I think of my brain as a “hot brain.” Like an engine. It runs hot and that’s a little dangerous. For most of my life, I’ve noticed that I need more rest than other people. Not necessarily sleep, but rest. My brain works overtime unless I force it to stop. Sleep is actually sometimes hard to do because my brain tends to churn even when I don’t need it to think about anything right now, thanks sweetie.
And also, I’m aging and that means I’ve had to learn new strategies for how to manage my energy. But my mom is ninety-four this year, and she still has more energy than most people thirty years younger, so I use that as a marker for what I might be like then. It might be a little scary on me.
It can be very useful to have a brain that runs hot. I take in information deeply, memorize big chunks much more easily than other people, and I also synthetize at a high level. This isn’t me bragging. It’s just a reality of living with this brain. Maybe that sounds like bragging, but there’s a good side and a bad side. It definitely helped me to finish college and an M.A. in two years after high school and end up starting a PhD program at Princeton at age 19 after a perfect score on the GRE.
But it also annoys people a lot, and because I’m autistic, I’m not often using my brain (mostly because I’m unable to) to figure out how to react best in social situations. I can’t tell what other people are feeling much of the time, unless they, you know, tell me with words. It means that I see things that other people don’t notice—and also feel frustrated that I pointed out because I do kind of blurt out things that I can’t NOT see that other people get embarrassed by. As you might imagine, this is not the most endearing trait.
I say often that I live in upside-down world, and that’s true. I notice lots of things that seem obvious to me that aren’t to other people and they see things that I didn’t notice that they think are obvious and sometimes think I must be lying about not seeing. But truly, I don’t guess what rules you’re using for your social group until I observe you for a while and then point them out to you, and you might not necessarily like it when I say what I see because it isn’t the way you think of yourselves.
But my hot brain means that it spins if I don’t make it rest. Or it does now. I’m not entirely sure that it did this when I was younger because I had absolute trust in my brain and its thoughts back then, not at all true now. So I can’t tell if I was just more stupidly confident then or if my brain has gone wonkier with age. I suspect the latter, but there’s no real way to know. My spinning brain thinks it’s helpful, but it’s really just tired. It’s good to get it occupied with useless tasks like playing games I’m bad at.
Exercise has long been another way for me to quiet my brain. It’s the main reason I exercise. It helps my mental health enormously for me to work out hard enough that my brain turns off, or focuses only on counting steps, pedal revolutions, or swim strokes. While I’m exercising, my brain is constantly doing simple math equations over and over again, like what is the portion of this race/workout I’ve already finished and what fraction remains. My brain needs to be directed to do something if I’m awake. It doesn’t just sit and relax. This is not actually one of my options, though I’m aware that it’s the default for most people.
For most people, their brain just—doesn’t spin. Ever. It doesn’t do anything unless they make it do something. These people might get less done than I do, but I’m also envious of how restful it must be inside their heads. Can I get me some of that? Apparently, no. None of the meds I’ve ever taken for my anxiety or depression help slow my brain down, and if they did, I suspect that I’d dislike them anyway because I wouldn’t feel like me anymore. I would feel like an alien had invaded my head and I was trying to get back in to make it WORK RIGHT again.
This is possibly the best descriptions I've come across of what it feels like to live in my brain!