Occam's razor, also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony, is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity."
In other words, seek the simplest solution first.
Life is infinitely complicated, especially nowadays. There's so many options for everything. In a world where something as horrifying as Common Core exists, we as humans do everything in our power to overcomplicate everything. Double that number if you have a vagina. There's twenty million different euphemisms for feelings and how you process them and you have to be totally and completely PC these days (or at least pretend to) or the world will leave you behind, cancel you out, stand on your neck, and snicker in contempt during the whole thing. Anything we could ever want can be accessed, ordered, and delivered by a simple click of our fingertips and if we don't want that one we usually have about sixty thousand other options in other colors, shapes, or sizes or tastes. We have too many choices and usually we make the wrong ones cause we’re just too overwhelmed by it all to think things through. Especially matters of the heart, because every other Instagram post takes one single emotion and gives it a fancy name and it’s own ICD-10 code and before you know it people on Tiktok and IG are diagnosing you with shit you’ve never even heard of and before you know it you’re afraid to feel anything because you have to investigate your whole fucking family tree and things you said twenty years ago and Jesus, can’t anyone just have a one word emotion anymore? I’m not sure of what they would call the following behavior, but I’m pretty sure it‘s got the word “toxic” in the title.
If there's something that I need to finish but I want to relax first, my brain will literally poke me every five seconds, "Hey, you gotta do this. Hey, you gotta do this. Hey, you gotta do this. Do it. Do it. Do it. Why are you waiting? Do it and get it over with." I cannot rest until it is done. Of course, I am human and sometimes my body just doesn't want to fucking do it. Sometimes my brain hurts after work and I just want to sit on my goddamn couch/bed and read for awhile. I tell myself that the world won't burn if I don't wash my sheets AT THAT EXACT SECOND, or if I don't finish that blog entry, or if I don't go run to the store and buy that thing that I absolutely do not need in that moment just to satisfy some weird checklist in my head because what if I do need it soon and I don't have it? What then? What will I do? I'll be betraying that other gut instinct I have to always be prepared. What if I don't write that blog entry and I forget what happened and I lose it forever? And while my body is fighting this impulse because it needs to learn patience and rest, my brain will also try and reason with me the way it always does: "Why wait to get something done? The sooner you get it done, the sooner it's over and the sooner you can enjoy yourself. There's just no sense in procrastinating." So I just do it. And that wrinkle in my brain smoothes out. The little box on my internal checklist gets clicked. My body relaxes. My brain shuts the fuck up. Never for long. I tell myself to go watch a movie or read a book because I did the thing and now I can do what I please. But my body was cheated out of rebelling in the simplest way and it knows it and now it wants it's revenge and it won't let me do anything resembling rest. So I have to move.
The only place my brain does not demand a laundry list of activities is the bathtub. Or, you know. Bed. Doing not-bed things. Especially doing not bed things with someone who doesn’t allow me to think of anything else. And it takes something harsh to refocus me. Pain refocuses you. It demands to be felt.
When I am on vacation, my brain reasons that I did not travel all the way to wherever I'm going to spend the money I rarely have to do absolutely nothing. I tell it, "We're here. Let's go chill in the pool. We have nothing to do. We're here. You're on VACATION." But I get to the pool and already my stupid brain is poking me. "What are we doing after the pool? Are we doing something? Are we eating something? Where are we going to eat? Do we need to get there early so we don't have to wait? What are you going to wear? Are we justifying the money and gas we spent to get here? What are we doing? You're doing nothing. Why are we just standing around in the pool, not talking? Why aren't you doing anything? You're WASTING THE DAY. Pretty soon it'll be nighttime and you'll have to sleep and it'll be one day closer to having to go home and go back to work and YOU HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING TO EARN THIS FUCKING RELAXATION SO FUCKING DO SOMETHING."
God, SHUT. UP.
That's what I'm yelling at this relentless asshole in my head. Just shut the fuck up. It's not just YOUR vacation. Stop being selfish and let me cook your stupid ass in the Jacuzzi for awhile. Just BE here, goddammit. That's why you left home. To BE HERE. SO BE HERE.
