My Brain!

I will write up to the point where my brain just feels like it’s about to melt and flow out of my ears.

Is this normal?

I don’t have an answer for that but I will do my best to come up with something. After all, this is my blog. (Nervous laughter in my head). When I usually write my blog, I have an idea of my topic that I want to write about then wing it from there. Not the best way to go about writing a blog, but, it works for me. Todays topic is going to be, brain drain.

I already wrote about being tired when I write and how I hate that. Ya see, I have a wonderful thing called dyslexia. When I get tired, my dyslexia comes out in full force and the keyboard looks like a bunch of Klingon hieroglyphs. Yes I do love Star Trek and Star Wars, I’m allowed to love them both. So, back to the topic at hand. Did I mention that I also have Adult ADHD. My brain is so much fun. Like herding cats on meth. Sometimes I think that I’m going to wake up and my brain is going to give me the Blue Screen of Death!!!!

Any who, when I get tired, by brain loves to slowdown and go into ‘stoned mode’. First, I look at the keys, think about what I’m going to write and then everything going to hell in a handbasket. Trying to spell simple words takes an extreme amount of effort. Putting together sentences is like doing a rubrics cube, blindfolded on a unicycle. I am fully aware that this is happening and I fight like hell to get past it. Sometime I triumph, sometimes I fail.

I have to confess, this is really hard for me to talk about. I hate showing, allowing people to know that my brain shorts out when I’m tired. Being raised a male, playing football, wrestling, baseball, and trying not to show vulnerability was what I understood to be manly. I was raised my a ex-Marine Corps Drill Instructor who was W.I.A. in Vietnam. I had fun experiences as a kid of going places like the Devil Pups. What the hell is a Devil Pup you may ask. Well, it’s a one month long experience for kids the ages 12-17 to be in the Marine’s. That’s right, we got taught by real life DI’s and got to experience the whole shebang of being a Marine. Wake ups at 4 am, bunks tight, hair high and tight, dressed and ready for PT in less then 5 minutes. This is also why I never went into the military.

This is why I hate to show vulnerability.

As I traveled through life over the last 50 years, I have changed. So, now I have this brains thing. This is not a new thing. I’ve noticed through the years that when I get tired, it is very hard for me to write. In college this part of my life sucked. I got a degree in History. We write, and write, and write, it’s what we do. My first reaction to this brain thing was coffee. Coffee, the greatest fix for all of lives little mysteries. Well, coffee failed me. All it did was speed my brain up. It was like having a broken part on your car and thinking that if you sped up, it would magically fix itself. I tried other things like sports drinks, energy drinks, energy pills, and so one. Nothing worked.

I guess right about now it would be relevant to inform you, the reader, that I’ve had about a dozen or so concussions. Football, rugby, mountain biking and just being a young male, all make these concussions possible.

Now, you may be asking yourself, have you gotten this brain thing checked out? The short answer is, not really. I have had a psych evaluation but not an MRI. I was scheduled for an MRI, but is canceled it when I found out it was $3000. Can anyone give me $3K, I’m a little short right now. (Totally kidding, I think)

Let me be honest, it’s frightening when I can’t spell a simple word like, ‘spell’. I scares the hell out of me when I look at my keyboard and the letters are all jumbled about. Most of the time, I just close my computer and just veg out. Sometimes I push myself and try to soldier on through and get some work done. The times that I am to stubborn to quit, I do get frustrated and eventually get like, 300 words down, then quit.

So, this is the story of my brain and me. It’s strange to know that when I get home from work, sometimes I cannot write one sentence and other times I can write for hours.

Maybe I should write a book about this.

Have a great day, and thank you for reading this blog.

J.W. Berwyn