A Step outside the echo chamber

Written by Christopher Pentecost on April 1, 2024

Well, it’s been a while. Not that I expected it to be this long in between posts, because that’s not what I was doing. But it seems that just faith is not on my side on most things recently. I ended up getting sick, needing to spend a bunch of time dealing with some personal matters, and currently, I need a root canal on one of my teeth. So yeah, it’s been a fun couple of weeks.

So much so, I can’t remember where we left off. But I do know I have made a decision that was brought up by my therapist. After working with her just a couple of times, I’ve come to the realization that as much as this is no outlet, it’s not really the full outlet that I believe I’ve been needing to work with. It was pointed out to me that I don’t really do a lot of things for myself, that I do put a lot of myself out there for other people, whether that be family (mainly my children and my wife), or work, because I can say that now. But really, I haven’t prioritized myself in a very long time, which is sort of weird to wrap your head around because a lot of the time, I’ve always thought of myself as having wasted enough opportunities that I just ended up taking that time for myself. So it’s kind of hard to try to separate the two.

This is going to be a short one, mainly because there’s something else that goes along with this that sort of requires my attention. And I’ve come to realize that if I don’t act on it while it’s fresh in my head, it sort of gets pushed to the wayside.

Stepping out of the echo chamber, most of the time, you would think that it would be like surrounding yourself with people with like-minded opinions about social and political issues, that the same arguments get kicked around. And I would say most of the time, you’re right. But that’s not the echo chamber I’m trying to get out of right now. Currently, I’m trying to get out of the echo chamber that is my head.

As anyone who has ever listened to a particular amount of comedy knows, there was a joke that said it’s healthy to talk to yourself, it’s healthy to argue with yourself. It is not healthy to argue with yourself and have a third voice come in and mediate. For me, I personally have been mediating, quite possibly, with about three to five different voices that tell me to do different things, none of which are to harm the people around me. Let’s be okay with that because we don’t have those thoughts. But those voices have also lent me the ability to look at situations and things from multiple different perspectives. And yes, it can come off slightly biased because, at the end of the day, they’re all my voices.

But when you’ve grown up a good 35 years dealing with these voices continuously going off in your head, it makes you really cautious about doing things. My echo chamber has been one that has been a constant presence and is one that, because I’ve built up this sort of echo chamber or, as Sherlock Holmes once described it, a mind palace, it makes it hard to try to separate myself from the rest of it. You get used to the daily grind and being able to deal with everything that goes on around you and also dealing with everything that’s going on inside you.

To give you a little bit of perspective, how I related this to my therapist was: I have built a mind palace as an upside-down pyramid, held up by Greek columns and fortified with medieval Gothic buttresses. And my greatest fear is to finally get to a point where I can start to deconstruct things in a healthy way that it all falls apart and that I can’t look at myself in the mirror and see me. If that sort of makes sense, it does to me. It’s okay if it doesn’t to you. She agreed that that was an interesting way of constructing an analogy and decided to delve deeper into my ability to use words and imagery and things to create arguments. And that’s sort of started this move towards exiting the echo chamber.

Going back to my childhood, the one thing that I never really had was a consistent and constant group of close friends. To at least one person, that may kind of come off as slightly insulting, but I’m not talking about him. I spent a lot of time by myself, and it’s what has, in my own mind, created a lot of the coping mechanisms for the ADHD. One of the symptoms of ADHD is the ability to hyper-focus on daydreaming, and that’s one of the things that I have an uncanny ability to do.

I remember back in my university days, sitting in an English lecture, listening to the professor drone on and on about a famous poet who hated school and spent his time not really listening to the lecture but looking out the window and writing down his observations. The most interesting part about that is, while that was going on, I was looking out the window and writing down my observations to the point where I didn’t really realize that the class was over and that everyone was leaving the room until someone bumped into me.

This ability to sort of daydream also can sort of get me into trouble, and it’s why I either have to be talking and present in a situation or I have headphones on. It’s mainly to give my mind something to focus on so that the rest of me can focus on the task in front of me. One of the things that I have an uncanny ability to sort of control but not really is the fact that my daydreaming is done with eyes wide open. I can sit and lose myself for a good 5 minutes and almost be separated from reality, where I can see everything within the daydream as if it’s happening in real-time. So, a lot of times, people would be like, “Did you leave us there, Christopher?” And I would be snapped back into the moment, wondering what I’m doing or where I am.

This is incredibly interesting, and the main reason I listen to loud music when I’m by myself in the car, so that I don’t do that when I’m driving. I have been on a country road doing 80 and could not remember the last 10 km, and that was just me thinking to myself. Now, you could say I was probably present and I just don’t remember it. My problem is, I remember what I witnessed, and it wasn’t me driving, so now music must be played. That’s also why I sleep with an earbud in, listening to mindless podcasts and videos off of YouTube at night. It’s a way to occupy the parts of me that will not take a break for the rest of me to be able to take a break.

My therapist believes that this is sort of a healthy way of allowing your imagination to run wild, and I’ve always had a very vivid imagination. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do was be creative. There’s nothing like putting on a record or cassette or CD (fuck I’m really dating myself) and being able to close my eyes and just create a vision of what could be to what I’m listening to. It was a way of giving me solace like meditation but without the continued focus and inner focus of thinking about myself. It was allowing my mind to traverse things.

