Back in the Trees

Wrote this in the summer of 2013, just before I moved from Pennsylvania to Georgia:

“I’m pretty sure what I'm going through is called “crisis perspective,” and it— for a brief time— allows a person to view things from a different perspective, usually from the perspective of your own "without" that person.  It sort of lifts you up above the “forest” so that you can actually “see the trees.”Then, as time passes, it sets you back down inside the “trees” again, as the human mind isn’t capable of maintaining that hypersensitivity over long periods of time— it would literally drive you crazy with being over-sensitive, leading to anxiety and, I would imagine, ultimately a nervous breakdown.

“With one death, you get the perspective shift, then the shift back.  What happened to me was that before my mind/perspective had the chance to switch back, someone else passed.  And then someone else. And then someone else.  And on and on, until my mind is sort-of “stuck open” to the expanded perspective— the hypersensitivity, if you will.  I have always been unusually aware of other people’s perspectives, to the point where I probably cared a bit too much what people thought. Since I experienced the "run of deaths," my anxiety level has grown proportionally with the amount of time my mind has been stuck on “hypersensitive” perspective, to the point now where I cannot return to the “normal” way of looking at things.

“In time I will.  I just need to experience a couple of years with no huge traumatic events, to allow myself to be set back down and lost once again “in the trees,” so that the “forest” isn’t quite so— crisp.”

So, six years later, and I think the perspective has shifted back into comfortable inconspicuousness. The wounds aren’t so raw anymore, although the scar tissue they have conferred on my soul is still jagged and sensitive, such that I can’t probe it too hard or too often without feeling—not like I felt in the beginning of the shift, but rather, like I’m supposed to be doing something else? I don’t exactly know if that’s accurate, but it’s the closest I can come.

That feeling is nothing new, really. I’ve always felt like I was supposed to be doing something else. Truthfully though, I kind of like the feeling of inconspicuousness that came as I blended into the anonymity of my new environment. I don’t consciously think so much anymore about what if or where if or who if. It’s not that I’m not concerned about those things at a certain level—I am. Still. It’s that I realize at a more cognizant level that all of those thoughts led me to here anyway, regardless, and that I wouldn’t have necessarily picked this path if I had the pick, but here I am anyway. So why take those thoughts as seriously as I have taken them throughout my life?

Buckaroo Bonsai was right when he said: “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.” I used to think that line was just a silly little farcical joke. Now I realize the mindful depth behind the truth of it.

And the funny part is that I will realize another truth six years hence.

© Ray Cattie