I have a loud brain, that’s how I think of it.
There’s always some kind of noise going on in there. Story ideas, blog posts, random bits of dialogue, craft projects, essays, observations, bits of poetry, my ever-present To Do List of Doom, daydreams, ruminations, memories, and if there’s nothing in particular I’m thinking about, then there’s a song playing. Hell, even my dreams are loud. My brain is just loud.
It’s been loud for so long that I don’t notice how loud it is most of the time. On rare occasions I’ll wake up in the morning and it’s like my eyes are open before my brain realizes that my body is awake and the split-second of silence in my head right then is deafening. That’s how I know just how loud my brain is.
And sometimes, my brain turns up the volume.
Sometimes it’s tornado loud in there.
You know what I mean. People say that tornadoes sound like a roaring freight train. The winds are violent, destroying everything, creating the loudest chaos. It gets like that in my brain. Too many ideas churning around, too many projects I want to do, too many items on the To Do List of Doom, too many fucking songs with their needles stuck in the groove, all playing at once. So damn loud. A roaring freight train would be quieter.
And like with a tornado, the pressure changes. In my head, it rises, making my head feel unbelievably full, putting pressure on my eyes, making them close. An excessively loud brain shouldn’t exhaust me, but it does. The fatigue trickles down to my limbs and I am tired the whole time my brain is turned up to 11.
The cure for this is to release some of the pressure by getting some of the thoughts out of my head. This involves writing out my thoughts: the story ideas, the blog posts, the essays, the poetry, re-organizing the To Do List of Doom so I can better visualize it. Doing that, the physical act of taking some of the storm raging in my mind and channeling it through my fingertips onto a computer screen or a piece of paper so I can see it plainly in front of me instead of trying to catch glimpses of the madness as it ricochets off the walls of my mind, calms the storm. It brings the noise level back down to the dull roar that I’m used to.
Therein lies the catch-22. I need to empty my brain of some of the noise, but the excessive noise has made me too tired to empty my brain.
There are times when the noise dies down on it’s own, like a tornado suddenly dissipating as quickly as it formed. Most of the time, though, I just push through, emptying my brain bit by bit, hoping that the pressure will come down enough to allow me to do a full purge.
There’s nothing I can do about the songs stuck in there, though.
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