How to lobotomize yourself for an hour a day
We used to need love.
Warmth and intimacy added to comfort to the comfort of early modern humans who lived among one another, no computers, just body body body.
We survive better in groups. We’re stronger, less fearful, intellectually diversified, more efficient.
Further into human evolution we actually start to crave intellect (see: Marshall McLuhan and the invention of media).
I wonder how worried we should be that our grandest need for one another is digital. Like like like so that I can continue to entertain my own existence.
For introverts, like me, there seemed to be a moment of time when social currency flowed faster and thicker than ever before.
I can go online and make friends, feel loved and appreciated, go to bed happy….for the first time in my life.
Social pressure evaporated.
But, that was only momentary.
Now there’s immense pressure even to be popular online.
It takes actual strategy to succeed at social media.
Socializing has become more of a game of chess than ever before.
All we do is think about ourselves in relation to others. Not even real “others”. Pictures of them.
The key to great writing is a good lobotomy.
Usually, I keep a notebook of time, a list, numbered, titled on some pages, of actions I take in the day.
I work from home on a flex schedule, no one really needs me and so instead of letting Time matter to me in the way it does to normal people, I list moments and call them “minutes” or sometimes “hours” and then after a few pages have gone by, I decide it’s a new year.
For four years, this record is how I take care of my life: By inventing it.
I reinvent logic so that at the end of the day, when I have time to write, I can sit comfortably in fiction.
I sweat, run, hop through yogic poses or taking twenty minutes to accomplish a handstand (never happens).
I drink detoxifying teas, I sit holding burning sage in meditation, I do whatever I can to silence my ego, to forget the ego of the world just so I can write a truthful fiction.
If I don’t do that, I think too much and I slip away into social media meta-life.
I have obsess over my body. I wonder about making new friends. I compare myself to the images that we’re given of the world, of the people in the world, who we believe are real. I make lists of new goals which don’t make any sense to me: Lose weight, harden every piece of yourself, everyone will love it and the clothing will finally look good, travel, see every corner of the “exotic” world, everyone will love it and you’ll finally have stories that are worth reading, have sex, find men who think lively of you, everyone will love it, salacious and cinematic and interesting as it is, as it will be, other people will like it.
I fear that I will never feel like an important enough person.
If I stop thinking, I come to the realization: Important People are illlusions. We are only as important as we feel.
Even the need to be important is entirely invented.
The social spectrum of Importance is absolute nonsense.
Importance is an illusion now. It’s just something we mentally assign to one another based on institutionalized role-play, which is incredibly dangerous.
Fiction is the gift you give yourself when you decide to write.
You want to be important?
Write it. Write that story where you are important and start living it.
If that sounds stupid, give yourself the gift that writer’s give themselves and start looking at the people and things around you as if they are complete fictionEverything and everyone is fiction. All you are obligated to do in this world is commit to the truths you believe in.
Let go.
Take note of why you think other people are important and realize that, with a little writing, you can feel as important as they feel.
I’m not telling you to “believe in your self”. I am telling you to “believe in your fiction”.
Writing has always been my modern lobotomy.
Historically, the process of lobotomy has been the purposeful damaging of the brain in order to prevent the over-stimulation of a mental illness. You may have heard the 19th Century lobotomizing process wherein a hole is drilled into the patients frontal cranium and Ethanol is passed onto the frontal lobes to prevent those lobes from communicating with other areas of the brain.
Once lobotomized, the patient’s personality is muted.
A person who once was a person is now a dummy, a marionette of normalcy, performing constantly without passion or overt sensation. Without full function of the brain, the individual transforms from a reactive, imaginative, creative and call it Mania or Hysteria or any specific diagnosis you wish but the ego is washed over precisely because it was too much for too many people.
Lobotomy is not usually a contemporary practice.
Even the word Lobotomy screams taboo, reminiscent of early “mental institutions” wherein people were entrapped into less-than-civil “remedies” for their illness. Lobotomy is profanity, scary, movie-like, hardly anything but an accessory to horror should it even happen.
We don’t do it anymore.
Thanks to our reverence for “personality” and the modern mind, we have any number of brain damaging obsessions, primarily the cellphone, which has proven terrifying effects on the brain yet most of us sleep with them under our pillows.
I should be lying on the floor sniffing sage and praying to an unknown entity but instead I am staring at instagram wondering what else I can do to make myself more Important.
If I wasn’t on social media, I’d be writing a play they no one will ever see.
And it wouldn’t matter to me that no one will ever see it.
I do like social media because it’s a great vehicle for writing.
Until it becomes a less-than-great vehicle for chasing love from strangers,
Like me, like me, please like me, say something to me, please follow me so that I remember I am here.
I keep hoping my phone will give me a purpose.
I keep forgetting that I don’t need a purpose.
All I need is a fiction.
Give your brain a break.
Let it get drunk for you.
Write down every realization you can have about anything in the world.
Make it fascinating.
Make it fiction.
Rachel Ganz 