Now, whether that was good or bad or so-so was all about how I was feeling that day. I’ve recounted to my therapist that from the age of five up until now, I have had a recurring dream. A recurring dream that has garnered almost a life of itself as I have aged. Think of it as if you find an old TV show from like the 60s or the 70s and watching it in its original format. Nothing has been updated, and you watch it through a lens that is grainy, that’s foggy, is so far pixelated from HD that really makes you wonder how did we live before modern 1080p, but we did and we have progressed to the point now where we have UHD ultra-high definition.

This dream for me has been like that. The dream is the same, the feelings are the same, but the detail and the clarity have only gotten better as I’ve grown older. Not going into a lot of detail with my therapist, she says, “Have you ever thought about writing stuff down?” And I said, “Yeah, but it always got lost in the shuffle.” And she related to me that maybe this is something that I could do for myself that would give me an outlet and give the voices an outlet to allow me to create something and make it more tangible. And I agree. It is a dream that has continuously evolved so much that I can be very descriptive with what’s going on.

So currently (this is the thing that I need to get to), I am working to break down the dream into short stories, almost like blog posts but maybe a little longer and in a way so that maybe this is something that I can also share with the world around me. I also think it would be easier to publish if I had it down on paper, but that’s just me.

Now is that something I would love yeah be great to have something that has been with me a long time that has ultimately created itself in my mind and can give me an outlet and maybe it does get published I don’t know it’d be great being neat little thing to put on my shelf and be like What’s this book and get to tell people? Well, that’s mine, but not there yet. Not a lot has ever been put on paper or digital paper in this case, so let’s not jump the gun on a lot of what-ifs. But is this going to take up a little bit of time? Yes, because I’m allowing my thoughts to flow free form, like I do for this blog. The literary stuff will need editing. I try not to edit myself here too much because I want something that sounds like me, and a lot of the things I say are definitely not edited. There have been a lot of embarrassing pauses at parties where everyone’s going, “Did he really just say that?” or “What did he say?” So, it’s not something I want to just put my raw thoughts out there. That’s what this is for, and this part of me I’m okay with being more raw because it does sound like me, and when I read it back, I do feel like there’s a part of me here.

The creative part of me is the part of me that is more interested in the finite detail of things being right to a level of perfection that even I know I can’t live up to, but we’re going to try. Yoda would be quite angry, but this is the perfect time to do it, and it’s scary because the creative/unconscious me, I find, is a little more brash, unabashed, and blunt. And if I am going to do this, it is something that I want to focus a lot of energy on to shape that blunt object into something that’s refined.

So, a lot of YouTube videos on proper short story etiquette have been coming out, and this particular dream or sequence of events will all be released in shorter sections as a way to sort of segment how I interpret what’s going on there. So, there’s a lot of writing and rewriting and making sure I’m getting the details correct because if it’s one thing I do want, I want to share what I see, and I hope that will come across.

So where are we going from here? I’m going to get back into doing two posts a week. I will add a third into a separate sort of thread, maybe on another site. I don’t know yet for what will become a lot of creative writing. I already know and already have about three major ideas. One being my recurring dream, but I also have two other storylines that came out of music that I listen to.

If it’s one thing I really love, it’s a concept album. Think of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and how that entire work of art created a very in-depth story that just looped around on itself. So amazing. And more recently, look at Broadway with things like Mamma Mia, Bat Out of Hell, and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, where they take a bunch of different popular culture songs and weave them into a story that allows you to get into the story that’s taking place but also feel good about the songs that you know are being played throughout.

I have one story that sort of goes along those sorts of lines, but it’s more almost music-video-esque to a bunch of Silver Chair songs. And that particular story for me has always been more of a cross between Rob Zombie and Quentin Tarantino, so there’s a lot of blood, sort of gore, very descriptive things, but also a lot of stuff you don’t see that is left to your imagination. And if it’s one thing I have, it’s an imagination. And God help us all for that. But that may come out in its own little different sort of chronicles of short stories.

I am glad my therapist has sort of opened me to this because it helps me to relate to a lot of the characters that I grew up with that are sort of like me. The main one in this case would be Gordie LaChance, who was Wil Wheaton’s character in Stand By Me, which is a movie based on a Stephen King short story called The Body.

I always identified more with Gordie because I had the ability to create these stories in my head, even if it was a serial story in my head of the same characters doing different things. And it’s one of the things that allows Gordie to be creative, especially as the narrator of the story, but also allowed me to identify with someone who would be seen as eccentric, just a little bit strange. So I always appreciated that and being able to connect to that. And to an extent, I like Stephen King’s novels, but I love his short stories.

Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe are two of the best short story writers I’ve found, and yeah, that’s probably because I love darker imagery. But even the lighter stories like The Body, like Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption, it allows you to convey a lot of images, a lot of thoughts in a shorter, more digestible form of reading. So, I’m going to attempt to put a few of my images down and see where this leads me.

I’m not sure if there will be a post at the end of this week. Mainly because I’m doing something for me that also is doing something for a family member. I’m volunteering all week to be a chaperone for my son’s week-long education field trips. It’s something that my mother used to do for me, and I always appreciated it. And I know that he appreciates me showing up for these things because it allows us to do stuff together.

So, I don’t know if there will be another post later this week. If I can throw one together, I definitely will try. Again, Yoda’s going to hate me. But until then, I’m going to try to get out of my head while also trying to get into my head to get stuff out of my head. If you’re as confused as I am right now, awesome, that means we’re in the same boat. At least I’m not alone. That’s always a plus because, you know, sometimes it’s really dark in here… hello?

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash