I admit it

I've denied it for a long time, but the time has come to be honest with myself...































I am out of touch with my emotions.




Someone said this was cured for them through an epiphany. I'm afraid I cannot wait for that. I need to begin trying to get in touch somehow, now.


Or maybe it's just true that I can't translate my feelings and thoughts (thoughts which are so often just feelings... I've gone through this so many times before, if you've not caught a post on it by now then you are hopeless.  heh) into my emotions well enough. eyesthebye tried to help me understand what it means when it is said that my thoughts are "non-linear".
Upon using my brain and actually just looking up the damn word, the best I came up with was:

• A product or process that exhibits an uneven distribution, or wide variations in terms of quantity and timing.
• Disproportionate in cause and effect.

Not much help. When googled "non-linear thought", this came up on the first result, so someone gets what it is, and it's valuble to them!:

• Nor have our linear media ever robbed us of nonlinear thought.

Then I found something that said, "Once we begin to hear nonlinear thoughts, we can assist the pathfinder but not determine the path. If we remain silent but interested and focused, nonlinear ...". I went to the website and the article that came from is titled "The Best Approaches to Successful Communication". ...With seniors. heh(!). So apparently I'm senile at the age of 18? I had to laugh at that, because without reading the article, I just seems to me from the little bit they give you there on google that they suggest nonlinear thoughts are something useful? HAHAHAH.

I scanned through the article (I have not interest in reading it) and found the complete bit I began quoting above off of google:

• Don't predict the path. Once we begin to hear nonlinear thoughts, we can assist the pathfinder but not determine the path. If we remain silent but interested and focused, nonlinear thoughts will organize themselves and perhaps emerge as an epiphany that can lead to legacy.

There's that epiphany word again...

A BREAKTHROUGH!!! *sigh of relief*

I stumbled across a blogger makes an interesting post. He says about a piece of an article he read: I think this might explain my inability to draw logical conclusions during conversations or in arguments. Sometimes I catch myself finding a lead thought only to pause and say to myself “i dont know if thats what they are referring to”. Many times i an just dumb-founded: “whats the point they are getting at?” Its either the NLT or my inability to draw conclusions- which is a charcteristic of linear thought.. if foo then bar else baz. I think my most common responses are: “I dont know”, “I’ll have to think about it”, or “I’ll have to sleep on it”.

Holy shit. I'm not the only one... I can trudge on...

Upon visiting an article he linked to, conveniently titled, WHAT IS NONLEAR THINKING?, I find that the some doctor compares non-linear thinking with lateral thinking (which I also have no idea what that means) and he says:

·         In Conventional or Vertical Thinking – the thinking moves only if there is a direction.

·         In Lateral thinking the thought process moves in order to “generate” a direction.

The first thing that came to mind for me was something I've always experienced in school. If I use non-linear thinking... if that's just the way my brain works... Then if I'm correctly understanding what they are saying in these pages I'm reading, it may explain why I have always had a much more difficult time solving very simple problems given to me in school than more complex ones. Give me the most simple problem you can come up with in some kind of algebra, and I'll have no idea how to do it. Go three or four steps up on difficulty on the same type of problem, and I can do it. I never understood this and I would ask my peers if they experienced the same thing but they thought it was just strange or didn't care.  heh. My teachers would begin review and they'd start out with the easiest problems and then work into the harder ones, but it was backwards for me: it was hardest at first and got easier as we went on. It kind of makes sense now, though...
Also, when an issue is so clear in my mind that the explanation it just makes sense without me even thinking about it at all, I have this strange inability to voice it to people. It's... it makes so much sense to me... that there wasn't actually any thinking involved in understanding it or getting there - it just IS and always was to me, so how can you explain that to someone? I haven't found a way. Now, if it's something more complex that I really don't understand but can construct my way to coming to some understanding about, then I can do that and then I can explain it to you. But if it's something so totally "common sense" to me, no luck.
(What is happening right here, right now, is a wonderful example. You are witnessing my understanding... if it was naturally understood by me, there would be nothing to witness. Now... sometimes, I can retrace my steps carefully and analyse my thoughts and explain them to you, but that is still usually me coming to an understanding of myself so it makes sense that I'd have an explanation...
Have I lost anyone yet? Is anyone even listening at this point? hahah. Doesn't matter.)

So... what I seem to gather from reading more... it seems like non-linear thinking is more like...
Well, what I find especially interesting is when I finally came across an article written about non-linear thinking by a natural non-linear thinker, I realized how he wrote... especially has he began discussing how he has always known and understood the convenience for him to translate his non-linear thoughts into something linear in his writing. Writing provides him a format to put those things down in a linear fashion for others to read and understand. His writing is very... I'm not sure how to explain it. But it seemed familiar. And then I remembered all the comments I used to get when back in the days I would write more themed posts, posts with a point and posts detached from just me... opinion posts ... the comments I would get a lot of the time that would say I was a good writer and sometimes they would explain that I organized my thoughts well or they liked how I explained things or I even had one person literally say that they liked my "thought process". I always still felt like a big ol jumble of BLEH! but here people were telling me it not only made sense, but it made GOOD sense and they appreciated it... I would reread the post to try and see anything like what they saw and usually failed. But in reading this guy... I can kind of see what those people were saying, because his writing reminds me very much of my own a lot of the time...
But here's what I don't really understand: How the hell does that happen? And without my realizing it? If things in my head are so non-linear by nature, how am I able to translate them so well sometimes, naturally, into something linear when I'm writing? Maybe it's just the nature of writing? No... I've seen some people write and it's hard to fallow and nonsensical because it is very out of whack. I find that interesting, though...





I honestly don't understand all of this. Everything I just said about my understanding of this could be totally wrong. Totally. I probably don't have much of a better understanding of this than before that first google.



eyesthebye did mention right/left brain thinking. In the past I've always been very weary of that whole theory. It didn't seem very valid to me. And upon reading a bit about it... it seems to contradict a lot of what I already know. I do seem to have a preference for right brain thinking, but a lot of left brain things come into play as well. And I don't think this is so much because my brain is balanced, but to me it seems like the things are interwoven... or maybe there's a system-

...






Here I am trying to understand the brain. heh. I laugh at myself...


I'm not going to read any more about this for now. I may mention it to other INTJs, but unless something comes up among them that I am compelled to research, I'll let this lay at this point. Until someone can give me a better explanation as to what it means, or something... I'm just not liking this whole thing..

Adieu
-Liv-