On the walk to the post office to mail the reimbursement submission, I realized I have actively suppressed thoughts. I was not aware of this until today. This insight explains some of my other behaviours.

I know that I am trying very hard to avoid a depression spiral. This is the proximate cause of the problem. A thought enters my mind, I recognize the thought involves a negative association and I seek to suppress the thought. At night, when falling asleep, I am less able to suppress thought. At the edge of sleep, all those thoughts I have attempted to suppress, or ignore, come floating back into consciousness and I am unable to avoid them. This surrender to the problematic results in an extended period of wakefulness that makes it impossible to enter sleep.

Suppressed Thoughts

This may not be a complete inventory. These are some of the thoughts I found myself attempting to suppress today.

Loss of self as evidenced by projects, or objects, toward which I no longer have any emotional attachment. This has two aspects. The first is the shock that accompanies each “Pompeii moment.” In Pompeii, the citizens became frozen in time as they were smothered by the ash of the exploding volcano.

My Pompeii moments result from the accident. As I clean up the house, I discover old projects abandoned in progress, projects abruptly arrested by the after effects of the crash. I downed tools, walked away, and never returned. The project has been untouched for three years.

This phenomenon has a second aspect. It also speaks to the degree of routinization. Subsequent to the accident, I became enmeshed in a narrow routine and rarely exited this behaviour pattern. The routine focused on the most basic life skills. I cooked. I washed. I slept. I wrote. Everything else was cut away, abandoned, left untouched.  Today I have become an archaeologist, picking over old tracks, trying to interpret and make sense of what I find.

It is a cold shock to rediscover my injury in the form of these abandoned moments. Each discovery leaves me more hesitant, tentative, uncertain, mistrusting. I learn that I cannot trust myself for the world I perceive as “out there,” this world of solid phenomena, exists primarily in here, in the wet pulp between my ears. Somehow a set of operations more intimate than sex, more complex than calculus, that unfathomable nugget that is me, was me, has eroded away, become atrophied, lost, disappeared. And this ghost of ego departed on quiet cats paws, silently, without me ever noticing it had left.

There is nothing positive about this epiphany.  It leaves me shaken and choked to the core. Even when writing these words I am left to struggle with my comprehension of these effects, their implications for what it means to be “me,” to be human, a member of homo sapiens sapiens.