[personal] Sometimes You Just Have to Wax Philisophical, For Better or For Worse...
My mind never seems to sleep, not even when the rest of me is asleep. There's not a single moment where I'm not thinking about something, anything. Important things, unimportant things. Logically sound theories, strange explanations for common phenomenon (ask me about time sometime). My mind does its utmost to make every thought connect to as many other thoughts as possible. Sometimes the connections are... strange. But they always make sense. At least, to me.
For an example of my brain never shutting up, just the other day I was contemplating love and hate. It occurred to me that love was NOT the opposite of hate. Not even slightly. You see, both love and hate are at times intense and at other times calm and assured (yes, even hate can be remarkably calm at times... or, at least, it seems so to me after a lifetime of careful observation. I will concede I don't have much direct experience with feeling hatred myself, but I have had at least one person hate me enough to try and destroy not only my life but my then-boyfriend-now-husband's as well).
In a lot of ways, love and hate are alike. They're both very purple emotions. They are both filled with paradoxes and contradictions and, despite the fact that they seem completely contrary to each other, they can exist at the same time in the same person for the same topic.
So, no, I don't believe love to be the opposite of hate.
You might be asking yourself (as well you should LOL) what then IS the opposite of hate? In my opinion, apathy. Hate is something you take the time to feel because you care enough about a person/place/object to exert the sometimes invigorating but more often draining effort. Things you hate matter to you, whether you want to admit it or not.
But just because apathy is the opposite of hate doesn't mean that hate is the opposite of apathy. Emotions are the opposite of apathy and hate is only a small part of the whole realm of emotions.
See? Stuff like that. Things that don't really matter. My mind decided it needed to know once and for all how love and hate and apathy were related... and that's what it came up with. Of course, everything I think is subject to many additions and alterations over time.
On the other hand, there's the stuff that really does matter. Things that feel more like destiny. I get struck with the utter certainty sometimes that there's a place I have to be or at thing I have to do and they're not usually earth-shattering things. Things like, "for some reason, I think I should walk on the other side of the street today, even though I never do that" and then I'll end up bumping into a person I've never met before who seems sad but is smiling when we part ways. I never see the person again, but then it turns out they're the brother/sister/cousin/boss/spouse/whatever of someone else I know and I find out that such a little thing had an extraordinary consequence for just one person.
Now I have that feeling, and it's related to the dark fic I'm writing right now. I hate nightmares. My mind is waaaaaaay too skilled at terrorizing me (not just when I'm asleep, either). If I have reason to believe something will cause me nightmares, I will go out of my way to make sure there's so much distance between me and it that I can't even stumble upon it accidentally.
But twice now this new fic has given me nightmares. It's unusual. My fics have never influenced my dreams. Now, I've had some dreams with KAT-TUN in them but nothing in the dreams resembled anything in the fics at all.
So, my normal inclination would be to just apologize that I would never finish it, take down what I already wrote, delete it off my computer, and never think on it again.
But I just can't do that. I have that feeling again. Didn't have it with any of the other fics. Don't have it with Uppity Pirates (though that story continues to amuse me). So instead of getting rid of it, I'm trying to come up with precautions I can take to try to keep it out of my dreams. I wrote Chapter 04 a couple paragraphs at a time and then went and did something else, under the logic that if I divided it up, it would be less capable of striking back at me in my dreams.
Not that it worked. I woke up practically screaming that someone was attacking me and it took a couple of minutes to realize I was the only one in the room and that nobody was trying to kill me and that if I opened my eyes I would see that there wasn't anyone right next to me. Fortunately, it was just a nightmare and not a Nightmare Nightmare. Once I calmed down and fell back asleep, I did not go right back into the same dream, which is what happens with N.N.s.
This is after the dream I had recently that I won't admit how much I remember because, even though it wasn't fear-driven like a nightmare tends to be, I have never had a dream leave me so ashamed before. No, scratch that. The one with the lions I had in highschool was pretty fucked up too. And in the cannibalistic sex N.N. I had a couple years ago, I was pretty damn ashamed of the missing pieces of me and that I couldn't escape the situation. But this one that I 'barely remember' was so much worse. It literally left me sobbing that I would never be forgiven.
Given all of that and the powerful affect I know my dreams always have on my waking self, I don't understand why I'm willing to risk it to continue writing this fic. To be perfectly honest, I didn't originally plan ANY of the stuff with the boy. What happened in chapter 1 was supposed to be the start of the story. But then I suddenly found myself writing and the prologue came from it. I looked at it with a sort of "what the fuck?" look but somehow I knew that it was part of the same fic, so I wrote chapter 1. Then I realized how they were connected (even I didn't know at first. I'm the writer; I should know. But I didn't, not until chapter 2 and 3)
I know there are coincidences out there in the world and I also know that, in its efforts to tie things together, my mind is completely capable of stringing unrelated things together in an intricate web that exists only in my own mind but that make complete sense even to other people when I explain it. It's also very possible that those times when I'm struck with the "supposed to" vibe, it's all a product of my mental illness. The psychiatrists did say I hallucinated and was delusional in addition to the bipolar. I believe them on the bipolar part but the rest is still up for debate.
But, you know what? I don't think I care. I don't want to live my life restricting what I feel I need to do out of the fear that I'm attributing too much significance. And, whether it's all in my head or not, it has real results. I've seen it work over and over again.
It goes along with the things I suddenly know that I can provide no logical explanation for. I've walked into a room once with seven friend in there and even though they were each doing their own thing (okay, two of them were play Tekken 3 together), I realized that the girl reading on the sofa and the guy digging through the refrigerator in the kitchen (it was all sort of one big room, divided by countertops) were involved sexually despite the fact that the girl was dating a guy online from Great Britain. They weren't looking at each other, they weren't near each other, nobody else knew about it in the room. But I knew suddenly and when I asked her later, she said it was true.
It's not magic. It's just intuition. Purple people are like that. They soak so much up from around them that they notice stuff.
Where does this leave me?
Apparently, writing a fic that haunts me just in case I'm right that I'm supposed to write it (or, more accurately, someone is supposed to and I seem to be getting the job done).
I dunno. Assuming anyone's actually reading this, you guys might find the whole thing ridiculous.
But, yeah, so I guess I've made my point:
My brain never shuts up.
For an example of my brain never shutting up, just the other day I was contemplating love and hate. It occurred to me that love was NOT the opposite of hate. Not even slightly. You see, both love and hate are at times intense and at other times calm and assured (yes, even hate can be remarkably calm at times... or, at least, it seems so to me after a lifetime of careful observation. I will concede I don't have much direct experience with feeling hatred myself, but I have had at least one person hate me enough to try and destroy not only my life but my then-boyfriend-now-husband's as well).
In a lot of ways, love and hate are alike. They're both very purple emotions. They are both filled with paradoxes and contradictions and, despite the fact that they seem completely contrary to each other, they can exist at the same time in the same person for the same topic.
So, no, I don't believe love to be the opposite of hate.
You might be asking yourself (as well you should LOL) what then IS the opposite of hate? In my opinion, apathy. Hate is something you take the time to feel because you care enough about a person/place/object to exert the sometimes invigorating but more often draining effort. Things you hate matter to you, whether you want to admit it or not.
But just because apathy is the opposite of hate doesn't mean that hate is the opposite of apathy. Emotions are the opposite of apathy and hate is only a small part of the whole realm of emotions.
See? Stuff like that. Things that don't really matter. My mind decided it needed to know once and for all how love and hate and apathy were related... and that's what it came up with. Of course, everything I think is subject to many additions and alterations over time.
On the other hand, there's the stuff that really does matter. Things that feel more like destiny. I get struck with the utter certainty sometimes that there's a place I have to be or at thing I have to do and they're not usually earth-shattering things. Things like, "for some reason, I think I should walk on the other side of the street today, even though I never do that" and then I'll end up bumping into a person I've never met before who seems sad but is smiling when we part ways. I never see the person again, but then it turns out they're the brother/sister/cousin/boss/spouse/whatever of someone else I know and I find out that such a little thing had an extraordinary consequence for just one person.
