Do I Ever Think Out Loud?

[Sherry STOP! This thing is as long as a book, but if you want, you should refrain from reading it, and call me up and make me read it to you. Won't that be fun? An hour or so of me talking and I'll even be mean and not let you interrupt me.]

Sherry asked me yesterday on the phone. I said yes, but the question rolled around in my head for the next hour or more.

It almost makes me choke (the kind of choking that leads to tears when you're overtired, but I'm not) because it's tied to so many things and I don't know where to start.

OK the lighter side first. I walked to the bank and back while thinking about this, and then I helped Pam with gardening since she asked, and she said it would make me feel better, which was a rather prophetic thing to say because it did. Anyway, while going inside to put some stuff down and find bug spray etc. I was talking to myself and realized it as I was walking back out and stopped and laughed. I talk to myself all the time which is precisely thinking out loud. So the obvious answer is of course yes.

I also polled Pam, Kirk, and RJ just for fun. Kirk voted that I don't talk enough. He likened me to God who is smart and thus Kirk appreciates what he has to say, but he has some sort of funky currency for how he talks and so sometimes he's silent and other times he uses varied ways to communicate, but again I got an emphatic, "say more!"

Pam's answer was ironic because she said that sometimes I do what Pam likes to call, "the Sherry Victor," where I give people a blank stare. I wasn't especially concerned about Pam holding to my need to talk more. I'm not sure why, but I end up seeing Pam quite a bit, relative to the house, mornings or after work or whatever and end up chatting.

I kept interrupting RJ with the blender and we were joking around but then he refused to answer, so he doesn't get a public opinion, even if it was a good one.

I suppose I should have asked God what he thinks, and I guess I'll give you a story for this part for now. When I was leaving to go to the bank, I passed Ang, who upon seeing me, apologized to someone on the phone (because she'd thought I already left). So I lay in the grass and let the ants crawl on me and forgot that there were mosquitoes about while I waited. And while lying there I wondered what I might say. I still felt empty, though peaceable. And I think I might have prayed something like God help. He said I should pray with her on the phone. He'd mentioned this at some earlier point too.
So towards the end of the phone call, it came back and before I brought it up, I realized, I'm empty. I don't know how to pray right now. Right about then Sherry interrupted my thoughts by asking me what I was thinking. She had already said she needed to go, her friends were waiting for her, but then she'd started talking about her dreams.
First I was tempted to ask about her dreams, but wait, I really want to pray before she left, since God had suggested it, so yes, that's what I'll do, except I had nothing to say for/to God.
This is an excellent excellent example of what happens a lot in my brain. There is a decision to be made, but there is a distraction that I can't resolve and I get stuck.
I really appreciate friends who so often get me past this hiccup. RJ has been doing this for 5 years and it's great.
The brain freeze happens at work all the time and gets me very frustrated, mostly if Kyle isn't around, but even when he is, if it's something I should be able to resolve quickly but don't.

Sherry commented, isn't it great how fast one can think? And I answered sure. Sure because I've often marveled at such things. But it's not very helpful for communication. If I look at what I've written above, which I have a couple of times, there are ridiculous numerous branches, where my brain has taken off on a different direction, except I have to finish off my first thought or it will lose the point or the emphasis. My brain isn't linear. It jumps around with connections. So if I could hyperlink a whack of words from within a single paragraph and then go give each of them their own paragraph, it would better represent how I'm actually thinking, but it's scary because I can think really quickly (when my brain isn't frozen, but even then it's revving, just not productively) and there could be a dozen paragraphs and each of those could have a dozen paragraphs, and they have immediate connections to past conversations and events and people and places and songs and smells and tastes and I can experience those connections in all of their dimensions in a tiny fraction of a second. Each one an entity, and I can't really see them as if it were a vision, I'm just aware they're there. It's like each one is a person with their own identity and personality.

So how do you think out loud?

I often talk to myself in the morning: Focus Nolan! Make your lunch. But I won't even turn around to get to the fridge before my brain's occupied with a hundred things.
I don't know how other people's brains work. But man, mine makes me wonder if it talks to itself out loud for things that everyone else's is on silent autopilot for. And then it has the nerve to ask me my opinion on everything.
So sometimes it's nice to be so worn out and tired from being so busy, because then I'm too tired to notice the thousand things lurking below the surface. I can turn it off and ignore them, or at least make it less frantic. It's much harder to do that when I'm alone, although writing can be a bit of a concentrated outlet. I prefer people though, and it can be very relaxing to listen to you. Because although my brain is still multi-tasking, playing with what you say, at least it's engaged in a single train of thought, because you can only talk to me about one thing at a time.
At least until you ask me a question. And then yes, I'll give you a stare, while my brain explodes in several directions. And I'm left confused because sometimes none of those are answers. They're explorations and research and more questions. And they're demanding specifics. Begging you to refine your question. Narrow it down so I can eliminate all the extraneous. And I wish I was a big picture kind of person. I assume those people can spread all of their thoughts out like a map and compare them. Mine however are a jumbled up pile of details, definitely not laid out and neatly organized and sorted for ease of analysis.

Maybe that's why it's so relaxing when everything around me is organized. My brain has less to do.

So, new poll, am I crazy?
I'm going to go first and say no. I'm too happy most of the time to be crazy. I only bottom out a dozen times a year, and in between when I start to slip, it takes very little to boost me up.

It should be stated that I don't think I'm a genius or anything like that. When I say my mind goes off in a hundred directions, please don't think of Ted Dekker's book Blink, as if I can see all possible outcomes. I might be thinking of a lot of things all at the same time, but that doesn't mean that any of those are especially smart or good thoughts. Again, I really appreciate friends because frequently they'll say things that are so simple and, good, and they never entered my head.
I'll also say that I can get so annoyed with my brain, especially while driving, because it can focus on and think to death the most banal subjects. Ugh! Can't I think about something more interesting or worthwhile?

Oooh ooh, and as if this wasn't already a book, I've come back to add another bit. Somehow this might be connected to why I really like activity. Singing for example. It's taking my focus and putting it on music, and on a task. I'm still just as distracted with other thoughts and the things going on around me, but at least I've limited my brain a bit and it can't think to the same magnitude.
And sleep is always a good thing. It makes me much sharper. Duh.

Right, and I never finished my story about God.
So after Sherry asked me what I was thinking and I gave her the short run-down. Well, actually I think that's when she asked me question, and then she moved on to her dreams, which I thought was kind of funny since, in my head I had opted for prayer. Anyway there was some sort of awkward bit of conversation after that about whether or not I would pray. I was probably quiet a few moments because I still couldn't pray. So I think she asked me if I was going to, and I wavered, frustrated, and then said yes, because it was right and I had to.
So then I started and the prayers came. It was actually kind of shocking in a very pleasant way. I prayed about Chasey and somethings that had registered a little bit during his grad ceremony. I thanked God for my Dad's eyes doing good and a couple other things. But it sounded good. I won't explain this well enough. Sherry and God both got what they wanted because I was thinking out loud. None of that had been preconceived before I said it. It hadn't been rolling around in my head wondering how it would look when it finally came out. Yes it was about things that had happened earlier in the day, and specifically thoughts that had occurred earlier that day, but I hadn't dwelt on them at the time, and I hadn't thought of them since.

So I guess I'm trying to tell you I enjoyed it too. Instead of an exercize in tripping over myself trying to verbalize something that's been eluding me for the last ten minutes in my head. Something I'm sick or bored of already. Something that will feel hollow and thin and cheap to say out loud (insert hyper-link to old nickname from Nathan: Nolan non-repeating Archer). It was fresh and new and interesting to hear come out of my mouth.