Link to Part 2. Link to Part 3. Link to Part 4.
——
A story in up to four parts.
I’ve had a weird few weeks and just wanted to get some of this stuff down.
So I normally consider myself a very logical and rational thinker, and am careful to try to rein my brain in if I start feeling it’s straying too far off the beaten path. There are certain times I let it run where it wants to, though, such as in my past creative writing attempts or when I’m rabbitholing hard into my most recent wikipedia topic of choice (which I do often enough, typically with about a few dozen cross linked pages open at a time, that I’ve been guilted into donating).
I usually have enough control of it to know when it’s running wild and call it back as needed, but I wasn’t as good at it when I was younger, and I was recently reminded that even now, I’m not as in control of my own thoughts as I’d like to think I am. My most recent spiral was triggered off a reddit post discussing the nature of humor. I’d casually made the observation that the only people who can come up with originally funny jokes are those who can be surprised by their own brain, suggesting that all truly funny people are a little off in the head.
It was only afterwards that I realized that this thought itself had surprised me, though I hadn’t quite registered it at the time - as though this very idea about humor hadn’t been my own thought at all, but a new thought (from who knows where) implanted from a source external to me. I tried to go over and catalogue the number of times I’ve had similar experiences, and discovered that although there were many borderline calls (including indeterminable ones lost to memory), there were still meaningfully more such “surprise” or “impulse” thoughts (or potential such thoughts) than I would have initially expected. The proper term for it may be “intrusive thoughts,” but I’m no shrink, and “impulse thoughts” is generally the way I’ve been thinking of them, because they usually come in the form of discrete conclusions that I have to work back from in order to justify rationally (if I can).
Although I didn’t have very many examples of this, the few that I did have (consisting primarily of an impromptu 9/11 detour and a strong aversion to Boston at the time of the marathon bombings), made me want to look into these further. These impulse thoughts were usually tied to strong emotional convictions - typically enough to cause me to alter my behavior despite what I otherwise thought made the most sense. I’d generally followed these hunches the infrequent times it has come up in my day-to-day living, such as getting off a subway car early if it felt uncomfortable or getting some work done earlier than I otherwise might, often without really bothering to verify whether it made any sense.
The few times I’ve been able to check on it, it’s generally (eerily consistently and possibly always) turned out to be right, making me feel incredibly lucky at times. But at that moment, confused and curious about the nature and origin of these impulse thoughts, I had a sudden fear that I was being remote-controlled from afar and possibly even across time. The idea of being a puppet Pinocchio was very unnerving to me, despite the fact that whoever was running the controls had helped me out in some pretty big ways in the past. I accordingly started paying closer attention to these impulse thoughts, to see if I could detect any patterns.
Link to Part 2. Link to Part 3. Link to Part 4.