How Do You Teach The Brain That It Is Sick?

Sometimes I have trouble understanding that I am sick.

I suppose my articulateness doesn’t help, nor my writing ability, which is weirdly intact. Others are often incredulous about how disabled I actually am. But so am I.

What is even more unhelpful is a lack of documentation. Despite complaining of varying degrees of brain fog or inattention since maybe 2015, I’ve never had basic neuropsychological testing to confirm or classify this. I may pursue this soon.

It’s to the point that most of the time I lack the endurance to fill out a basic form, read a short article, watch a television show with full attention – and particularly, to do any of those things repetitively.

There’s also the thing I call inertia. That’s where the day just kind of…slips by me. I had days in college where I would wake up and spend hours on the couch scrolling through Facebook, playing freemium games, maybe having a snack – but not really quite remembering to do things like make breakfast, brush my teeth, take a shower.

I didn’t feel depressed. I felt pathologically content. I didn’t know why my brain had forgotten how to care. I was sated by mindless YouTube content and snacks, and would often be baffled when I failed all my college courses.

Perhaps there is a signal that our brain gives us – like hunger or thirst – to sense the effort it would take to complete something. If there is, at some point mine just…broke. It’s beyond ADHD, though there are similarities.

Even as my days slip away and my brain screams for oxygen, I will regularly try to initiate some project – maybe improving my website’s SEO, learning financial literacy, researching treatments for my condition – and then be somehow surprised when I can’t remember to follow even the basic initial steps for a day or two, let alone see a project through to completion.

Surprised despite that on many days I can’t even watch a silly Jubilee Media video with full attention. Surprised despite that in 2020 the approximate amount of “tasks” I could initiate in one day was three, where a “task” was defined as writing a single brief email or making a short phone call to schedule an appointment. Surprised despite that in order to watch a film I often have to break it into chunks – watch 12 minutes one day, 10 minutes the next, 15 minutes the next day…hey, wait, is there a film I was in the middle of? Look at that bird!

But I wonder what one is to do? How do you teach the brain that it is sick? How do you unteach desire?

I won’t soon stop longing, but I will find my way.