4.28.18

(Just as a PSA: The following makes as little sense to me right now as it probably does to you guys. This is more of an attempt at some personal workshopping than anything else, and I hope that such an act might help me better perform in life)

    At the state Scioly tournament and, to put it bluntly, I am not doing well. I just did some test flights with Andrea, messed up some key stuff, and proceeded to both make her worry about her event and yell at me. Thinking on this, for it is my own fault, I shall proceed to write about something that I think bears notice to some of my more crazy ideas, and also the main part of myself that I need to utlise/control/push/discipline/understand in order to better mitigate a specific type of problem that I am having - one which I shall lovingly call “magical ignorance”.

    This particular sort of occurence, where my partner(s) end up getting mad due to my own sheer incompetence, is unfortunately not new to me. Especially this year, I am understanding ( is that what I want to use here? Seems off ) the extent to which I am unable to focus for relatively long periods of time on certain types of work. In particular, this work seems to stem from the types of work where I am participating in a team and, due to some reason or another, am unable to really get stuff done. In previous years, such incidents have existed, like “my” Siemens Science Fair Project and “my” Econ Challenge presentation, but I used to explain these with the simple reason that both outside factors ( like, in the case of my old job as Class Officer, I had tests that ran 10 minutes late, enough so that they had the meeting without me ), and on an internal lack of mismanagement of my time ( where I spread myself too thin and thus am unable to work during the times when everyone else worked, yet forgot to inform anyone ). However, thinking on this current incident, I realize that there could be another factor, one which I hope is not true but, if it is, will require work of a kind that I can barely comprehend.

    This new factor? “Magical Ignorance”. What I mean by this, to put it more technically, is that my mind is unable to focus on the situation at hand, leading to problems which depend on the given circumstance. This sort of problem has been pretty endemic to my mind, stemming from my Brookfield days where I would not be able to even do the most basic of tasks without some assistance and some push from an external factor. What tends to happen is that my mind gets plagued by long strings of, well, empty noise where I honestly space out ( Not to be confused with some of the after-effects of sleep deprivation, although I am sure that might play a factor in some of the more recent cases ). Before, I have dealt with and used this problem in several ways to improve my situation. I have started to meditate to learn when my mind is both drifting off the task at hand and have used the ability as a handy silencer for some social circumstances. However, I also run into the opposite problem: too much mental excitation, where I start drifting from the task at hand. With both of these “modes” playing around in my mind, I sometimes wonder how I can even get any work done, let alone what needs to be done. Furthermore, the techniques I have used to try to force myself to work, such as some of the focus skills I learned via middle school karate, tend not to lead to focus, but to more of the same type of problem, except now I am in one mode longer than the other. What makes this even worse is that I am unsure if this is some aspect of my personality that I never realized or if this particular combination of issues is something new. While I would love to blame my lack of mental clarity on something as simple as my INTP nature, one which tends to focus on thoughts rather than realities, there has to be some better way of coping with it that is not as long-term oriented as better meditation is/will be once I get to college. Additionally, I also wonder what activities will lead to the prevalence of one thought system over another. For example, while I used to think my walks around with both “Flowing” and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations helped put me in a working mode to get essays done, I am now pretty unsure of the long-term viability of this phenomenon, for such a strategy seems to also increase the problems I have with a lack of thought in general. This is an issue, however, that both cannot wait yet has to wait. Until I get a clear way to solve the issue, short of the types of longterm behavior I have already figured out like meditation and establishing mental discipline, I have no easy way of dealing with it until I finish my IB exams. Hopefully I can address this problem before it gets worse, or help any mental solution I do not see yet to potential resolution.