Now I have that feeling, and it's related to the dark fic I'm writing right now. I hate nightmares. My mind is waaaaaaay too skilled at terrorizing me (not just when I'm asleep, either). If I have reason to believe something will cause me nightmares, I will go out of my way to make sure there's so much distance between me and it that I can't even stumble upon it accidentally.
But twice now this new fic has given me nightmares. It's unusual. My fics have never influenced my dreams. Now, I've had some dreams with KAT-TUN in them but nothing in the dreams resembled anything in the fics at all.
So, my normal inclination would be to just apologize that I would never finish it, take down what I already wrote, delete it off my computer, and never think on it again.
But I just can't do that. I have that feeling again. Didn't have it with any of the other fics. Don't have it with Uppity Pirates (though that story continues to amuse me). So instead of getting rid of it, I'm trying to come up with precautions I can take to try to keep it out of my dreams. I wrote Chapter 04 a couple paragraphs at a time and then went and did something else, under the logic that if I divided it up, it would be less capable of striking back at me in my dreams.
Not that it worked. I woke up practically screaming that someone was attacking me and it took a couple of minutes to realize I was the only one in the room and that nobody was trying to kill me and that if I opened my eyes I would see that there wasn't anyone right next to me. Fortunately, it was just a nightmare and not a Nightmare Nightmare. Once I calmed down and fell back asleep, I did not go right back into the same dream, which is what happens with N.N.s.
This is after the dream I had recently that I won't admit how much I remember because, even though it wasn't fear-driven like a nightmare tends to be, I have never had a dream leave me so ashamed before. No, scratch that. The one with the lions I had in highschool was pretty fucked up too. And in the cannibalistic sex N.N. I had a couple years ago, I was pretty damn ashamed of the missing pieces of me and that I couldn't escape the situation. But this one that I 'barely remember' was so much worse. It literally left me sobbing that I would never be forgiven.
Given all of that and the powerful affect I know my dreams always have on my waking self, I don't understand why I'm willing to risk it to continue writing this fic. To be perfectly honest, I didn't originally plan ANY of the stuff with the boy. What happened in chapter 1 was supposed to be the start of the story. But then I suddenly found myself writing and the prologue came from it. I looked at it with a sort of "what the fuck?" look but somehow I knew that it was part of the same fic, so I wrote chapter 1. Then I realized how they were connected (even I didn't know at first. I'm the writer; I should know. But I didn't, not until chapter 2 and 3)
I know there are coincidences out there in the world and I also know that, in its efforts to tie things together, my mind is completely capable of stringing unrelated things together in an intricate web that exists only in my own mind but that make complete sense even to other people when I explain it. It's also very possible that those times when I'm struck with the "supposed to" vibe, it's all a product of my mental illness. The psychiatrists did say I hallucinated and was delusional in addition to the bipolar. I believe them on the bipolar part but the rest is still up for debate.
But, you know what? I don't think I care. I don't want to live my life restricting what I feel I need to do out of the fear that I'm attributing too much significance. And, whether it's all in my head or not, it has real results. I've seen it work over and over again.
It goes along with the things I suddenly know that I can provide no logical explanation for. I've walked into a room once with seven friend in there and even though they were each doing their own thing (okay, two of them were play Tekken 3 together), I realized that the girl reading on the sofa and the guy digging through the refrigerator in the kitchen (it was all sort of one big room, divided by countertops) were involved sexually despite the fact that the girl was dating a guy online from Great Britain. They weren't looking at each other, they weren't near each other, nobody else knew about it in the room. But I knew suddenly and when I asked her later, she said it was true.
It's not magic. It's just intuition. Purple people are like that. They soak so much up from around them that they notice stuff.
Where does this leave me?
Apparently, writing a fic that haunts me just in case I'm right that I'm supposed to write it (or, more accurately, someone is supposed to and I seem to be getting the job done).
I dunno. Assuming anyone's actually reading this, you guys might find the whole thing ridiculous.
But, yeah, so I guess I've made my point:
My brain never shuts up.