Over the years I've figured out the only way to shut the bitch up when I’m not in a bathtub (or fornicating) is to throw liquor at it. Thankfully, it does not take me a lot to get drunk, but it's a delicate seesaw because once I'm drunk, I'm either silly and dumb or I get drowsy. The liquor doesn't just shut the bitch up, it shuts EVERYTHING up. So now I'm sleepy. During the day. And I fucking hate naps. So I fight it, like a toddler. Which makes me even grumpier. I can't go anywhere because I'm drunk and I'm not good at hiding the fact that I'm drunk and I can't rest because I know if I take a nap there goes a good chunk of my vacation and I'm going to wake up with a fucking headache and nausea and be so fucking angry at myself for wasting time that I'm not going to enjoy anything. And on and on it goes. I can never just enjoy where I am. I can spend months planning every detail of an event, like tubing, and once I'm on the river I'm already thinking "I can't wait to get to 2nd & Charles" or "I can't wait to get to Steak & Shake" or "I can't wait to get home and do the pictures." Don't get me wrong, I have fun when I'm at the event. I wouldn't plan them if I didn't have fun at them. But I can never just be happy where I am, I can't just accept the moment as it is. My brain likes to trick me that there will be a reward for rushing to these things and I'm like "Ooo ooh reward!" and then I get there and the reward is just that it's not bugging me about the first thing anymore, now it’s just bugging me about something else and I never learn, like a dumb dog that keeps going for a ball that's never thrown. So I'm just fated to be like Tom chasing Jerry, or the Coyote chasing the roadrunner. I get nowhere. And it keeps going and going and I feel like I'm running this rat race all alone. So I try to get others to run at my same pace because I'm way up there ahead and I think I'm having a great time because ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING AT ONCE AND I WANT THEM TO HAPPEN TO OTHER PEOPLE BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS EXCITING. All the while, I'm not really having a good time because I feel like I'm on a treadmill I can't turn off, but I don't realize that because all of the reward centers in my brain are being satisfied and I think I'm doing the right thing. Meanwhile, I am annoying and exhausting everyone else around me who ARE capable of SITTING STILL and they paid money to be here too so what the fuck, man? By the time I convince them to go do whatever it is my brain says we should do that I believe is going to optimize our trip, I’m exhausted. And everyone else probably just wants to be in the pool. And I’m ashamed deep down because I don’t want to be selfish and I feel like a jerk because who am I to decide what’s good or fun for anyone else?
Anyway. Occam's razor. Where was I?
Simplest solution first. But first we have to find the solution, which means I have to find all of the little ways that the situation may not float, and when I do that, they sink. This leads me to other 'solutions', so I pick those apart, too. Pretty soon the whole idea of Occam's razor is redundant because there is no simple solution because my brain needs for it to have no holes and well, everything has holes. (That's what she said)
I don't know what I want because I have not given my heart, my brain or my body a chance to SLOW. THE. FUCK. DOWN. It feels like I've been riding the Gravitron since 2008. I have not gotten off the ride and even when I'm off the ride I'm never off of it for long and I never get my equilibrium back, which just adds more time I'm gonna have to spend learning how to walk straight on my own two feet. Maybe it's not that I'm a coward. Maybe it's just that everything in me is always ready to go, and I don't know how to stop it. All my sediment is constantly being shaken up and rearranged and I won't know what things will be like when it settles, so yes, I chalk that up to cowardice because I am not used to not knowing what I want. I always swore since the Tyler days that I'd never be so confused as to not know what I wanted but I was fucking stupid because as I stated so eloquently in my last post, I wanted to be hard as well. If you're hell bent on not letting something in that means you don't trust it and henceforth do not trust yourself, so, nope, you don't know what you want.
And that makes you dangerous, especially when you're getting off of an emotional Gravitron and can't walk straight, bumping into people and throwing their shit off and knocking their corndogs in the dirt and shit. I don't know. It's a whole fucking thing that I don't think I'm explaining too well. The point is, your judgement is not sound.
In good news, I have been writing like a maniac, which is rare. At first I just kept looking at my screen and wincing and doing like my boy Johnny Depp in Secret Window when he stares at his computer and he says, "You know what this is? This is just bad writing." Unlike JD I don't delete, but the more I relaxed into it and just let the story flow, it got better. Not great, but better, and I have always enjoyed editing. So, like my writing, I am going to do my very best to just let myself flow. It is definitely not going to be easy, but it will never get easier if I don't start. I am going to try to slow. the. fuck. down. At this point I think there might be a real diagnosis (not Instagram or TikTok invented) involved and I might need medication but my therapist is a social worker and I don't think she can diagnose. I always thought maybe I had ADD or ADHD because of my focus issues but I've taken Adderall and it doesn't do anything but turn me up to 100000000000000 so I don't think that's the explanation. Maybe I've just conditioned myself this way over the years and it's just a matter of reconditioning. Whatever it is, I don't want collateral damage. I don't want to hurt anyone getting off the Graviton.
I'm trying to figure out where all these patterns are coming from. I can understand some of them. But I'm not sure why my brain tells me I am a worthless person if I am not effective and useful and productive 10000000% of the time. I mean, I have the basic skeleton of an idea, but I'm not gonna write it in here. I've been going over very old DJ entries trying to figure out what the hell led to all this and all that got me was hormonal and I'm not about it, not right now, no thank you. I'm pretty sure one of my problems is that I'm always fucking looking back, much like overly anxious people like to rewatch TV shows they've seen a million times because they feel comforted knowing what's about to happen. I hate not being prepared.
I am going to go try to work and wait for them to fix my washing machine, which decided yesterday, in the middle of washing my sheets, that it just didn't want to drain anymore, because, you know, what's one more inconvenience? After work I plan on getting shitfaced and doing horrible things to my girl character because someone else is going to suffer around here if I have to and it might as well be her.
-Rae