Recently I realised that I am very self-deluding about my daydreaming. I think to myself "I'm doing quite well today. I hardly drifted off at all". And then realise that I've spent the last hour replaying a 4-min Youtube music video so I can daydream through it. I lie to myself often. I'm a natural optimist, clearly.
The way I KNOW. Beyond doubt. That I have not been daydreaming. Is the way that time elongates while I have genuinely stopped. Today for instance. I took a N-acetyl-cysteine break for most of last week, then started a new round of dosing on Friday. It kicked in today. I've been either in the present moment, or thinking about something directly relevant, the whole day. And it feels like I've been awake for 3 days. I suppose this is because I lose 2/3 of my time to daydreaming under "normal" circumstances. But is this extended day how non-daydreamers feel? I suppose it feels "normal" to them. And if they could see into my brain, I might look a little like a mayfly. Packing life into a compressed period of time. Unfortunately, also minimising what life needs to be packed in the first place.
The worst thing is that I actively choose this. When the NAC stops working [or before I discovered that sometimes it helped] I want to daydream. I LOVE daydreaming. My life is structured around having time for it. Time. There's no point in searching for my lost time. I know where it all is. Null and void inside me. What's worse, daydreaming taints what little time I spend on other activities. I never feel like I'm "allowed" to relax. Watching a movie is quite challenging. TV almost impossible. 'All that time being wasted in a different way. How dare I?' I waste so much anyway. How can I even consider wasting more.
But wasting time is living too. The delusion of who I could be without MDD is as corrosive and dangerous as the MDD itself. I have to remind myself again, as I've done in this blog before, that nothing about ME changes whether I daydream or not. I'm the same person.
I like having more time in which to be, though. It's like getting to live to 500 in a healthy body. Sometimes it's exhausting. Today I got up at the usual time and was ready for lunch by 11am. When it feels like it should be evening at 4pm, and bedtime at 8pm. Simply because I have far more time than I'm used to. And it's only the NAC's effect that stops that awareness being a trigger in itself. Boredom. Guilt. Anxiety. Quick, hide.
THE DOCTOR: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly ... timey wimey ... stuff.