindfulness is the absence of feedback loops. The brain(s) stops searching for similar information to compare and categorise memories with what’s happening in the given moment. That’s the majority of the buzz usually: the processing. I can hear its gear most of the time, but not this time.
To be in the moment, I have to let go of the past, and the past doesn’t really exist, it’s all just memories stored somewhere in the brain, a place to come back to when necessary, but better if consciously. So, when is it necessary? What if I allow for the new information to come in without comparing it with the pre-existing cognisance? What if I store it temporarily in some other part of my brain without processing and come back to it in a more conscious way when the time is right?
Since I am autistic, that information has to be handled actively and manually anyway, but does it have to be processed here and now? Does it go lost if it’s not processed immediately? ADHD also doesn’t make it easy to hold the memories for long enough, the thoughts feel like slippery fish too close to the board of the boat. Maybe the more physical and intuitive things can linger around, but words have to be filtered as soon as possible. I don’t know.
What if someone tells me “I like you”? Am I going to smile and blush? Or am I going to wonder why and ask about the specifics of their feelings towards me? Probably all of the above. Are my fucking emotions even necessary to be expressed? Probably not, but that would freak people out. Are any of the emotions I express spontaneous? Maybe. But why?
Sadness seems easier to engage in and reveal. Happiness takes much more effort. But that could be because of all the fucked up things that I went through since I was a child; repetitive abusive behaviour made happiness more difficult to feel and recognise, let alone understand and express openly. I guess I didn’t have many points of reference to build an archive in my brain.
I am building that archive in my adult life, but the preexisting factors already take a lot of space, it is just more work to dismantle something and repair what’s broken, rather than build from scratch.
In conclusion, what is mindfulness for me? It’s when I don’t have to express what’s in my mind in any shape or form. It’s all water. There is no past. There are no memories, therefore there is no time because my perception of time is dictated by how much space is occupied by my own memories. Mindfulness is the absence of time, it’s my own non-existence, it’s the death of ego, it’s my soul stretching across the universe, it’s my life without a purpose but not without meaning.
