I started drinking when I was 12 years old.
I mean don’t get me wrong it was never a problem, it wasn’t like I was drinking every day. I just sometimes had blackouts. And then those sometimes became fairly often, but between those times it was generally fine so, I can’t say I ever had a problem.
Photo by 𝗔𝗹𝗲𝘅 𝘙𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘳 on Unsplash
On a mountainous road in southern Serbia between Leskovac and Vranje, I saw myself through someone else’s eyes.
We’d been cycling up the hills for hours at a snail’s pace, dragging our own baggage along with us. I’d been haemorrhaging money from before we’d even left, and my fragile eggshell ego had been shattered and unpicked a fragment at a time, as I revealed myself to be close to useless in our two-man team. Also, I’d brought a set of 4 heavy pliers that I had precisely no use for.
Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash
Not long ago, I stumbled upon a process called sensory gating, which claims that we naturally filter out redundant or unnecessary stimuli, as a means of stopping an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centres of the brain. The point of this is to allow us a basic understanding of our surroundings with a handful of accents to colour the scene in the vein of sounds, sights and smells.
That is, however, unless you’ve taken LSD.
In a room I’d been in countless times, with the same small group of close friends that I’d experienced this very thing with many times before, somebody had unlatched the gate, and I was a little overwhelmed.