The Traffic Cop Inside Your Brain

I’m not going to write about where I got this from.  It will turn people off for the wrong reasons, and I don’t want that.  It’s a life-changing realization for those of us with mental illness, and a life-saver to those who deal with unbearable everyday stress. But it’s not cool to give credit, so I’ll throw a link at the end.  But you don’t have to follow it.  But you can.  It’s not required.  But feel free.

Shut up, Jim.

My brain does not leave me alone.  Ever. It’s at Threat Level Midnight, Defcon 1. and 5-Alarm Chili Spice every day.  My biggest mistake in life was not finding a job that would pull all of my focus.  Something that I would have to be aware of for most of the day.  All our brains are firing all the time, but it’s the thoughts that make people like me different.  If you have a job that takes concentration, then your brain has been trained to prioritize.  These thoughts are more important than those thoughts. Those thoughts can wait until later.

I don’t have that. It’s chaos in there.  Writing doesn’t help, either.  In fact, it just encourages the weirdos to be louder.

When you have that chaos, it is extremely easy to forget or understand who is in charge.  I was a substitute teacher once, and that happened a few times.  I was supposed to be in charge, but high school kids tend to run amok when they know nothing will happen to them.  Thoughts come that are irrelevant, or rehashes from older thoughts or memories.  Major thoughts that can’t be solved at the moment.  Minor thoughts that don’t need any attention at all.  Your mind tries to maintain control, but the thought parade never ends. Then, there are the dark and shitty ones.  The gross ones.  The scary ones.  How do you function?

Well, there is the traffic cop.  The police aren’t everyone’s favorite public service these days, so if we need another metaphor, then we should find one.  The hall monitor?  The football coach?  The personal trainer?  You’ll have to pick something.  Pick a figure of authority in your life that makes the yes or no decisions.  Got it?  Okay.  So, if you are following along you’ve guessed that this cop/coach/trainer is the one who organizes and prioritizes your thoughts.  The boring ones, the dark ones, the sexy ones, the work and job ones, the ancient ones, the wild ones, then boring ones.  This coach is how you are able to function.  The problem is, all of these thoughts keep coming and you realize it is your brain generating them.

With a little understanding of mental illness or stress, you learn that you aren’t your thoughts.  Your thoughts are just that.  Thoughts.  When we judge ourselves by our thoughts, we are skewing the idea of ourselves.  Have you ever judged a band by their fans?  You don’t like the fans because of some perceived attribute, then you in turn don’t like the band they like by some bizarre transitive property of mathematics.  It’s a dumbass reason.  The band has no control over the fans and it doesn’t matter who also is a fan of the same thing you like.   Your thoughts are like the mixed batch of nutballs that crowd a summer jam band festival.  They aren’t you.

If that’s true, who are you? 

You’re the coach, baby.

That process is what makes us who we are.  We are only as functional as that traffic cop or coach or trainer that runs the show.  All of those thoughts are fodder for creativity, language, relationships, love, decisions…everything.  But they are raw material organized by the coach. It doesn’t matter how shitty or repetitive or scary the thoughts are.  They’re just ore excavated by your brain.  You can’t control that, but you can control the coach.  You can train him up, give him a break, pat him on the back.  He or she or they are you.

That shit blew my mind.  The simple truths often do.

Nowadays, I have taken control.  I tell the thoughts to stop, cease and desist, or wait until later all the time.  I actually say “Sh!” out loud.  I’ll tell old annoying thoughts to shut up.  Its so weird, but it works.  I like “Enough!”  That one is reserved for the thoughts that I’ve hashed out, but still stir around in there.  It prevents rumination.  It’s a way to move on. 

I can actually separate my life into two halves.  The years before I learned this, and the last two or so.  It’s made me a happier person.  Really.