Or my brain is lying to me, at least.
I’m not talking about the subjectivity of reality or how much subjective experiences do/do not matter, but something far more mundane: generalized anxiety. I wasn’t diagnosed until my twenties but it’s been a problem all my life. All these stupid things everything does from time to time are my system defaults. Short version: I can’t trust my intuition because it’s a paranoid idiot.
Not that it’s not fixable. With treatment I no longer jump at every damn thing but risk assessment isn’t a gut thing so I have to consciously overwrite my bad mental habits.
This is on my mind because I’m on several learning curves and the constant forebrain check of the stuff my lizard brain can’t handle has been exhausting. Doesn’t stop me fervently overthinking everything though, and the writing is falling into a spiral perfectionism paralysis. I’m digging out, but it’s taking time so I just listen to my internal Lying Cat hissing lying, lying, lying.
How does your mind lie to you?
It’s migraines that do it to me … ugh. My “bonus” for moving to Calgary … I’ve lived at high altitude, in high ionization, and in the midst pressure zones that zip up and down like hyperspeed yo-yos … separately they’ve never bothered me. But Calgary combines them and that is, apparently, enough to crack my resistance. I’m lucky enough to only be in severe discomfort but not actual pain nor do I become overly light-sensitive (I’ve seen what I get called silent migraines, ghost migraines and several other names) but some sort of weird mental disconnect happens to me during them and that’s more distressing than the physical symptoms (and even potentially dangerous to me)
The disconnect boils down to me not being able to trust my actions to be appropriate to my perceptions. Go through doorway, realize I’m not centred and am going to hit the doorframe, be fully aware that I need to adjust my trajectory to not hit doorframe and … nothing happens, I hit the doorframe. No showering because, similarly, I cannot trust myself to move away from under what I know is scalding water … I’m liable to stand there watching my skin peel off. No going outside (not that I really feel like it anyway) because traffic lights and walk/don’t walk signals … let’s just say I’m lucky to not have ended up a smear on the pavement. I also have the joy of feeling ravenously hungry (and I can tell it’s all in my head and nothing to do with my stomach) accompanied by a sensation of revulsion at the though of food or drink in my mouth (and I do mean revulsion, not nausea)
Brains are SO much fun!
Oh no! It sounds like both your body AND brain are lying! At the very least you’re aware of it, and able to compensate.
As far as I’ve been able to detect, my body is tellng the truth … it’s my brain that scrambles the signals for interpretation and response (I know I can feel that the water is hot but the movement away from it has to be done consciously and deliberately on manual rather than the faster auto response). But yeah, as long as I stay home where things are pretty much predictable I can compensate and follow procedures I’ve worked out (like using the stove timer to create a temperature safety gap between making a hot drink … caffeine helps alleviate the thing a bit … and actually taking the first sip from it)